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Title: Biographia Literaria

Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6081]
Most recently updated: October 14, 2023

Language: English

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LITERARIA ***

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

CONTENTS

DETAILED CONTENTS

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

SATYRANE’S LETTERS

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CONCLUSION

FOOTNOTES

LIST OF CONTENTS
CHAP.
Motives to the present work—Reception of the Author’s first
publication—Discipline of his taste at school—Effect of
I
contemporary writers on youthful minds—Bowles’s Sonnets—
Comparison between the poets before and since Pope
Supposed irritability of genius brought to the test of facts—
II
Causes and occasions of the charge—Its injustice
The Author’s obligations to Critics, and the probable occasion—
III Principles of modern criticism—Mr. Southey’s works and
character
The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface—Mr. Wordsworth’s earlier
IV poems—On Fancy and Imagination—The investigation of the
distinction important to the Fine Arts
On the law of Association—Its history traced from Aristotle to
V
Hartley
That Hartley’s system, as far as it differs from that of Aristotle, is
VI
neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts
Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory—Of the
VII original mistake or equivocation which procured its admission—
Memoria technica
The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes—Refined first
by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of
Harmonia praestabilita—Hylozoism—Materialism —None of
VIII
these systems, or any possible theory of Association, supplies or
supersedes a theory of Perception, or explains the formation of
the Associable
XI Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its conditions?
—Giordano Bruno—Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of a

tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order—The
Author’s obligations to the Mystics- To Immanuel Kant—The
difference between the letter and The spirit of Kant’s writings,
and a vindication of Prudence in the teaching of Philosophy—
Fichte’s attempt to complete the Critical system-Its partial success
and ultimate failure—Obligations to Schelling; and among
English writers to Saumarez
A Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding
that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power
—On Pedantry and pedantic expressions— Advice to young
X
authors respecting publication—Various anecdotes of the
Author’s literary life, and the progress of his opinions in Religion
and Politics
An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel
XI
themselves disposed to become authors
A Chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or
XII
omission of the chapter that follows
XIII On the Imagination, or Esemplastic power
Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally
proposed—Preface to the second edition—The ensuing
XIV
controversy, its causes and acrimony—Philosophic definitions of
a Poem and Poetry with scholia
The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a Critical
XV
analysis of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece
Striking points of difference between the Poets of the present age
XVI and those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—Wish
expressed for the union of the characteristic merits of both

Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth— Rustic
life (above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavourable to the
formation of a human diction-The best parts of language the
XVII product of philosophers, not of clowns or shepherds—Poetry
essentially ideal and generic— The language of Milton as much
the language of real life, yea, incomparably more so than that of
the cottager
Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially
different from that of prose—Origin and elements of metre —Its
XVIII
necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on
the metrical writer in the choice of his diction
Continuation—Concerning the real object, which, it is probable,
XIX Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical preface—
Elucidation and application of this
The former subject continued—The neutral style, or that common
XX to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from Chaucer,
Herbert, and others
XXI Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals
The characteristic defects of Wordsworth’s poetry, with the
principles from which the judgment, that they are defects, is
XXII
deduced—Their proportion to the beauties—For the greatest part
characteristic of his theory only
SATYRANE’S LETTERS
XXIII Critique on Bertram
XXIV Conclusion

So wenig er auch bestimmt seyn mag, andere zu belehren, so wuenscht er
doch sich denen mitzutheilen, die er sich gleichgesinnt weis, (oder hofft,)
deren Anzahl aber in der Breite der Welt zerstreut ist; er wuenscht sein
Verhaeltniss zu den aeltesten Freunden dadurch wieder anzuknuepfen, mit
neuen es fortzusetzen, und in der letzten Generation sich wieder andere fur
seine uebrige Lebenszeit zu gewinnen. Er wuenscht der Jugend die
Umwege zu ersparen, auf denen er sich selbst verirrte. (Goethe. Einleitung
in die Propylaeen.)

TRANSLATION. Little call as he may have to instruct others, he wishes
nevertheless to open out his heart to such as he either knows or hopes to be
of like mind with himself, but who are widely scattered in the world: he
wishes to knit anew his connections with his oldest friends, to continue
those recently formed, and to win other friends among the rising generation
for the remaining course of his life. He wishes to spare the young those
circuitous paths, on which he himself had lost his way.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

CHAPTER I
Motives to the present work—Reception of the Author’s first publication—
Discipline of his taste at school—Effect of contemporary writers on
youthful minds—Bowles’s Sonnets—Comparison between the poets before
and since Pope.

It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation,
and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain, whether I
consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings,
or the retirement and distance, in which I have lived, both from the literary
and political world. Most often it has been connected with some charge
which I could not acknowledge, or some principle which I had never
entertained. Nevertheless, had I had no other motive or incitement, the
reader would not have been troubled with this exculpation. What my
additional purposes were, will be seen in the following pages. It will be
found, that the least of what I have written concerns myself personally. I
have used the narration chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the
work, in part for the sake of the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me
by particular events, but still more as introductory to a statement of my
principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy, and an application of the
rules, deduced from philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism. But of
the objects, which I proposed to myself, it was not the least important to
effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continued controversy
concerning the true nature of poetic diction; and at the same time to define
with the utmost impartiality the real poetic character of the poet, by whose
writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been since fuelled and
fanned.

In the spring of 1796, when I had but little passed the verge of manhood, I
published a small volume of juvenile poems. They were received with a
degree of favour, which, young as I was, I well know was bestowed on
them not so much for any positive merit, as because they were considered
buds of hope, and promises of better works to come. The critics of that day,
the most flattering, equally with the severest, concurred in objecting to them

obscurity, a general turgidness of diction, and a profusion of new coined
double epithets [1]. The first is the fault which a writer is the least able to
detect in his own compositions: and my mind was not then sufficiently
disciplined to receive the authority of others, as a substitute for my own
conviction. Satisfied that the thoughts, such as they were, could not have
been expressed otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, I forgot to inquire,
whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a degree of attention
unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry. This remark however applies
chiefly, though not exclusively, to the Religious Musings. The remainder of
the charge I admitted to its full extent, and not without sincere
acknowledgments both to my private and public censors for their friendly
admonitions. In the after editions, I pruned the double epithets with no
sparing hand, and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of
thought and diction; though in truth, these parasite plants of youthful poetry
had insinuated themselves into my longer poems with such intricacy of
union, that I was often obliged to omit disentangling the weed, from the fear
of snapping the flower. From that period to the date of the present work I
have published nothing, with my name, which could by any possibility have
come before the board of anonymous criticism. Even the three or four
poems, printed with the works of a friend [2], as far as they were censured
at all, were charged with the same or similar defects, (though I am
persuaded not with equal justice),—with an excess of ornament, in addition
to strained and elaborate diction. I must be permitted to add, that, even at
the early period of my juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the superiority of
an austerer and more natural style, with an insight not less clear, than I at
present possess. My judgment was stronger than were my powers of
realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly
owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving a poetic
colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a new world then
seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in unfeigned
diffidence of my own comparative talent.—During several years of my
youth and early manhood, I reverenced those who had re-introduced the
manly simplicity of the Greek, and of our own elder poets, with such
enthusiasm as made the hope seem presumptuous of writing successfully in
the same style. Perhaps a similar process has happened to others; but my
earliest poems were marked by an ease and simplicity, which I have
studied, perhaps with inferior success, to impress on my later compositions.

At school, (Christ’s Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very
sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the Reverend James
Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to
Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He
habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read,)
Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the
Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with even those
of the Augustan aera: and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to
see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness both
of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying the
Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and
they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up,
so as to escape his censure. I learned from him, that poetry, even that of the
loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as
severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more
complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly
great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every
word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember that, availing
himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to
show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same
purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the
original text.

In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three years of our
school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image,
unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been
conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words [3]. Lute, harp, and
lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene
were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now,
exclaiming “Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy,
Muse? Your nurse’s daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the
cloister-pump, I suppose!” Nay certain introductions, similes, and
examples, were placed by name on a list of interdiction. Among the similes,
there was, I remember, that of the manchineel fruit, as suiting equally well
with too many subjects; in which however it yielded the palm at once to the
example of Alexander and Clytus, which was equally good and apt,
whatever might be the theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and Clytus!—

Flattery? Alexander and Clytus!—anger—drunkenness—pride—friendship
—ingratitude—late repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length,
the praises of agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious
observation that, had Alexander been holding the plough, he would not have
run his friend Clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old
friend was banished by public edict in saecula saeculorum. I have
sometimes ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index
expurgatorius of certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both
introductory, and transitional, including a large assortment of modest
egoisms, and flattering illeisms, and the like, might be hung up in our Law-
courts, and both Houses of Parliament, with great advantage to the public,
as an important saving of national time, an incalculable relief to his
Majesty’s ministers, but above all, as insuring the thanks of country
attornies, and their clients, who have private bills to carry through the
House.

Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master’s, which I cannot pass
over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy of imitation. He
would often permit our exercises, under some pretext of want of time, to
accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing
the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or
that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that
other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of
the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed,
the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in
addition to the tasks of the day. The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of
recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the
dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the
painful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither lessen nor dim the deep
sense of my moral and intellectual obligations. He sent us to the University
excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and tolerable Hebraists. Yet our
classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts, which we derived from
his zealous and conscientious tutorage. He is now gone to his final reward,
full of years, and full of honours, even of those honours, which were dearest
to his heart, as gratefully bestowed by that school, and still binding him to
the interests of that school, in which he had been himself educated, and to
which during his whole life he was a dedicated thing.

From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no models of past
times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on the youthful
mind, as the productions of contemporary genius. The discipline, my mind
had undergone, Ne falleretur rotundo sono et versuum cursu, cincinnis, et
floribus; sed ut inspiceret quidnam subesset, quae, sedes, quod
firmamentum, quis fundus verbis; an figures essent mera ornatura et
orationis fucus; vel sanguinis e materiae ipsius corde effluentis rubor
quidam nativus et incalescentia genuina;—removed all obstacles to the
appreciation of excellence in style without diminishing my delight. That I
was thus prepared for the perusal of Mr. Bowles’s sonnets and earlier
poems, at once increased their influence, and my enthusiasm. The great
works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race, in respect to
which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars
and mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years
older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and disciplined
by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual
friendship as of a man for a man. His very admiration is the wind which
fans and feeds his hope. The poems themselves assume the properties of
flesh and blood. To recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment
of a debt due to one, who exists to receive it.

There are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and are
producing, youths of a very different stamp; modes of teaching, in
comparison with which we have been called on to despise our great public
schools, and universities,
in whose halls are hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old—

modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. And
prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus produced; prodigies of self-
conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! Instead of storing the
memory, during the period when the memory is the predominant faculty,
with facts for the after exercise of the judgment; and instead of awakening
by the noblest models the fond and unmixed love and admiration, which is
the natural and graceful temper of early youth; these nurslings of improved
pedagogy are taught to dispute and decide; to suspect all but their own and
their lecturer’s wisdom; and to hold nothing sacred from their contempt, but

their own contemptible arrogance; boy-graduates in all the technicals, and
in all the dirty passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. To such
dispositions alone can the admonition of Pliny be requisite, Neque enim
debet operibus ejus obesse, quod vivit. An si inter eos, quos nunquam
vidimus, floruisset, non solum libros ejus, verum etiam imagines
conquireremus, ejusdem nunc honor prasentis, et gratia quasi satietate
languescet? At hoc pravum, malignumque est, non admirari hominem
admiratione dignissimum, quia videre, complecti, nec laudare tantum,
verum etiam amare contingit.

I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles,
twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first
made known and presented to me, by a schoolfellow who had quitted us for
the University, and who, during the whole time that he was in our first form
(or in our school language a Grecian,) had been my patron and protector. I
refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned, and every way excellent Bishop of
Calcutta:
qui laudibus amplis
Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat,
Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terra
Obruta; vivit amor, vivit dolor; ora negatur
Dulcia conspicere; at fiere et meminisse relictum est.

It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection, that I
should have received from a friend so revered the first knowledge of a poet,
by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and
inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the
undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal, with which I laboured to make
proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed,
of whatever rank, and in whatever place. As my school finances did not
permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half,
more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those,
who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I
receive the three or four following publications of the same author.

Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well aware, that I
shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it will be well, if I subject
myself to no worse charge than that of singularity; I am not therefore

deterred from avowing, that I regard, and ever have regarded the obligations
of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of gratitude. A valuable
thought, or a particular train of thoughts, gives me additional pleasure,
when I can safely refer and attribute it to the conversation or
correspondence of another. My obligations to Mr. Bowles were indeed
important, and for radical good. At a very premature age, even before my
fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysics, and in theological
controversy. Nothing else pleased me. History, and particular facts, lost all
interest in my mind. Poetry—(though for a school-boy of that age, I was
above par in English versification, and had already produced two or three
compositions which, I may venture to say, without reference to my age,
were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit
than the sound, good sense of my old master was at all pleased with,)—
poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me. In my
friendless wanderings on our leave-days [4], (for I was an orphan, and had
scarcely any connections in London,) highly was I delighted, if any
passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, would enter into
conversation with me. For I soon found the means of directing it to my
favourite subjects
Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute,
And found no end in wandering mazes lost.

This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious both to my natural
powers, and to the progress of my education. It would perhaps have been
destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was auspiciously
withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to an amiable
family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style of poetry, so
tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified and
harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr. Bowles. Well
would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same
mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and reap the harvest
from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome
quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time I have sought a
refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches,
which exercised the strength and subtilty of the understanding without
awakening the feelings of the heart; still there was a long and blessed

interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my
original tendencies to develop themselves;—my fancy, and the love of
nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds.

The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration of
these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat
later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe bears more immediately on
my present subject. Among those with whom I conversed, there were, of
course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of poetry,
from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more generally, in
that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English
understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not
blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of the world,
and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of these poems,
they gave me little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the
presumption of youth withheld from its masters the legitimate name of
poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute
observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its
matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and
strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form: that even when the subject was
addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the
Essay on Man; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in that
astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity Pope’s Translation of
the Iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of each second line, and the
whole was, as it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a
grammatical metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime
the matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic
thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last
point, I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and more
plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin’s Botanic
Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only by the
reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and natural
robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act foremost in
dissipating these “painted mists” that occasionally rise from the marshes at
the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge vacation, I assisted a
friend in a contribution for a literary society in Devonshire: and in this I
remember to have compared Darwin’s work to the Russian palace of ice,

glittering, cold and transitory. In the same essay too, I assigned sundry
reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison of passages in the Latin poets
with the original Greek, from which they were borrowed, for the preference
of Collins’s odes to those of Gray; and of the simile in Shakespeare
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg’d and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather’d ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar’d by the strumpet wind!
(Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6.)

to the imitation in the Bard;
Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
While proudly riding o’er the azure realm
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind’s sway,
That hush’d in grim repose, expects it’s evening prey.

(in which, by the bye, the words “realm” and “sway” are rhymes dearly
purchased)—I preferred the original on the ground, that in the imitation it
depended wholly on the compositor’s putting, or not putting, a small
capital, both in this, and in many other passages of the same poet, whether
the words should be personifications, or mere abstractions. I mention this,
because, in referring various lines in Gray to their original in Shakespeare
and Milton, and in the clear perception how completely all the propriety
was lost in the transfer, I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture,
which, many years afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought
having been started in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more
fully, by Mr. Wordsworth;—namely, that this style of poetry, which I have
characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic language,
had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of writing
Latin verses, and the great importance attached to these exercises, in our
public schools. Whatever might have been the case in the fifteenth century,
when the use of the Latin tongue was so general among learned men, that
Erasmus is said to have forgotten his native language; yet in the present day
it is not to be supposed, that a youth can think in Latin, or that he can have
any other reliance on the force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of

the writer from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first
prepare his thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or
perhaps more compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines,
in which to embody them.

I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man from
the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided I find him
always arguing on one side of the question. The controversies, occasioned
by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a favourite contemporary, then
known to me only by his works, were of great advantage in the formation
and establishment of my taste and critical opinions. In my defence of the
lines running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of
natural language, neither bookish, nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp,
nor of the kennel, such as I will remember thee; instead of the same thought
tricked up in the rag-fair finery of,
———thy image on her wing
Before my fancy’s eye shall memory bring,—

I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets, from
Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder English poets,
from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was my constant reply to
authorities brought against me from later poets of great name, that no
authority could avail in opposition to Truth, Nature, Logic, and the Laws of
Universal Grammar; actuated too by my former passion for metaphysical
investigations; I laboured at a solid foundation, on which permanently to
ground my opinions, in the component faculties of the human mind itself,
and their comparative dignity and importance. According to the faculty or
source, from which the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived,
I estimated the merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my
reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them
to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;—first, that not the
poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest
pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential
poetry;—secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other words of
the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense
or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction.
Be it however observed, that I excluded from the list of worthy feelings, the

pleasure derived from mere novelty in the reader, and the desire of exciting
wonderment at his powers in the author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing
French tragedies, I have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each
line, as hieroglyphics of the author’s own admiration at his own cleverness.
Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of
feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate
excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more
difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with the bare hand, than to
alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare, (in their
most important works at least,) without making the poet say something else,
or something worse, than he does say. One great distinction, I appeared to
myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder
poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to
Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most
pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in
language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed
the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to
the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet
broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something,
made up, half of image, and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one sacrificed
the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.

The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand and
account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody at
Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius
to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in improving
the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed,
had the merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were cold, and, if I may
so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton’s there is a
stiffness, which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from the
Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse Percy’s collection
of Ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present day; yet in a
more sustained and elevated style, of the then living poets, Cowper and
Bowles [6] were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined
natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with
the head.

It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own
powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction, which I
myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth.
Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgment; and the
compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years—(for example,
the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which now form the middle and
conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of Nations, and the tragedy of
Remorse)—are not more below my present ideal in respect of the general
tissue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults were at least a
remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who have done me the
honour of putting my poems in the same class with those of my betters, the
one or two, who have pretended to bring examples of affected simplicity
from my volume, have been able to adduce but one instance, and that out of
a copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which I intended, and had
myself characterized, as sermoni propiora.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me for
noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the three sins of
poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a young writer.
So long ago as the publication of the second number of the Monthly
Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom, I contributed three
sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh
at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the recurrence of favourite phrases,
with the double defect of being at once trite and licentious;—the second
was on low creeping language and thoughts, under the pretence of
simplicity; the third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my
own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language
and imagery. The reader will find them in the note [7] below, and will I trust
regard them as reprinted for biographical purposes alone, and not for their
poetic merits. So general at that time, and so decided was the opinion
concerning the characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician
(now, alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual
kindness, to a gentleman, who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could
not however resist giving him a hint not to mention ‘The house that Jack
built’ in my presence, for “that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet;” he
not knowing that I was myself the author of it.

CHAPTER II
Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of facts—Causes
and occasions of the charge—Its injustice.

I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor unamusing
to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness, that complex
feeling, with which readers in general take part against the author, in favour
of the critic; and the readiness with which they apply to all poets the old
sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of his time
———genus irritabile vatum.

A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent
necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we
know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having a
deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class seek in
the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not possess
singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp hay, they heat
and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become restless and irritable
through the increased temperature of collected multitudes. Hence the
German word for fanaticism, (such at least was its original import,) is
derived from the swarming of bees, namely, schwaermen, schwaermerey.
The passion being in an inverse proportion to the insight,—that the more
vivid, as this the less distinct—anger is the inevitable consequence. The
absense of all foundation within their own minds for that, which they yet
believe both true and indispensable to their safety and happiness, cannot but
produce an uneasy state of feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from which
nature has no means of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience informs us
that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
There’s no philosopher but sees,
That rage and fear are one disease;
Tho’ that may burn, and this may freeze,
They’re both alike the ague.

But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more
easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects of the
senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things; and only
then feels the requisite interest even for the most important events and
accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into thoughts.
The sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism on the one
hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased slowness to action
on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be so vivid and adequate,
as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of them, which is strongest and
most restless in those, who possess more than mere talent, (or the faculty of
appropriating and applying the knowledge of others,)—yet still want
something of the creative and self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For
this reason therefore, they are men of commanding genius. While the
former rest content between thought and reality, as it were in an
intermundium of which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and
their imagination the ever-varying form; the latter must impress their
preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to their
own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and
individuality. These in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem
in palace, or temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that
join sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering back the billows,
imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to sheltered navies;
or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale from mountain to mountain, give
a Palmyra to the desert. But alas! in times of tumult they are the men
destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin, to destroy the wisdom
of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a day, and to change kings and
kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds [8]. The records of
biography seem to confirm this theory. The men of the greatest genius, as
far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of their
contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that
related to themselves. In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they
seem to have been either indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate
reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a
manly hilarity which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent
habit of feeling in the author himself. Shakespeare’s evenness and
sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. That this did

not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have
abundant proof in his Sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to
Pope [9], when he asserted, that our great bard--
------grew immortal in his own despite.
(Epist. to Augustus.)

Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration of
his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds:
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Tho’ I once gone to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, e’en in the mouth of men.
SONNET LXXXI.

I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare’s readiness to praise his
rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality with those whom
he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike manifested in another
Sonnet.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost,
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence!
But when your countenance fill’d up his line,
Then lack’d I matter, that enfeebled mine.
S. LXXXVI.

In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate, and, in
comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said, effeminate;
and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of Burleigh, and

the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter days. These causes
have diffused over all his compositions “a melancholy grace,” and have
drawn forth occasional strains, the more pathetic from their gentleness. But
no where do we find the least trace of irritability, and still less of
quarrelsome or affected contempt of his censurers.

The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be affirmed of
Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are concerned. He reserved
his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his country. My mind is
not capable of forming a more august conception, than arises from the
contemplation of this great man in his latter days;--poor, sick, old, blind,
slandered, persecuted,--
Darkness before, and danger’s voice behind,--

in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for whom, as by
that against whom, he had contended; and among men before whom he
strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening to the
music of his own thoughts, or if additionally cheered, yet cheered only by
the prophetic faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless
------argue not
Against Heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer’d
Right onward.

From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his latter day,
had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of youth and hope, that
he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not been likewise
the enemies of his country.

I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there exist
many and excellent models, a high degree of talent, combined with taste
and judgment, and employed in works of imagination, will acquire for a
man the name of a great genius; though even that analogon of genius,
which, in certain states of society, may even render his writings more
popular than the absolute reality could have done, would be sought for in
vain in the mind and temper of the author himself. Yet even in instances of
this kind, a close examination will often detect, that the irritability, which
has been attributed to the author’s genius as its cause, did really originate in

an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain, or constitutional defect of
pleasurable sensation. What is charged to the author, belongs to the man,
who would probably have been still more impatient, but for the humanizing
influences of the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame of his irritability.

How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this
charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavoured to show, supported
by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult solution. In whatever
country literature is widely diffused, there will be many who mistake an
intense desire to possess the reputation of poetic genius, for the actual
powers, and original tendencies which constitute it. But men, whose dearest
wishes are fixed on objects wholly out of their own power, become in all
cases more or less impatient and prone to anger. Besides, though it may be
paradoxical to assert, that a man can know one thing and believe the
opposite, yet assuredly a vain person may have so habitually indulged the
wish, and persevered in the attempt, to appear what he is not, as to become
himself one of his own proselytes. Still, as this counterfeit and artificial
persuasion must differ, even in the person’s own feelings, from a real sense
of inward power, what can be more natural, than that this difference should
betray itself in suspicious and jealous irritability? Even as the flowery sod,
which covers a hollow, may be often detected by its shaking and trembling.

But, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of literature,
have produced other and more lamentable effects in the world of letters, and
such as are abundant to explain, though by no means to justify, the
contempt with which the best grounded complaints of injured genius are
rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter of merriment. In the days of
Chaucer and Gower, our language might (with due allowance for the
imperfections of a simile) be compared to a wilderness of vocal reeds, from
which the favourites only of Pan or Apollo could construct even the rude
syrinx; and from this the constructors alone could elicit strains of music.
But now, partly by the labours of successive poets, and in part by the more
artificial state of society and social intercourse, language, mechanized as it
were into a barrel-organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune. Thus
even the deaf may play, so as to delight the many. Sometimes (for it is with
similes, as it is with jests at a wine table, one is sure to suggest another) I
have attempted to illustrate the present state of our language, in its relation

to literature, by a press-room of larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which,
in the present Anglo-Gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic
periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely,
and yet still produce something, which, if not sense, will be so like it as to
do as well. Perhaps better: for it spares the reader the trouble of thinking;
prevents vacancy, while it indulges indolence; and secures the memory
from all danger of an intellectual plethora. Hence of all trades, literature at
present demands the least talent or information; and, of all modes of
literature, the manufacturing of poems. The difference indeed between these
and the works of genius is not less than between an egg and an egg-shell;
yet at a distance they both look alike.

Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little examination works of
polite literature are commonly perused, not only by the mass of readers, but
by men of first rate ability, till some accident or chance [10] discussion
have roused their attention, and put them on their guard. And hence
individuals below mediocrity not less in natural power than in acquired
knowledge; nay, bunglers who have failed in the lowest mechanic crafts,
and whose presumption is in due proportion to their want of sense and
sensibility; men, who being first scribblers from idleness and ignorance,
next become libellers from envy and malevolence,—have been able to drive
a successful trade in the employment of the booksellers, nay, have raised
themselves into temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by
that most powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant
passions of mankind [11]. But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and all
malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such writers are
sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity to disappointment
and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings. Even during their
short-lived success, sensible in spite of themselves on what a shifting
foundation it rests, they resent the mere refusal of praise as a robbery, and at
the justest censures kindle at once into violent and undisciplined abuse; till
the acute disease changing into chronical, the more deadly as the less
violent, they become the fit instruments of literary detraction and moral
slander. They are then no longer to be questioned without exposing the
complainant to ridicule, because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and
authorized, in Andrew Marvell’s phrase, as “synodical individuals” to speak
of themselves plurali majestatico! As if literature formed a caste, like that of

the Paras in Hindostan, who, however maltreated, must not dare to deem
themselves wronged! As if that, which in all other cases adds a deeper dye
to slander, the circumstance of its being anonymous, here acted only to
make the slanderer inviolable! [12] Thus, in part, from the accidental
tempers of individuals—(men of undoubted talent, but not men of genius)
—tempers rendered yet more irritable by their desire to appear men of
genius; but still more effectively by the excesses of the mere counterfeits
both of talent and genius; the number too being so incomparably greater of
those who are thought to be, than of those who really are men of genius;
and in part from the natural, but not therefore the less partial and unjust
distinction, made by the public itself between literary and all other property;
I believe the prejudice to have arisen, which considers an unusual
irascibility concerning the reception of its products as characteristic of
genius.

It might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of readers, to
suppose a Review set on foot, the object of which should be to criticise all
the chief works presented to the public by our ribbon-weavers, calico-
printers, cabinet-makers, and china-manufacturers; which should be
conducted in the same spirit, and take the same freedom with personal
character, as our literary journals. They would scarcely, I think, deny their
belief, not only that the genus irritabile would be found to include many
other species besides that of bards; but that the irritability of trade would
soon reduce the resentments of poets into mere shadow-fights in the
comparison. Or is wealth the only rational object of human interest? Or
even if this were admitted, has the poet no property in his works? Or is it a
rare, or culpable case, that he who serves at the altar of the Muses, should
be compelled to derive his maintenance from the altar, when too he has
perhaps deliberately abandoned the fairest prospects of rank and opulence
in order to devote himself, an entire and undistracted man, to the instruction
or refinement of his fellow-citizens? Or, should we pass by all higher
objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence, and even that ambition
of lasting praise which is at once the crutch and ornament, which at once
supports and betrays, the infirmity of human virtue,—is the character and
property of the man, who labours for our intellectual pleasures, less entitled
to a share of our fellow feeling, than that of the wine-merchant or milliner?
Sensibility indeed, both quick and deep, is not only a characteristic feature,

but may be deemed a component part, of genius. But it is not less an
essential mark of true genius, that its sensibility is excited by any other
cause more powerfully than by its own personal interests; for this plain
reason, that the man of genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the
present is still constituted by the future or the past; and because his feelings
have been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the number,
clearness, and vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an inverse
proportion. And yet, should he perchance have occasion to repel some false
charge, or to rectify some erroneous censure, nothing is more common than
for the many to mistake the general liveliness of his manner and language,
whatever is the subject, for the effects of peculiar irritation from its
accidental relation to himself. [13]

For myself, if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious test of the
observations of others, I had been made aware of any literary testiness or
jealousy; I trust, that I should have been, however, neither silly nor arrogant
enough to have burthened the imperfection on genius. But an experience—
(and I should not need documents in abundance to prove my words, if I
added)—a tried experience of twenty years, has taught me, that the original
sin of my character consists in a careless indifference to public opinion, and
to the attacks of those who influence it; that praise and admiration have
become yearly less and less desirable, except as marks of sympathy; nay
that it is difficult and distressing to me to think with any interest even about
the sale and profit of my works, important as, in my present circumstances,
such considerations must needs be. Yet it never occurred to me to believe or
fancy, that the quantum of intellectual power bestowed on me by nature or
education was in any way connected with this habit of my feelings; or that
it needed any other parents or fosterers than constitutional indolence,
aggravated into languor by ill-health; the accumulating embarrassments of
procrastination; the mental cowardice, which is the inseparable companion
of procrastination, and which makes us anxious to think and converse on
any thing rather than on what concerns ourselves; in fine, all those close
vexations, whether chargeable on my faults or my fortunes, which leave me
but little grief to spare for evils comparatively distant and alien.

Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I
cannot afford it. But so far from condemning those who can, I deem it a

writer’s duty, and think it creditable to his heart, to feel and express a
resentment proportioned to the grossness of the provocation, and the
importance of the object. There is no profession on earth, which requires an
attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of poetry; and indeed
as that of literary composition in general, if it be such as at all satisfies the
demands both of taste and of sound logic. How difficult and delicate a task
even the mere mechanism of verse is, may be conjectured from the failure
of those, who have attempted poetry late in life. Where then a man has,
from his earliest youth, devoted his whole being to an object, which by the
admission of all civilized nations in all ages is honourable as a pursuit, and
glorious as an attainment; what of all that relates to himself and his family,
if only we except his moral character, can have fairer claims to his
protection, or more authorize acts of self-defence, than the elaborate
products of his intellect and intellectual industry? Prudence itself would
command us to show, even if defect or diversion of natural sensibility had
prevented us from feeling, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the
offspring and representatives of our nobler being. I know it, alas! by woful
experience. I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness,
the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion. The greater part
indeed have been trod under foot, and are forgotten; but yet no small
number have crept forth into life, some to furnish feathers for the caps of
others, and still more to plume the shafts in the quivers of my enemies, of
them that unprovoked have lain in wait against my soul.
Sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis, apes!

CHAPTER III
The Author’s obligations to critics, and the probable occasion—Principles
of modern criticism—Mr. Southey’s works and character.

To anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and news-journals of various
name and rank, and to satirists with or without a name in verse or prose, or
in verse-text aided by prose-comment, I do seriously believe and profess,
that I owe full two-thirds of whatever reputation and publicity I happen to
possess. For when the name of an individual has occurred so frequently, in
so many works, for so great a length of time, the readers of these works—
(which with a shelf or two of beauties, elegant Extracts and Anas, form
nine-tenths of the reading of the reading Public [14])—cannot but be
familiar with the name, without distinctly remembering whether it was
introduced for eulogy or for censure. And this becomes the more likely, if
(as I believe) the habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added
to Averroes’ catalogue of Anti-Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory
[15]. But where this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt to
suspect that there must be something more than usually strong and
extensive in a reputation, that could either require or stand so merciless and
long-continued a cannonading. Without any feeling of anger therefore—(for
which indeed, on my own account, I have no pretext)—I may yet be
allowed to express some degree of surprise, that, after having run the
critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults which I had, nothing having
come before the judgment-seat in the interim, I should, year after year,
quarter after quarter, month after month—(not to mention sundry petty
periodicals of still quicker revolution, “or weekly or diurnal”)—have been,
for at least seventeen years consecutively, dragged forth by them into the
foremost ranks of the proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for
faults directly opposite, and which I certainly had not. How shall I explain
this?

Whatever may have been the case with others, I certainly cannot attribute
this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy, or to feelings of vindictive
animosity. Not to the former, for with the exception of a very few who are

my intimate friends, and were so before they were known as authors, I have
had little other acquaintance with literary characters, than what may be
implied in an accidental introduction, or casual meeting in a mixed
company. And as far as words and looks can be trusted, I must believe that,
even in these instances, I had excited no unfriendly disposition. Neither by
letter, nor in conversation, have I ever had dispute or controversy beyond
the common social interchange of opinions. Nay, where I had reason to
suppose my convictions fundamentally different, it has been my habit, and I
may add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief,
rather than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till I could establish
some points of complete sympathy, some grounds common to both sides,
from which to commence its explanation.

Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few pages
which I have published, are of too distant a date, and the extent of their sale
a proof too conclusive against their having been popular at any time, to
render probable, I had almost said possible, the excitement of envy on their
account; and the man who should envy me on any other, verily he must be
envy-mad!

Lastly, with as little semblance of reason, could I suspect any animosity
towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I have before said, that
my acquaintance with literary men has been limited and distant; and that I
have had neither dispute nor controversy. From my first entrance into life, I
have, with few and short intervals, lived either abroad or in retirement. My
different essays on subjects of national interest, published at different times,
first in the Morning Post and then in the Courier, with my courses of
Lectures on the principles of criticism as applied to Shakespeare and
Milton, constitute my whole publicity; the only occasions on which I could
offend any member of the republic of letters. With one solitary exception in
which my words were first misstated and then wantonly applied to an
individual, I could never learn that I had excited the displeasure of any
among my literary contemporaries. Having announced my intention to give
a course of Lectures on the characteristic merits and defects of English
poetry in its different aeras; first, from Chaucer to Milton; second, from
Dryden inclusively to Thomson; and third, from Cowper to the present day;
I changed my plan, and confined my disquisition to the former two periods,

that I might furnish no possible pretext for the unthinking to misconstrue, or
the malignant to misapply my words, and having stamped their own
meaning on them, to pass them as current coin in the marts of garrulity or
detraction.

Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the
deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon, Harrington,
Machiavel, and Spinoza, are not read, because Hume, Condillac, and
Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company no prudent man will oppugn the
merits of a contemporary in his own supposed department; contenting
himself with praising in his turn those whom he deems excellent. If I should
ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the pretensions of individuals, I would
oppose them in books which could be weighed and answered, in which I
could evolve the whole of my reasons and feelings, with their requisite
limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable conversation, where however
strong the reasons might be, the feelings that prompted them would
assuredly be attributed by some one or other to envy and discontent.
Besides I well know, and, I trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must
be the ignorant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; and the eulogies of
critics without taste or judgment are the natural reward of authors without
feeling or genius. Sint unicuique sua praemia.

How then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to account for
attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require all
three to explain? The solution seems to be this,—I was in habits of intimacy
with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey! This, however, transfers, rather than
removes the difficulty. Be it, that, by an unconscionable extension of the old
adage, noscitur a socio, my literary friends are never under the water-fall of
criticism, but I must be wet through with the spray; yet how came the
torrent to descend upon them?

First then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general
reception of his earlier publications; namely, the poems published with Mr.
Lovell under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two volumes of poems
under his own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures of the critics by
profession are extant, and may be easily referred to:—careless lines,
inequality in the merit of the different poems, and (in the lighter works) a

predilection for the strange and whimsical; in short, such faults as might
have been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were indeed sufficiently
enforced. Nor was there at that time wanting a party spirit to aggravate the
defects of a poet, who with all the courage of uncorrupted youth had
avowed his zeal for a cause, which he deemed that of liberty, and his
abhorrence of oppression by whatever name consecrated. But it was as little
objected by others, as dreamed of by the poet himself, that he preferred
careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or indeed that he
pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction, except that which we
may all learn from Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable dialogue, De
Oratoribus, generally attributed to Tacitus, or Strada’s Prolusions; if indeed
natural good sense and the early study of the best models in his own
language had not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may
venture the expression, more vitally. All that could have been fairly deduced
was, that in his taste and estimation of writers Mr. Southey agreed far more
with Thomas Warton, than with Dr. Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny, that at
all times Mr. Southey was of the same mind with Sir Philip Sidney in
preferring an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry to twenty
indifferent poems that strutted in the highest. And by what have his works,
published since then, been characterized, each more strikingly than the
preceding, but by greater splendour, a deeper pathos, profounder reflections,
and a more sustained dignity of language and of metre? Distant may the
period be, but whenever the time shall come, when all his works shall be
collected by some editor worthy to be his biographer, I trust that an
appendix of excerpta of all the passages, in which his writings, name, and
character have been attacked, from the pamphlets and periodical works of
the last twenty years, may be an accompaniment. Yet that it would prove
medicinal in after times I dare not hope; for as long as there are readers to
be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate.
And such readers will become in all probability more numerous, in
proportion as a still greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase
of sciolists, and sciolism bring with it petulance and presumption. In times
of old, books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next
became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of instructive
friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sank still lower to that of
entertaining companions; and at present they seem degraded into culprits to
hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the less

peremptory, judge, who chooses to write from humour or interest, from
enmity or arrogance, and to abide the decision “of him that reads in malice,
or him that reads after dinner.”

The same retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation which the
authors themselves have assumed towards their readers. From the lofty
address of Bacon: “these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam, which
that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their interest:” or from
dedication to Monarch or Pontiff, in which the honour given was asserted in
equipoise to the patronage acknowledged: from Pindar’s
———’ep’ alloi—
si d’alloi megaloi: to d’eschaton koryphoutai
basilensi. Maeketi
paptaine porsion.
Eiae se te touton
upsou chronon patein, eme
te tossade nikaphorois
omilein, prophanton sophian kath’ Ellanas eonta panta.—OLYMP.
OD. I.

there was a gradual sinking in the etiquette or allowed style of pretension.

Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number, addressed
themselves to “learned readers;” then aimed to conciliate the graces of “the
candid reader;” till, the critic still rising as the author sank, the amateurs of
literature collectively were erected into a municipality of judges, and
addressed as the Town! And now, finally, all men being supposed able to
read, and all readers able to judge, the multitudinous Public, shaped into
personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the
throne of criticism. But, alas! as in other despotisms, it but echoes the
decisions of its invisible ministers, whose intellectual claims to the
guardianship of the Muses seem, for the greater part, analogous to the
physical qualifications which adapt their oriental brethren for the
superintendence of the Harem. Thus it is said, that St. Nepomuc was
installed the guardian of bridges, because he had fallen over one, and sunk
out of sight; thus too St. Cecilia is said to have been first propitiated by
musicians, because, having failed in her own attempts, she had taken a
dislike to the art and all its successful professors. But I shall probably have

occasion hereafter to deliver my convictions more at large concerning this
state of things, and its influences on taste, genius and morality.

In the Thalaba, the Madoc, and still more evidently in the unique [16] Cid,
in the Kehama, and, as last, so best, the Roderick; Southey has given
abundant proof, se cogitare quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus
hominum: nec persuadere sibi posse, non saepe tractandum quod placere et
semper et omnibus cupiat. But on the other hand, I conceive, that Mr.
Southey was quite unable to comprehend, wherein could consist the crime
or mischief of printing half a dozen or more playful poems; or to speak
more generally, compositions which would be enjoyed or passed over,
according as the taste and humour of the reader might chance to be;
provided they contained nothing immoral. In the present age periturae
parcere chartae is emphatically an unreasonable demand. The merest trifle
he ever sent abroad had tenfold better claims to its ink and paper than all the
silly criticisms on it, which proved no more than that the critic was not one
of those, for whom the trifle was written; and than all the grave exhortations
to a greater reverence for the public—as if the passive page of a book, by
having an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly assumed at
once loco-motive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buz in
the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of the said mysterious
personage. But what gives an additional and more ludicrous absurdity to
these lamentations is the curious fact, that if in a volume of poetry the critic
should find poem or passage which he deems more especially worthless, he
is sure to select and reprint it in the review; by which, on his own grounds,
he wastes as much more paper than the author, as the copies of a
fashionable review are more numerous than those of the original book; in
some, and those the most prominent instances, as ten thousand to five
hundred. I know nothing that surpasses the vileness of deciding on the
merits of a poet or painter,—(not by characteristic defects; for where there
is genius, these always point to his characteristic beauties; but)—by
accidental failures or faulty passages; except the impudence of defending it,
as the proper duty, and most instructive part, of criticism. Omit or pass
slightly over the expression, grace, and grouping of Raffael’s figures; but
ridicule in detail the knitting-needles and broom-twigs, that are to represent
trees in his back grounds; and never let him hear the last of his galli-pots!
Admit that the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton are not without merit; but

repay yourself for this concession, by reprinting at length the two poems on
the University Carrier! As a fair specimen of his Sonnets, quote
“A Book was writ of late called Tetrachordon;”

and, as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal translation of
the first and second Psalm! In order to justify yourself, you need only
assert, that had you dwelt chiefly on the beauties and excellencies of the
poet, the admiration of these might seduce the attention of future writers
from the objects of their love and wonder, to an imitation of the few poems
and passages in which the poet was most unlike himself.

But till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far other
motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant sneers, the
reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed canons of criticism,
previously established and deduced from the nature of man; reflecting
minds will pronounce it arrogance in them thus to announce themselves to
men of letters, as the guides of their taste and judgment. To the purchaser
and mere reader it is, at all events, an injustice. He who tells me that there
are defects in a new work, tells me nothing which I should not have taken
for granted without his information. But he, who points out and elucidates
the beauties of an original work does indeed give me interesting
information, such as experience would not have authorized me in
anticipating. And as to compositions which the authors themselves
announce with
Haec ipsi novimus esse nihil,

why should we judge by a different rule two printed works, only because
the one author is alive, and the other in his grave? What literary man has not
regretted the prudery of Spratt in refusing to let his friend Cowley appear in
his slippers and dressing gown? I am not perhaps the only one who has
derived an innocent amusement from the riddles, conundrums, tri-syllable
lines, and the like, of Swift and his correspondents, in hours of languor,
when to have read his more finished works would have been useless to
myself, and, in some sort, an act of injustice to the author. But I am at a loss
to conceive by what perversity of judgment, these relaxations of his genius
could be employed to diminish his fame as the writer of Gulliver, or the
Tale of a Tub. Had Mr. Southey written twice as many poems of inferior

merit, or partial interest, as have enlivened the journals of the day, they
would have added to his honour with good and wise men, not merely or
principally as proving the versatility of his talents, but as evidences of the
purity of that mind, which even in its levities never dictated a line which it
need regret on any moral account.

I have in imagination transferred to the future biographer the duty of
contrasting Southey’s fixed and well-earned fame, with the abuse and
indefatigable hostility of his anonymous critics from his early youth to his
ripest manhood. But I cannot think so ill of human nature as not to believe,
that these critics have already taken shame to themselves, whether they
consider the object of their abuse in his moral or his literary character. For
reflect but on the variety and extent of his acquirements! He stands second
to no man, either as an historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard
him as a popular essayist,—(for the articles of his compositions in the
reviews are, for the greater part, essays on subjects of deep or curious
interest rather than criticisms on particular works)—I look in vain for any
writer, who has conveyed so much information, from so many and such
recondite sources, with so many just and original reflections, in a style so
lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in
short, who has combined so much wisdom with so much wit; so much truth
and knowledge with so much life and fancy. His prose is always intelligible
and always entertaining. In poetry he has attempted almost every species of
composition known before, and he has added new ones; and if we except
the highest lyric,—(in which how few, how very few even of the greatest
minds have been fortunate)—he has attempted every species successfully;
from the political song of the day, thrown off in the playful overflow of
honest joy and patriotic exultation, to the wild ballad; from epistolary ease
and graceful narrative, to austere and impetuous moral declamation; from
the pastoral charms and wild streaming lights of the Thalaba, in which
sentiment and imagery have given permanence even to the excitement of
curiosity; and from the full blaze of the Kehama,—(a gallery of finished
pictures in one splendid fancy piece, in which, notwithstanding, the moral
grandeur rises gradually above the brilliance of the colouring and the
boldness and novelty of the machinery)—to the more sober beauties of the
Madoc; and lastly, from the Madoc to his Roderick, in which, retaining all
his former excellencies of a poet eminently inventive and picturesque, he

has surpassed himself in language and metre, in the construction of the
whole, and in the splendour of particular passages.

Here then shall I conclude? No! The characters of the deceased, like the
encomia on tombstones, as they are described with religious tenderness, so
are they read, with allowing sympathy indeed, but yet with rational
deduction. There are men, who deserve a higher record; men with whose
characters it is the interest of their contemporaries, no less than that of
posterity, to be made acquainted; while it is yet possible for impartial
censure, and even for quick-sighted envy, to cross-examine the tale without
offence to the courtesies of humanity; and while the eulogist, detected in
exaggeration or falsehood, must pay the full penalty of his baseness in the
contempt which brands the convicted flatterer. Publicly has Mr. Southey
been reviled by men, who, as I would fain hope for the honour of human
nature, hurled fire-brands against a figure of their own imagination;
publicly have his talents been depreciated, his principles denounced; as
publicly do I therefore, who have known him intimately, deem it my duty to
leave recorded, that it is Southey’s almost unexampled felicity, to possess
the best gifts of talent and genius free from all their characteristic defects.
To those who remember the state of our public schools and universities
some twenty years past, it will appear no ordinary praise in any man to have
passed from innocence into virtue, not only free from all vicious habit, but
unstained by one act of intemperance, or the degradations akin to
intemperance. That scheme of head, heart, and habitual demeanour, which
in his early manhood, and first controversial writings, Milton, claiming the
privilege of self-defence, asserts of himself, and challenges his calumniators
to disprove; this will his school-mates, his fellow-collegians, and his
maturer friends, with a confidence proportioned to the intimacy of their
knowledge, bear witness to, as again realized in the life of Robert Southey.
But still more striking to those, who by biography or by their own
experience are familiar with the general habits of genius, will appear the
poet’s matchless industry and perseverance in his pursuits; the worthiness
and dignity of those pursuits; his generous submission to tasks of transitory
interest, or such as his genius alone could make otherwise; and that having
thus more than satisfied the claims of affection or prudence, he should yet
have made for himself time and power, to achieve more, and in more
various departments, than almost any other writer has done, though

employed wholly on subjects of his own choice and ambition. But as
Southey possesses, and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is he master
even of his virtues. The regular and methodical tenor of his daily labours,
which would be deemed rare in the most mechanical pursuits, and might be
envied by the mere man of business, loses all semblance of formality in the
dignified simplicity of his manners, in the spring and healthful cheerfulness
of his spirits. Always employed, his friends find him always at leisure. No
less punctual in trifles, than steadfast in the performance of highest duties,
he inflicts none of those small pains and discomforts which irregular men
scatter about them, and which in the aggregate so often become formidable
obstacles both to happiness and utility; while on the contrary he bestows all
the pleasures, and inspires all that ease of mind on those around him or
connected with him, which perfect consistency, and (if such a word might
be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small as in great concerns, cannot
but inspire and bestow; when this too is softened without being weakened
by kindness and gentleness. I know few men who so well deserve the
character which an antient attributes to Marcus Cato, namely, that he was
likest virtue, in as much as he seemed to act aright, not in obedience to any
law or outward motive, but by the necessity of a happy nature, which could
not act otherwise. As son, brother, husband, father, master, friend, he moves
with firm yet light steps, alike unostentatious, and alike exemplary. As a
writer, he has uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of
humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been the
cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national independence and of
national illumination. When future critics shall weigh out his guerdon of
praise and censure, it will be Southey the poet only, that will supply them
with the scanty materials for the latter. They will likewise not fail to record,
that as no man was ever a more constant friend, never had poet more friends
and honourers among the good of all parties; and that quacks in education,
quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism were his only enemies. [17]

CHAPTER IV
The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface—Mr. Wordsworth’s earlier poems—
On fancy and imagination—The investigation of the distinction important
to the Fine Arts.

I have wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied to myself
readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me from the main
road; so I dare calculate on not a few, who will warmly sympathize with
them. At present it will be sufficient for my purpose, if I have proved, that
Mr. Southey’s writings no more than my own furnished the original
occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, and to the clamours
against its supposed founders and proselytes.

As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were in
themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so entitled. A
careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in the belief, that the
omission of less than a hundred lines would have precluded nine-tenths of
the criticism on this work. I hazard this declaration, however, on the
supposition, that the reader has taken it up, as he would have done any other
collection of poems purporting to derive their subjects or interests from the
incidents of domestic or ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of
meditation which the poet utters in his own person and character; with the
proviso, that these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference
to, the author’s peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his
attention previously directed to those peculiarities. In that case, as actually
happened with Mr. Southey’s earlier works, the lines and passages which
might have offended the general taste, would have been considered as mere
inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to perversity of judgment. The
men of business who had passed their lives chiefly in cities, and who might
therefore be expected to derive the highest pleasure from acute notices of
men and manners conveyed in easy, yet correct and pointed language; and
all those who, reading but little poetry, are most stimulated with that species
of it, which seems most distant from prose, would probably have passed by
the volumes altogether. Others more catholic in their taste, and yet

habituated to be most pleased when most excited, would have contented
themselves with deciding, that the author had been successful in proportion
to the elevation of his style and subject. Not a few, perhaps, might, by their
admiration of the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Wye,
those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old Cumberland Beggar, and Ruth,
have been gradually led to peruse with kindred feeling The Brothers, the
Hart-leap Well, and whatever other poems in that collection may be
described as holding a middle place between those written in the highest
and those in the humblest style; as for instance between the Tintern Abbey,
and The Thorn, or Simon Lee. Should their taste submit to no further
change, and still remain unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or the
imitations of them, that are, more or less, scattered through the class last
mentioned; yet even from the small number of the latter, they would have
deemed them but an inconsiderable subtraction from the merit of the whole
work; or, what is sometimes not unpleasing in the publication of a new
writer, as serving to ascertain the natural tendency, and consequently the
proper direction of the author’s genius.

In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical
Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of the unexampled
opposition which Mr. Wordsworth’s writings have been since doomed to
encounter. The humbler passages in the poems themselves were dwelt on
and cited to justify the rejection of the theory. What in and for themselves
would have been either forgotten or forgiven as imperfections, or at least
comparative failures, provoked direct hostility when announced as
intentional, as the result of choice after full deliberation. Thus the poems,
admitted by all as excellent, joined with those which had pleased the far
greater number, though they formed two-thirds of the whole work, instead
of being deemed (as in all right they should have been, even if we take for
granted that the reader judged aright) an atonement for the few exceptions,
gave wind and fuel to the animosity against both the poems and the poet. In
all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger.
Not able to deny that the author possessed both genius and a powerful
intellect, they felt very positive,—but yet were not quite certain that he
might not be in the right, and they themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state
of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of it, and

by wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had written a long and
argumentative essay to persuade them, that
Fair is foul, and foul is fair;

in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without judgment,
and were now about to censure without reason. [18]

That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to believe
from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own knowledge, that the
same general censure has been grounded by almost every different person
on some different poem. Among those, whose candour and judgment I
estimate highly, I distinctly remember six who expressed their objections to
the Lyrical Ballads almost in the same words, and altogether to the same
purport, at the same time admitting, that several of the poems had given
them great pleasure; and, strange as it might seem, the composition which
one cited as execrable, another quoted as his favourite. I am indeed
convinced in my own mind, that could the same experiment have been tried
with these volumes, as was made in the well known story of the picture, the
result would have been the same; the parts which had been covered by
black spots on the one day, would be found equally albo lapide notatae on
the succeeding.

However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the attention
on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion, as if they had
been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of passing them over
in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a bookseller’s catalogue;
especially, as no one pretended to have found in them any immorality or
indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the worst, could only be regarded as
so many light or inferior coins in a rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in
a weight of bullion. A friend whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but
whose judgment and strong sound sense I have had almost continued
occasion to revere, making the usual complaints to me concerning both the
style and subjects of Mr. Wordsworth’s minor poems; I admitted that there
were some few of the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find a
sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre. I mentioned Alice
Fell as an instance; “Nay,” replied my friend with more than usual
quickness of manner, “I cannot agree with you there!—that, I own, does

seem to me a remarkably pleasing poem.” In the Lyrical Ballads, (for my
experience does not enable me to extend the remark equally unqualified to
the two subsequent volumes,) I have heard at different times, and from
different individuals, every single poem extolled and reprobated, with the
exception of those of loftier kind, which as was before observed, seem to
have won universal praise. This fact of itself would have made me diffident
in my censures, had not a still stronger ground been furnished by the
strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the
nature of the faults stated as justifying it. The seductive faults, the dulcia
vitia of Cowley, Marini, or Darwin might reasonably be thought capable of
corrupting the public judgment for half a century, and require a twenty
years war, campaign after campaign, in order to dethrone the usurper and
re-establish the legitimate taste. But that a downright simpleness, under the
affectation of simplicity, prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in
childish phrases, and a preference of mean, degrading, or at best trivial
associations and characters, should succeed in forming a school of
imitators, a company of almost religious admirers, and this too among
young men of ardent minds, liberal education, and not
———with academic laurels unbestowed;

and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is characterized as
below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have well-nigh engrossed
criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of review, magazine, pamphlet,
poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter of wonder. Of yet greater is it,
that the contest should still continue as undecided as [19] that between
Bacchus and the frogs in Aristophanes; when the former descended to the
realms of the departed to bring back the spirit of old and genuine poesy;—
CH. Brekekekex, koax, koax.

D. All’ exoloisth’ auto koax.
Ouden gar est’ all’, hae koax.
Oimozet’ ou gar moi melei.

CH. Alla maen kekraxomestha
g’, oposon hae pharynx an haemon
chandanae di’ haemeras, brekekekex, koax, koax!

D. Touto gar ou nikaesete.

CH. Oude men haemas su pantos.

D. Oude maen humeis ge dae m’
oudepote. Kekraxomai gar,
kan me deae, di’ haemeras,
eos an humon epikrataeso tou koax!

CH. Brekekekex, KO’AX, KOAX!

During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became
acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth’s first publication entitled Descriptive
Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic
genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the form,
style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of the particular
lines and periods, there is a harshness and acerbity connected and combined
with words and images all a-glow, which might recall those products of the
vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of a hard and thorny
rind and shell, within which the rich fruit is elaborating. The language is not
only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own
impatient strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images,
acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demands always a
greater closeness of attention, than poetry,—at all events, than descriptive
poetry—has a right to claim. It not seldom therefore justified the complaint
of obscurity. In the following extract I have sometimes fancied, that I saw
an emblem of the poem itself, and of the author’s genius as it was then
displayed.—
’Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,
All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;
The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight
Dark is the region as with coming night;
Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle’s wheeling form;
Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o’er the lake recline;
Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun
The west, that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.

The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as many
changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it is remarkable how

soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of its earliest
products; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are the more obtrusive
and confluent, because as heterogeneous elements, which had only a
temporary use, they constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are
carried off. Or we may compare them to some diseases, which must work
on the humours, and be thrown out on the surface, in order to secure the
patient from their future recurrence. I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I
had the happiness of knowing Mr. Wordsworth personally, and while
memory lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind,
by his recitation of a manuscript poem, which still remains unpublished, but
of which the stanza and tone of style were the same as those of The Female
Vagrant, as originally printed in the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads.
There was here no mark of strained thought, or forced diction, no crowd or
turbulence of imagery; and, as the poet hath himself well described in his
Lines on revisiting the Wye, manly reflection and human associations had
given both variety, and an additional interest to natural objects, which, in
the passion and appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him neither to
need nor permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen from an
imperfect control over the resources of his native language, had almost
wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and
illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so
distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will, more or
less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the attention has
been specially directed to their worthlessness and incongruity [21]. I did not
perceive anything particular in the mere style of the poem alluded to during
its recitation, except indeed such difference as was not separable from the
thought and manner; and the Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less,
recalls to the reader’s mind Spenser’s own style, would doubtless have
authorized, in my then opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of
ordinary life, than could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the
heroic couplet. It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as
to common defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so
unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my
judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine
balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the
objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the
atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around

forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom
had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops.

This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth’s writings is more or less
predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner
felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me first to
suspect,--(and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their
appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture into full
conviction,)--that Fancy and Imagination were two distinct and widely
different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either
two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and higher degree of
one and the same power. It is not, I own, easy to conceive a more apposite
translation of the Greek phantasia than the Latin imaginatio; but it is
equally true that in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain
collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize
[22] those words originally of the same meaning, which the conflux of
dialects supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as the Greek and
German: and which the same cause, joined with accidents of translation
from original works of different countries, occasion in mixed languages like
our own. The first and most important point to be proved is, that two
conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under one and the same word,
and—this done—to appropriate that word exclusively to the one meaning,
and the synonyme, should there be one, to the other. But if,—(as will be
often the case in the arts and sciences,)—no synonyme exists, we must
either invent or borrow a word. In the present instance the appropriation has
already begun, and been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had
a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should
succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally
different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To the faculty by
which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the term
‘imagination;’ while the other would be contra-distinguished as ‘fancy.’
Now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no less grounded in
nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway’s
Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,

from Shakespeare’s
What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?

or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of the fine arts,
and of poetry in particular, could not but derive some additional and
important light. It would in its immediate effects furnish a torch of guidance
to the philosophical critic; and ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic
minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from directing
in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in
the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without
loss of originality.

It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long been
my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it, are so
commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I trust
therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt, in the smile
with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I confess myself
uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception of a truth new to
myself may not have been rendered more poignant by the conceit, that it
would be equally so to the public. There was a time, certainly, in which I
took some little credit to myself, in the belief that I had been the first of my
countrymen, who had pointed out the diverse meaning of which the two
terms were capable, and analyzed the faculties to which they should be
appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor’s recent volume of synonymes I have not yet
seen [23]; but his specification of the terms in question has been clearly
shown to be both insufficient and erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth in the
Preface added to the late collection of his Poems. The explanation which
Mr. Wordsworth has himself given, will be found to differ from mine,
chiefly, perhaps as our objects are different. It could scarcely indeed happen
otherwise, from the advantage I have enjoyed of frequent conversation with
him on a subject to which a poem of his own first directed my attention, and
my conclusions concerning which he had made more lucid to myself by
many happy instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the
mind. But it was Mr. Wordsworth’s purpose to consider the influences of
fancy and imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the
different effects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to
investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the
degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their
poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift

themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common
consciousness.

Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged to draw more
largely on the reader’s attention, than so immethodical a miscellany as this
can authorize; when in such a work (the Ecclesiasical Polity) of such a mind
as Hooker’s, the judicious author, though no less admirable for the
perspicuity than for the port and dignity of his language,—and though he
wrote for men of learning in a learned age,—saw nevertheless occasion to
anticipate and guard against “complaints of obscurity,” as often as he was to
trace his subject “to the highest well-spring and fountain.” Which,
(continues he) “because men are not accustomed to, the pains we take are
more needful a great deal, than acceptable; and the matters we handle, seem
by reason of newness (till the mind grow better acquainted with them) dark
and intricate.” I would gladly therefore spare both myself and others this
labour, if I knew how without it to present an intelligible statement of my
poetic creed,—not as my opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as
deductions from established premises conveyed in such a form, as is
calculated either to effect a fundamental conviction, or to receive a
fundamental confutation. If I may dare once more adopt the words of
Hooker, “they, unto whom we shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by
us, because it is in their own hands to spare that labour, which they are not
willing to endure.” Those at least, let me be permitted to add, who have
taken so much pains to render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and
have supported the charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other
authority than their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as to me
not to refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory which I do
acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining the grounds on
which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its justification.

CHAPTER V
On the law of Association—Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley.

There have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as by an instinct
to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their attempts to
its solution. The first step was to construct a table of distinctions, which
they seem to have formed on the principle of the absence or presence of the
Will. Our various sensations, perceptions, and movements were classed as
active or passive, or as media partaking of both. A still finer distinction was
soon established between the voluntary and the spontaneous. In our
perceptions we seem to ourselves merely passive to an external power,
whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or as a blank canvass on which
some unknown hand paints it. For it is worthy of notice, that the latter, or
the system of Idealism may be traced to sources equally remote with the
former, or Materialism; and Berkeley can boast an ancestry at least as
venerable as Gassendi or Hobbes. These conjectures, however, concerning
the mode in which our perceptions originated, could not alter the natural
difference of Things and Thoughts. In the former, the cause appeared
wholly external, while in the latter, sometimes our will interfered as the
producing or determining cause, and sometimes our nature seemed to act by
a mechanism of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or even
against it. Our inward experiences were thus arranged in three separate
classes, the passive sense, or what the School-men call the merely receptive
quality of the mind; the voluntary; and the spontaneous, which holds the
middle place between both. But it is not in human nature to meditate on any
mode of action, without inquiring after the law that governs it; and in the
explanation of the spontaneous movements of our being, the metaphysician
took the lead of the anatomist and natural philosopher. In Egypt, Palestine,
Greece, and India the analysis of the mind had reached its noon and
manhood, while experimental research was still in its dawn and infancy. For
many, very many centuries, it has been difficult to advance a new truth, or
even a new error, in the philosophy of the intellect or morals. With regard,
however, to the laws that direct the spontaneous movements of thought and

the principle of their intellectual mechanism there exists, it has been
asserted, an important exception most honourable to the moderns, and in the
merit of which our own country claims the largest share. Sir James
Mackintosh,—(who, amid the variety of his talents and attainments, is not
of less repute for the depth and accuracy of his philosophical inquiries than
for the eloquence with which he is said to render their most difficult results
perspicuous, and the driest attractive,)—affirmed in the Lectures, delivered
by him in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, that the law of association as established in
the contemporaneity of the original impressions, formed the basis of all true
psychology; and that any ontological or metaphysical science, not contained
in such (that is, an empirical) psychology, was but a web of abstractions and
generalizations. Of this prolific truth, of this great fundamental law, he
declared Hobbes to have been the original discoverer, while its full
application to the whole intellectual system we owed to Hartley; who stood
in the same relation to Hobbes as Newton to Kepler; the law of association
being that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter.

Of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the comparative merits
of the ancient metaphysicians, including their commentators, the School-
men, and of the modern and British and French philosophers from Hobbes
to Hume, Hartley, and Condillac, this is not the place to speak. So wide
indeed is the chasm between Sir James Mackintosh’s philosophical creed
and mine, that so far from being able to join hands, we could scarcely make
our voices intelligible to each other: and to bridge it over would require
more time, skill, and power than I believe myself to possess. But the latter
clause involves for the greater part a mere question of fact and history, and
the accuracy of the statement is to be tried by documents rather than
reasoning.

First, then, I deny Hobbes’s claim in toto: for he had been anticipated by
Des Cartes, whose work De Methodo, preceded Hobbes’s De Natura
Humana, by more than a year. But what is of much more importance,
Hobbes builds nothing on the principle which he had announced. He does
not even announce it, as differing in any respect from the general laws of
material motion and impact: nor was it, indeed, possible for him so to do,
compatibly with his system, which was exclusively material and
mechanical. Far otherwise is it with Des Cartes; greatly as he too in his after

writings (and still more egregiously his followers De la Forge, and others)
obscured the truth by their attempts to explain it on the theory of nervous
fluids, and material configurations. But, in his interesting work, De
Methodo, Des Cartes relates the circumstance which first led him to
meditate on this subject, and which since then has been often noticed and
employed as an instance and illustration of the law. A child who with its
eyes bandaged had lost several of his fingers by amputation, continued to
complain for many days successively of pains, now in this joint and now in
that, of the very fingers which had been cut off. Des Cartes was led by this
incident to reflect on the uncertainty with which we attribute any particular
place to any inward pain or uneasiness, and proceeded after long
consideration to establish it as a general law: that contemporaneous
impressions, whether images or sensations, recall each other mechanically.
On this principle, as a ground work, he built up the whole system of human
language, as one continued process of association. He showed in what sense
not only general terms, but generic images,—under the name of abstract
ideas,—actually existed, and in what consist their nature and power. As one
word may become the general exponent of many, so by association a simple
image may represent a whole class. But in truth Hobbes himself makes no
claims to any discovery, and introduces this law of association, or (in his
own language) discursion of mind, as an admitted fact, in the solution alone
of which, and this by causes purely physiological, he arrogates any
originality. His system is briefly this; whenever the senses are impinged on
by external objects, whether by the rays of light reflected from them, or by
effluxes of their finer particles, there results a correspondent motion of the
innermost and subtlest organs. This motion constitutes a representation, and
there remains an impression of the same, or a certain disposition to repeat
the same motion. Whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the
impressions that are left, (or in the language of Mr. Hume, the ideas,) [24]
are linked together. Whenever therefore any one of the movements, which
constitute a complex impression, is renewed through the senses, the others
succeed mechanically. It follows of necessity, therefore, that Hobbes, as
well as Hartley and all others who derive association from the connection
and interdependence of the supposed matter, the movements of which
constitute our thoughts, must have reduced all its forms to the one law of
Time. But even the merit of announcing this law with philosophic precision
cannot be fairly conceded to him. For the objects of any two ideas need not

have co-existed in the same sensation in order to become mutually
associable. The same result will follow when one only of the two ideas has
been represented by the senses, and the other by the memory.

Long however before either Hobbes or Des Cartes the law of association
had been defined, and its important functions set forth by Ludovicus Vives.
Phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by Vives to express the mental
power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind; and imaginatio
for the receptivity (via receptiva) of impressions, or for the passive
perception. The power of combination he appropriates to the former: “quae
singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea conjungit et disjungait
phantasia.” And the law by which the thoughts are spontaneously presented
follows thus: “quae simul sunt a phantasia comprehensa, si alterutrum
occurrat, solet secum alterum representare.” To time therefore he
subordinates all the other exciting causes of association. The soul proceeds
“a causa ad effectum, ab hoc ad instrumentum, a parte ad totum;” thence to
the place, from place to person, and from this to whatever preceded or
followed, all as being parts of a total impression, each of which may recall
the other. The apparent springs “saltus vel transitus etiam longissimos,” he
explains by the same thought having been a component part of two or more
total impressions. Thus “ex Scipione venio in cogitationem potentiae
Turcicae, propter victorias ejus de Asia, in qua regnabat Antiochus.”

But from Vives I pass at once to the source of his doctrines, and (as far as
we can judge from the remains yet extant of Greek philosophy) as to the
first, so to the fullest and most perfect enunciation of the associative
principle, namely, to the writings of Aristotle; and of these in particular to
the treatises De Anima, and “De Memoria,” which last belongs to the series
of essays entitled in the old translations Parva Naturalia. In as much as later
writers have either deviated from, or added to his doctrines, they appear to
me to have introduced either error or groundless supposition.

In the first place it is to be observed, that Aristotle’s positions on this
subject are unmixed with fiction. The wise Stagyrite speaks of no
successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls, as Hobbes; nor
of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are
thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and

intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain, as the
followers of Des Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general; nor of an
oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the nerves of the
brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal spirits perform for them
under the notion of hollow tubes, as Hartley teaches—nor finally, (with yet
more recent dreamers) of chemical compositions by elective affinity, or of
an electric light at once the immediate object and the ultimate organ of
inward vision, which rises to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there,
disporting in various shapes,—as the balance of plus and minus, or negative
and positive, is destroyed or re-established,—images out both past and
present. Aristotle delivers a just theory without pretending to an hypothesis;
or in other words a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and of their
relations to each other without supposition, that is, a fact placed under a
number of facts, as their common support and explanation; though in the
majority of instances these hypotheses or suppositions better deserve the
name of upopoiaeseis, or suffictions. He uses indeed the word kinaeseis, to
express what we call representations or ideas, but he carefully distinguishes
them from material motion, designating the latter always by annexing the
words en topo, or kata topon. On the contrary, in his treatise De Anima, he
excludes place and motion from all the operations of thought, whether
representations or volitions, as attributes utterly and absurdly
heterogeneous.

The general law of association, or, more accurately, the common condition
under which all exciting causes act, and in which they may be generalized,
according to Aristotle is this. Ideas by having been together acquire a power
of recalling each other; or every partial representation awakes the total
representation of which it had been a part. In the practical determination of
this common principle to particular recollections, he admits five agents or
occasioning causes: first, connection in time, whether simultaneous,
preceding, or successive; second, vicinity or connection in space; third,
interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; fourth,
likeness; and fifth, contrast. As an additional solution of the occasional
seeming chasms in the continuity of reproduction he proves, that
movements or ideas possessing one or the other of these five characters had
passed through the mind as intermediate links, sufficiently clear to recall
other parts of the same total impressions with which they had co-existed,

though not vivid enough to excite that degree of attention which is requisite
for distinct recollection, or as we may aptly express it, after consciousness.
In association then consists the whole mechanism of the reproduction of
impressions, in the Aristotelian Psychology. It is the universal law of the
passive fancy and mechanical memory; that which supplies to all other
faculties their objects, to all thought the elements of its materials.

In consulting the excellent commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Parva
Naturalia of Aristotle, I was struck at once with its close resemblance to
Hume’s Essay on Association. The main thoughts were the same in both,
the order of the thoughts was the same, and even the illustrations differed
only by Hume’s occasional substitution of more modern examples. I
mentioned the circumstance to several of my literary acquaintances, who
admitted the closeness of the resemblance, and that it seemed too great to
be explained by mere coincidence; but they thought it improbable that
Hume should have held the pages of the Angelic Doctor worth turning over.
But some time after Mr. Payne showed Sir James Mackintosh some odd
volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, partly perhaps from having heard that he
had in his Lectures passed a high encomium on this canonized philosopher;
but chiefly from the fact, that the volumes had belonged to Mr. Hume, and
had here and there marginal marks and notes of reference in his own hand
writing. Among these volumes was that which contains the Parva Naturalia,
in the old Latin version, swathed and swaddled in the commentary afore
mentioned

It remains then for me, first to state wherein Hartley differs from Aristotle;
then, to exhibit the grounds of my conviction, that he differed only to err:
and next as the result, to show, by what influences of the choice and
judgment the associative power becomes either memory or fancy; and, in
conclusion, to appropriate the remaining offices of the mind to the reason,
and the imagination. With my best efforts to be as perspicuous as the nature
of language will permit on such a subject, I earnestly solicit the good
wishes and friendly patience of my readers, while I thus go “sounding on
my dim and perilous way.”

CHAPTER VI
That Hartley’s system, as far as it differs from that of Aristotle, is neither
tenable in theory, nor founded in facts.

Of Hartley’s hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating ether of
the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction between his
system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This, with all other similar
attempts to render that an object of the sight which has no relation to sight,
has been already sufficiently exposed by the younger Reimarus, Maasz, and
others, as outraging the very axioms of mechanics in a scheme, the merit of
which consists in its being mechanical. Whether any other philosophy be
possible, but the mechanical; and again, whether the mechanical system can
have any claim to be called philosophy; are questions for another place. It
is, however, certain, that as long as we deny the former, and affirm the
latter, we must bewilder ourselves, whenever we would pierce into the
adyta of causation; and all that laborious conjecture can do, is to fill up the
gaps of fancy. Under that despotism of the eye (the emancipation from
which Pythagoras by his numeral, and Plato by his musical, symbols, and
both by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the first propaideuma of the
mind)—under this strong sensuous influence, we are restless because
invisible things are not the objects of vision; and metaphysical systems, for
the most part, become popular, not for their truth, but in proportion as they
attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen, if only our visual organs
were sufficiently powerful.

From a hundred possible confutations let one suffice. According to this
system the idea or vibration a from the external object A becomes
associable with the idea or vibration m from the external object M, because
the oscillation a propagated itself so as to re-produce the oscillation m. But
the original impression from M was essentially different from the
impression A: unless therefore different causes may produce the same
effect, the vibration a could never produce the vibration m: and this
therefore could never be the means, by which a and m are associated. To
understand this, the attentive reader need only be reminded, that the ideas

are themselves, in Hartley’s system, nothing more than their appropriate
configurative vibrations. It is a mere delusion of the fancy to conceive the
pre-existence of the ideas, in any chain of association, as so many
differently coloured billiard-balls in contact, so that when an object, the
billiard-stick, strikes the first or white ball, the same motion propagates
itself through the red, green, blue and black, and sets the whole in motion.
No! we must suppose the very same force, which constitutes the white ball,
to constitute the red or black; or the idea of a circle to constitute the idea of
a triangle; which is impossible.

But it may be said, that by the sensations from the objects A and M, the
nerves have acquired a disposition to the vibrations a and m, and therefore a
need only be repeated in order to re-produce m. Now we will grant, for a
moment, the possibility of such a disposition in a material nerve, which yet
seems scarcely less absurd than to say, that a weather-cock had acquired a
habit of turning to the east, from the wind having been so long in that
quarter: for if it be replied, that we must take in the circumstance of life,
what then becomes of the mechanical philosophy? And what is the nerve,
but the flint which the wag placed in the pot as the first ingredient of his
stone broth, requiring only salt, turnips, and mutton, for the remainder! But
if we waive this, and pre-suppose the actual existence of such a disposition;
two cases are possible. Either, every idea has its own nerve and
correspondent oscillation, or this is not the case. If the latter be the truth, we
should gain nothing by these dispositions; for then, every nerve having
several dispositions, when the motion of any other nerve is propagated into
it, there will be no ground or cause present, why exactly the oscillation m
should arise, rather than any other to which it was equally pre-disposed. But
if we take the former, and let every idea have a nerve of its own, then every
nerve must be capable of propagating its motion into many other nerves;
and again, there is no reason assignable, why the vibration m should arise,
rather than any other ad libitum.

It is fashionable to smile at Hartley’s vibrations and vibratiuncles; and his
work has been re-edited by Priestley, with the omission of the material
hypothesis. But Hartley was too great a man, too coherent a thinker, for this
to have been done, either consistently or to any wise purpose. For all other
parts of his system, as far as they are peculiar to that system, once removed

from their mechanical basis, not only lose their main support, but the very
motive which led to their adoption. Thus the principle of contemporaneity,
which Aristotle had made the common condition of all the laws of
association, Hartley was constrained to represent as being itself the sole
law. For to what law can the action of material atoms be subject, but that of
proximity in place? And to what law can their motions be subjected but that
of time? Again, from this results inevitably, that the will, the reason, the
judgment, and the understanding, instead of being the determining causes of
association, must needs be represented as its creatures, and among its
mechanical effects. Conceive, for instance, a broad stream, winding through
a mountainous country with an indefinite number of currents, varying and
running into each other according as the gusts chance to blow from the
opening of the mountains. The temporary union of several currents in one,
so as to form the main current of the moment, would present an accurate
image of Hartley’s theory of the will.

Had this been really the case, the consequence would have been, that our
whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward impressions,
and that of senseless and passive memory. Take his law in its highest
abstraction and most philosophical form, namely, that every partial
representation recalls the total representation of which it was a part; and the
law becomes nugatory, were it only for its universality. In practice it would
indeed be mere lawlessness. Consider, how immense must be the sphere of
a total impression from the top of St. Paul’s church; and how rapid and
continuous the series of such total impressions. If, therefore, we suppose the
absence of all interference of the will, reason, and judgment, one or other of
two consequences must result. Either the ideas, or reliques of such
impression, will exactly imitate the order of the impression itself, which
would be absolute delirium: or any one part of that impression might recall
any other part, and—(as from the law of continuity, there must exist in
every total impression, some one or more parts, which are components of
some other following total impression, and so on ad infinitum)—any part of
any impression might recall any part of any other, without a cause present
to determine what it should be. For to bring in the will, or reason, as causes
of their own cause, that is, as at once causes and effects, can satisfy those
only who, in their pretended evidences of a God, having first demanded
organization, as the sole cause and ground of intellect, will then coolly

demand the pre-existence of intellect, as the cause and ground-work of
organization. There is in truth but one state to which this theory applies at
all, namely, that of complete light-headedness; and even to this it applies
but partially, because the will and reason are perhaps never wholly
suspended.

A case of this kind occurred in a Roman Catholic town in Germany a year
or two before my arrival at Goettingen, and had not then ceased to be a
frequent subject of conversation. A young woman of four or five and
twenty, who could neither read, nor write, was seized with a nervous fever;
during which, according to the asseverations of all the priests and monks of
the neighbourhood, she became possessed, and, as it appeared, by a very
learned devil. She continued incessantly talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew,
in very pompous tones and with most distinct enunciation. This possession
was rendered more probable by the known fact that she was or had been a
heretic. Voltaire humorously advises the devil to decline all acquaintance
with medical men; and it would have been more to his reputation, if he had
taken this advice in the present instance. The case had attracted the
particular attention of a young physician, and by his statement many
eminent physiologists and psychologists visited the town, and cross-
examined the case on the spot. Sheets full of her ravings were taken down
from her own mouth, and were found to consist of sentences, coherent and
intelligible each for itself, but with little or no connection with each other.
Of the Hebrew, a small portion only could be traced to the Bible; the
remainder seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick or conspiracy
was out of the question. Not only had the young woman ever been a
harmless, simple creature; but she was evidently labouring under a nervous
fever. In the town, in which she had been resident for many years as a
servant in different families, no solution presented itself. The young
physician, however, determined to trace her past life step by step; for the
patient herself was incapable of returning a rational answer. He at length
succeeded in discovering the place, where her parents had lived: travelled
thither, found them dead, but an uncle surviving; and from him learned, that
the patient had been charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor at nine
years old, and had remained with him some years, even till the old man’s
death. Of this pastor the uncle knew nothing, but that he was a very good
man. With great difficulty, and after much search, our young medical

philosopher discovered a niece of the pastor’s, who had lived with him as
his house-keeper, and had inherited his effects. She remembered the girl;
related, that her venerable uncle had been too indulgent, and could not bear
to hear the girl scolded; that she was willing to have kept her, but that, after
her patron’s death, the girl herself refused to stay. Anxious inquiries were
then, of course, made concerning the pastor’s habits; and the solution of the
phenomenon was soon obtained. For it appeared, that it had been the old
man’s custom, for years, to walk up and down a passage of his house into
which the kitchen door opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice, out
of his favourite books. A considerable number of these were still in the
niece’s possession. She added, that he was a very learned man and a great
Hebraist. Among the books were found a collection of Rabbinical writings,
together with several of the Greek and Latin Fathers; and the physician
succeeded in identifying so many passages with those taken down at the
young woman’s bedside, that no doubt could remain in any rational mind
concerning the true origin of the impressions made on her nervous system.

This authenticated case furnishes both proof and instance, that reliques of
sensation may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state, in the very same
order in which they were originally impressed; and as we cannot rationally
suppose the feverish state of the brain to act in any other way than as a
stimulus, this fact (and it would not be difficult to adduce several of the
same kind) contributes to make it even probable, that all thoughts are in
themselves imperishable; and, that if the intelligent faculty should be
rendered more comprehensive, it would require only a different and
apportioned organization,—the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial,
—to bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole
past existence. And this, this, perchance, is the dread book of judgment, in
the mysterious hieroglyphics of which every idle word is recorded! Yea, in
the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and
earth should pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be
loosened or lost from that living chain of causes, with all the links of which,
conscious or unconscious, the free-will, our only absolute Self, is
coextensive and co-present. But not now dare I longer discourse of this,
waiting for a loftier mood, and a nobler subject, warned from within and
from without, that it is profanation to speak of these “mysteries tois maede
phantasteisin, os kalon to taes dikaiosynaes kai sophrosynaes prosopon, kai

oute hesperos oute eoos outo kala. To gar horon pros to horomenon
syngenes kai homoion poiaesamenon dei epiballein tae thea, ou gar an
popote eiden ophthalmos haelion, haelioeidaes mae gegenaemenos oude to
kalon an idae psychae, mae kagae genomenae—to those to whose
imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is the countenance
of justice and wisdom; and that neither the morning nor the evening star are
so fair. For in order to direct the view aright, it behoves that the beholder
should have made himself congenerous and similar to the object beheld.
Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been
soliform,” (i.e. pre-configured to light by a similarity of essence with that of
light) “neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty.”

CHAPTER VII
Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory—Of the original
mistake or equivocation which procured its admission—Memoria technica.

We will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law—if law it may be
called, which would itself be a slave of chances—with even that appearance
of rationality forced upon us by the outward phaenomena of human
conduct, abstracted from our own consciousness. We will agree to forget
this for the moment, in order to fix our attention on that subordination of
final to efficient causes in the human being, which flows of necessity from
the assumption, that the will and, with the will, all acts of thought and
attention are parts and products of this blind mechanism, instead of being
distinct powers, the function of which it is to control, determine, and
modify the phantasmal chaos of association. The soul becomes a mere ens
logicum; for, as a real separable being, it would be more worthless and
ludicrous than the Grimalkins in the cat-harpsichord, described in the
Spectator. For these did form a part of the process; but, to Hartley’s scheme,
the soul is present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals or
purring are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. It
involves all the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be not indeed,
os emoige dokei, the absurdity), of intercommunion between substances
that have no one property in common, without any of the convenient
consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of the Dualistic
hypothesis. Accordingly, this caput mortuum of the Hartleian process has
been rejected by his followers, and the consciousness considered as a result,
as a tune, the common product of the breeze and the harp though this again
is the mere remotion of one absurdity to make way for another, equally
preposterous. For what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of
which is percipi?—an ens rationale, which pre-supposes the power, that by
perceiving creates it? The razor’s edge becomes a saw to the armed vision;
and the delicious melodies of Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed
stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of time should be a thousand times
subtler than ours. But this obstacle too let us imagine ourselves to have

surmounted, and “at one bound high overleap all bound.” Yet according to
this hypothesis the disquisition, to which I am at present soliciting the
reader’s attention, may be as truly said to be written by Saint Paul’s church,
as by me: for it is the mere motion of my muscles and nerves; and these
again are set in motion from external causes equally passive, which external
causes stand themselves in interdependent connection with every thing that
exists or has existed. Thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the
minutest stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone, have
nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless beholding of it
when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be called a beholding; for it is neither an
act nor an effect; but an impossible creation of a something nothing out of
its very contrary! It is the mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass;
and in this alone consists the poor worthless I! The sum total of my moral
and intellectual intercourse, dissolved into its elements, is reduced to
extension, motion, degrees of velocity, and those diminished copies of
configurative motion, which form what we call notions, and notions of
notions. Of such philosophy well might Butler say—
The metaphysic’s but a puppet motion
That goes with screws, the notion of a notion;
The copy of a copy and lame draught
Unnaturally taken from a thought
That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks,
And turns the eyes, like an old crucifix;
That counterchanges whatsoe’er it calls
By another name, and makes it true or false;
Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth,
By virtue of the Babylonian’s tooth.

The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, did not in reality invent
it; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the only true artists, were
unfolding themselves. So must it have been too with my friend Allston,
when he sketched his picture of the dead man revived by the bones of the
prophet Elijah. So must it have been with Mr. Southey and Lord Byron,
when the one fancied himself composing his Roderick, and the other his
Childe Harold. The same must hold good of all systems of philosophy; of
all arts, governments, wars by sea and by land; in short, of all things that
ever have been or that ever will be produced. For, according to this system,
it is not the affections and passions that are at work, in as far as they are
sensations or thoughts. We only fancy, that we act from rational resolves, or

prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or generosity. In all these
cases the real agent is a something-nothing-everything, which does all of
which we know, and knows nothing of all that itself does.

The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will, must, on
this system, be mere articulated motions of the air. For as the function of the
human understanding is no other than merely to appear to itself to combine
and to apply the phaenomena of the association; and as these derive all their
reality from the primary sensations; and the sensations again all their reality
from the impressions ab extra; a God not visible, audible, or tangible, can
exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and attributes. If in
ourselves there be no such faculties as those of the will, and the scientific
reason, we must either have an innate idea of them, which would overthrow
the whole system; or we can have no idea at all. The process, by which
Hume degraded the notion of cause and effect into a blind product of
delusion and habit, into the mere sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis)
associated with the images of the memory; this same process must be
repeated to the equal degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or
theology.

Far, very far am I from burthening with the odium of these consequences
the moral characters of those who first formed, or have since adopted the
system! It is most noticeable of the excellent and pious Hartley, that, in the
proofs of the existence and attributes of God, with which his second volume
commences, he makes no reference to the principle or results of the first.
Nay, he assumes, as his foundations, ideas which, if we embrace the
doctrines of his first volume, can exist no where but in the vibrations of the
ethereal medium common to the nerves and to the atmosphere. Indeed the
whole of the second volume is, with the fewest possible exceptions,
independent of his peculiar system. So true is it, that the faith, which saves
and sanctifies, is a collective energy, a total act of the whole moral being;
that its living sensorium is in the heart; and that no errors of the
understanding can be morally arraigned unless they have proceeded from
the heart. But whether they be such, no man can be certain in the case of
another, scarcely perhaps even in his own. Hence it follows by inevitable
consequence, that man may perchance determine what is a heresy; but God
only can know who is a heretic. It does not, however, by any means follow

that opinions fundamentally false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-
exist to form one complex antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains
venomous, though there are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it
hurted them not. Some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate
neighbour nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view
of all its moral and religious consequences; some—
———who deem themselves most free,
When they within this gross and visible sphere
Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent,
Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat
With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,
Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,
Self-working tools, uncaus’d effects, and all
Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves,
Untenanting creation of its God!

Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men,
before they can become wiser.

The attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to discover
and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a faith could find
admission into minds framed for a nobler creed. These, it appears to me,
may be all reduced to one sophism as their common genus; the mistaking
the conditions of a thing for its causes and essence; and the process, by
which we arrive at the knowledge of a faculty, for the faculty itself. The air
I breathe is the condition of my life, not its cause. We could never have
learned that we had eyes but by the process of seeing; yet having seen we
know that the eyes must have pre-existed in order to render the process of
sight possible. Let us cross-examine Hartley’s scheme under the guidance
of this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity, (Leibnitz’s
Lex Continui,) is the limit and condition of the laws of mind, itself being
rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena considered as material. At the
utmost, it is to thought the same, as the law of gravitation is to loco-motion.
In every voluntary movement we first counteract gravitation, in order to
avail ourselves of it. It must exist, that there may be a something to be
counteracted, and which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is exerted
to resist it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the
gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act,
voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to alight on the spot, which we had

previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his mind while he is
composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to
recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most
of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of
rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic
colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the
little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active
and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in
order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion.
This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of
thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each
other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate
faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language,
we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and
determinations, the IMAGINATION. But, in common language, and
especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior
degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary control over it.

Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of
association, and a component element in the materia subjecta, the parts of
which are to be associated, must needs be co-present with all. Nothing,
therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an incautious mind this
constant companion of each, for the essential substance of all. But if we
appeal to our own consciousness, we shall find that even time itself, as the
cause of a particular act of association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as
the condition of all association. Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I
immediately think of gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel
with gooseberries as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter word, being
that which had coexisted with the image of the bird so called, I may then
think of a goose. In the next moment the image of a swan may arise before
me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In the first two
instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in time was the
circumstance, that enabled me to recollect them; and equally conscious am I
that the latter was recalled to me by the joint operation of likeness and
contrast. So it is with cause and effect: so too with order. So I am able to
distinguish whether it was proximity in time, or continuity in space, that
occasioned me to recall B on the mention of A. They cannot be indeed

separated from contemporaneity; for that would be to separate them from
the mind itself. The act of consciousness is indeed identical with time
considered in its essence. I mean time per se, as contra-distinguished from
our notion of time; for this is always blended with the idea of space, which,
as the opposite of time, is therefore its measure. Nevertheless the accident
of seeing two objects at the same moment, and the accident of seeing them
in the same place are two distinct or distinguishable causes: and the true
practical general law of association is this; that whatever makes certain
parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest, will
determine the mind to recall these in preference to others equally linked
together by the common condition of contemporaneity, or (what I deem a
more appropriate and philosophical term) of continuity. But the will itself
by confining and intensifying [25] the attention may arbitrarily give
vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever; and from hence we may
deduce the uselessness, if not the absurdity, of certain recent schemes which
promise an artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a
confusion and debasement of the fancy. Sound logic, as the habitual
subordination of the individual to the species, and of the species to the
genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under the relation of cause and
effect; a cheerful and communicative temper disposing us to notice the
similarities and contrasts of things, that we may be able to illustrate the one
by the other; a quiet conscience; a condition free from anxieties; sound
health, and above all (as far as relates to passive remembrance) a healthy
digestion; these are the best, these are the only Arts of Memory.

CHAPTER VIII
The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes—Refined first by Spinoza
and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita—
Hylozoism—Materialism—None of these systems, or any possible theory
of association, supplies or supersedes a theory of perception, or explains the
formation of the associable.

To the best of my knowledge Des Cartes was the first philosopher who
introduced the absolute and essential heterogenity of the soul as
intelligence, and the body as matter. The assumption, and the form of
speaking have remained, though the denial of all other properties to matter
but that of extension, on which denial the whole system of Dualism is
grounded, has been long exploded. For since impenetrability is intelligible
only as a mode of resistance; its admission places the essence of matter in
an act or power, which it possesses in common with spirit; and body and
spirit are therefore no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but may without
any absurdity be supposed to be different modes, or degrees in perfection,
of a common substratum. To this possibility, however, it was not the fashion
to advert. The soul was a thinking substance, and body a space-filling
substance. Yet the apparent action of each on the other pressed heavy on the
philosopher on the one hand; and no less heavily on the other hand pressed
the evident truth, that the law of causality holds only between homogeneous
things, that is, things having some common property; and cannot extend
from one world into another, its contrary. A close analysis evinced it to be
no less absurd than the question whether a man’s affection for his wife lay
North-east, or South-west of the love he bore towards his child. Leibnitz’s
doctrine of a pre-established harmony; which he certainly borrowed from
Spinoza, who had himself taken the hint from Des Cartes’s animal
machines, was in its common interpretation too strange to survive the
inventor—too repugnant to our common sense; which is not indeed entitled
to a judicial voice in the courts of scientific philosophy; but whose whispers
still exert a strong secret influence. Even Wolf, the admirer and illustrious

systematizer of the Leibnitzian doctrine, contents himself with defending
the possibility of the idea, but does not adopt it as a part of the edifice.

The hypothesis of Hylozoism, on the other side, is the death of all rational
physiology, and indeed of all physical science; for that requires a limitation
of terms, and cannot consist with the arbitrary power of multiplying
attributes by occult qualities. Besides, it answers no purpose; unless,
indeed, a difficulty can be solved by multiplying it, or we can acquire a
clearer notion of our soul by being told that we have a million of souls, and
that every atom of our bodies has a soul of its own. Far more prudent is it to
admit the difficulty once for all, and then let it lie at rest. There is a
sediment indeed at the bottom of the vessel, but all the water above it is
clear and transparent. The Hylozoist only shakes it up, and renders the
whole turbid.

But it is not either the nature of man, or the duty of the philosopher to
despair concerning any important problem until, as in the squaring of the
circle, the impossibility of a solution has been demonstrated. How the esse
assumed as originally distinct from the scire, can ever unite itself with it;
how being can transform itself into a knowing, becomes conceivable on one
only condition; namely, if it can be shown that the vis representativa, or the
Sentient, is itself a species of being; that is, either as a property or attribute,
or as an hypostasis or self subsistence. The former—that thinking is a
property of matter under particular conditions,—is, indeed, the assumption
of materialism; a system which could not but be patronized by the
philosopher, if only it actually performed what it promises. But how any
affection from without can metamorphose itself into perception or will, the
materialist has hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible as he found it, but
has aggravated it into a comprehensible absurdity. For, grant that an object
from without could act upon the conscious self, as on a consubstantial
object; yet such an affection could only engender something homogeneous
with itself. Motion could only propagate motion. Matter has no Inward. We
remove one surface, but to meet with another. We can but divide a particle
into particles; and each atom comprehends in itself the properties of the
material universe. Let any reflecting mind make the experiment of
explaining to itself the evidence of our sensuous intuitions, from the
hypothesis that in any given perception there is a something which has been

communicated to it by an impact, or an impression ab extra. In the first
place, by the impact on the percipient, or ens representans, not the object
itself, but only its action or effect, will pass into the same. Not the iron
tongue, but its vibrations, pass into the metal of the bell. Now in our
immediate perception, it is not the mere power or act of the object, but the
object itself, which is immediately present. We might indeed attempt to
explain this result by a chain of deductions and conclusions; but that, first,
the very faculty of deducing and concluding would equally demand an
explanation; and secondly, that there exists in fact no such intermediation
by logical notions, such as those of cause and effect. It is the object itself,
not the product of a syllogism, which is present to our consciousness. Or
would we explain this supervention of the object to the sensation, by a
productive faculty set in motion by an impulse; still the transition, into the
percipient, of the object itself, from which the impulse proceeded, assumes
a power that can permeate and wholly possess the soul,
And like a God by spiritual art,
Be all in all, and all in every part.

And how came the percipient here? And what is become of the wonder-
promising Matter, that was to perform all these marvels by force of mere
figure, weight and motion? The most consistent proceeding of the dogmatic
materialist is to fall back into the common rank of soul-and- bodyists; to
affect the mysterious, and declare the whole process a revelation given, and
not to be understood, which it would be profane to examine too closely.
Datur non intelligitur. But a revelation unconfirmed by miracles, and a faith
not commanded by the conscience, a philosopher may venture to pass by,
without suspecting himself of any irreligious tendency.

Thus, as materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible,
and owes all its proselytes to the propensity so common among men, to
mistake distinct images for clear conceptions; and vice versa, to reject as
inconceivable whatever from its own nature is unimaginable. But as soon as
it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be materialism. In order to explain
thinking, as a material phaenomenon, it is necessary to refine matter into a
mere modification of intelligence, with the two-fold function of appearing
and perceiving. Even so did Priestley in his controversy with Price. He
stripped matter of all its material properties; substituted spiritual powers;

and when we expected to find a body, behold! we had nothing but its ghost
—the apparition of a defunct substance!

I shall not dilate further on this subject; because it will, (if God grant health
and permission), be treated of at large and systematically in a work, which I
have many years been preparing, on the Productive Logos human and
divine; with, and as the introduction to, a full commentary on the Gospel of
St. John. To make myself intelligible as far as my present subject requires, it
will be sufficient briefly to observe.—1. That all association demands and
presupposes the existence of the thoughts and images to be associated.—2.
That the hypothesis of an external world exactly correspondent to those
images or modifications of our own being, which alone, according to this
system, we actually behold, is as thorough idealism as Berkeley’s, inasmuch
as it equally, perhaps in a more perfect degree, removes all reality and
immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms
and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions
in our own brains.—3. That this hypothesis neither involves the
explanation, nor precludes the necessity, of a mechanism and co-adequate
forces in the percipient, which at the more than magic touch of the impulse
from without is to create anew for itself the correspondent object. The
formation of a copy is not solved by the mere pre-existence of an original;
the copyist of Raffael’s Transfiguration must repeat more or less perfectly
the process of Raffael. It would be easy to explain a thought from the image
on the retina, and that from the geometry of light, if this very light did not
present the very same difficulty. We might as rationally chant the Brahim
creed of the tortoise that supported the bear, that supported the elephant,
that supported the world, to the tune of “This is the house that Jack built.”
The sic Deo placitum est we all admit as the sufficient cause, and the divine
goodness as the sufficient reason; but an answer to the Whence and Why is
no answer to the How, which alone is the physiologist’s concern. It is a
sophisma pigrum, and (as Bacon hath said) the arrogance of pusillanimity,
which lifts up the idol of a mortal’s fancy and commands us to fall down
and worship it, as a work of divine wisdom, an ancile or palladium fallen
from heaven. By the very same argument the supporters of the Ptolemaic
system might have rebuffed the Newtonian, and pointing to the sky with
self-complacent grin [26] have appealed to common sense, whether the sun
did not move and the earth stand still.

CHAPTER IX
Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its conditions?—Giordano
Bruno—Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of a tacit compact among the
learned as a privileged order—The Author’s obligations to the Mystics—to
Immanuel Kant—The difference between the letter and the spirit of Kant’s
writings, and a vindication of prudence in the teaching of Philosophy—
Fichte’s attempt to complete the Critical system—Its partial success and
ultimate failure—Obligations to Schelling; and among English writers to
Saumarez.

After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz,
and Hartley, and could find in none of them an abiding place for my reason,
I began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy; as different from mere
history and historic classification, possible? If possible, what are its
necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed to answer the first
question in the negative, and to admit that the sole practicable employment
for the human mind was to observe, to collect, and to classify. But I soon
felt, that human nature itself fought up against this wilful resignation of
intellect; and as soon did I find, that the scheme, taken with all its
consequences and cleared of all inconsistencies, was not less impracticable
than contranatural. Assume in its full extent the position, nihil in intellectu
quod non prius in sensu, assume it without Leibnitz’s qualifying praeter
ipsum intellectum, and in the same sense, in which the position was
understood by Hartley and Condillac: and then what Hume had
demonstratively deduced from this concession concerning cause and effect,
will apply with equal and crushing force to all the other eleven categorical
forms [27], and the logical functions corresponding to them. How can we
make bricks without straw;--or build without cement? We learn all things
indeed by occasion of experience; but the very facts so learned force us
inward on the antecedents, that must be presupposed in order to render
experience itself possible. The first book of Locke’s Essay, (if the supposed
error, which it labours to subvert, be not a mere thing of straw, an absurdity
which, no man ever did, or indeed ever could, believe,) is formed on a

sophisma heterozaetaeseos, and involves the old mistake of Cum hoc: ergo,
propter hoc.

The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the
truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is no way
conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are ab initio, identical
and coinherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally each other’s
substrate. I presumed that this was a possible conception, (i.e. that it
involved no logical inconsonance,) from the length of time during which
the scholastic definition of the Supreme Being, as actus purissimus sine ulla
potentialitate, was received in the schools of Theology, both by the
Pontifician and the Reformed divines. The early study of Plato and Plotinus,
with the commentaries and the THEOLOGIA PLATONICA of the
illustrious Florentine; of Proclus, and Gemistius Pletho; and at a later period
of the De Immenso et Innumerabili and the “De la causa, principio et uno,”
of the philosopher of Nola, who could boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and
Fulke Greville among his patrons, and whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as
an atheist in the year 1600; had all contributed to prepare my mind for the
reception and welcoming of the Cogito quia Sum, et Sum quia Cogito; a
philosophy of seeming hardihood, but certainly the most ancient, and
therefore presumptively the most natural.

Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be ashamed of the Teutonic
theosophist, Jacob Behmen? Many, indeed, and gross were his delusions;
and such as furnish frequent and ample occasion for the triumph of the
learned over the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had dared think for himself.
But while we remember that these delusions were such, as might be
anticipated from his utter want of all intellectual discipline, and from his
ignorance of rational psychology, let it not be forgotten that the latter defect
he had in common with the most learned theologians of his age. Neither
with books, nor with book-learned men was he conversant. A meek and shy
quietest, his intellectual powers were never stimulated into feverous energy
by crowds of proselytes, or by the ambition of proselyting. Jacob Behmen
was an enthusiast, in the strictest sense, as not merely distinguished, but as
contra-distinguished, from a fanatic. While I in part translate the following
observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let me be
permitted to premise, that I might have transcribed the substance from

memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his
pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another’s words to my
own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still more from the
pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was possible.

Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during the last two or
three centuries, cannot but admit that there appears to have existed a sort of
secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to pass beyond a certain
limit in speculative science. The privilege of free thought, so highly
extolled, has at no time been held valid in actual practice, except within this
limit; and not a single stride beyond it has ever been ventured without
bringing obloquy on the transgressor. The few men of genius among the
learned class, who actually did overstep this boundary, anxiously avoided
the appearance of having so done. Therefore the true depth of science, and
the penetration to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge
diverge to their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate
and the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebulliency of
spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living ground of
all things. These, then, because their names had never been enrolled in the
guilds of the learned, were persecuted by the registered livery-men as
interlopers on their rights and privileges. All without distinction were
branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those, whose wild and
exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered only extravagant and
grotesque phantasms, and whose productions were, for the most part, poor
copies and gross caricatures of genuine inspiration; but the truly inspired
likewise, the originals themselves. And this for no other reason, but because
they were the unlearned, men of humble and obscure occupations. When,
and from whom among the literati by profession, have we ever heard the
divine doxology repeated, I thank thee, O Father! Lord of Heaven and
Earth! because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and
hast revealed them unto babes [28]. No; the haughty priests of learning not
only banished from the schools and marts of science all who had dared
draw living waters from the fountain, but drove them out of the very
Temple, which mean time the buyers, and sellers, and money-changers were
suffered to make a den of thieves.

And yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground for this
contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished
themselves by their scorn of Behmen, Thaulerus, George Fox, and others;
unless it be, that they could write orthographically, make smooth periods,
and had the fashions of authorship almost literally at their fingers’ ends,
while the latter, in simplicity of soul, made their words immediate echoes of
their feelings. Hence the frequency of those phrases among them, which
have been mistaken for pretences to immediate inspiration; as for instance,
“It was delivered unto me;”—“I strove not to speak;”-“I said, I will be
silent;”—“But the word was in my heart as a burning fire;”—“and I could
not forbear.” Hence too the unwillingness to give offence; hence the
foresight, and the dread of the clamours, which would be raised against
them, so frequently avowed in the writings of these men, and expressed, as
was natural, in the words of the only book, with which they were familiar
[29]. “Woe is me that I am become a man of strife, and a man of
contention,--I love peace: the souls of men are dear unto me: yet because I
seek for light every one of them doth curse me!” O! it requires deeper
feeling, and a stronger imagination, than belong to most of those, to whom
reasoning and fluent expression have been as a trade learnt in boyhood, to
conceive with what might, with what inward strivings and commotion, the
perception of a new and vital truth takes possession of an uneducated man
of genius. His meditations are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, or
the everlasting; for “the world is not his friend, nor the world’s law.” Need
we then be surprised, that, under an excitement at once so strong and so
unusual, the man’s body should sympathize with the struggles of his mind;
or that he should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake the tumultuous
sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of his fancy, as parts
or symbols of the truths which were opening on him? It has indeed been
plausibly observed, that in order to derive any advantage, or to collect any
intelligible meaning, from the writings of these ignorant Mystics, the reader
must bring with him a spirit and judgment superior to that of the writers
themselves:
And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?

—a sophism, which I fully agree with Warburton, is unworthy of Milton;
how much more so of the awful Person, in whose mouth he has placed it?
One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience,

that there exist folios on the human understanding, and the nature of man,
which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if in the
whole huge volume there could be found as much fulness of heart and
intellect, as burst forth in many a simple page of George Fox, Jacob
Behmen, and even of Behmen’s commentator, the pious and fervid William
Law.

The feeling of gratitude, which I cherish toward these men, has caused me
to digress further than I had foreseen or proposed; but to have passed them
over in an historical sketch of my literary life and opinions, would have
seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the concealment of a boon. For the
writings of these Mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from
being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system. They
contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet
stirring and working presentiment, that all the products of the mere
reflective faculty partook of death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays
in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which
I had not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter. If
they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they were
always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings through
the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the
sandy deserts of utter unbelief. That the system is capable of being
converted into an irreligious Pantheism, I well know. The Ethics of Spinoza,
may, or may not, be an instance. But at no time could I believe, that in itself
and essentially it is incompatible with religion, natural or revealed: and now
I am most thoroughly persuaded of the contrary. The writings of the
illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the founder of the Critical Philosophy,
more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my
understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the
thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the
distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and I will venture to add—
(paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel
Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen)—the clearness and evidence, of the
Critique of the Pure Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the
Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy; and of his Religion within
the bounds of Pure Reason, took possession of me as with the giant’s hand.
After fifteen years’ familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other

productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. The few
passages that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of thought, (as the
chapter on original apperception,) and the apparent contradictions which
occur, I soon found were hints and insinuations referring to ideas, which
KANT either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he considered as
consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human nature in toto, but
of the speculative intellect alone. Here therefore he was constrained to
commence at the point of reflection, or natural consciousness: while in his
moral system he was permitted to assume a higher ground (the autonomy of
the will) as a postulate deducible from the unconditional command, or (in
the technical language of his school) the categorical imperative, of the
conscience. He had been in imminent danger of persecution during the
reign of the late king of Prussia, that strange compound of lawless
debauchery and priest-ridden superstition: and it is probable that he had
little inclination, in his old age, to act over again the fortunes, and hair-
breadth escapes of Wolf. The expulsion of the first among Kant’s disciples,
who attempted to complete his system, from the University of Jena, with
the confiscation and prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint efforts
of the courts of Saxony and Hanover, supplied experimental proof, that the
venerable old man’s caution was not groundless. In spite therefore of his
own declarations, I could never believe, that it was possible for him to have
meant no more by his Noumenon, or Thing in itself, than his mere words
express; or that in his own conception he confined the whole plastic power
to the forms of the intellect, leaving for the external cause, for the materiale
of our sensations, a matter without form, which is doubtless inconceivable.
I entertained doubts likewise, whether, in his own mind, he even laid all the
stress, which he appears to do, on the moral postulates.

An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a
symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an
apparent contradiction. Phonaese synetoisin: and for those who could not
pierce through this symbolic husk, his writings were not intended.
Questions which cannot be fully answered without exposing the respondent
to personal danger, are not entitled to a fair answer; and yet to say this
openly, would in many cases furnish the very advantage which the
adversary is insidiously seeking after. Veracity does not consist in saying,
but in the intention of communicating, truth; and the philosopher who

cannot utter the whole truth without conveying falsehood, and at the same
time, perhaps, exciting the most malignant passions, is constrained to
express himself either mythically or equivocally. When Kant therefore was
importuned to settle the disputes of his commentators himself, by declaring
what he meant, how could he decline the honours of martyrdom with less
offence, than by simply replying, “I meant what I said, and at the age of
near fourscore, I have something else, and more important to do, than to
write a commentary on my own works.”

Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, or Lore of Ultimate Science, was to add the
key-stone of the arch: and by commencing with an act, instead of a thing or
substance, Fichte assuredly gave the first mortal blow to Spinozism, as
taught by Spinoza himself; and supplied the idea of a system truly
metaphysical, and of a metaphysique truly systematic: (i.e. having its spring
and principle within itself). But this fundamental idea he overbuilt with a
heavy mass of mere notions, and psychological acts of arbitrary reflection.
Thus his theory degenerated into a crude [30] egoismus, a boastful and
hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy:
while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere Ordo ordinans,
which we were permitted exoterice to call GOD; and his ethics in an
ascetic, and almost monkish, mortification of the natural passions and
desires. In Schelling’s Natur-Philosophie, and the System des
transcendentalen Idealismus, I first found a genial coincidence with much
that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet
to do.

I have introduced this statement, as appropriate to the narrative nature of
this sketch; yet rather in reference to the work which I have announced in a
preceding page, than to my present subject. It would be but a mere act of
justice to myself, were I to warn my future readers, than an identity of
thought, or even similarity of phrase, will not be at all times a certain proof
that the passage has been borrowed from Schelling, or that the conceptions
were originally learnt from him. In this instance, as in the dramatic lectures
of Schlegel to which I have before alluded, from the same motive of self-
defence against the charge of plagiarism, many of the most striking
resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and
matured in my mind before I had ever seen a single page of the German

Philosopher; and I might indeed affirm with truth, before the more
important works of Schelling had been written, or at least made public. Nor
is this coincidence at all to be wondered at. We had studied in the same
school; been disciplined by the same preparatory philosophy, namely, the
writings of Kant; we had both equal obligations to the polar logic and
dynamic philosophy of Giordano Bruno; and Schelling has lately, and, as of
recent acquisition, avowed that same affectionate reverence for the labours
of Behmen, and other mystics, which I had formed at a much earlier period.
The coincidence of Schelling’s system with certain general ideas of
Behmen, he declares to have been mere coincidence; while my obligations
have been more direct. He needs give to Behmen only feelings of
sympathy; while I owe him a debt of gratitude. God forbid! that I should be
suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with Schelling for the honours so
unequivocally his right, not only as a great and original genius, but as the
founder of the Philosophy of Nature, and as the most successful improver of
the Dynamic System [31] which, begun by Bruno, was re-introduced (in a
more philosophical form, and freed from all its impurities and visionary
accompaniments) by Kant; in whom it was the native and necessary growth
of his own system. Kant’s followers, however, on whom (for the greater
part) their master’s cloak had fallen without, or with a very scanty portion
of, his spirit, had adopted his dynamic ideas, only as a more refined species
of mechanics. With exception of one or two fundamental ideas, which
cannot be withheld from Fichte, to Schelling we owe the completion, and
the most important victories, of this revolution in philosophy. To me it will
be happiness and honour enough, should I succeed in rendering the system
itself intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application of it to the most
awful of subjects for the most important of purposes. Whether a work is the
offspring of a man’s own spirit, and the product of original thinking, will be
discovered by those who are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests than
the mere reference to dates. For readers in general, let whatever shall be
found in this or any future work of mine, that resembles, or coincides with,
the doctrines of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly
attributed to him: provided, that the absence of distinct references to his
books, which I could not at all times make with truth as designating
citations or thoughts actually derived from him; and which, I trust, would,
after this general acknowledgment be superfluous; be not charged on me as
an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism. I have not indeed

(eheu! res angusta domi!) been hitherto able to procure more than two of his
books, viz. the first volume of his collected Tracts, and his System of
Transcendental Idealism; to which, however, I must add a small pamphlet
against Fichte, the spirit of which was to my feelings painfully incongruous
with the principles, and which (with the usual allowance afforded to an
antithesis) displayed the love of wisdom rather than the wisdom of love. I
regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the
sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and
intelligible. “Albeit, I must confess to be half in doubt, whether I should
bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to the eye of the world, and the
world so potent in most men’s hearts, that I shall endanger either not to be
regarded or not to be understood.”

And to conclude the subject of citation, with a cluster of citations, which as
taken from books, not in common use, may contribute to the reader’s
amusement, as a voluntary before a sermon: “Dolet mihi quidem deliciis
literarum inescatos subito jam homines adeo esse, praesertim qui
Christianos se profitentur, et legere nisi quod ad delectationem facit,
sustineant nihil: unde et discipline severiores et philosophia ipsa jam fere
prorsus etiam a doctis negliguntur. Quod quidem propositum studiorum,
nisi mature corrigitur, tam magnum rebus incommodum dabit, quam dedit
barbaries olim. Pertinax res barbaries est, fateor: sed minus potent tamen,
quam illa mollities et persuasa prudentia literarum, si ratione caret,
sapientiae virtutisque specie mortales misere circumducens. Succedet igitur,
ut arbitror, haud ita multo post, pro rusticana seculi nostri ruditate captatrix
illa communi-loquentia robur animi virilis omne, omnem virtutem
masculam, profligatura nisi cavetur.”

A too prophetic remark, which has been in fulfilment from the year 1680, to
the present 1815. By persuasa prudentia, Grynaeus means self- complacent
common sense as opposed to science and philosophic reason.

Est medius ordo, et velut equestris, ingeniorum quidem sagacium, et
commodorum rebus humanis, non tamen in primam magnitudinem
patentium. Eorum hominum, ut sic dicam, major annona est. Sedulum esse,
nihil temere loqui, assuescere labori, et imagine prudentiae et modistiae

tegere angustiores partes captus, dum exercitationem ac usum, quo isti in
civilibus rebus pollent, pro natura et magnitudine ingenii plerique accipiunt.

“As therefore physicians are many times forced to leave such methods of
curing as themselves know to be the fittest, and being overruled by the
patient’s impatiency, are fain to try the best they can: in like sort,
considering how the case doth stand with this present age, full of tongue
and weak of brain, behold we would (if our subject permitted it) yield to the
stream thereof. That way we would be contented to prove our thesis, which
being the worse in itself, is notwithstanding now by reason of common
imbecility the fitter and likelier to be brooked.”

If this fear could be rationally entertained in the controversial age of
Hooker, under the then robust discipline of the scholastic logic, pardonably
may a writer of the present times anticipate a scanty audience for abstrusest
themes, and truths that can neither be communicated nor received without
effort of thought, as well as patience of attention.
“Che s’io non erro al calcolar de’ punti,
Par ch’ Asinina Stella a noi predomini,
E’l Somaro e’l Castron si sian congiunti.
Il tempo d’Apuleio piu non si nomini:
Che se allora un sol huom sembrava un Asino,
Mille Asini a’ miei di rassembran huomini!”

CHAPTER X
A chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the
nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power—On pedantry and
pedantic expressions—Advice to young authors respecting publication—
Various anecdotes of the Author’s literary life, and the progress of his
opinions in Religion and Politics.

“Esemplastic. The word is not in Johnson, nor have I met with it
elsewhere.” Neither have, I. I constructed it myself from the Greek words,
eis en plattein, to shape into one; because, having to convey a new sense, I
thought that a new term would both aid the recollection of my meaning, and
prevent its being confounded with the usual import of the word,
imagination. “But this is pedantry!” Not necessarily so, I hope. If I am not
misinformed, pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time,
place, and company. The language of the market would be in the schools as
pedantic, though it might not be reprobated by that name, as the language of
the schools in the market. The mere man of the world, who insists that no
other terms but such as occur in common conversation should be employed
in a scientific disquisition, and with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant
as the man of letters, who either over-rating the acquirements of his
auditors, or misled by his own familiarity with technical or scholastic terms,
converses at the wine-table with his mind fixed on his museum or
laboratory; even though the latter pedant instead of desiring his wife to
make the tea should bid her add to the quant. suff. of thea Sinensis the oxyd
of hydrogen saturated with caloric. To use the colloquial (and in truth
somewhat vulgar) metaphor, if the pedant of the cloister, and the pedant of
the lobby, both smell equally of the shop, yet the odour from the Russian
binding of good old authentic-looking folios and quartos is less annoying
than the steams from the tavern or bagnio. Nay, though the pedantry of the
scholar should betray a little ostentation, yet a well-conditioned mind would
more easily, methinks, tolerate the fox brush of learned vanity, than the sans
culotterie of a contemptuous ignorance, that assumes a merit from
mutilation in the self-consoling sneer at the pompous incumbrance of tails.

The first lesson of philosophic discipline is to wean the student’s attention
from the degrees of things, which alone form the vocabulary of common
life, and to direct it to the kind abstracted from degree. Thus the chemical
student is taught not to be startled at disquisitions on the heat in ice, or on
latent and fixible light. In such discourse the instructor has no other
alternative than either to use old words with new meanings (the plan
adopted by Darwin in his Zoonomia;) or to introduce new terms, after the
example of Linnaeus, and the framers of the present chemical
nomenclature. The latter mode is evidently preferable, were it only that the
former demands a twofold exertion of thought in one and the same act. For
the reader, or hearer, is required not only to learn and bear in mind the new
definition; but to unlearn, and keep out of his view, the old and habitual
meaning; a far more difficult and perplexing task, and for which the mere
semblance of eschewing pedantry seems to me an inadequate
compensation. Where, indeed, it is in our power to recall an unappropriate
term that had without sufficient reason become obsolete, it is doubtless a
less evil to restore than to coin anew. Thus to express in one word all that
appertains to the perception, considered as passive and merely recipient, I
have adopted from our elder classics the word sensuous; because sensual is
not at present used, except in a bad sense, or at least as a moral distinction;
while sensitive and sensible would each convey a different meaning. Thus
too have I followed Hooker, Sanderson, Milton and others, in designating
the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge by the word intuition,
used sometimes subjectively, sometimes objectively, even as we use the
word, thought; now as the thought, or act of thinking, and now as a thought,
or the object of our reflection; and we do this without confusion or
obscurity. The very words, objective and subjective, of such constant
recurrence in the schools of yore, I have ventured to re-introduce, because I
could not so briefly or conveniently by any more familiar terms distinguish
the percipere from the percipi. Lastly, I have cautiously discriminated the
terms, the reason, and the understanding, encouraged and confirmed by the
authority of our genuine divines and philosophers, before the Revolution.
———both life, and sense,
Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
Reason receives, and reason is her bring,
Discursive or intuitive: discourse [32]
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,
Differing but in degree, in kind the same.

I say, that I was confirmed by authority so venerable: for I had previous and
higher motives in my own conviction of the importance, nay, of the
necessity of the distinction, as both an indispensable condition and a vital
part of all sound speculation in metaphysics, ethical or theological. To
establish this distinction was one main object of The Friend; if even in a
biography of my own literary life I can with propriety refer to a work,
which was printed rather than published, or so published that it had been
well for the unfortunate author, if it had remained in manuscript. I have
even at this time bitter cause for remembering that, which a number of my
subscribers have but a trifling motive for forgetting. This effusion might
have been spared; but I would fain flatter myself, that the reader will be less
austere than an oriental professor of the bastinado, who during an attempt to
extort per argumentum baculinum a full confession from a culprit,
interrupted his outcry of pain by reminding him, that it was “a mere
digression!” “All this noise, Sir! is nothing to the point, and no sort of
answer to my questions!” “Ah! but,” (replied the sufferer,) “it is the most
pertinent reply in nature to your blows.”

An imprudent man of common goodness of heart cannot but wish to turn
even his imprudences to the benefit of others, as far as this is possible. If
therefore any one of the readers of this semi-narrative should be preparing
or intending a periodical work, I warn him, in the first place, against
trusting in the number of names on his subscription list. For he cannot be
certain that the names were put down by sufficient authority; or, should that
be ascertained, it still remains to be known, whether they were not extorted
by some over zealous friend’s importunity; whether the subscriber had not
yielded his name, merely from want of courage to answer, no; and with the
intention of dropping the work as soon as possible. One gentleman procured
me nearly a hundred names for THE FRIEND, and not only took frequent
opportunity to remind me of his success in his canvass, but laboured to
impress my mind with the sense of the obligation, I was under to the
subscribers; for, (as he very pertinently admonished me,) “fifty-two
shillings a year was a large sum to be bestowed on one individual, where
there were so many objects of charity with strong claims to the assistance of
the benevolent.” Of these hundred patrons ninety threw up the publication
before the fourth number, without any notice; though it was well known to
them, that in consequence of the distance, and the slowness and irregularity

of the conveyance, I was compelled to lay in a stock of stamped paper for at
least eight weeks beforehand; each sheet of which stood me in five pence
previously to its arrival at my printer’s; though the subscription money was
not to be received till the twenty-first week after the commencement of the
work; and lastly, though it was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me
to receive the money for two or three numbers without paying an equal sum
for the postage.

In confirmation of my first caveat, I will select one fact among many. On
my list of subscribers, among a considerable number of names equally
flattering, was that of an Earl of Cork, with his address. He might as well
have been an Earl of Bottle, for aught I knew of him, who had been content
to reverence the peerage in abstracto, rather than in concretis. Of course
THE FRIEND was regularly sent as far, if I remember right, as the
eighteenth number; that is, till a fortnight before the subscription was to be
paid. And lo! just at this time I received a letter from his Lordship,
reproving me in language far more lordly than courteous for my impudence
in directing my pamphlets to him, who knew nothing of me or my work!
Seventeen or eighteen numbers of which, however, his Lordship was
pleased to retain, probably for the culinary or post-culinary conveniences of
his servants.

Secondly, I warn all others from the attempt to deviate from the ordinary
mode of publishing a work by the trade. I thought indeed, that to the
purchaser it was indifferent, whether thirty per cent of the purchase-money
went to the booksellers or to the government; and that the convenience of
receiving the work by the post at his own door would give the preference to
the latter. It is hard, I own, to have been labouring for years, in collecting
and arranging the materials; to have spent every shilling that could be
spared after the necessaries of life had been furnished, in buying books, or
in journeys for the purpose of consulting them or of acquiring facts at the
fountain head; then to buy the paper, pay for the printing, and the like, all at
least fifteen per cent beyond what the trade would have paid; and then after
all to give thirty per cent not of the net profits, but of the gross results of the
sale, to a man who has merely to give the books shelf or warehouse room,
and permit his apprentice to hand them over the counter to those who may
ask for them; and this too copy by copy, although, if the work be on any

philosophical or scientific subject, it may be years before the edition is sold
off. All this, I confess, must seem a hardship, and one, to which the
products of industry in no other mode of exertion are subject. Yet even this
is better, far better, than to attempt in any way to unite the functions of
author and publisher. But the most prudent mode is to sell the copy-right, at
least of one or more editions, for the most that the trade will offer. By few
only can a large remuneration be expected; but fifty pounds and ease of
mind are of more real advantage to a literary man, than the chance of five
hundred with the certainty of insult and degrading anxieties. I shall have
been grievously misunderstood, if this statement should be interpreted as
written with the desire of detracting from the character of booksellers or
publishers. The individuals did not make the laws and customs of their
trade, but, as in every other trade, take them as they find them. Till the evil
can be proved to be removable, and without the substitution of an equal or
greater inconvenience, it were neither wise nor manly even to complain of
it. But to use it as a pretext for speaking, or even for thinking, or feeling,
unkindly or opprobriously of the tradesmen, as individuals, would be
something worse than unwise or even than unmanly; it would be immoral
and calumnious. My motives point in a far different direction and to far
other objects, as will be seen in the conclusion of the chapter.

A learned and exemplary old clergyman, who many years ago went to his
reward followed by the regrets and blessings of his flock, published at his
own expense two volumes octavo, entitled, A NEW THEORY OF
REDEMPTION. The work was most severely handled in THE MONTHLY
or CRITICAL REVIEW, I forget which; and this unprovoked hostility
became the good old man’s favourite topic of conversation among his
friends. “Well!” (he used to exclaim,) “in the second edition, I shall have an
opportunity of exposing both the ignorance and the malignity of the
anonymous critic.” Two or three years however passed by without any
tidings from the bookseller, who had undertaken the printing and
publication of the work, and who was perfectly at his ease, as the author
was known to be a man of large property. At length the accounts were
written for; and in the course of a few weeks they were presented by the
rider for the house, in person. My old friend put on his spectacles, and
holding the scroll with no very firm hand, began—“Paper, so much: O
moderate enough—not at all beyond my expectation! Printing, so much:

well! moderate enough! Stitching, covers, advertisements, carriage, and so
forth, so much.”—Still nothing amiss. Selleridge (for orthography is no
necessary part of a bookseller’s literary acquirements) L3. 3s. “Bless me!
only three guineas for the what d’ye call it—the selleridge?” “No more,
Sir!” replied the rider. “Nay, but that is too moderate!” rejoined my old
friend. “Only three guineas for selling a thousand copies of a work in two
volumes?” “O Sir!” (cries the young traveller) “you have mistaken the
word. There have been none of them sold; they have been sent back from
London long ago; and this L3. 3s. is for the cellaridge, or warehouse-room
in our book cellar.” The work was in consequence preferred from the
ominous cellar of the publisher’s to the author’s garret; and, on presenting a
copy to an acquaintance, the old gentleman used to tell the anecdote with
great humour and still greater good nature.

With equal lack of worldly knowledge, I was a far more than equal sufferer
for it, at the very outset of my authorship. Toward the close of the first year
from the time, that in an inauspicious hour I left the friendly cloisters, and
the happy grove of quiet, ever honoured Jesus College, Cambridge, I was
persuaded by sundry philanthropists and Anti-polemists to set on foot a
periodical work, entitled THE WATCHMAN, that, according to the general
motto of the work, all might know the truth, and that the truth might make
us free! In order to exempt it from the stamp-tax, and likewise to contribute
as little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom, it was to
be published on every eighth day, thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely
printed, and price only four-pence. Accordingly with a flaming prospectus,
—“Knowledge is Power,” “To cry the state of the political atmosphere,”—
and so forth, I set off on a tour to the North, from Bristol to Sheffield, for
the purpose of procuring customers, preaching by the way in most of the
great towns, as an hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that
not a rag of the woman of Babylon might be seen on me. For I was at that
time and long after, though a Trinitarian (that is ad normam Platonis) in
philosophy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion; more accurately, I was a
Psilanthropist, one of those who believe our Lord to have been the real son
of Joseph, and who lay the main stress on the resurrection rather than on the
crucifixion. O! never can I remember those days with either shame or
regret. For I was most sincere, most disinterested. My opinions were indeed
in many and most important points erroneous; but my heart was single.

Wealth, rank, life itself then seemed cheap to me, compared with the
interests of what I believed to be the truth, and the will of my Maker. I
cannot even accuse myself of having been actuated by vanity; for in the
expansion of my enthusiasm I did not think of myself at all.

My campaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a
rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man, in
whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have
been borrowed for a foundery poker. O that face! a face kat’ emphasin! I
have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair, pingui-
nitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin
gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a last
week’s shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and
lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I suppose he called his hair,
and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck,—the only approach
to flexure in his whole figure,—slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the
countenance lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows,
gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a used gridiron,
all soot, grease, and iron! But he was one of the thorough-bred, a true lover
of liberty, and, as I was informed, had proved to the satisfaction of many,
that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second beast in THE
REVELATIONS, that spake as a dragon. A person, to whom one of my
letters of recommendation had been addressed, was my introducer. It was a
new event in my life, my first stroke in the new business I had undertaken
of an author, yea, and of an author trading on his own account. My
companion after some imperfect sentences and a multitude of hums and has
abandoned the cause to his client; and I commenced an harangue of half an
hour to Phileleutheros, the tallow-chandler, varying my notes, through the
whole gamut of eloquence, from the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and in
the latter from the pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described, I
promised, I prophesied; and beginning with the captivity of nations I ended
with the near approach of the millennium, finishing the whole with some of
my own verses describing that glorious state out of the Religious Musings:
———Such delights
As float to earth, permitted visitants!
When in some hour of solemn jubilee
The massive gates of Paradise are thrown
Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild

Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies,
And odours snatched from beds of amaranth,
And they, that from the crystal river of life
Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales!

My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy patience,
though, as I was afterwards told, on complaining of certain gales that were
not altogether ambrosial, it was a melting day with him. “And what, Sir,” he
said, after a short pause, “might the cost be?” “Only four-pence,”—(O! how
I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four-pence!)—“only four-
pence, Sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day.”—“That
comes to a deal of money at the end of a year. And how much, did you say,
there was to be for the money?”—“Thirty-two pages, Sir, large octavo,
closely printed.”—“Thirty and two pages? Bless me! why except what I
does in a family way on the Sabbath, that’s more than I ever reads, Sir! all
the year round. I am as great a one, as any man in Brummagem, Sir! for
liberty and truth and all them sort of things, but as to this,—no offence, I
hope, Sir,—I must beg to be excused.”

So ended my first canvass: from causes that I shall presently mention, I
made but one other application in person. This took place at Manchester to
a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. He took my letter of
introduction, and, having perused it, measured me from head to foot and
again from foot to head, and then asked if I had any bill or invoice of the
thing. I presented my prospectus to him. He rapidly skimmed and hummed
over the first side, and still more rapidly the second and concluding page;
crushed it within his fingers and the palm of his hand; then most
deliberately and significantly rubbed and smoothed one part against the
other; and lastly putting it into his pocket turned his back on me with an
“over-run with these articles!” and so without another syllable retired into
his counting house. And, I can truly say, to my unspeakable amusement.

This, I have said, was my second and last attempt. On returning baffled
from the first, in which I had vainly essayed to repeat the miracle of
Orpheus with the Brummagem patriot, I dined with the tradesman who had
introduced me to him. After dinner he importuned me to smoke a pipe with
him, and two or three other illuminati of the same rank. I objected, both
because I was engaged to spend the evening with a minister and his friends,
and because I had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime, and

then it was herb tobacco mixed with Oronooko. On the assurance, however,
that the tobacco was equally mild, and seeing too that it was of a yellow
colour; not forgetting the lamentable difficulty, I have always experienced,
in saying, “No,” and in abstaining from what the people about me were
doing,—I took half a pipe, filling the lower half of the bowl with salt. I was
soon however compelled to resign it, in consequence of a giddiness and
distressful feeling in my eyes, which, as I had drunk but a single glass of
ale, must, I knew, have been the effect of the tobacco. Soon after, deeming
myself recovered, I sallied forth to my engagement; but the walk and the
fresh air brought on all the symptoms again, and, I had scarcely entered the
minister’s drawing-room, and opened a small pacquet of letters, which he
had received from Bristol for me; ere I sank back on the sofa in a sort of
swoon rather than sleep. Fortunately I had found just time enough to inform
him of the confused state of my feelings, and of the occasion. For here and
thus I lay, my face like a wall that is white-washing, deathly pale and with
the cold drops of perspiration running down it from my forehead, while one
after another there dropped in the different gentlemen, who had been invited
to meet, and spend the evening with me, to the number of from fifteen to
twenty. As the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke
from insensibility, and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the
candles which had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my
embarrassment one of the gentlemen began the conversation, with “Have
you seen a paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?” “Sir!” I replied, rubbing my eyes,
“I am far from convinced, that a Christian is permitted to read either
newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary interest.”
This remark, so ludicrously inapposite to, or rather, incongruous with, the
purpose, for which I was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist
me in which they were all then met, produced an involuntary and general
burst of laughter; and seldom indeed have I passed so many delightful
hours, as I enjoyed in that room from the moment of that laugh till an early
hour the next morning. Never, perhaps, in so mixed and numerous a party
have I since heard conversation, sustained with such animation, enriched
with such variety of information and enlivened with such a flow of
anecdote. Both then and afterwards they all joined in dissuading me from
proceeding with my scheme; assured me in the most friendly and yet most
flattering expressions, that neither was the employment fit for me, nor I fit
for the employment. Yet, if I determined on persevering in it, they promised

to exert themselves to the utmost to procure subscribers, and insisted that I
should make no more applications in person, but carry on the canvass by
proxy. The same hospitable reception, the same dissuasion, and, that failing,
the same kind exertions in my behalf, I met with at Manchester, Derby,
Nottingham, Sheffield,—indeed, at every place in which I took up my
sojourn. I often recall with affectionate pleasure the many respectable men
who interested themselves for me, a perfect stranger to them, not a few of
whom I can still name among my friends. They will bear witness for me
how opposite even then my principles were to those of Jacobinism or even
of democracy, and can attest the strict accuracy of the statement which I
have left on record in the tenth and eleventh numbers of THE FRIEND.

From this rememberable tour I returned with nearly a thousand names on
the subscription list of THE WATCHMAN; yet more than half convinced,
that prudence dictated the abandonment of the scheme. But for this very
reason I persevered in it; for I was at that period of my life so completely
hag-ridden by the fear of being influenced by selfish motives, that to know
a mode of conduct to be the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive
proof to my feelings, that the contrary was the dictate of duty. Accordingly,
I commenced the work, which was announced in London by long bills in
letters larger than had ever been seen before, and which, I have been
informed, for I did not see them myself, eclipsed the glories even of the
lottery puffs. But alas! the publication of the very first number was delayed
beyond the day announced for its appearance. In the second number an
essay against fast days, with a most censurable application of a text from
Isaiah for its motto, lost me near five hundred of my subscribers at one
blow. In the two following numbers I made enemies of all my Jacobin and
democratic patrons; for, disgusted by their infidelity, and their adoption of
French morals with French psilosophy; and perhaps thinking, that charity
ought to begin nearest home; Instead of abusing the government and the
Aristocrats chiefly or entirely, as had been expected of me, I levelled my
attacks at “modern patriotism,” and even ventured to declare my belief, that
whatever the motives of ministers might have been for the sedition, or as it
was then the fashion to call them, the gagging bills, yet the bills themselves
would produce an effect to be desired by all the true friends of freedom, as
far as they should contribute to deter men from openly declaiming on
subjects, the principles of which they had never bottomed and from

“pleading to the poor and ignorant, instead of pleading for them.” At the
same time I avowed my conviction, that national education and a
concurring spread of the Gospel were the indispensable condition of any
true political melioration. Thus by the time the seventh number was
published, I had the mortification—(but why should I say this, when in
truth I cared too little for any thing that concerned my worldly interests to
be at all mortified about it?)—of seeing the preceding numbers exposed in
sundry old iron shops for a penny a piece. At the ninth number I dropt the
work. But from the London publisher I could not obtain a shilling; he was a
——— and set me at defiance. From other places I procured but little, and
after such delays as rendered that little worth nothing; and I should have
been inevitably thrown into jail by my Bristol printer, who refused to wait
even for a month, for a sum between eighty and ninety pounds, if the
money had not been paid for me by a man by no means affluent, a dear
friend, who attached himself to me from my first arrival at Bristol, who has
continued my friend with a fidelity unconquered by time or even by my
own apparent neglect; a friend from whom I never received an advice that
was not wise, nor a remonstrance that was not gentle and affectionate.

Conscientiously an opponent of the first revolutionary war, yet with my
eyes thoroughly opened to the true character and impotence of the favourers
of revolutionary principles in England, principles which I held in
abhorrence,—(for it was part of my political creed, that whoever ceased to
act as an individual by making himself a member of any society not
sanctioned by his Government, forfeited the rights of a citizen)—a
vehement Anti-Ministerialist, but after the invasion of Switzerland, a more
vehement Anti-Gallican, and still more intensely an Anti-Jacobin, I retired
to a cottage at Stowey, and provided for my scanty maintenance by writing
verses for a London Morning Paper. I saw plainly, that literature was not a
profession, by which I could expect to live; for I could not disguise from
myself, that, whatever my talents might or might not be in other respects,
yet they were not of the sort that could enable me to become a popular
writer; and that whatever my opinions might be in themselves, they were
almost equi-distant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites, the
Foxites, and the Democrats. Of the unsaleable nature of my writings I had
an amusing memento one morning from our own servant girl. For
happening to rise at an earlier hour than usual, I observed her putting an

extravagant quantity of paper into the grate in order to light the fire, and
mildly checked her for her wastefulness; “La, Sir!” (replied poor Nanny)
“why, it is only Watchmen.”

I now devoted myself to poetry and to the study of ethics and psychology;
and so profound was my admiration at this time of Hartley’s ESSAY ON
MAN, that I gave his name to my first-born. In addition to the gentleman,
my neighbour, whose garden joined on to my little orchard, and the
cultivation of whose friendship had been my sole motive in choosing
Stowey for my residence, I was so fortunate as to acquire, shortly after my
settlement there, an invaluable blessing in the society and neighbourhood of
one, to whom I could look up with equal reverence, whether I regarded him
as a poet, a philosopher, or a man. His conversation extended to almost all
subjects, except physics and politics; with the latter he never troubled
himself. Yet neither my retirement nor my utter abstraction from all the
disputes of the day could secure me in those jealous times from suspicion
and obloquy, which did not stop at me, but extended to my excellent friend,
whose perfect innocence was even adduced as a proof of his guilt. One of
the many busy sycophants of that day,—(I here use the word sycophant in
its original sense, as a wretch who flatters the prevailing party by informing
against his neighbours, under pretence that they are exporters of prohibited
figs or fancies,—for the moral application of the term it matters not which)
—one of these sycophantic law-mongrels, discoursing on the politics of the
neighbourhood, uttered the following deep remark: “As to Coleridge, there
is not so much harm in him, for he is a whirl-brain that talks whatever
comes uppermost; but that ———! he is the dark traitor. You never hear
HIM say a syllable on the subject.”

Now that the hand of Providence has disciplined all Europe into sobriety, as
men tame wild elephants, by alternate blows and caresses; now that
Englishmen of all classes are restored to their old English notions and
feelings; it will with difficulty be credited, how great an influence was at
that time possessed and exerted by the spirit of secret defamation,—(the too
constant attendant on party-zeal)—during the restless interim from 1793 to
the commencement of the Addington administration, or the year before the
truce of Amiens. For by the latter period the minds of the partizans,
exhausted by excess of stimulation and humbled by mutual disappointment,

had become languid. The same causes, that inclined the nation to peace,
disposed the individuals to reconciliation. Both parties had found
themselves in the wrong. The one had confessedly mistaken the moral
character of the revolution, and the other had miscalculated both its moral
and its physical resources. The experiment was made at the price of great,
almost, we may say, of humiliating sacrifices; and wise men foresaw that it
would fail, at least in its direct and ostensible object. Yet it was purchased
cheaply, and realized an object of equal value, and, if possible, of still more
vital importance. For it brought about a national unanimity unexampled in
our history since the reign of Elizabeth; and Providence, never wanting to a
good work when men have done their parts, soon provided a common focus
in the cause of Spain, which made us all once more Englishmen by at once
gratifying and correcting the predilections of both parties. The sincere
reverers of the throne felt the cause of loyalty ennobled by its alliance with
that of freedom; while the honest zealots of the people could not but admit,
that freedom itself assumed a more winning form, humanized by loyalty
and consecrated by religious principle. The youthful enthusiasts who,
flattered by the morning rainbow of the French revolution, had made a
boast of expatriating their hopes and fears, now, disciplined by the
succeeding storms and sobered by increase of years, had been taught to
prize and honour the spirit of nationality as the best safeguard of national
independence, and this again as the absolute pre-requisite and necessary
basis of popular rights.

If in Spain too disappointment has nipped our too forward expectations, yet
all is not destroyed that is checked. The crop was perhaps springing up too
rank in the stalk to kern well; and there were, doubtless, symptoms of the
Gallican blight on it. If superstition and despotism have been suffered to let
in their wolvish sheep to trample and eat it down even to the surface, yet the
roots remain alive, and the second growth may prove the stronger and
healthier for the temporary interruption. At all events, to us heaven has been
just and gracious. The people of England did their best, and have received
their rewards. Long may we continue to deserve it! Causes, which it had
been too generally the habit of former statesmen to regard as belonging to
another world, are now admitted by all ranks to have been the main agents
of our success. “We fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought
against Sisera.” If then unanimity grounded on moral feelings has been

among the least equivocal sources of our national glory, that man deserves
the esteem of his countrymen, even as patriots, who devotes his life and the
utmost efforts of his intellect to the preservation and continuance of that
unanimity by the disclosure and establishment of principles. For by these all
opinions must be ultimately tried; and, (as the feelings of men are worthy of
regard only as far as they are the representatives of their fixed opinions,) on
the knowledge of these all unanimity, not accidental and fleeting, must be
grounded. Let the scholar, who doubts this assertion, refer only to the
speeches and writings of Edmund Burke at the commencement of the
American war and compare them with his speeches and writings at the
commencement of the French revolution. He will find the principles exactly
the same and the deductions the same; but the practical inferences almost
opposite in the one case from those drawn in the other; yet in both equally
legitimate and in both equally confirmed by the results. Whence gained he
the superiority of foresight? Whence arose the striking difference, and in
most instances even, the discrepancy between the grounds assigned by him
and by those who voted with him, on the same questions? How are we to
explain the notorious fact, that the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke
are more interesting at the present day than they were found at the time of
their first publication; while those of his illustrious confederates are either
forgotten, or exist only to furnish proofs, that the same conclusion, which
one man had deduced scientifically, may be brought out by another in
consequence of errors that luckily chanced to neutralize each other. It would
be unhandsome as a conjecture, even were it not, as it actually is, false in
point of fact to attribute this difference to the deficiency of talent on the part
of Burke’s friends, or of experience, or of historical knowledge. The
satisfactory solution is, that Edmund Burke possessed and had sedulously
sharpened that eye, which sees all things, actions, and events, in relation to
the laws that determine their existence and circumscribe their possibility.
He referred habitually to principles. He was a scientific statesman; and
therefore a seer. For every principle contains in itself the germs of a
prophecy; and, as the prophetic power is the essential privilege of science,
so the fulfilment of its oracles supplies the outward and, (to men in
general,) the only test of its claim to the title. Wearisome as Burke’s
refinements appeared to his parliamentary auditors, yet the cultivated
classes throughout Europe have reason to be thankful, that he

———went on refining,
And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining.

Our very sign-boards, (said an illustrious friend to me,) give evidence, that
there has been a Titian in the world. In like manner, not only the debates in
parliament, not only our proclamations and state papers, but the essays and
leading paragraphs of our journals are so many remembrancers of Edmund
Burke. Of this the reader may easily convince himself, if either by
recollection or reference he will compare the opposition newspapers at the
commencement and during the five or six following years of the French
revolution with the sentiments, and grounds of argument assumed in the
same class of journals at present, and for some years past.

Whether the spirit of jacobinism, which the writings of Burke exorcised
from the higher and from the literary classes, may not, like the ghost in
Hamlet, be heard moving and mining in the underground chambers with an
activity the more dangerous because less noisy, may admit of a question. I
have given my opinions on this point, and the grounds of them, in my
letters to judge Fletcher occasioned by his charge to the Wexford grand jury,
and published in the Courier. Be this as it may, the evil spirit of jealousy,
and with it the Cerberean whelps of feud and slander, no longer walk their
rounds, in cultivated society.

Far different were the days to which these anecdotes have carried me back.
The dark guesses of some zealous Quidnunc met with so congenial a soil in
the grave alarm of a titled Dogberry of our neighbourhood, that a spy was
actually sent down from the government pour surveillance of myself and
friend. There must have been not only abundance, but variety of these
“honourable men” at the disposal of Ministers: for this proved a very honest
fellow. After three weeks’ truly Indian perseverance in tracking us, (for we
were commonly together,) during all which time seldom were we out of
doors, but he contrived to be within hearing,—(and all the while utterly
unsuspected; how indeed could such a suspicion enter our fancies?)—he not
only rejected Sir Dogberry’s request that he would try yet a little longer, but
declared to him his belief, that both my friend and myself were as good
subjects, for aught he could discover to the contrary, as any in His Majesty’s
dominions. He had repeatedly hid himself, he said, for hours together
behind a bank at the sea-side, (our favourite seat,) and overheard our

conversation. At first he fancied, that we were aware of our danger; for he
often heard me talk of one Spy Nozy, which he was inclined to interpret of
himself, and of a remarkable feature belonging to him; but he was speedily
convinced that it was the name of a man who had made a book and lived
long ago. Our talk ran most upon books, and we were perpetually desiring
each other to look at this, and to listen to that; but he could not catch a word
about politics. Once he had joined me on the road; (this occurred, as I was
returning home alone from my friend’s house, which was about three miles
from my own cottage,) and, passing himself off as a traveller, he had
entered into conversation with me, and talked of purpose in a democrat way
in order to draw me out. The result, it appears, not only convinced him that
I was no friend of jacobinism; but, (he added,) I had “plainly made it out to
be such a silly as well as wicked thing, that he felt ashamed though he had
only put it on.” I distinctly remembered the occurrence, and had mentioned
it immediately on my return, repeating what the traveller with his Bardolph
nose had said, with my own answer; and so little did I suspect the true
object of my “tempter ere accuser,” that I expressed with no small pleasure
my hope and belief, that the conversation had been of some service to the
poor misled malcontent. This incident therefore prevented all doubt as to
the truth of the report, which through a friendly medium came to me from
the master of the village inn, who had been ordered to entertain the
Government gentleman in his best manner, but above all to be silent
concerning such a person being in his house. At length he received Sir
Dogberry’s commands to accompany his guest at the final interview; and,
after the absolving suffrage of the gentleman honoured with the confidence
of Ministers, answered, as follows, to the following queries: D. “Well,
landlord! and what do you know of the person in question? L. I see him
often pass by with maister ——, my landlord, (that is, the owner of the
house,) and sometimes with the new-comers at Holford; but I never said a
word to him or he to me. D. But do you not know, that he has distributed
papers and hand-bills of a seditious nature among the common people? L.
No, your Honour! I never heard of such a thing. D. Have you not seen this
Mr. Coleridge, or heard of, his haranguing and talking to knots and clusters
of the inhabitants?—What are you grinning at, Sir? L. Beg your Honour’s
pardon! but I was only thinking, how they’d have stared at him. If what I
have heard be true, your Honour! they would not have understood a word
he said. When our Vicar was here, Dr. L. the master of the great school and

Canon of Windsor, there was a great dinner party at maister’s; and one of
the farmers, that was there, told us that he and the Doctor talked real
Hebrew Greek at each other for an hour together after dinner. D. Answer the
question, Sir! does he ever harangue the people? L. I hope your Honour an’t
angry with me. I can say no more than I know. I never saw him talking with
any one, but my landlord, and our curate, and the strange gentleman. D. Has
he not been seen wandering on the hills towards the Channel, and along the
shore, with books and papers in his hand, taking charts and maps of the
country? L. Why, as to that, your Honour! I own, I have heard; I am sure, I
would not wish to say ill of any body; but it is certain, that I have heard—
D. Speak out, man! don’t be afraid, you are doing your duty to your King
and Government. What have you heard? L. Why, folks do say, your
Honour! as how that he is a Poet, and that he is going to put Quantock and
all about here in print; and as they be so much together, I suppose that the
strange gentleman has some consarn in the business.”—So ended this
formidable inquisition, the latter part of which alone requires explanation,
and at the same time entitles the anecdote to a place in my literary life. I had
considered it as a defect in the admirable poem of THE TASK, that the
subject, which gives the title to the work, was not, and indeed could not be,
carried on beyond the three or four first pages, and that, throughout the
poem, the connections are frequently awkward, and the transitions abrupt
and arbitrary. I sought for a subject, that should give equal room and
freedom for description, incident, and impassioned reflections on men,
nature, and society, yet supply in itself a natural connection to the parts, and
unity to the whole. Such a subject I conceived myself to have found in a
stream, traced from its source in the hills among the yellow-red moss and
conical glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first break or fall, where its drops
become audible, and it begins to form a channel; thence to the peat and turf
barn, itself built of the same dark squares as it sheltered; to the sheepfold; to
the first cultivated plot of ground; to the lonely cottage and its bleak garden
won from the heath; to the hamlet, the villages, the market-town, the
manufactories, and the seaport. My walks therefore were almost daily on
the top of Quantock, and among its sloping coombes. With my pencil and
memorandum-book in my hand, I was making studies, as the artists call
them, and often moulding my thoughts into verse, with the objects and
imagery immediately before my senses. Many circumstances, evil and
good, intervened to prevent the completion of the poem, which was to have

been entitled THE BROOK. Had I finished the work, it was my purpose in
the heat of the moment to have dedicated it to our then committee of public
safety as containing the charts and maps, with which I was to have supplied
the French Government in aid of their plans of invasion. And these too for a
tract of coast that, from Clevedon to Minehead, scarcely permits the
approach of a fishing-boat!

All my experience from my first entrance into life to the present hour is in
favour of the warning maxim, that the man, who opposes in toto the
political or religious zealots of his age, is safer from their obloquy than he
who differs from them but in one or two points, or perhaps only in degree.
By that transfer of the feelings of private life into the discussion of public
questions, which is the queen bee in the hive of party fanaticism, the
partisan has more sympathy with an intemperate opposite than with a
moderate friend. We now enjoy an intermission, and long may it continue!
In addition to far higher and more important merits, our present Bible
societies and other numerous associations for national or charitable objects,
may serve perhaps to carry off the superfluous activity and fervour of
stirring minds in innocent hyperboles and the bustle of management. But
the poison-tree is not dead, though the sap may for a season have subsided
to its roots. At least let us not be lulled into such a notion of our entire
security, as not to keep watch and ward, even on our best feelings. I have
seen gross intolerance shown in support of toleration; sectarian antipathy
most obtrusively displayed in the promotion of an undistinguishing
comprehension of sects: and acts of cruelty, (I had almost said,) of
treachery, committed in furtherance of an object vitally important to the
cause of humanity; and all this by men too of naturally kind dispositions
and exemplary conduct.

The magic rod of fanaticism is preserved in the very adyta of human nature;
and needs only the re-exciting warmth of a master hand to bud forth afresh
and produce the old fruits. The horror of the Peasants’ war in Germany, and
the direful effects of the Anabaptists’ tenets, (which differed only from
those of jacobinism by the substitution of theological for philosophical
jargon,) struck all Europe for a time with affright. Yet little more than a
century was sufficient to obliterate all effective memory of these events.
The same principles with similar though less dreadful consequences were

again at work from the imprisonment of the first Charles to the restoration
of his son. The fanatic maxim of extirpating fanaticism by persecution
produced a civil war. The war ended in the victory of the insurgents; but the
temper survived, and Milton had abundant grounds for asserting, that
“Presbyter was but OLD PRIEST writ large!” One good result, thank
heaven! of this zealotry was the re-establishment of the church. And now it
might have been hoped, that the mischievous spirit would have been bound
for a season, “and a seal set upon him, that he should deceive the nation no
more.” [33] But no! The ball of persecution was taken up with
undiminished vigour by the persecuted. The same fanatic principle that,
under the solemn oath and covenant, had turned cathedrals into stables,
destroyed the rarest trophies of art and ancestral piety, and hunted the
brightest ornaments of learning and religion into holes and corners, now
marched under episcopal banners, and, having first crowded the prisons of
England, emptied its whole vial of wrath on the miserable Covenanters of
Scotland [34]. A merciful providence at length constrained both parties to
join against a common enemy. A wise government followed; and the
established church became, and now is, not only the brightest example, but
our best and only sure bulwark, of toleration!—the true and indispensable
bank against a new inundation of persecuting zeal—Esto perpetua!

A long interval of quiet succeeded; or rather, the exhaustion had produced a
cold fit of the ague which was symptomatized by indifference among the
many, and a tendency to infidelity or scepticism in the educated classes. At
length those feelings of disgust and hatred, which for a brief while the
multitude had attached to the crimes and absurdities of sectarian and
democratic fanaticism, were transferred to the oppressive privileges of the
noblesse, and the luxury; intrigues and favouritism of the continental courts.
The same principles, dressed in the ostentatious garb of a fashionable
philosophy, once more rose triumphant and effected the French revolution.
And have we not within the last three or four years had reason to
apprehend, that the detestable maxims and correspondent measures of the
late French despotism had already bedimmed the public recollections of
democratic phrensy; had drawn off to other objects the electric force of the
feelings which had massed and upheld those recollections; and that a
favourable concurrence of occasions was alone wanting to awaken the

thunder and precipitate the lightning from the opposite quarter of the
political heaven?

In part from constitutional indolence, which in the very hey-day of hope
had kept my enthusiasm in check, but still more from the habits and
influences of a classical education and academic pursuits, scarcely had a
year elapsed from the commencement of my literary and political
adventures before my mind sank into a state of thorough disgust and
despondency, both with regard to the disputes and the parties disputant.
With more than poetic feeling I exclaimed:
The sensual and the dark rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
They break their manacles, to wear the name
Of freedom, graven on a heavier chain.
O Liberty! with profitless endeavour
Have I pursued thee many a weary hour;
But thou nor swell’st the victor’s pomp, nor ever
Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power!
Alike from all, howe’er they praise thee,
(Nor prayer nor boastful name delays thee)
From Superstition’s harpy minions
And factious Blasphemy’s obscener slaves,
Thou speedest on thy cherub pinions,
The guide of homeless winds and playmate of the waves!

I retired to a cottage in Somersetshire at the foot of Quantock, and devoted
my thoughts and studies to the foundations of religion and morals. Here I
found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in; broke upon me “from the
fountains of the great deep,” and fell “from the windows of heaven.” The
fontal truths of natural religion and the books of Revelation alike
contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark touched on an Ararat,
and rested. The idea of the Supreme Being appeared to me to be as
necessarily implied in all particular modes of being as the idea of infinite
space in all the geometrical figures by which space is limited. I was pleased
with the Cartesian opinion, that the idea of God is distinguished from all
other ideas by involving its reality; but I was not wholly satisfied. I began
then to ask myself, what proof I had of the outward existence of anything?
Of this sheet of paper for instance, as a thing in itself, separate from the
phaenomenon or image in my perception. I saw, that in the nature of things
such proof is impossible; and that of all modes of being, that are not objects

of the senses, the existence is assumed by a logical necessity arising from
the constitution of the mind itself,—by the absence of all motive to doubt it,
not from any absolute contradiction in the supposition of the contrary. Still
the existence of a Being, the ground of all existence, was not yet the
existence of a moral creator, and governour. “In the position, that all reality
is either contained in the necessary being as an attribute, or exists through
him, as its ground, it remains undecided whether the properties of
intelligence and will are to be referred to the Supreme Being in the former
or only in the latter sense; as inherent attributes, or only as consequences
that have existence in other things through him [35]. Were the latter the
truth, then notwithstanding all the pre-eminence which must be assigned to
the Eternal First from the sufficiency, unity, and independence of his being,
as the dread ground of the universe, his nature would yet fall far short of
that, which we are bound to comprehend in the idea of GOD. For, without
any knowledge or determining resolve of its own, it would only be a blind
necessary ground of other things and other spirits; and thus would be
distinguished from the FATE of certain ancient philosophers in no respect,
but that of being more definitely and intelligibly described.”

For a very long time, indeed, I could not reconcile personality with infinity;
and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul
and John. Yet there had dawned upon me, even before I had met with the
CRITIQUE OF THE PURE REASON, a certain guiding light. If the mere
intellect could make no certain discovery of a holy and intelligent first
cause, it might yet supply a demonstration, that no legitimate argument
could be drawn from the intellect against its truth. And what is this more
than St. Paul’s assertion, that by wisdom,—(more properly translated by the
powers of reasoning)—no man ever arrived at the knowledge of God? What
more than the sublimest, and probably the oldest, book on earth has taught
us,
Silver and gold man searcheth out:
Bringeth the ore out of the earth, and darkness into light.

But where findeth he wisdom?
Where is the place of understanding?

The abyss crieth; it is not in me!
Ocean echoeth back; not in me!

Whence then cometh wisdom?
Where dwelleth understanding?

Hidden from the eyes of the living
Kept secret from the fowls of heaven!

Hell and death answer;
We have heard the rumour thereof from afar!

GOD marketh out the road to it;
GOD knoweth its abiding place!

He beholdeth the ends of the earth;
He surveyeth what is beneath the heavens!

And as he weighed out the winds, and measured the sea,
And appointed laws to the rain,
And a path to the thunder,
A path to the flashes of the lightning!

Then did he see it,
And he counted it;
He searched into the depth thereof,
And with a line did he compass it round!

But to man he said,
The fear of the Lord is wisdom for thee!
And to avoid evil,
That is thy understanding. [36]

I become convinced, that religion, as both the cornerstone and the key-stone
of morality, must have a moral origin; so far at least, that the evidence of its
doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly
independent of the will. It were therefore to be expected, that its
fundamental truth would be such as might be denied; though only, by the
fool, and even by the fool from the madness of the heart alone!

The question then concerning our faith in the existence of a God, not only
as the ground of the universe by his essence, but as its maker and judge by
his wisdom and holy will, appeared to stand thus. The sciential reason, the
objects of which are purely theoretical, remains neutral, as long as its name
and semblance are not usurped by the opponents of the doctrine. But it then
becomes an effective ally by exposing the false show of demonstration, or
by evincing the equal demonstrability of the contrary from premises equally
logical [37]. The understanding meantime suggests, the analogy of

experience facilitates, the belief. Nature excites and recalls it, as by a
perpetual revelation. Our feelings almost necessitate it; and the law of
conscience peremptorily commands it. The arguments, that at all apply to it,
are in its favour; and there is nothing against it, but its own sublimity. It
could not be intellectually more evident without becoming morally less
effective; without counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith
to the cold mechanism of a worth less because compulsory assent. The
belief of a God and a future state, (if a passive acquiescence may be
flattered with the name of belief,) does not indeed always beget a good
heart; but a good heart so naturally begets the belief, that the very few
exceptions must be regarded as strange anomalies from strange and
unfortunate circumstances.

From these premises I proceeded to draw the following conclusions. First,
that having once fully admitted the existence of an infinite yet self-
conscious Creator, we are not allowed to ground the irrationality of any
other article of faith on arguments which would equally prove that to be
irrational, which we had allowed to be real. Secondly, that whatever is
deducible from the admission of a self-comprehending and creative spirit
may be legitimately used in proof of the possibility of any further mystery
concerning the divine nature. Possibilitatem mysteriorum, (Trinitatis, etc.)
contra insultus Infidelium et Haereticorum a contradictionibus vindico;
haud quidem veritatem, quae revelatione sola stabiliri possit; says Leibnitz
in a letter to his Duke. He then adds the following just and important
remark. “In vain will tradition or texts of scripture be adduced in support of
a doctrine, donec clava impossibilitatis et contradictionis e manibus horum
Herculum extorta fuerit. For the heretic will still reply, that texts, the literal
sense of which is not so much above as directly against all reason, must be
understood figuratively, as Herod is a fox, and so forth.”

These principles I held, philosophically, while in respect of revealed
religion I remained a zealous Unitarian. I considered the idea of the Trinity
a fair scholastic inference from the being of God, as a creative intelligence;
and that it was therefore entitled to the rank of an esoteric doctrine of
natural religion. But seeing in the same no practical or moral bearing, I
confined it to the schools of philosophy. The admission of the Logos, as
hypostasized (that is, neither a mere attribute, nor a personification) in no

respect removed my doubts concerning the Incarnation and the Redemption
by the cross; which I could neither reconcile in reason with the
impassiveness of the Divine Being, nor in my moral feelings with the
sacred distinction between things and persons, the vicarious payment of a
debt and the vicarious expiation of guilt. A more thorough revolution in my
philosophic principles, and a deeper insight into my own heart, were yet
wanting. Nevertheless, I cannot doubt, that the difference of my
metaphysical notions from those of Unitarians in general contributed to my
final re-conversion to the whole truth in Christ; even as according to his
own confession the books of certain Platonic philosophers (libri quorundam
Platonicorum) commenced the rescue of St. Augustine’s faith from the same
error aggravated by the far darker accompaniment of the Manichaean
heresy.

While my mind was thus perplexed, by a gracious providence for which I
can never be sufficiently grateful, the generous and munificent patronage of
Mr. Josiah, and Mr. Thomas Wedgwood enabled me to finish my education
in Germany. Instead of troubling others with my own crude notions and
juvenile compositions, I was thenceforward better employed in attempting
to store my own head with the wisdom of others. I made the best use of my
time and means; and there is therefore no period of my life on which I can
look back with such unmingled satisfaction. After acquiring a tolerable
sufficiency in the German language [38] at Ratzeburg, which with my
voyage and journey thither I have described in The Friend, I proceeded
through Hanover to Goettingen.

Here I regularly attended the lectures on physiology in the morning, and on
natural history in the evening, under Blumenbach, a name as dear to every
Englishman who has studied at that university, as it is venerable to men of
science throughout Europe! Eichhorn’s lectures on the New Testament were
repeated to me from notes by a student from Ratzeburg, a young man of
sound learning and indefatigable industry, who is now, I believe, a professor
of the oriental languages at Heidelberg. But my chief efforts were directed
towards a grounded knowledge of the German language and literature.
From professor Tychsen I received as many lessons in the Gothic of
Ulphilas as sufficed to make me acquainted with its grammar, and the
radical words of most frequent occurrence; and with the occasional

assistance of the same philosophical linguist, I read through [39] Ottfried’s
metrical paraphrase of the gospel, and the most important remains of the
Theotiscan, or the transitional state of the Teutonic language from the
Gothic to the old German of the Swabian period. Of this period—(the
polished dialect of which is analogous to that of our Chaucer, and which
leaves the philosophic student in doubt, whether the language has not since
then lost more in sweetness and flexibility, than it has gained in
condensation and copiousness)—I read with sedulous accuracy the
Minnesinger (or singers of love, the Provencal poets of the Swabian court)
and the metrical romances; and then laboured through sufficient specimens
of the master singers, their degenerate successors; not however without
occasional pleasure from the rude, yet interesting strains of Hans Sachs, the
cobbler of Nuremberg. Of this man’s genius five folio volumes with double
columns are extant in print, and nearly an equal number in manuscript; yet
the indefatigable bard takes care to inform his readers, that he never made a
shoe the less, but had virtuously reared a large family by the labour of his
hands.

In Pindar, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, and many more, we have instances of
the close connection of poetic genius with the love of liberty and of genuine
reformation. The moral sense at least will not be outraged, if I add to the list
the name of this honest shoemaker, (a trade by the by remarkable for the
production of philosophers and poets).

His poem entitled THE MORNING STAR, was the very first publication
that appeared in praise and support of Luther; and an excellent hymn of
Hans Sachs, which has been deservedly translated into almost all the
European languages, was commonly sung in the Protestant churches,
whenever the heroic reformer visited them.

In Luther’s own German writings, and eminently in his translation of the
Bible, the German language commenced. I mean the language as it is at
present written; that which is called the High-German, as contra-
distinguished from the Platt-Teutsch, the dialect on the flat or northern
countries, and from the Ober-Teutsch, the language of the middle and
Southern Germany. The High German is indeed a lingua communis, not
actually the native language of any province, but the choice and fragrancy

of all the dialects. From this cause it is at once the most copious and the
most grammatical of all the European tongues.

Within less than a century after Luther’s death the German was inundated
with pedantic barbarisms. A few volumes of this period I read through from
motives of curiosity; for it is not easy to imagine any thing more fantastic,
than the very appearance of their pages. Almost every third word is a Latin
word with a Germanized ending, the Latin portion being always printed in
Roman letters, while in the last syllable the German character is retained.

At length, about the year 1620, Opitz arose, whose genius more nearly
resembled that of Dryden than any other poet, who at present occurs to my
recollection. In the opinion of Lessing, the most acute of critics, and of
Adelung, the first of Lexicographers, Opitz, and the Silesian poets, his
followers, not only restored the language, but still remain the models of
pure diction. A stranger has no vote on such a question; but after repeated
perusal of the works of Opitz my feelings justified the verdict, and I seemed
to have acquired from them a sort of tact for what is genuine in the style of
later writers.

Of the splendid aera, which commenced with Gellert, Klopstock, Ramler,
Lessing, and their compeers, I need not speak. With the opportunities which
I enjoyed, it would have been disgraceful not to have been familiar with
their writings; and I have already said as much as the present biographical
sketch requires concerning the German philosophers, whose works, for the
greater part, I became acquainted with at a far later period.

Soon after my return from Germany I was solicited to undertake the literary
and political department in the Morning Post; and I acceded to the proposal
on the condition that the paper should thenceforwards be conducted on
certain fixed and announced principles, and that I should neither be obliged
nor requested to deviate from them in favour of any party or any event. In
consequence, that journal became and for many years continued anti-
ministerial indeed, yet with a very qualified approbation of the opposition,
and with far greater earnestness and zeal both anti-Jacobin and anti-
Gallican. To this hour I cannot find reason to approve of the first war either
in its commencement or its conduct. Nor can I understand, with what reason
either Mr. Perceval, (whom I am singular enough to regard as the best and

wisest minister of this reign,) nor the present Administration, can be said to
have pursued the plans of Mr. Pitt. The love of their country, and
perseverant hostility to French principles and French ambition are indeed
honourable qualities common to them and to their predecessor. But it
appears to me as clear as the evidence of the facts can render any question
of history, that the successes of the Perceval and of the existing ministry
have been owing to their having pursued measures the direct contrary to Mr.
Pitt’s. Such for instance are the concentration of the national force to one
object; the abandonment of the subsidizing policy, so far at least as neither
to goad nor bribe the continental courts into war, till the convictions of their
subjects had rendered it a war of their own seeking; and above all, in their
manly and generous reliance on the good sense of the English people, and
on that loyalty which is linked to the very [40] heart of the nation by the
system of credit and the interdependence of property.

Be this as it may, I am persuaded that the Morning Post proved a far more
useful ally to the Government in its most important objects, in consequence
of its being generally considered as moderately anti- ministerial, than if it
had been the avowed eulogist of Mr. Pitt. The few, whose curiosity or fancy
should lead them to turn over the journals of that date, may find a small
proof of this in the frequent charges made by the Morning Chronicle, that
such and such essays or leading paragraphs had been sent from the
Treasury. The rapid and unusual increase in the sale of the Morning Post is
a sufficient pledge, that genuine impartiality with a respectable portion of
literary talent will secure the success of a newspaper without the aid of
party or ministerial patronage. But by impartiality I mean an honest and
enlightened adherence to a code of intelligible principles previously
announced, and faithfully referred to in support of every judgment on men
and events; not indiscriminate abuse, not the indulgence of an editor’s own
malignant passions, and still less, if that be possible, a determination to
make money by flattering the envy and cupidity, the vindictive restlessness
and self-conceit of the half-witted vulgar; a determination almost fiendish,
but which, I have been informed, has been boastfully avowed by one man,
the most notorious of these mob-sycophants! From the commencement of
the Addington administration to the present day, whatever I have written in
THE MORNING POST, or (after that paper was transferred to other

proprietors) in THE COURIER, has been in defence or furtherance of the
measures of Government.
Things of this nature scarce survive that night
That gives them birth; they perish in the sight;
Cast by so far from after-life, that there
Can scarcely aught be said, but that they were!

Yet in these labours I employed, and, in the belief of partial friends wasted,
the prime and manhood of my intellect. Most assuredly, they added nothing
to my fortune or my reputation. The industry of the week supplied the
necessities of the week. From government or the friends of government I
not only never received remuneration, nor ever expected it; but I was never
honoured with a single acknowledgment, or expression of satisfaction. Yet
the retrospect is far from painful or matter of regret. I am not indeed silly
enough to take as any thing more than a violent hyperbole of party debate,
Mr. Fox’s assertion that the late war (I trust that the epithet is not
prematurely applied) was a war produced by the Morning Post; or I should
be proud to have the words inscribed on my tomb. As little do I regard the
circumstance, that I was a specified object of Buonaparte’s resentment
during my residence in Italy in consequence of those essays in the Morning
Post during the peace of Amiens. Of this I was warned, directly, by Baron
Von Humboldt, the Prussian Plenipotentiary, who at that time was the
minister of the Prussian court at Rome; and indirectly, through his secretary,
by Cardinal Fesch himself. Nor do I lay any greater weight on the
confirming fact, that an order for my arrest was sent from Paris, from which
danger I was rescued by the kindness of a noble Benedictine, and the
gracious connivance of that good old man, the present Pope. For the late
tyrant’s vindictive appetite was omnivorous, and preyed equally on a Duc
d’Enghien [41], and the writer of a newspaper paragraph. Like a true
vulture [42], Napoleon with an eye not less telescopic, and with a taste
equally coarse in his ravin, could descend from the most dazzling heights to
pounce on the leveret in the brake, or even on the field mouse amid the
grass. But I do derive a gratification from the knowledge, that my essays
contributed to introduce the practice of placing the questions and events of
the day in a moral point of view; in giving a dignity to particular measures
by tracing their policy or impolicy to permanent principles, and an interest
to principles by the application of them to individual measures. In Mr.
Burke’s writings indeed the germs of almost all political truths may be

found. But I dare assume to myself the merit of having first explicitly
defined and analyzed the nature of Jacobinism; and that in distinguishing
the Jacobin from the republican, the democrat, and the mere demagogue, I
both rescued the word from remaining a mere term of abuse, and put on
their guard many honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against
Jacobinism, admitted or supported principles from which the worst parts of
that system may be legitimately deduced. That these are not necessary
practical results of such principles, we owe to that fortunate inconsequence
of our nature, which permits the heart to rectify the errors of the
understanding. The detailed examination of the consular Government and
its pretended constitution, and the proof given by me, that it was a
consummate despotism in masquerade, extorted a recantation even from the
Morning Chronicle, which had previously extolled this constitution as the
perfection of a wise and regulated liberty. On every great occurrence I
endeavoured to discover in past history the event, that most nearly
resembled it. I procured, wherever it was possible, the contemporary
historians, memorialists, and pamphleteers. Then fairly subtracting the
points of difference from those of likeness, as the balance favoured the
former or the latter, I conjectured that the result would be the same or
different. In the series of essays entitled “A comparison of France under
Napoleon with Rome under the first Caesars,” and in those which followed
“On the probable final restoration of the Bourbons,” I feel myself
authorized to affirm, by the effect produced on many intelligent men, that,
were the dates wanting, it might have been suspected that the essays had
been written within the last twelve months. The same plan I pursued at the
commencement of the Spanish revolution, and with the same success,
taking the war of the United Provinces with Philip II as the ground work of
the comparison. I have mentioned this from no motives of vanity, nor even
from motives of self defence, which would justify a certain degree of
egotism, especially if it be considered, how often and grossly I have been
attacked for sentiments, which I have exerted my best powers to confute
and expose, and how grievously these charges acted to my disadvantage
while I was in Malta. Or rather they would have done so, if my own
feelings had not precluded the wish of a settled establishment in that island.
But I have mentioned it from the full persuasion that, armed with the two-
fold knowledge of history and the human mind, a man will scarcely err in
his judgment concerning the sum total of any future national event, if he

have been able to procure the original documents of the past, together with
authentic accounts of the present, and if he have a philosophic tact for what
is truly important in facts, and in most instances therefore for such facts as
the dignity of history has excluded from the volumes of our modern
compilers, by the courtesy of the age entitled historians.

To have lived in vain must be a painful thought to any man, and especially
so to him who has made literature his profession. I should therefore rather
condole than be angry with the mind, which could attribute to no worthier
feelings than those of vanity or self-love, the satisfaction which I
acknowledged myself to have enjoyed from the republication of my
political essays (either whole or as extracts) not only in many of our own
provincial papers, but in the federal journals throughout America. I
regarded it as some proof of my not having laboured altogether in vain, that
from the articles written by me shortly before and at the commencement of
the late unhappy war with America, not only the sentiments were adopted,
but in some instances the very language, in several of the Massachusetts
state papers.

But no one of these motives nor all conjointly would have impelled me to a
statement so uncomfortable to my own feelings, had not my character been
repeatedly attacked, by an unjustifiable intrusion on private life, as of a man
incorrigibly idle, and who intrusted not only with ample talents, but
favoured with unusual opportunities of improving them, had nevertheless
suffered them to rust away without any efficient exertion, either for his own
good or that of his fellow creatures. Even if the compositions, which I have
made public, and that too in a form the most certain of an extensive
circulation, though the least flattering to an author’s self-love, had been
published in books, they would have filled a respectable number of
volumes, though every passage of merely temporary interest were omitted.
My prose writings have been charged with a disproportionate demand on
the attention; with an excess of refinement in the mode of arriving at truths;
with beating the ground for that which might have been run down by the
eye; with the length and laborious construction of my periods; in short with
obscurity and the love of paradox. But my severest critics have not
pretended to have found in my compositions triviality, or traces of a mind
that shrunk from the toil of thinking. No one has charged me with tricking

out in other words the thoughts of others, or with hashing up anew the
cramben jam decies coctam of English literature or philosophy. Seldom
have I written that in a day, the acquisition or investigation of which had not
cost me the previous labour of a month.

But are books the only channel through which the stream of intellectual
usefulness can flow? Is the diffusion of truth to be estimated by
publications; or publications by the truth, which they diffuse or at least
contain? I speak it in the excusable warmth of a mind stung by an
accusation, which has not only been advanced in reviews of the widest
circulation, not only registered in the bulkiest works of periodical literature,
but by frequency of repetition has become an admitted fact in private
literary circles, and thoughtlessly repeated by too many who call themselves
my friends, and whose own recollections ought to have suggested a
contrary testimony. Would that the criterion of a scholar’s utility were the
number and moral value of the truths, which he has been the means of
throwing into the general circulation; or the number and value of the minds,
whom by his conversation or letters, he has excited into activity, and
supplied with the germs of their after-growth! A distinguished rank might
not indeed, even then, be awarded to my exertions; but I should dare look
forward with confidence to an honourable acquittal. I should dare appeal to
the numerous and respectable audiences, which at different times and in
different places honoured my lecture rooms with their attendance, whether
the points of view from which the subjects treated of were surveyed,—
whether the grounds of my reasoning were such, as they had heard or read
elsewhere, or have since found in previous publications. I can
conscientiously declare, that the complete success of the REMORSE on the
first night of its representation did not give me as great or as heart-felt a
pleasure, as the observation that the pit and boxes were crowded with faces
familiar to me, though of individuals whose names I did not know, and of
whom I knew nothing, but that they had attended one or other of my
courses of lectures. It is an excellent though perhaps somewhat vulgar
proverb, that there are cases where a man may be as well “in for a pound as
for a penny.” To those, who from ignorance of the serious injury I have
received from this rumour of having dreamed away my life to no purpose,
injuries which I unwillingly remember at all, much less am disposed to
record in a sketch of my literary life; or to those, who from their own

feelings, or the gratification they derive from thinking contemptuously of
others, would like job’s comforters attribute these complaints, extorted from
me by the sense of wrong, to self conceit or presumptuous vanity, I have
already furnished such ample materials, that I shall gain nothing by
withholding the remainder. I will not therefore hesitate to ask the
consciences of those, who from their long acquaintance with me and with
the circumstances are best qualified to decide or be my judges, whether the
restitution of the suum cuique would increase or detract from my literary
reputation. In this exculpation I hope to be understood as speaking of
myself comparatively, and in proportion to the claims, which others are
entitled to make on my time or my talents. By what I have effected, am I to
be judged by my fellow men; what I could have done, is a question for my
own conscience. On my own account I may perhaps have had sufficient
reason to lament my deficiency in self-control, and the neglect of
concentering my powers to the realization of some permanent work. But to
verse rather than to prose, if to either, belongs the voice of mourning for
Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;
And fears self-willed that shunned the eye of hope;
And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;
Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
And genius given and knowledge won in vain;
And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild,
And all which patient toil had reared, and all,
Commune with thee had opened out—but flowers
Strewed on my corpse, and borne upon my bier,
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!

These will exist, for the future, I trust, only in the poetic strains, which the
feelings at the time called forth. In those only, gentle reader,
Affectus animi varios, bellumque sequacis
Perlegis invidiae, curasque revolvis inanes,
Quas humilis tenero stylus olim effudit in aevo.
Perlegis et lacrymas, et quod pharetratus acuta
Ille puer puero fecit mihi cuspide vulnus.
Omnia paulatim consumit longior aetas,
Vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo.
Ipse mihi collatus enim non ille videbor;
Frons alia est, moresque alii, nova mentis imago,
Vox aliudque sonat—Jamque observatio vitae
Multa dedit—lugere nihil, ferre omnia; jamque
Paulatim lacrymas rerum experientia tersit.

CHAPTER XI
An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves
disposed to become authors.

It was a favourite remark of the late Mr. Whitbread’s, that no man does any
thing from a single motive. The separate motives, or rather moods of mind,
which produced the preceding reflections and anecdotes have been laid
open to the reader in each separate instance. But an interest in the welfare of
those, who at the present time may be in circumstances not dissimilar to my
own at my first entrance into life, has been the constant accompaniment,
and (as it were) the under-song of all my feelings. Whitehead exerting the
prerogative of his laureateship addressed to youthful poets a poetic Charge,
which is perhaps the best, and certainly the most interesting, of his works.
With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I
would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded
on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and
end converge to one charge: never pursue literature as a trade. With the
exception of one extraordinary man, I have never known an individual, least
of all an individual of genius, healthy or happy without a profession, that is,
some regular employment, which does not depend on the will of the
moment, and which can be carried on so far mechanically that an average
quantum only of health, spirits, and intellectual exertion are requisite to its
faithful discharge. Three hours of leisure, unannoyed by any alien anxiety,
and looked forward to with delight as a change and recreation, will suffice
to realize in literature a larger product of what is truly genial, than weeks of
compulsion. Money, and immediate reputation form only an arbitrary and
accidental end of literary labour. The hope of increasing them by any given
exertion will often prove a stimulant to industry; but the necessity of
acquiring them will in all works of genius convert the stimulant into a
narcotic. Motives by excess reverse their very nature, and instead of
exciting, stun and stupify the mind. For it is one contradistinction of genius
from talent, that its predominant end is always comprised in the means; and
this is one of the many points, which establish an analogy between genius

and virtue. Now though talents may exist without genius, yet as genius
cannot exist, certainly not manifest itself, without talents, I would advise
every scholar, who feels the genial power working within him, so far to
make a division between the two, as that he should devote his talents to the
acquirement of competence in some known trade or profession, and his
genius to objects of his tranquil and unbiassed choice; while the
consciousness of being actuated in both alike by the sincere desire to
perform his duty, will alike ennoble both. “My dear young friend,” (I would
say) “suppose yourself established in any honourable occupation. From the
manufactory or counting house, from the law-court, or from having visited
your last patient, you return at evening,
Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home
Is sweetest———

to your family, prepared for its social enjoyments, with the very
countenances of your wife and children brightened, and their voice of
welcome made doubly welcome, by the knowledge that, as far as they are
concerned, you have satisfied the demands of the day by the labour of the
day. Then, when you retire into your study, in the books on your shelves
you revisit so many venerable friends with whom you can converse. Your
own spirit scarcely less free from personal anxieties than the great minds,
that in those books are still living for you! Even your writing desk with its
blank paper and all its other implements will appear as a chain of flowers,
capable of linking your feelings as well as thoughts to events and characters
past or to come; not a chain of iron, which binds you down to think of the
future and the remote by recalling the claims and feelings of the peremptory
present. But why should I say retire? The habits of active life and daily
intercourse with the stir of the world will tend to give you such self-
command, that the presence of your family will be no interruption. Nay, the
social silence, or undisturbing voices of a wife or sister will be like a
restorative atmosphere, or soft music which moulds a dream without
becoming its object. If facts are required to prove the possibility of
combining weighty performances in literature with full and independent
employment, the works of Cicero and Xenophon among the ancients; of Sir
Thomas More, Bacon, Baxter, or to refer at once to later and contemporary
instances, Darwin and Roscoe, are at once decisive of the question.”

But all men may not dare promise themselves a sufficiency of self- control
for the imitation of those examples: though strict scrutiny should always be
made, whether indolence, restlessness, or a vanity impatient for immediate
gratification, have not tampered with the judgment and assumed the vizard
of humility for the purposes of self- delusion. Still the Church presents to
every man of learning and genius a profession, in which he may cherish a
rational hope of being able to unite the widest schemes of literary utility
with the strictest performance of professional duties. Among the numerous
blessings of Christianity, the introduction of an established Church makes
an especial claim on the gratitude of scholars and philosophers; in England,
at least, where the principles of Protestantism have conspired with the
freedom of the government to double all its salutary powers by the removal
of its abuses.

That not only the maxims, but the grounds of a pure morality, the mere
fragments of which
———the lofty grave tragedians taught
In chorus or iambic, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with delight received
In brief sententious precepts; [43]

and that the sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a Plato
found most hard to learn and deemed it still more difficult to reveal; that
these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and
poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they
sound as common place, is a phaenomenon, which must withhold all but
minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the
pulpit and the reading desk. Yet those, who confine the efficiency of an
established Church to its public offices, can hardly be placed in a much
higher rank of intellect. That to every parish throughout the kingdom there
is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a
nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and
brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to
encourage and facilitate, imitation; this, the unobtrusive, continuous agency
of a protestant church establishment, this it is, which the patriot, and the
philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with the faith in the
progressive melioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price. It
cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the

sapphire. No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of
wisdom is above rubies. The clergyman is with his parishioners and among
them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a
neighbour and a family-man, whose education and rank admit him to the
mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent
visitor of the farmhouse and the cottage. He is, or he may become,
connected, with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. And
among the instances of the blindness, or at best of the short-sightedness,
which it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, I know few more striking than
the clamours of the farmers against Church property. Whatever was not paid
to the clergyman would inevitably at the next lease be paid to the
landholder, while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of the Church
are in some sort the reversionary property of every family, that may have a
member educated for the Church, or a daughter that may marry a
clergyman. Instead of being foreclosed and immovable, it is in fact the only
species of landed property, that is essentially moving and circulative. That
there exist no inconveniences, who will pretend to assert? But I have yet to
expect the proof, that the inconveniences are greater in this than in any
other species; or that either the farmers or the clergy would be benefited by
forcing the latter to become either Trullibers or salaried placemen. Nay, I do
not hesitate to declare my firm persuasion, that whatever reason of
discontent the farmers may assign, the true cause is this; that they may
cheat the parson, but cannot cheat the steward; and that they are
disappointed, if they should have been able to withhold only two pounds
less than the legal claim, having expected to withhold five. At all events,
considered relatively to the encouragement of learning and genius, the
establishment presents a patronage at once so effective and unburdensome,
that it would be impossible to afford the like or equal in any but a Christian
and Protestant country. There is scarce a department of human knowledge
without some bearing on the various critical, historical, philosophical and
moral truths, in which the scholar must be interested as a clergyman; no one
pursuit worthy of a man of genius, which may not be followed without
incongruity. To give the history of the Bible as a book, would be little less
than to relate the origin or first excitement of all the literature and science,
that we now possess. The very decorum, which the profession imposes, is
favourable to the best purposes of genius, and tends to counteract its most
frequent defects. Finally, that man must be deficient in sensibility, who

would not find an incentive to emulation in the great and burning lights,
which in a long series have illustrated the church of England; who would
not hear from within an echo to the voice from their sacred shrines,
Et Pater Aeneas et avunculus excitat Hector.

But, whatever be the profession or trade chosen, the advantages are many
and important, compared with the state of a mere literary man, who in any
degree depends on the sale of his works for the necessaries and comforts of
life. In the former a man lives in sympathy with the world, in which he
lives. At least he acquires a better and quicker tact for the knowledge of
that, with which men in general can sympathize. He learns to manage his
genius more prudently and efficaciously. His powers and acquirements gain
him likewise more real admiration; for they surpass the legitimate
expectations of others. He is something besides an author, and is not
therefore considered merely as an author. The hearts of men are open to
him, as to one of their own class; and whether he exerts himself or not in
the conversational circles of his acquaintance, his silence is not attributed to
pride, nor his communicativeness to vanity. To these advantages I will
venture to add a superior chance of happiness in domestic life, were it only
that it is as natural for the man to be out of the circle of his household
during the day, as it is meritorious for the woman to remain for the most
part within it. But this subject involves points of consideration so numerous
and so delicate, and would not only permit, but require such ample
documents from the biography of literary men, that I now merely allude to
it in transitu. When the same circumstance has occurred at very different
times to very different persons, all of whom have some one thing in
common; there is reason to suppose that such circumstance is not merely
attributable to the persons concerned, but is in some measure occasioned by
the one point in common to them all. Instead of the vehement and almost
slanderous dehortation from marriage, which the Misogyne, Boccaccio[44]
addresses to literary men, I would substitute the simple advice: be not
merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honourable augmentation to
your arms; but not constitute the coat, or fill the escutcheon!

To objections from conscience I can of course answer in no other way, than
by requesting the youthful objector (as I have already done on a former
occasion) to ascertain with strict self-examination, whether other influences

may not be at work; whether spirits, “not of health,” and with whispers “not
from heaven,” may not be walking in the twilight of his consciousness. Let
him catalogue his scruples, and reduce them to a distinct intelligible form;
let him be certain, that he has read with a docile mind and favourable
dispositions the best and most fundamental works on the subject; that he
has had both mind and heart opened to the great and illustrious qualities of
the many renowned characters, who had doubted like himself, and whose
researches had ended in the clear conviction, that their doubts had been
groundless, or at least in no proportion to the counter-weight. Happy will it
be for such a man, if among his contemporaries elder than himself he
should meet with one, who, with similar powers and feelings as acute as his
own, had entertained the same scruples; had acted upon them; and who by
after-research (when the step was, alas! irretrievable, but for that very
reason his research undeniably disinterested) had discovered himself to
have quarrelled with received opinions only to embrace errors, to have left
the direction tracked out for him on the high road of honourable exertion,
only to deviate into a labyrinth, where when he had wandered till his head
was giddy, his best good fortune was finally to have found his way out
again, too late for prudence though not too late for conscience or for truth!
Time spent in such delay is time won: for manhood in the meantime is
advancing, and with it increase of knowledge, strength of judgment, and
above all, temperance of feelings. And even if these should effect no
change, yet the delay will at least prevent the final approval of the decision
from being alloyed by the inward censure of the rashness and vanity, by
which it had been precipitated. It would be a sort of irreligion, and scarcely
less than a libel on human nature to believe, that there is any established
and reputable profession or employment, in which a man may not continue
to act with honesty and honour; and doubtless there is likewise none, which
may not at times present temptations to the contrary. But wofully will that
man find himself mistaken, who imagines that the profession of literature,
or (to speak more plainly) the trade of authorship, besets its members with
fewer or with less insidious temptations, than the Church, the law, or the
different branches of commerce. But I have treated sufficiently on this
unpleasant subject in an early chapter of this volume. I will conclude the
present therefore with a short extract from Herder, whose name I might
have added to the illustrious list of those, who have combined the
successful pursuit of the Muses, not only with the faithful discharge, but

with the highest honours and honourable emoluments of an established
profession. The translation the reader will find in a note below [45]. “Am
sorgfaeltigsten, meiden sie die Autorschaft. Zu frueh oder unmaessig
gebraucht, macht sie den Kopf wueste and das Herz leer; wenn sie auch
sonst keine ueble Folgen gaebe. Ein Mensch, der nur lieset um zu druecken,
lieset wahrscheinlich uebel; und wer jeden Gedanken, der ihm aufstosst,
durch Feder and Presse versendet, hat sie in kurzer Zeit alle versandt, und
wird bald ein blosser Diener der Druckerey, ein Buchstabensetzer werden.”

CHAPTER XII
A chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or omission
of the chapter that follows.

In the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by a
resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with the allowed quaintness of an
adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus: until you understand
a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. This
golden rule of mine does, I own, resemble those of Pythagoras in its
obscurity rather than in its depth. If however the reader will permit me to be
my own Hierocles, I trust, that he will find its meaning fully explained by
the following instances. I have now before me a treatise of a religious
fanatic, full of dreams and supernatural experiences. I see clearly the
writer’s grounds, and their hollowness. I have a complete insight into the
causes, which through the medium of his body has acted on his mind; and
by application of received and ascertained laws I can satisfactorily explain
to my own reason all the strange incidents, which the writer records of
himself. And this I can do without suspecting him of any intentional
falsehood. As when in broad day-light a man tracks the steps of a traveller,
who had lost his way in a fog or by a treacherous moonshine, even so, and
with the same tranquil sense of certainty, can I follow the traces of this
bewildered visionary. I understand his ignorance.

On the other hand, I have been re-perusing with the best energies of my
mind the TIMAEUS of Plato. Whatever I comprehend, impresses me with a
reverential sense of the author’s genius; but there is a considerable portion
of the work, to which I can attach no consistent meaning. In other treatises
of the same philosopher, intended for the average comprehensions of men, I
have been delighted with the masterly good sense, with the perspicuity of
the language, and the aptness of the inductions. I recollect likewise, that
numerous passages in this author, which I thoroughly comprehend, were
formerly no less unintelligible to me, than the passages now in question. It
would, I am aware, be quite fashionable to dismiss them at once as Platonic
jargon. But this I cannot do with satisfaction to my own mind, because I

have sought in vain for causes adequate to the solution of the assumed
inconsistency. I have no insight into the possibility of a man so eminently
wise, using words with such half-meanings to himself, as must perforce
pass into no meaning to his readers. When in addition to the motives thus
suggested by my own reason, I bring into distinct remembrance the number
and the series of great men, who, after long and zealous study of these
works had joined in honouring the name of Plato with epithets, that almost
transcend humanity, I feel, that a contemptuous verdict on my part might
argue want of modesty, but would hardly be received by the judicious, as
evidence of superior penetration. Therefore, utterly baffled in all my
attempts to understand the ignorance of Plato, I conclude myself ignorant of
his understanding.

In lieu of the various requests which the anxiety of authorship addresses to
the unknown reader, I advance but this one; that he will either pass over the
following chapter altogether, or read the whole connectedly. The fairest part
of the most beautiful body will appear deformed and monstrous, if
dissevered from its place in the organic whole. Nay, on delicate subjects,
where a seemingly trifling difference of more or less may constitute a
difference in kind, even a faithful display of the main and supporting ideas,
if yet they are separated from the forms by which they are at once clothed
and modified, may perchance present a skeleton indeed; but a skeleton to
alarm and deter. Though I might find numerous precedents, I shall not
desire the reader to strip his mind of all prejudices, nor to keep all prior
systems out of view during his examination of the present. For in truth, such
requests appear to me not much unlike the advice given to hypochondriacal
patients in Dr. Buchan’s domestic medicine; videlicet, to preserve
themselves uniformly tranquil and in good spirits. Till I had discovered the
art of destroying the memory a parte post, without injury to its future
operations, and without detriment to the judgment, I should suppress the
request as premature; and therefore, however much I may wish to be read
with an unprejudiced mind, I do not presume to state it as a necessary
condition.

The extent of my daring is to suggest one criterion, by which it may be
rationally conjectured beforehand, whether or no a reader would lose his
time, and perhaps his temper, in the perusal of this, or any other treatise

constructed on similar principles. But it would be cruelly misinterpreted, as
implying the least disrespect either for the moral or intellectual qualities of
the individuals thereby precluded. The criterion is this: if a man receives as
fundamental facts, and therefore of course indemonstrable and incapable of
further analysis, the general notions of matter, spirit, soul, body, action,
passiveness, time, space, cause and effect, consciousness, perception,
memory and habit; if he feels his mind completely at rest concerning all
these, and is satisfied, if only he can analyse all other notions into some one
or more of these supposed elements with plausible subordination and apt
arrangement: to such a mind I would as courteously as possible convey the
hint, that for him the chapter was not written.
Vir bonus es, doctus, prudens; ast haud tibi spiro.

For these terms do in truth include all the difficulties, which the human
mind can propose for solution. Taking them therefore in mass, and
unexamined, it required only a decent apprenticeship in logic, to draw forth
their contents in all forms and colours, as the professors of legerdemain at
our village fairs pull out ribbon after ribbon from their mouths. And not
more difficult is it to reduce them back again to their different genera. But
though this analysis is highly useful in rendering our knowledge more
distinct, it does not really add to it. It does not increase, though it gives us a
greater mastery over, the wealth which we before possessed. For forensic
purposes, for all the established professions of society, this is sufficient. But
for philosophy in its highest sense as the science of ultimate truths, and
therefore scientia scientiarum, this mere analysis of terms is preparative
only, though as a preparative discipline indispensable.

Still less dare a favourable perusal be anticipated from the proselytes of that
compendious philosophy, which talking of mind but thinking of brick and
mortar, or other images equally abstracted from body, contrives a theory of
spirit by nicknaming matter, and in a few hours can qualify its dullest
disciples to explain the omne scibile by reducing all things to impressions,
ideas, and sensations.

But it is time to tell the truth; though it requires some courage to avow it in
an age and country, in which disquisitions on all subjects, not privileged to
adopt technical terms or scientific symbols, must be addressed to the Public.

I say then, that it is neither possible nor necessary for all men, nor for many,
to be philosophers. There is a philosophic (and inasmuch as it is actualized
by an effort of freedom, an artificial) consciousness, which lies beneath or
(as it were) behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting
beings. As the elder Romans distinguished their northern provinces into
Cis-Alpine and Trans-Alpine, so may we divide all the objects of human
knowledge into those on this side, and those on the other side of the
spontaneous consciousness; citra et trans conscientiam communem. The
latter is exclusively the domain of pure philosophy, which is therefore
properly entitled transcendental, in order to discriminate it at once, both
from mere reflection and representation on the one hand, and on the other
from those flights of lawless speculation which, abandoned by all distinct
consciousness, because transgressing the bounds and purposes of our
intellectual faculties, are justly condemned, as transcendent [46]. The first
range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for
the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and
departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By the
many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but
imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden by mists and
clouds from uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to
penetrate. To the multitude below these vapours appear, now as the dark
haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude with impunity; and
now all aglow, with colours not their own, they are gazed at as the splendid
palaces of happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few, who
measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest
inaccessible falls have learned, that the sources must be far higher and far
inward; a few, who even in the level streams have detected elements, which
neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or could
supply [47]. How and whence to these thoughts, these strong probabilities,
the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge may finally supervene, can
be learnt only by the fact. I might oppose to the question the words with
which [48] Plotinus supposes Nature to answer a similar difficulty. “Should
any one interrogate her, how she works, if graciously she vouchsafe to
listen and speak, she will reply, it behoves thee not to disquiet me with
interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as I am silent, and work
without words.”

Likewise in the fifth book of the fifth Ennead, speaking of the highest and
intuitive knowledge as distinguished from the discursive, or in the language
of Wordsworth,
“The vision and the faculty divine;”

he says: “it is not lawful to inquire from whence it sprang, as if it were a
thing subject to place and motion, for it neither approached hither, nor again
departs from hence to some other place; but it either appears to us or it does
not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it with a view of detecting its
secret source, but to watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us; preparing
ourselves for the blessed spectacle as the eye waits patiently for the rising
sun.” They and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the
sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and
understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within
the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same
instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its
involucrum for antenna, yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential
works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of
sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the
organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the
latter organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in all, and their
first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else could it be,
that even worldlings, not wholly debased, will contemplate the man of
simple and disinterested goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and
respect? “Poor man! he is not made for this world.” Oh! herein they utter a
prophecy of universal fulfilment; for man must either rise or sink.

It is the essential mark of the true philosopher to rest satisfied with no
imperfect light, as long as the impossibility of attaining a fuller knowledge
has not been demonstrated. That the common consciousness itself will
furnish proofs by its own direction, that it is connected with master-currents
below the surface, I shall merely assume as a postulate pro tempore. This
having been granted, though but in expectation of the argument, I can safely
deduce from it the equal truth of my former assertion, that philosophy
cannot be intelligible to all, even of the most learned and cultivated classes.
A system, the first principle of which it is to render the mind intuitive of the
spiritual in man (i.e. of that which lies on the other side of our natural

consciousness) must needs have a great obscurity for those, who have never
disciplined and strengthened this ulterior consciousness. It must in truth be
a land of darkness, a perfect Anti-Goshen, for men to whom the noblest
treasures of their own being are reported only through the imperfect
translation of lifeless and sightless motions. Perhaps, in great part, through
words which are but the shadows of notions; even as the notional
understanding itself is but the shadowy abstraction of living and actual
truth. On the IMMEDIATE, which dwells in every man, and on the original
intuition, or absolute affirmation of it, (which is likewise in every man, but
does not in every man rise into consciousness) all the certainty of our
knowledge depends; and this becomes intelligible to no man by the ministry
of mere words from without. The medium, by which spirits understand each
other, is not the surrounding air; but the freedom which they possess in
common, as the common ethereal element of their being, the tremulous
reciprocations of which propagate themselves even to the inmost of the
soul. Where the spirit of a man is not filled with the consciousness of
freedom (were it only from its restlessness, as of one still struggling in
bondage) all spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with others, but
even with himself. No wonder then, that he remains incomprehensible to
himself as well as to others. No wonder, that, in the fearful desert of his
consciousness, he wearies himself out with empty words, to which no
friendly echo answers, either from his own heart, or the heart of a fellow
being; or bewilders himself in the pursuit of notional phantoms, the mere
refractions from unseen and distant truths through the distorting medium of
his own unenlivened and stagnant understanding! To remain unintelligible
to such a mind, exclaims Schelling on a like occasion, is honour and a good
name before God and man.

The history of philosophy (the same writer observes) contains instances of
systems, which for successive generations have remained enigmatic. Such
he deems the system of Leibnitz, whom another writer (rashly I think, and
invidiously) extols as the only philosopher, who was himself deeply
convinced of his own doctrines. As hitherto interpreted, however, they have
not produced the effect, which Leibnitz himself, in a most instructive
passage, describes as the criterion of a true philosophy; namely, that it
would at once explain and collect the fragments of truth scattered through
systems apparently the most incongruous. The truth, says he, is diffused

more widely than is commonly believed; but it is often painted, yet oftener
masked, and is sometimes mutilated and sometimes, alas! in close alliance
with mischievous errors. The deeper, however, we penetrate into the ground
of things, the more truth we discover in the doctrines of the greater number
of the philosophical sects. The want of substantial reality in the objects of
the senses, according to the sceptics; the harmonies or numbers, the
prototypes and ideas, to which the Pythagoreans and Platonists reduced all
things: the ONE and ALL of Parmenides and Plotinus, without [49]
Spinozism; the necessary connection of things according to the Stoics,
reconcilable with the spontaneity of the other schools; the vital-philosophy
of the Cabalists and Hermetists, who assumed the universality of sensation;
the substantial forms and entelechies of Aristotle and the schoolmen,
together with the mechanical solution of all particular phaenomena
according to Democritus and the recent philosophers—all these we shall
find united in one perspective central point, which shows regularity and a
coincidence of all the parts in the very object, which from every other point
of view must appear confused and distorted. The spirit of sectarianism has
been hitherto our fault, and the cause of our failures. We have imprisoned
our own conceptions by the lines, which we have drawn, in order to exclude
the conceptions of others. J’ai trouve que la plupart des Sectes ont raison
dans une bonne partie de ce qu’elles avancent, mais non pas tant en ce
qu’elles nient.

A system, which aims to deduce the memory with all the other functions of
intelligence, must of course place its first position from beyond the
memory, and anterior to it, otherwise the principle of solution would be
itself a part of the problem to be solved. Such a position therefore must, in
the first instance be demanded, and the first question will be, by what right
is it demanded? On this account I think it expedient to make some
preliminary remarks on the introduction of Postulates in philosophy. The
word postulate is borrowed from the science of mathematics [50]. In
geometry the primary construction is not demonstrated, but postulated. This
first and most simple construction in space is the point in motion, or the
line. Whether the point is moved in one and the same direction, or whether
its direction is continually changed, remains as yet undetermined. But if the
direction of the point have been determined, it is either by a point without
it, and then there arises the straight line which incloses no space; or the

direction of the point is not determined by a point without it, and then it
must flow back again on itself, that is, there arises a cyclical line, which
does enclose a space. If the straight line be assumed as the positive, the
cyclical is then the negation of the straight. It is a line, which at no point
strikes out into the straight, but changes its direction continuously. But if
the primary line be conceived as undetermined, and the straight line as
determined throughout, then the cyclical is the third compounded of both. It
is at once undetermined and determined; undetermined through any point
without, and determined through itself. Geometry therefore supplies
philosophy with the example of a primary intuition, from which every
science that lays claim to evidence must take its commencement. The
mathematician does not begin with a demonstrable proposition, but with an
intuition, a practical idea.

But here an important distinction presents itself. Philosophy is employed on
objects of the inner SENSE, and cannot, like geometry, appropriate to every
construction a correspondent outward intuition. Nevertheless, philosophy, if
it is to arrive at evidence, must proceed from the most original construction,
and the question then is, what is the most original construction or first
productive act for the inner sense. The answer to this question depends on
the direction which is given to the inner sense. But in philosophy the inner
sense cannot have its direction determined by an outward object. To the
original construction of the line I can be compelled by a line drawn before
me on the slate or on sand. The stroke thus drawn is indeed not the line
itself, but only the image or picture of the line. It is not from it, that we first
learn to know the line; but, on the contrary, we bring this stroke to the
original line generated by the act of the imagination; otherwise we could
not define it as without breadth or thickness. Still however this stroke is the
sensuous image of the original or ideal line, and an efficient mean to excite
every imagination to the intuition of it.

It is demanded then, whether there be found any means in philosophy to
determine the direction of the inner sense, as in mathematics it is
determinable by its specific image or outward picture. Now the inner sense
has its direction determined for the greater part only by an act of freedom.
One man’s consciousness extends only to the pleasant or unpleasant
sensations caused in him by external impressions; another enlarges his inner

sense to a consciousness of forms and quantity; a third in addition to the
image is conscious of the conception or notion of the thing; a fourth attains
to a notion of his notions—he reflects on his own reflections; and thus we
may say without impropriety, that the one possesses more or less inner
sense, than the other. This more or less betrays already, that philosophy in
its first principles must have a practical or moral, as well as a theoretical or
speculative side. This difference in degree does not exist in the
mathematics. Socrates in Plato shows, that an ignorant slave may be
brought to understand and of himself to solve the most difficult geometrical
problem. Socrates drew the figures for the slave in the sand. The disciples
of the critical philosophy could likewise (as was indeed actually done by La
Forge and some other followers of Des Cartes) represent the origin of our
representations in copper-plates; but no one has yet attempted it, and it
would be utterly useless. To an Esquimaux or New Zealander our most
popular philosophy would be wholly unintelligible. The sense, the inward
organ, for it is not yet born in him. So is there many a one among us, yes,
and some who think themselves philosophers too, to whom the philosophic
organ is entirely wanting. To such a man philosophy is a mere play of words
and notions, like a theory of music to the deaf, or like the geometry of light
to the blind. The connection of the parts and their logical dependencies may
be seen and remembered; but the whole is groundless and hollow,
unsustained by living contact, unaccompanied with any realizing intuition
which exists by and in the act that affirms its existence, which is known,
because it is, and is, because it is known. The words of Plotinus, in the
assumed person of Nature, hold true of the philosophic energy. To theoroun
mou, theoraema poiei, osper oi geometrai theorountes graphousin; all’ emon
mae graphousaes, theorousaes de, uphistantai ai ton somaton grammai.
With me the act of contemplation makes the thing contemplated, as the
geometricians contemplating describe lines correspondent; but I not
describing lines, but simply contemplating, the representative forms of
things rise up into existence.

The postulate of philosophy and at the same time the test of philosophic
capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF! (E
coelo descendit, Gnothi seauton). And this at once practically and
speculatively. For as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or
understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of

BEING altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative nor
merely practical, but both in one. All knowledge rests on the coincidence of
an object with a subject. (My readers have been warned in a former chapter
that, for their convenience as well as the writer’s, the term, subject, is used
by me in its scholastic sense as equivalent to mind or sentient being, and as
the necessary correlative of object or quicquid objicitur menti.) For we can
know that only which is true: and the truth is universally placed in the
coincidence of the thought with the thing, of the representation with the
object represented.

Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE, we will henceforth call
NATURE, confining the term to its passive and material sense, as
comprising all the phaenomena by which its existence is made known to us.
On the other hand the sum of all that is SUBJECTIVE, we may
comprehend in the name of the SELF or INTELLIGENCE. Both
conceptions are in necessary antithesis. Intelligence is conceived of as
exclusively representative, nature as exclusively represented; the one as
conscious, the other as without consciousness. Now in all acts of positive
knowledge there is required a reciprocal concurrence of both, namely of the
conscious being, and of that which is in itself unconscious. Our problem is
to explain this concurrence, its possibility and its necessity.

During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so
instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority
belongs. There is here no first, and no second; both are coinstantaneous and
one. While I am attempting to explain this intimate coalition, I must
suppose it dissolved. I must necessarily set out from the one, to which
therefore I give hypothetical antecedence, in order to arrive at the other. But
as there are but two factors or elements in the problem, subject and object,
and as it is left indeterminate from which of them I should commence, there
are two cases equally possible.

1. EITHER THE OBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THEN
WE HAVE TO ACCOUNT FOR THE SUPERVENTION OF THE
SUBJECTIVE, WHICH COALESCES WITH IT.

The notion of the subjective is not contained in the notion of the objective.
On the contrary they mutually exclude each other. The subjective therefore

must supervene to the objective. The conception of nature does not
apparently involve the co-presence of an intelligence making an ideal
duplicate of it, that is, representing it. This desk for instance would
(according to our natural notions) be, though there should exist no sentient
being to look at it. This then is the problem of natural philosophy. It
assumes the objective or unconscious nature as the first, and as therefore to
explain how intelligence can supervene to it, or how itself can grow into
intelligence. If it should appear, that all enlightened naturalists, without
having distinctly proposed the problem to themselves, have yet constantly
moved in the line of its solution, it must afford a strong presumption that
the problem itself is founded in nature. For if all knowledge has, as it were,
two poles reciprocally required and presupposed, all sciences must proceed
from the one or the other, and must tend toward the opposite as far as the
equatorial point in which both are reconciled and become identical. The
necessary tendency therefore of all natural philosophy is from nature to
intelligence; and this, and no other is the true ground and occasion of the
instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural
phaenomena. The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist in
the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and
intellect. The phaenomena (the material) most wholly disappear, and the
laws alone (the formal) must remain. Thence it comes, that in nature itself
the more the principle of law breaks forth, the more does the husk drop off,
the phaenomena themselves become more spiritual and at length cease
altogether in our consciousness. The optical phaenomena are but a
geometry, the lines of which are drawn by light, and the materiality of this
light itself has already become matter of doubt. In the appearances of
magnetism all trace of matter is lost, and of the phaenomena of gravitation,
which not a few among the most illustrious Newtonians have declared no
otherwise comprehensible than as an immediate spiritual influence, there
remains nothing but its law, the execution of which on a vast scale is the
mechanism of the heavenly motions. The theory of natural philosophy
would then be completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical
in essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as
intelligence and self-consciousness; when the heavens and the earth shall
declare not only the power of their maker, but the glory and the presence of
their God, even as he appeared to the great prophet during the vision of the
mount in the skirts of his divinity.

This may suffice to show, that even natural science, which commences with
the material phaenomenon as the reality and substance of things existing,
does yet by the necessity of theorizing unconsciously, and as it were
instinctively, end in nature as an intelligence; and by this tendency the
science of nature becomes finally natural philosophy, the one of the two
poles of fundamental science.

2. OR THE SUBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THE
PROBLEM THEN IS, HOW THERE SUPERVENES TO IT A
COINCIDENT OBJECTIVE.

In the pursuit of these sciences, our success in each, depends on an austere
and faithful adherence to its own principles, with a careful separation and
exclusion of those, which appertain to the opposite science. As the natural
philosopher, who directs his views to the objective, avoids above all things
the intermixture of the subjective in his knowledge, as for instance,
arbitrary suppositions or rather suflictions, occult qualities, spiritual agents,
and the substitution of final for efficient causes; so on the other hand, the
transcendental or intelligential philosopher is equally anxious to preclude
all interpellation of the objective into the subjective principles of his
science, as for instance the assumption of impresses or configurations in the
brain, correspondent to miniature pictures on the retina painted by rays of
light from supposed originals, which are not the immediate and real objects
of vision, but deductions from it for the purposes of explanation. This
purification of the mind is effected by an absolute and scientific scepticism,
to which the mind voluntarily determines itself for the specific purpose of
future certainty. Des Cartes who (in his meditations) himself first, at least of
the moderns, gave a beautiful example of this voluntary doubt, this self-
determined indetermination, happily expresses its utter difference from the
scepticism of vanity or irreligion: Nec tamen in Scepticos imitabar, qui
dubitant tantum ut dubitent, et praeter incertitudinem ipsam nihil quaerunt.
Nam contra totus in eo eram ut aliquid certi reperirem [51]. Nor is it less
distinct in its motives and final aim, than in its proper objects, which are not
as in ordinary scepticism the prejudices of education and circumstance, but
those original and innate prejudices which nature herself has planted in all
men, and which to all but the philosopher are the first principles of
knowledge, and the final test of truth.

Now these essential prejudices are all reducible to the one fundamental
presumption, THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT US. As this on
the one hand originates, neither in grounds nor arguments, and yet on the
other hand remains proof against all attempts to remove it by grounds or
arguments (naturam furca expellas tamen usque redibit;) on the one hand
lays claim to IMMEDIATE certainty as a position at once indemonstrable
and irresistible, and yet on the other hand, inasmuch as it refers to
something essentially different from ourselves, nay even in opposition to
ourselves, leaves it inconceivable how it could possibly become a part of
our immediate consciousness; (in other words how that, which ex hypothesi
is and continues to be extrinsic and alien to our being, should become a
modification of our being) the philosopher therefore compels himself to
treat this faith as nothing more than a prejudice, innate indeed and
connatural, but still a prejudice.

The other position, which not only claims but necessitates the admission of
its immediate certainty, equally for the scientific reason of the philosopher
as for the common sense of mankind at large, namely, I AM, cannot so
properly be entitled a prejudice. It is groundless indeed; but then in the very
idea it precludes all ground, and separated from the immediate
consciousness loses its whole sense and import. It is groundless; but only
because it is itself the ground of all other certainty. Now the apparent
contradiction, that the former position, namely, the existence of things
without us, which from its nature cannot be immediately certain, should be
received as blindly and as independently of all grounds as the existence of
our own being, the Transcendental philosopher can solve only by the
supposition, that the former is unconsciously involved in the latter; that it is
not only coherent but identical, and one and the same thing with our own
immediate self consciousness. To demonstrate this identity is the office and
object of his philosophy.

If it be said, that this is idealism, let it be remembered that it is only so far
idealism, as it is at the same time, and on that very account, the truest and
most binding realism. For wherein does the realism of mankind properly
consist? In the assertion that there exists a something without them, what,
or how, or where they know not, which occasions the objects of their
perception? Oh no! This is neither connatural nor universal. It is what a few

have taught and learned in the schools, and which the many repeat without
asking themselves concerning their own meaning. The realism common to
all mankind is far elder and lies infinitely deeper than this hypothetical
explanation of the origin of our perceptions, an explanation skimmed from
the mere surface of mechanical philosophy. It is the table itself, which the
man of common sense believes himself to see, not the phantom of a table,
from which he may argumentatively deduce the reality of a table, which he
does not see. If to destroy the reality of all, that we actually behold, be
idealism, what can be more egregiously so, than the system of modern
metaphysics, which banishes us to a land of shadows, surrounds us with
apparitions, and distinguishes truth from illusion only by the majority of
those who dream the same dream? “I asserted that the world was mad,”
exclaimed poor Lee, “and the world said, that I was mad, and confound
them, they outvoted me.”

It is to the true and original realism, that I would direct the attention. This
believes and requires neither more nor less, than the object which it beholds
or presents to itself, is the real and very object. In this sense, however much
we may strive against it, we are all collectively born idealists, and therefore
and only therefore are we at the same time realists. But of this the
philosophers of the schools know nothing, or despise the faith as the
prejudice of the ignorant vulgar, because they live and move in a crowd of
phrases and notions from which human nature has long ago vanished. Oh,
ye that reverence yourselves, and walk humbly with the divinity in your
own hearts, ye are worthy of a better philosophy! Let the dead bury the
dead, but do you preserve your human nature, the depth of which was never
yet fathomed by a philosophy made up of notions and mere logical entities.

In the third treatise of my Logosophia, announced at the end of this volume,
I shall give (Deo volente) the demonstrations and constructions of the
Dynamic Philosophy scientifically arranged. It is, according to my
conviction, no other than the system of Pythagoras and of Plato revived and
purified from impure mixtures. Doctrina per tot manus tradita tandem in
vappam desiit! The science of arithmetic furnishes instances, that a rule
may be useful in practical application, and for the particular purpose may be
sufficiently authenticated by the result, before it has itself been fully
demonstrated. It is enough, if only it be rendered intelligible. This will, I

trust, have been effected in the following Theses for those of my readers,
who are willing to accompany me through the following chapter, in which
the results will be applied to the deduction of the Imagination, and with it
the principles of production and of genial criticism in the fine arts.

THESIS I

Truth is correlative to being. Knowledge without a correspondent reality is
no knowledge; if we know, there must be somewhat known by us. To know
is in its very essence a verb active.

THESIS II

All truth is either mediate, that is, derived from some other truth or truths;
or immediate and original. The latter is absolute, and its formula A. A.; the
former is of dependent or conditional certainty, and represented in the
formula B. A. The certainty, which adheres in A, is attributable to B.

SCHOLIUM. A chain without a staple, from which all the links derived
their stability, or a series without a first, has been not inaptly allegorized, as
a string of blind men, each holding the skirt of the man before him,
reaching far out of sight, but all moving without the least deviation in one
straight line. It would be naturally taken for granted, that there was a guide
at the head of the file: what if it were answered, No! Sir, the men are
without number, and infinite blindness supplies the place of sight?

Equally inconceivable is a cycle of equal truths without a common and
central principle, which prescribes to each its proper sphere in the system of
science. That the absurdity does not so immediately strike us, that it does
not seem equally unimaginable, is owing to a surreptitious act of the
imagination, which, instinctively and without our noticing the same, not
only fills up the intervening spaces, and contemplates the cycle (of B. C. D.
E. F. etc.) as a continuous circle (A.) giving to all collectively the unity of
their common orbit; but likewise supplies, by a sort of subintelligitur, the
one central power, which renders the movement harmonious and cyclical.

THESIS III

We are to seek therefore for some absolute truth capable of communicating
to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself borrowed; a truth self-
grounded, unconditional and known by its own light. In short, we have to
find a somewhat which is, simply because it is. In order to be such, it must
be one which is its own predicate, so far at least that all other nominal
predicates must be modes and repetitions of itself. Its existence too must be
such, as to preclude the possibility of requiring a cause or antecedent
without an absurdity.

THESIS IV

That there can be but one such principle, may be proved a priori; for were
there two or more, each must refer to some other, by which its equality is
affirmed; consequently neither would be self-established, as the hypothesis
demands. And a posteriori, it will be proved by the principle itself when it is
discovered, as involving universal antecedence in its very conception.

SCHOLIUM. If we affirm of a board that it is blue, the predicate (blue) is
accidental, and not implied in the subject, board. If we affirm of a circle that
it is equi-radial, the predicate indeed is implied in the definition of the
subject; but the existence of the subject itself is contingent, and supposes
both a cause and a percipient. The same reasoning will apply to the
indefinite number of supposed indemonstrable truths exempted from the
profane approach of philosophic investigation by the amiable Beattie, and
other less eloquent and not more profound inaugurators of common sense
on the throne of philosophy; a fruitless attempt, were it only that it is the
two-fold function of philosophy to reconcile reason with common sense,
and to elevate common sense into reason.

THESIS V

Such a principle cannot be any THING or OBJECT. Each thing is what it is
in consequence of some other thing. An infinite, independent [52] thing, is
no less a contradiction, than an infinite circle or a sideless triangle. Besides
a thing is that, which is capable of being an object which itself is not the
sole percipient. But an object is inconceivable without a subject as its
antithesis. Omne perceptum percipientem supponit.

But neither can the principle be found in a subject as a subject, contra-
distinguished from an object: for unicuique percipienti aliquid objicitur
perceptum. It is to be found therefore neither in object nor subject taken
separately, and consequently, as no other third is conceivable, it must be
found in that which is neither subject nor object exclusively, but which is
the identity of both.

THESIS VI

This principle, and so characterised manifests itself in the SUM or I AM;
which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words spirit, self,
and self-consciousness. In this, and in this alone, object and subject, being
and knowing, are identical, each involving and supposing the other. In other
words, it is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing
itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and
only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject. It may be described
therefore as a perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into
object and subject, which presuppose each other, and can exist only as
antitheses.

SCHOLIUM. If a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only
answer, sum quia sum. But if (the absoluteness of this certainty having been
admitted) he be again asked, how he, the individual person, came to be,
then in relation to the ground of his existence, not to the ground of his
knowledge of that existence, he might reply, sum quia Deus est, or still
more philosophically, sum quia in Deo sum.

But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal I AM,
then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea, and of reality; the
ground of existence, and the ground of the knowledge of existence, are
absolutely identical, Sum quia sum [53]; I am, because I affirm myself to
be; I affirm myself to be, because I am.

THESIS VII

If then I know myself only through myself, it is contradictory to require any
other predicate of self, but that of self-consciousness. Only in the self-
consciousness of a spirit is there the required identity of object and of

representation; for herein consists the essence of a spirit, that it is self-
representative. If therefore this be the one only immediate truth, in the
certainty of which the reality of our collective knowledge is grounded, it
must follow that the spirit in all the objects which it views, views only
itself. If this could be proved, the immediate reality of all intuitive
knowledge would be assured. It has been shown, that a spirit is that, which
is its own object, yet not originally an object, but an absolute subject for
which all, itself included, may become an object. It must therefore be an
ACT; for every object is, as an object, dead, fixed, incapable in itself of any
action, and necessarily finite. Again the spirit (originally the identity of
object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this identity, in order to be
conscious of it; fit alter et idem. But this implies an act, and it follows
therefore that intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible, except by
and in a will. The self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must
be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it.

THESIS VIII

Whatever in its origin is objective, is likewise as such necessarily finite.
Therefore, since the spirit is not originally an object, and as the subject
exists in antithesis to an object, the spirit cannot originally be finite. But
neither can it be a subject without becoming an object, and, as it is
originally the identity of both, it can be conceived neither as infinite nor
finite exclusively, but as the most original union of both. In the existence, in
the reconciling, and the recurrence of this contradiction consists the process
and mystery of production and life.

THESIS IX

This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a WILL,
or primary ACT of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect principle of
every science; but it is the immediate and direct principle of the ultimate
science alone, i.e. of transcendental philosophy alone. For it must be
remembered, that all these Theses refer solely to one of the two Polar
Sciences, namely, to that which commences with, and rigidly confines itself
within, the subjective, leaving the objective (as far as it is exclusively
objective) to natural philosophy, which is its opposite pole. In its very idea
therefore as a systematic knowledge of our collective KNOWING, (scientia

scientiae) it involves the necessity of some one highest principle of
knowing, as at once the source and accompanying form in all particular acts
of intellect and perception. This, it has been shown, can be found only in
the act and evolution of self-consciousness. We are not investigating an
absolute principium essendi; for then, I admit, many valid objections might
be started against our theory; but an absolute principium cognoscendi. The
result of both the sciences, or their equatorial point, would be the principle
of a total and undivided philosophy, as, for prudential reasons, I have
chosen to anticipate in the Scholium to Thesis VI and the note subjoined. In
other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and religion become
inclusive of philosophy. We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to
end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and
find all self in GOD.

THESIS X

The transcendental philosopher does not inquire, what ultimate ground of
our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the last in our
knowing itself, beyond which we cannot pass. The principle of our knowing
is sought within the sphere of our knowing. It must be some thing therefore,
which can itself be known. It is asserted only, that the act of self-
consciousness is for us the source and principle of all our possible
knowledge. Whether abstracted from us there exists any thing higher and
beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us the form of all our
knowing must be decided by the result.

That the self-consciousness is the fixed point, to which for us all is mortised
and annexed, needs no further proof. But that the self- consciousness may
be the modification of a higher form of being, perhaps of a higher
consciousness, and this again of a yet higher, and so on in an infinite
regressus; in short, that self-consciousness may be itself something
explicable into something, which must lie beyond the possibility of our
knowledge, because the whole synthesis of our intelligence is first formed
in and through the self-consciousness, does not at all concern us as
transcendental philosophers. For to us, self-consciousness is not a kind of
being, but a kind of knowing, and that too the highest and farthest that
exists for us. It may however be shown, and has in part already been shown

earlier, that even when the Objective is assumed as the first, we yet can
never pass beyond the principle of self-consciousness. Should we attempt it,
we must be driven back from ground to ground, each of which would cease
to be a ground the moment we pressed on it. We must be whirled down the
gulf of an infinite series. But this would make our reason baffle the end and
purpose of all reason, namely, unity and system. Or we must break off the
series arbitrarily, and affirm an absolute something that is in and of itself at
once cause and effect (causa sui), subject and object, or rather the absolute
identity of both. But as this is inconceivable, except in a self-consciousness,
it follows, that even as natural philosophers we must arrive at the same
principle from which as transcendental philosophers we set out; that is, in a
self-consciousness in which the principium essendi does not stand to the
principlum cognoscende in the relation of cause to effect, but both the one
and the other are co-inherent and identical. Thus the true system of natural
philosophy places the sole reality of things in an ABSOLUTE, which is at
once causa sui et effectus, pataer autopator, uios heautou—in the absolute
identity of subject and object, which it calls nature, and which in its highest
power is nothing else than self-conscious will or intelligence. In this sense
the position of Malebranche, that we see all things in God, is a strict
philosophical truth; and equally true is the assertion of Hobbes, of Hartley,
and of their masters in ancient Greece, that all real knowledge supposes a
prior sensation. For sensation itself is but vision nascent, not the cause of
intelligence, but intelligence itself revealed as an earlier power in the
process of self-construction.
Makar, ilathi moi;
Pater, ilathi moi
Ei para kosmon,
Ei para moiran
Ton son ethigon!

Bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-development, not a
quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all degree, and for
the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to kind, under the idea of
an indestructible power with two opposite and counteracting forces, which
by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we may call the centrifugal and
centripetal forces. The intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself, and in
the other to know itself in the object. It will be hereafter my business to
construct by a series of intuitions the progressive schemes, that must follow

from such a power with such forces, till I arrive at the fulness of the human
intelligence. For my present purpose, I assume such a power as my
principle, in order to deduce from it a faculty, the generation, agency, and
application of which form the contents of the ensuing chapter.

In a preceding page I have justified the use of technical terms in philosophy,
whenever they tend to preclude confusion of thought, and when they assist
the memory by the exclusive singleness of their meaning more than they
may, for a short time, bewilder the attention by their strangeness. I trust,
that I have not extended this privilege beyond the grounds on which I have
claimed it; namely, the conveniency of the scholastic phrase to distinguish
the kind from all degrees, or rather to express the kind with the abstraction
of degree, as for instance multeity instead of multitude; or secondly, for the
sake of correspondence in sound in interdependent or antithetical terms, as
subject and object; or lastly, to avoid the wearying recurrence of
circumlocutions and definitions. Thus I shall venture to use potence, in
order to express a specific degree of a power, in imitation of the Algebraists.
I have even hazarded the new verb potenziate, with its derivatives, in order
to express the combination or transfer of powers. It is with new or unusual
terms, as with privileges in courts of justice or legislature; there can be no
legitimate privilege, where there already exists a positive law adequate to
the purpose; and when there is no law in existence, the privilege is to be
justified by its accordance with the end, or final cause, of all law. Unusual
and new-coined words are doubtless an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and
imperfect conveyance of our thoughts, are a far greater. Every system,
which is under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the
metaphysics in fashion, will be described as written in an unintelligible
style, and the author must expect the charge of having substituted learned
jargon for clear conception; while, according to the creed of our modern
philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear conception, but what is
representable by a distinct image. Thus the conceivable is reduced within
the bounds of the picturable. Hinc patet, qui fiat, ut cum irrepraesentabile et
impossibile vulgo ejusdem significatus habeantur, conceptus tam continui,
quam infiniti, a plurimis rejiciantur, quippe quorum, secundum leges
cognitionis intuitivae, repraesentatio est impossibilis. Quanquam autem
harum e non paucis scholis explosarum notionum, praesertim prioris,
causam hic non gero, maximi tamen momendi erit monuisse. gravissimo

illos errore labi, qui tam perverse argumentandi ratione utuntur. Quicquid
enim repugnat legibus intellectus et rationis, utique est impossibile; quod
autem, cum rationis purae sit objectum, legibus cognitionis intuitivae
tantummodo non subest, non item. Nam hic dissensus inter facultatem
sensitivam et intellectualem, (quarum indolem mox exponam,) nihil
indigitat, nisi, quas mens ab intellectu acceptas fert ideas abstractas, illas in
concreto exsequi et in intuitus commutare saepenumero non posse. Haec
autem reluctantia subjectiva mentitur, ut plurimum, repugnantiam aliquam
objectivam, et incautos facile fallit, limitibus, quibus mens humana
circumscribitur, pro iis habitis, quibus ipsa rerum essentia continetur. [54]

Critics, who are most ready to bring this charge of pedantry and
unintelligibility, are the most apt to overlook the important fact, that,
besides the language of words, there is a language of spirits—(sermo
interior)—and that the former is only the vehicle of the latter. Consequently
their assurance, that they do not understand the philosophic writer, instead
of proving any thing against the philosophy, may furnish an equal, and
(caeteris paribus) even a stronger presumption against their own
philosophic talent.

Great indeed are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to
encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there will
be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the concerns and
interests of human life, and who bring with them to the perusal of a
philosophic system an habitual aversion to all speculations, the utility and
application of which are not evident and immediate. To these I would in the
first instance merely oppose an authority, which they themselves hold
venerable, that of Lord Bacon: non inutiles Scientiae existimandae sunt,
quarum in se nullus est usus, si ingenia acuant et ordinent.

There are others, whose prejudices are still more formidable, inasmuch as
they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles, which
had been alarmed and shocked by the impious and pernicious tenets
defended by Hume, Priestley, and the French fatalists or necessitarians;
some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings to the denial of the
mysteries and indeed of all the peculiar doctrines of Christianity; and others
even to the subversion of all distinction between right and wrong. I would

request such men to consider what an eminent and successful defender of
the Christian faith has observed, that true metaphysics are nothing else but
true divinity, and that in fact the writers, who have given them such just
offence, were sophists, who had taken advantage of the general neglect into
which the science of logic has unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians,
a name indeed which those writers were the first to explode as unmeaning.
Secondly, I would remind them, that as long as there are men in the world
to whom the Gnothi seauton is an instinct and a command from their own
nature, so long will there be metaphysicians and metaphysical speculations;
that false metaphysics can be effectually counteracted by true metaphysics
alone; and that if the reasoning be clear, solid and pertinent, the truth
deduced can never be the less valuable on account of the depth from which
it may have been drawn.

A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe that
they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to system or
terminology, provided it be the method and the nomenclature to which they
have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume, Hartley, Condillac,
or perhaps Dr. Reid, and Professor Stewart. To objections from this cause, it
is a sufficient answer, that one main object of my attempt was to
demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency of the terms used in the
metaphysical schools of France and Great Britain since the revolution, and
that the errors which I propose to attack cannot subsist, except as they are
concealed behind the mask of a plausible and indefinite nomenclature.

But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the predominance
of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the mortal enemy of all
true and manly metaphysical research. It is that corruption, introduced by
certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics, who, dismissing not only all
system, but all logical connection, pick and choose whatever is most
plausible and showy; who select, whatever words can have some semblance
of sense attached to them without the least expenditure of thought; in short
whatever may enable men to talk of what they do not understand, with a
careful avoidance of every thing that might awaken them to a moment’s
suspicion of their ignorance. This alas! is an irremediable disease, for it
brings with it, not so much an indisposition to any particular system, but an
utter loss of taste and faculty for all system and for all philosophy. Like

echoes that beget each other amongst the mountains, the praise or blame of
such men rolls in volleys long after the report from the original
blunderbuss. Sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus: et tamen (quod
pessimum est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia et fastidio se offert.
[55]

I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but I must
first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal of Mr.
Wordsworth’s remarks on the Imagination, in his preface to the new edition
of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so consentient with his as, I
confess, I had taken for granted. In an article contributed by me to Mr.
Southey’s Omniana, On the soul and its organs of sense, are the following
sentences. “These (the human faculties) I would arrange under the different
senses and powers: as the eye, the ear, the touch, etc.; the imitative power,
voluntary and automatic; the imagination, or shaping and modifying power;
the fancy, or the aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or
the regulative, substantiating and realizing power; the speculative reason,
vis theoretica et scientifica, or the power by which we produce or aim to
produce unity, necessity, and universality in all our knowledge by means of
principles a priori [56]; the will, or practical reason; the faculty of choice
(Germanice, Willkuehr) and (distinct both from the moral will and the
choice,) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to include
under the head of single and double touch.” To this, as far as it relates to the
subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative and associative
power) Mr. Wordsworth’s “objection is only that the definition is too
general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as
well to the Imagination as to the Fancy.” I reply, that if, by the power of
evoking and combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the same as, and no more
than, I meant by the aggregative and associative, I continue to deny, that it
belongs at all to the Imagination; and I am disposed to conjecture, that he
has mistaken the copresence of Fancy with Imagination for the operation of
the latter singly. A man may work with two very different tools at the same
moment; each has its share in the work, but the work effected by each is
distinct and different. But it will probably appear in the next chapter, that
deeming it necessary to go back much further than Mr. Wordsworth’s
subject required or permitted, I have attached a meaning to both Fancy and
Imagination, which he had not in view, at least while he was writing that

preface. He will judge. Would to Heaven, I might meet with many such
readers! I will conclude with the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor: “He to
whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things
in one, may enjoy true peace and rest of spirit.” [57]

CHAPTER XIII
On the imagination, or esemplastic power
O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav’d from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
But more refin’d, more spiritous and pure,
As nearer to him plac’d, or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assigu’d,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportion’d to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aery: last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,
Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublim’d,
To vital spirits aspire: to animal:
To intellectual!—give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
REASON receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive or intuitive. [58]

“Sane dicerentur si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent, verissime in
fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam, quemadmodum et
Platonici olim recte agnovere.”

“Hinc igitur, praeter pure mathematica et phantasiae subjecta, collegi
quaedam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et
massae materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale
addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis
axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto et
parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et effectu,
actioneque et passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis rerum rationes
salventur. Id principium rerum, an entelecheian an vim appellemus, non
refert, modo meminerimus, per solam Virium notionem intelligibiliter
explicari.” [59]

Sebomai noeron
Kruphian taxin
Chorei TI MESON
Ou katachuthen. [60]

Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes, said,
give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe. We must
of course understand him to have meant; I will render the construction of
the universe intelligible. In the same sense the transcendental philosopher
says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends
to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this
infinity, and I will cause the world of intelllgences with the whole system of
their representations to rise up before you. Every other science presupposes
intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates
it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its
birth to its maturity.

The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of this master-
thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the introduction of negative
quantities into philosophy, published 1763. In this he has shown, that
instead of assailing the science of mathematics by metaphysics, as Berkeley
did in his ANALYST, or of sophisticating it, as Wolf did, by the vain
attempt of deducing the first principles of geometry from supposed deeper
grounds of ontology, it behoved the metaphysician rather to examine
whether the only province of knowledge, which man has succeeded in
erecting into a pure science, might not furnish materials, or at least hints,
for establishing and pacifying the unsettled, warring, and embroiled domain
of philosophy. An imitation of the mathematical method had indeed been
attempted with no better success than attended the essay of David to wear
the armour of Saul. Another use however is possible and of far greater
promise, namely, the actual application of the positions which had so
wonderfully enlarged the discoveries of geometry, mutatis mutandis, to
philosophical subjects. Kant having briefly illustrated the utility of such an
attempt in the questions of space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as
employed by the mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities
and the transfer of them to metaphysical investigation. Opposites, he well
observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are absolutely
incompatible; or real, without being contradictory. The former he

denominates Nihil negativum irrepraesentabile, the connection of which
produces nonsense. A body in motion is something--Aliquid cogitabile; but
a body, at one and the same time in motion and not in motion, is nothing, or,
at most, air articulated into nonsense. But a motory force of a body in one
direction, and an equal force of the same body in an opposite direction is
not incompatible, and the result, namely, rest, is real and representable. For
the purposes of mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term
negative, and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to
that, which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus if a
man’s capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be the same,
whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt negative capital. But
in as much as the latter stands practically in reference to the former, we of
course represent the sum as 10-8. It is equally clear that two equal forces
acting in opposite directions, both being finite and each distinguished from
the other by its direction only, must neutralize or reduce each other to
inaction. Now the transcendental philosophy demands; first, that two forces
should be conceived which counteract each other by their essential nature;
not only not in consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior
to all direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all
possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that these forces
should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike indestructible. The
problem will then be to discover the result or product of two such forces, as
distinguished from the result of those forces which are finite, and derive
their difference solely from the circumstance of their direction. When we
have formed a scheme or outline of these two different kinds of force, and
of their different results, by the process of discursive reasoning, it will then
remain for us to elevate the thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating
intuitively this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet
counteracting forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-
penetration gives existence, in the living principle and in the process of our
own self-consciousness. By what instrument this is possible the solution
itself will discover, at the same time that it will reveal to and for whom it is
possible. Non omnia possumus omnes. There is a philosophic no less than a
poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest perfection of talent, not
by degree but by kind.

The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on their
meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them is
indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-ebullient; and as something
must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite, and both alike
indestructible; and as rest or neutralization cannot be this result; no other
conception is possible, but that the product must be a tertium aliquid, or
finite generation. Consequently this conception is necessary. Now this
tertium aliquid can be no other than an inter-penetration of the
counteracting powers, partaking of both.

******

Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received the
following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have had ample
reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and sensibility preclude all
the excuses which my self-love might possibly have prompted me to set up
in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good sense, but with less
tact and feeling.

“Dear C.

“You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on the Imagination, both as
to the impressions it made on myself, and as to those which I think it will
make on the Public, i.e. that part of the public, who, from the title of the
work and from its forming a sort of introduction to a volume of poems, are
likely to constitute the great majority of your readers.

“As to myself, and stating in the first place the effect on my understanding,
your opinions and method of argument were not only so new to me, but so
directly the reverse of all I had ever been accustomed to consider as truth,
that even if I had comprehended your premises sufficiently to have admitted
them, and had seen the necessity of your conclusions, I should still have
been in that state of mind, which in your note in Chap. IV you have so
ingeniously evolved, as the antithesis to that in which a man is, when he
makes a bull. In your own words, I should have felt as if I had been
standing on my head.

“The effect on my feelings, on the other hand, I cannot better represent,
than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy modern chapels
of ease, and then for the first time to have been placed, and left alone, in
one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty moonlight night of autumn.
‘Now in glimmer, and now in gloom;’ often in palpable darkness not
without a chilly sensation of terror; then suddenly emerging into broad yet
visionary lights with coloured shadows of fantastic shapes, yet all decked
with holy insignia and mystic symbols; and ever and anon coming out full
upon pictures and stone-work images of great men, with whose names I was
familiar, but which looked upon me with countenances and an expression,
the most dissimilar to all I had been in the habit of connecting with those
names. Those whom I had been taught to venerate as almost super-human
in magnitude of intellect, I found perched in little fret-work niches, as
grotesque dwarfs; while the grotesques, in my hitherto belief, stood
guarding the high altar with all the characters of apotheosis. In short, what I
had supposed substances were thinned away into shadows, while
everywhere shadows were deepened into substances:
If substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d,
For each seem’d either!

“Yet after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted from a
MS. poem of your own in the FRIEND, and applied to a work of Mr.
Wordsworth’s though with a few of the words altered:
------An Orphic tale indeed,
A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts
To a strange music chanted!

“Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book on
the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and
announced: and that I will do my best to understand it. Only I will not
promise to descend into the dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub
my own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes, which I am
required to see.

“So much for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate a moment in
advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter from the present work,
and to reserve it for your announced treatises on the Logos or

communicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because imperfectly as I
understand the present Chapter, I see clearly that you have done too much,
and yet not enough. You have been obliged to omit so many links, from the
necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if I may recur to my
former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined
tower. Secondly, a still stronger argument (at least one that I am sure will be
more forcible with you) is, that your readers will have both right and reason
to complain of you. This Chapter, which cannot, when it is printed, amount
to so little as an hundred pages, will of necessity greatly increase the
expense of the work; and every reader who, like myself, is neither prepared
nor perhaps calculated for the study of so abstruse a subject so abstrusely
treated, will, as I have before hinted, be almost entitled to accuse you of a
sort of imposition on him. For who, he might truly observe, could from
your title-page, to wit, “My Literary Life and Opinions,” published too as
introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or even
conjectured, a long treatise on Ideal Realism which holds the same relation
in abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato. It will be well, if
already you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition in your work,
though as the larger part of the disquisition is historical, it will doubtless be
both interesting and instructive to many to whose unprepared minds your
speculations on the esemplastic power would be utterly unintelligible. Be
assured, if you do publish this Chapter in the present work, you will be
reminded of Bishop Berkeley’s Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water,
which beginning with Tar ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming
the interspace. I say in the present work. In that greater work to which you
have devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be in
its proper place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both
its contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who feel no
interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have themselves only to
blame.

“I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives, and
particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present
publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the
preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from your
own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as
stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion of pig-

nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable creatures, must
occasionally be pulled backward from the boat in order to make you enter
it. All success attend you, for if hard thinking and hard reading are merits,
you have deserved it.

“Your affectionate, etc.”

In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete
conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with stating
the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that future
publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close
of the second volume.

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The
primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all
human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an
echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical
with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and
in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to
recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events
it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects
(as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and
definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated
from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by
that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word
Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all
its materials ready made from the law of association.

CHAPTER XIV
Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed—
Preface to the second edition—The ensuing controversy, its causes and
acrimony—Philosophic definitions of a Poem and Poetry with scholia.

During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the
power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the
truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the
modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of
light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over a known and
familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining
both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself—(to
which of us I do not recollect)—that a series of poems might be composed
of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least,
supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of
the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally
accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they
have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion,
has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second
class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and
incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity,
where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice
them, when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it
was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and
characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our
inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of
disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth,
on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm
of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the
supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom,

and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an
inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of
familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear
not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing
among other poems, THE DARK LADIE, and the CHRISTABEL, in which
I should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first
attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth’s industry had proved so much more
successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my
compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation
of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written
in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which
is characteristic of his genius. In this form the LYRICAL BALLADS were
published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether subjects,
which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial
style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of
ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest, which it is the peculiar
business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface of
considerable length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently
a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this
style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all
phrases and forms of speech that were not included in what he
(unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the
language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was
impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its
direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy.
For from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I
explain the inveteracy and in some instances, I grieve to say, the
acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by
the assailants.

Had Mr. Wordsworth’s poems been the silly, the childish things, which they
were for a long time described as being had they been really distinguished
from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and
inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is
found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have

sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged
the preface along with them. But year after year increased the number of
Mr. Wordsworth’s admirers. They were found too not in the lower classes of
the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and
meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree
by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its
religious fervour. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author,
which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even
boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions,
and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which
would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence with which it
whirled them round and round. With many parts of this preface in the sense
attributed to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I
never concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in
principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of
the same preface, and to the author’s own practice in the greater part of the
poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth in his recent collection has, I find,
degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be
read or not at the reader’s choice. But he has not, as far as I can discover,
announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering it as
the source of a controversy, in which I have been honoured more than I
deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I think it
expedient to declare once for all, in what points I coincide with the opinions
supported in that preface, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order
to render myself intelligible I must previously, in as few words as possible,
explain my views, first, of a Poem; and secondly, of Poetry itself, in kind,
and in essence.

The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it
is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware, that
distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth,
we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the
technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore
them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and
this is the result of philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a
prose composition; the difference therefore must consist in a different
combination of them, in consequence of a different object being proposed.

According to the difference of the object will be the difference of the
combination. It is possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the
recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial arrangement;
and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from
prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this, the lowest sense,
a man might attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration
of the days in the several months;
“Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November,” etc.

and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure is
found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all
compositions that have this charm super-added, whatever be their contents,
may be entitled poems.

So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents
supplies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose may be
the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and demonstrable, as
in works of science; or of facts experienced and recorded, as in history.
Pleasure, and that of the highest and most permanent kind, may result from
the attainment of the end; but it is not itself the immediate end. In other
works the communication of pleasure may be the immediate purpose; and
though truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet
this will distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the
work belongs. Blest indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate
purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in
which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the BATHYLLUS even
of an Anacreon, or the ALEXIS of Virgil, from disgust and aversion!

But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work
not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree
attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere superaddition of
metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The
answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in
itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be superadded, all
other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such, as to justify
the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an exact

correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite. The
final definition then, so deduced, may be thus worded. A poem is that
species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing
for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species—
(having this object in common with it)—it is discriminated by proposing to
itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct
gratification from each component part.

Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants
attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few instances
has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the present subject.
If a man chooses to call every composition a poem, which is rhyme, or
measure, or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted. The distinction is
at least competent to characterize the writer’s intention. If it were subjoined,
that the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of
interesting reflections; I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a
poem, and an additional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a
legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually
support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with,
and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement.
The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of
all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand,
to a series of striking lines or distiches, each of which, absorbing the whole
attention of the reader to itself, becomes disjoined from its context, and
forms a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other
hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly
the general result unattracted by the component parts. The reader should be
carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of
curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the
pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.
Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of
intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air;—at every step
he pauses and half recedes; and from the retrogressive movement collects
the force which again carries him onward. Praecipitandus est liber spiritus,
says Petronius most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding
verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer
words.

But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we have
still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of Plato, and Jeremy
Taylor, and Burnet’s Theory of the Earth, furnish undeniable proofs that
poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the
contradistringuishing objects of a poem. The first chapter of Isaiah—
(indeed a very large portion of the whole book)—is poetry in the most
emphatic sense; yet it would be not less irrational than strange to assert, that
pleasure, and not truth was the immediate object of the prophet. In short,
whatever specific import we attach to the word, Poetry, there will be found
involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length
neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to
be produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with the
poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected than by such a studied
selection and artificial arrangement, as will partake of one, though not a
peculiar property of poetry. And this again can be no other than the property
of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the language of
prose aims at, whether colloquial or written.

My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word,
have been in part anticipated in some of the remarks on the Fancy and
Imagination in the early part of this work. What is poetry?—is so nearly the
same question with, what is a poet?—that the answer to the one is involved
in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic
genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and
emotions of the poet’s own mind.

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into
activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to
their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that
blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical
power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.
This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained
under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur
habenis, reveals “itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or
discordant” qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the
concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the
sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than

usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake
and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or
vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial,
still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration
of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. Doubtless, as Sir John Davies
observes of the soul—(and his words may with slight alteration be applied,
and even more appropriately, to the poetic Imagination)—
Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
As we our food into our nature change.

From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things;
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings.

Thus does she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds;
Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through the senses to our minds.

Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery,
Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each;
and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.

CHAPTER XV
The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis of
Shakespeare’s VENUS AND ADONIS, and RAPE of LUCRECE.

In the application of these principles to purposes of practical criticism, as
employed in the appraisement of works more or less imperfect, I have
endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem are, which may be
deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power, as distinguished
from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives,
by an act of the will, rather than by the inspiration of a genial and
productive nature. In this investigation, I could not, I thought, do better,
than keep before me the earliest work of the greatest genius, that perhaps
human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded [61] Shakespeare. I
mean the VENUS AND ADONIS, and the LUCRECE; works which give at
once strong promises of the strength, and yet obvious proofs of the
immaturity, of his genius. From these I abstracted the following marks, as
characteristics of original poetic genius in general.

1. In the VENUS AND ADONIS, the first and most obvious excellence is
the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject; and
the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into
a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or
permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant.
The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it
be evidently original, and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I
regard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young man.
The man that hath not music in his soul can indeed never be a genuine poet.
Imagery,—(even taken from nature, much more when transplanted from
books, as travels, voyages, and works of natural history),—affecting
incidents, just thoughts, interesting personal or domestic feelings, and with
these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem,—
may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talent and
much reading, who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense
desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius; the love of the

arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the sense of
musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and
this together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and
modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling,
may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned. It is in these that
“poeta nascitur non fit.”

2. A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from
the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At least I have
found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the author’s
personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a particular poem is
but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic
power. We may perhaps remember the tale of the statuary, who had
acquired considerable reputation for the legs of his goddesses, though the
rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with ideal beauty; till his wife,
elated by her husband’s praises, modestly acknowledged that she had been
his constant model. In the VENUS AND ADONIS this proof of poetic
power exists even to excess. It is throughout as if a superior spirit more
intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves,
not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the
mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before
our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated
only by that pleasurable excitement, which had resulted from the energetic
fervour of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately
and profoundly contemplated. I think, I should have conjectured from these
poems, that even then the great instinct, which impelled the poet to the
drama, was secretly working in him, prompting him—by a series and never
broken chain of imagery, always vivid and, because unbroken, often
minute; by the highest effort of the picturesque in words, of which words
are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even
Dante not excepted; to provide a substitute for that visual language, that
constant intervention and running comment by tone, look and gesture,
which in his dramatic works he was entitled to expect from the players. His
Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole
representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. You
seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, from
the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader; from

the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and
images; and above all from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an
expression, the utter aloofness of the poet’s own feelings, from those of
which he is at once the painter and the analyst; that though the very subject
cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem
less dangerous on a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still
more offensively, Wieland has done, instead of degrading and deforming
passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence;
Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to
preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader’s notice among the
thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances,
which form its dresses and its scenery; or by diverting our attention from
the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections, which the
poet’s ever active mind has deduced from, or connected with, the imagery
and the incidents. The reader is forced into too much action to sympathize
with the merely passive of our nature. As little can a mind thus roused and
awakened be brooded on by mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy
mist can creep upon the surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it
onward in waves and billows.

3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though
faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do
not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original
genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by
associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have
the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or
lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the
poet’s own spirit,
Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air.

In the two following lines for instance, there is nothing objectionable,
nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place,
part of a descriptive poem:
Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow’d
Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve.

But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally in
their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The same image
will rise into semblance of poetry if thus conveyed:
Yon row of bleak and visionary pines,
By twilight glimpse discerned, mark! how they flee
From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild
Streaming before them.

I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of that
particular excellence which I had in view, and in which Shakespeare even in
his earliest, as in his latest, works surpasses all other poets. It is by this, that
he still gives a dignity and a passion to the objects which he presents.
Unaided by any previous excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and
in power,—
“Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.”

“Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come—

******
******

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d,
And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him, I’ll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes.
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants’ crests, and tombs of brass are spent.”

As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic genius
does the imagery become, when it moulds and colours itself to the
circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind. For
unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader’s own memory will refer
him to the LEAR, OTHELLO, in short to which not of the “great, ever
living, dead man’s” dramatic works? Inopem em copia fecit. How true it is
to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the instance of love in his 98th
Sonnet.

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April drest in all its trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing;
That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them, where they grew
Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were, tho’ sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow, I with these did play!”

Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark
Gonimon men poiaetou———
———hostis rhaema gennaion lakoi,

will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the painter, the
poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of
simultaneousness:—
With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace
Of those fair arms, which bound him to her breast,
And homeward through the dark laund runs apace;—

******
Look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky,
So glides he in the night from Venus’ eye.

4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but little,
except as taken conjointly with the former;—yet without which the former
could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were possible) would
give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric power;—is depth,
and energy of thought. No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at
the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the
fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions,
emotions, language. In Shakespeare’s poems the creative power and the
intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of
strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length in the drama
they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of
the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within

narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other and intermix
reluctantly and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more
yielding shores blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one
voice. The VENUS AND ADONIS did not perhaps allow the display of the
deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour and even demand
their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakespeare’s management of
the tale neither pathos, nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same
minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid
colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging
and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the
modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of
knowledge and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often
domination, over the whole world of language. What then shall we say?
even this; that Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of
genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not
possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely,
till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual
feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he
stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which
seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain,
with Milton as his compeer not rival. While the former darts himself forth,
and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one
Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to
himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action
shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes
all things, yet for ever remaining himself. O what great men hast thou not
produced, England, my country!—Truly indeed—
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue,
Which Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold,
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.

CHAPTER XVI
Striking points of difference between the Poets of the present age and those
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—Wish expressed for the union of
the characteristic merits of both.

Christendom, from its first settlement on feudal rights, has been so far one
great body, however imperfectly organized, that a similar spirit will be
found in each period to have been acting in all its members. The study of
Shakespeare’s poems—(I do not include his dramatic works, eminently as
they too deserve that title)—led me to a more careful examination of the
contemporary poets both in England and in other countries. But my
attention was especially fixed on those of Italy, from the birth to the death
of Shakespeare; that being the country in which the fine arts had been most
sedulously, and hitherto most successfully cultivated. Abstracted from the
degrees and peculiarities of individual genius, the properties common to the
good writers of each period seem to establish one striking point of
difference between the poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and
that of the present age. The remark may perhaps be extended to the sister art
of painting. At least the latter will serve to illustrate the former. In the
present age the poet—(I would wish to be understood as speaking generally,
and without allusion to individual names)—seems to propose to himself as
his main object, and as that which is the most characteristic of his art, new
and striking images; with incidents that interest the affections or excite the
curiosity. Both his characters and his descriptions he renders, as much as
possible, specific and individual, even to a degree of portraiture. In his
diction and metre, on the other hand, he is comparatively careless. The
measure is either constructed on no previous system, and acknowledges no
justifying principle but that of the writer’s convenience; or else some
mechanical movement is adopted, of which one couplet or stanza is so far
an adequate specimen, as that the occasional differences appear evidently to
arise from accident, or the qualities of the language itself, not from
meditation and an intelligent purpose. And the language from Pope’s
translation of Homer, to Darwin’s Temple of Nature [62], may,

notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized,
as claiming to be poetical for no better reason, than that it would be
intolerable in conversation or in prose. Though alas! even our prose
writings, nay even the style of our more set discourses, strive to be in the
fashion, and trick themselves out in the soiled and over-worn finery of the
meretricious muse. It is true that of late a great improvement in this respect
is observable in our most popular writers. But it is equally true, that this
recurrence to plain sense and genuine mother English is far from being
general; and that the composition of our novels, magazines, public
harangues, and the like is commonly as trivial in thought, and yet enigmatic
in expression, as if Echo and Sphinx had laid their heads together to
construct it. Nay, even of those who have most rescued themselves from
this contagion, I should plead inwardly guilty to the charge of duplicity or
cowardice, if I withheld my conviction, that few have guarded the purity of
their native tongue with that jealous care, which the sublime Dante in his
tract De la volgare Eloquenza, declares to be the first duty of a poet. For
language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the
trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests. Animadverte,
says Hobbes, quam sit ab improprietate verborum pronum hominihus
prolabi in errores circa ipsas res! Sat [vero], says Sennertus, in hac vitae
brevitate et naturae obscuritate, rerum est, quibus cognoscendis tempus
impendatur, ut [confusis et multivotis] sermonibus intelligendis illud
consumere opus non sit. [Eheu! quantas strages paravere verba nubila, quae
tot dicunt ut nihil dicunt;—nubes potius, e quibus et in rebus politicis et in
ecclesia turbines et tonitrua erumpunt!] Et proinde recte dictum putamus a
Platone in Gorgia: os an ta onomata eidei, eisetai kai ta pragmata: et ab
Epicteto, archae paideuseos hae ton onomaton episkepsis: et prudentissime
Galenus scribit, hae ton onomaton chraesis tarachtheisa kai taen ton
pragmaton epitarattei gnosin.

Egregie vero J. C. Scaliger, in Lib. I. de Plantis: Est primum, inquit,
sapientis officium, bene sentire, ut sibi vivat: proximum, bene loqui, ut
patriae vivat.

Something analogous to the materials and structure of modern poetry I
seem to have noticed—(but here I beg to be understood as speaking with
the utmost diffidence)—in our common landscape painters. Their

foregrounds and intermediate distances are comparatively unattractive:
while the main interest of the landscape is thrown into the background,
where mountains and torrents and castles forbid the eye to proceed, and
nothing tempts it to trace its way back again. But in the works of the great
Italian and Flemish masters, the front and middle objects of the landscape
are the most obvious and determinate, the interest gradually dies away in
the background, and the charm and peculiar worth of the picture consists,
not so much in the specific objects which it conveys to the understanding in
a visual language formed by the substitution of figures for words, as in the
beauty and harmony of the colours, lines, and expression, with which the
objects are represented. Hence novelty of subject was rather avoided than
sought for. Superior excellence in the manner of treating the same subjects
was the trial and test of the artist’s merit.

Not otherwise is it with the more polished poets of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, especially those of Italy. The imagery is almost always
general: sun, moon, flowers, breezes, murmuring streams, warbling
songsters, delicious shades, lovely damsels cruel as fair, nymphs, naiads,
and goddesses, are the materials which are common to all, and which each
shaped and arranged according to his judgment or fancy, little solicitous to
add or to particularize. If we make an honourable exception in favour of
some English poets, the thoughts too are as little novel as the images; and
the fable of their narrative poems, for the most part drawn from mythology,
or sources of equal notoriety, derive their chief attractions from the manner
of treating them; from impassioned flow, or picturesque arrangement. In
opposition to the present age, and perhaps in as faulty an extreme, they
placed the essence of poetry in the art. The excellence, at which they aimed,
consisted in the exquisite polish of the diction, combined with perfect
simplicity. This their prime object they attained by the avoidance of every
word, which a gentleman would not use in dignified conversation, and of
every word and phrase, which none but a learned man would use; by the
studied position of words and phrases, so that not only each part should be
melodious in itself, but contribute to the harmony of the whole, each note
referring and conducting to the melody of all the foregoing and following
words of the same period or stanza; and lastly with equal labour, the greater
because unbetrayed, by the variation and various harmonies of their
metrical movement. Their measures, however, were not indebted for their

variety to the introduction of new metres, such as have been attempted of
late in the Alonzo and Imogen, and others borrowed from the German,
having in their very mechanism a specific overpowering tune, to which the
generous reader humours his voice and emphasis, with more indulgence to
the author than attention to the meaning or quantity of the words; but
which, to an ear familiar with the numerous sounds of the Greek and
Roman poets, has an effect not unlike that of galloping over a paved road in
a German stage-waggon without springs. On the contrary, the elder bards
both of Italy and England produced a far greater as well as more charming
variety by countless modifications, and subtle balances of sound in the
common metres of their country. A lasting and enviable reputation awaits
that man of genius, who should attempt and realize a union;—who should
recall the high finish, the appropriateness, the facility, the delicate
proportion, and above all, the perfusive and omnipresent grace, which have
preserved, as in a shrine of precious amber, the Sparrow of Catullus, the
Swallow, the Grasshopper, and all the other little loves of Anacreon; and
which, with bright, though diminished glories, revisited the youth and early
manhood of Christian Europe, in the vales of [63] Arno, and the groves of
Isis and of Cam; and who with these should combine the keener interest,
deeper pathos, manlier reflection, and the fresher and more various imagery,
which give a value and a name that will not pass away to the poets who
have done honour to our own times, and to those of our immediate
predecessors.

CHAPTER XVII
Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth—Rustic life (above
all, low and rustic life) especially unfavourable to the formation of a human
diction—The best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of
clowns or shepherds—Poetry essentially ideal and generic—The language
of Milton as much the language of real life, yea, incomparably more so than
that of the cottager.

As far then as Mr. Wordsworth in his preface contended, and most ably
contended, for a reformation in our poetic diction, as far as he has evinced
the truth of passion, and the dramatic propriety of those figures and
metaphors in the original poets, which, stripped of their justifying reasons,
and converted into mere artifices of connection or ornament, constitute the
characteristic falsity in the poetic style of the moderns; and as far as he has,
with equal acuteness and clearness, pointed out the process by which this
change was effected, and the resemblances between that state into which the
reader’s mind is thrown by the pleasurable confusion of thought from an
unaccustomed train of words and images; and that state which is induced by
the natural language of impassioned feeling; he undertook a useful task, and
deserves all praise, both for the attempt and for the execution. The
provocations to this remonstrance in behalf of truth and nature were still of
perpetual recurrence before and after the publication of this preface. I
cannot likewise but add, that the comparison of such poems of merit, as
have been given to the public within the last ten or twelve years, with the
majority of those produced previously to the appearance of that preface,
leave no doubt on my mind, that Mr. Wordsworth is fully justified in
believing his efforts to have been by no means ineffectual. Not only in the
verses of those who have professed their admiration of his genius, but even
of those who have distinguished themselves by hostility to his theory, and
depreciation of his writings, are the impressions of his principles plainly
visible. It is possible, that with these principles others may have been
blended, which are not equally evident; and some which are unsteady and
subvertible from the narrowness or imperfection of their basis. But it is

more than possible, that these errors of defect or exaggeration, by kindling
and feeding the controversy, may have conduced not only to the wider
propagation of the accompanying truths, but that, by their frequent
presentation to the mind in an excited state, they may have won for them a
more permanent and practical result. A man will borrow a part from his
opponent the more easily, if he feels himself justified in continuing to reject
a part. While there remain important points in which he can still feel
himself in the right, in which he still finds firm footing for continued
resistance, he will gradually adopt those opinions, which were the least
remote from his own convictions, as not less congruous with his own theory
than with that which he reprobates. In like manner with a kind of instinctive
prudence, he will abandon by little and little his weakest posts, till at length
he seems to forget that they had ever belonged to him, or affects to consider
them at most as accidental and “petty annexments,” the removal of which
leaves the citadel unhurt and unendangered.

My own differences from certain supposed parts of Mr. Wordsworth’s
theory ground themselves on the assumption, that his words had been
rightly interpreted, as purporting that the proper diction for poetry in
general consists altogether in a language taken, with due exceptions, from
the mouths of men in real life, a language which actually constitutes the
natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings. My
objection is, first, that in any sense this rule is applicable only to certain
classes of poetry; secondly, that even to these classes it is not applicable,
except in such a sense, as hath never by any one (as far as I know or have
read,) been denied or doubted; and lastly, that as far as, and in that degree in
which it is practicable, it is yet as a rule useless, if not injurious, and
therefore either need not, or ought not to be practised. The poet informs his
reader, that he had generally chosen low and rustic life; but not as low and
rustic, or in order to repeat that pleasure of doubtful moral effect, which
persons of elevated rank and of superior refinement oftentimes derive from
a happy imitation of the rude unpolished manners and discourse of their
inferiors. For the pleasure so derived may be traced to three exciting causes.
The first is the naturalness, in fact, of the things represented. The second is
the apparent naturalness of the representation, as raised and qualified by an
imperceptible infusion of the author’s own knowledge and talent, which
infusion does, indeed, constitute it an imitation as distinguished from a

mere copy. The third cause may be found in the reader’s conscious feeling
of his superiority awakened by the contrast presented to him; even as for the
same purpose the kings and great barons of yore retained, sometimes actual
clowns and fools, but more frequently shrewd and witty fellows in that
character. These, however, were not Mr. Wordsworth’s objects. He chose
low and rustic life, “because in that condition the essential passions of the
heart find a better soil, in which they can attain their maturity, are less under
restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that
condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater
simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately contemplated, and
more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate
from those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural
occupations are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and
lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with
the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”

Now it is clear to me, that in the most interesting of the poems, in which the
author is more or less dramatic, as THE BROTHERS, MICHAEL, RUTH,
THE MAD MOTHER, and others, the persons introduced are by no means
taken from low or rustic life in the common acceptation of those words! and
it is not less clear, that the sentiments and language, as far as they can be
conceived to have been really transferred from the minds and conversation
of such persons, are attributable to causes and circumstances not necessarily
connected with “their occupations and abode.” The thoughts, feelings,
language, and manners of the shepherd- farmers in the vales of Cumberland
and Westmoreland, as far as they are actually adopted in those poems, may
be accounted for from causes, which will and do produce the same results
in every state of life, whether in town or country. As the two principal I rank
that independence, which raises a man above servitude, or daily toil for the
profit of others, yet not above the necessity of industry and a frugal
simplicity of domestic life; and the accompanying unambitious, but solid
and religious, education, which has rendered few books familiar, but the
Bible, and the Liturgy or Hymn book. To this latter cause, indeed, which is
so far accidental, that it is the blessing of particular countries and a
particular age, not the product of particular places or employments, the poet
owes the show of probability, that his personages might really feel, think,
and talk with any tolerable resemblance to his representation. It is an

excellent remark of Dr. Henry More’s, that “a man of confined education,
but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will naturally form a
more winning and commanding rhetoric than those that are learned: the
intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases debasing their style.”

It is, moreover, to be considered that to the formation of healthy feelings,
and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not less formidable
than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am convinced, that for the
human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain vantage-ground is prerequisite.
It is not every man that is likely to be improved by a country life or by
country labours. Education, or original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if
the changes, forms, and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient
stimulant. And where these are not sufficient, the mind contracts and
hardens by want of stimulants: and the man becomes selfish, sensual, gross,
and hard- hearted. Let the management of the Poor Laws in Liverpool,
Manchester, or Bristol be compared with the ordinary dispensation of the
poor rates in agricultural villages, where the farmers are the overseers and
guardians of the poor. If my own experience have not been particularly
unfortunate, as well as that of the many respectable country clergymen with
whom I have conversed on the subject, the result would engender more than
scepticism concerning the desirable influences of low and rustic life in and
for itself. Whatever may be concluded on the other side, from the stronger
local attachments and enterprising spirit of the Swiss, and other
mountaineers, applies to a particular mode of pastoral life, under forms of
property that permit and beget manners truly republican, not to rustic life in
general, or to the absence of artificial cultivation. On the contrary the
mountaineers, whose manners have been so often eulogized, are in general
better educated and greater readers than men of equal rank elsewhere. But
where this is not the case, as among the peasantry of North Wales, the
ancient mountains, with all their terrors and all their glories, are pictures to
the blind, and music to the deaf.

I should not have entered so much into detail upon this passage, but here
seems to be the point, to which all the lines of difference converge as to
their source and centre;—I mean, as far as, and in whatever respect, my
poetic creed does differ from the doctrines promulgated in this preface. I
adopt with full faith, the principle of Aristotle, that poetry, as poetry, is

essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident; that its apparent
individualities of rank, character, or occupation must be representative of a
class; and that the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes,
with the common attributes of the class: not with such as one gifted
individual might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it is most
probable before-hand that he would possess. If my premises are right and
my deductions legitimate, it follows that there can be no poetic medium
between the swains of Theocritus and those of an imaginary golden age.

The characters of the vicar and the shepherd-mariner in the poem of THE
BROTHERS, and that of the shepherd of Green-head Ghyll in the
MICHAEL, have all the verisimilitude and representative quality, that the
purposes of poetry can require. They are persons of a known and abiding
class, and their manners and sentiments the natural product of
circumstances common to the class. Take Michael for instance:
An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen,
Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,
And in his shepherd’s calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.
Hence he had learned the meaning of all winds,
Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes
When others heeded not, He heard the South
Make subterraneous music, like the noise
Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.
The Shepherd, at such warning, of his flock
Bethought him, and he to himself would say,
‘The winds are now devising work for me!’
And truly, at all times, the storm, that drives
The traveller to a shelter, summoned him
Up to the mountains: he had been alone
Amid the heart of many thousand mists,
That came to him and left him on the heights.
So lived he, until his eightieth year was past.
And grossly that man errs, who should suppose
That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,
Were things indifferent to the Shepherd’s thoughts.
Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed
The common air; the hills, which he so oft
Had climbed with vigorous steps; which had impressed
So many incidents upon his mind
Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;
Which, like a book, preserved the memory

Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved,
Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts,
So grateful in themselves, the certainty
Of honourable gain; these fields, these hills
Which were his living Being, even more
Than his own blood—what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself.

On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched in a lower key, as the
HARRY GILL, and THE IDIOT BOY, the feelings are those of human
nature in general; though the poet has judiciously laid the scene in the
country, in order to place himself in the vicinity of interesting images,
without the necessity of ascribing a sentimental perception of their beauty
to the persons of his drama. In THE IDIOT BOY, indeed, the mother’s
character is not so much the real and native product of a “situation where
the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they can attain
their maturity and speak a plainer and more emphatic language,” as it is an
impersonation of an instinct abandoned by judgment. Hence the two
following charges seem to me not wholly groundless: at least, they are the
only plausible objections, which I have heard to that fine poem. The one is,
that the author has not, in the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude
from the reader’s fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy,
which yet it was by no means his intention to represent. He was even by the
“burr, burr, burr,” uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy’s
beauty, assisted in recalling them. The other is, that the idiocy of the boy is
so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the general
reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile dotage, than an
analytic display of maternal affection in its ordinary workings.

In THE THORN, the poet himself acknowledges in a note the necessity of
an introductory poem, in which he should have portrayed the character of
the person from whom the words of the poem are supposed to proceed: a
superstitious man moderately imaginative, of slow faculties and deep
feelings, “a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who, being past
the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity, or small independent
income, to some village or country town of which he was not a native, or in
which he had not been accustomed to live. Such men having nothing to do
become credulous and talkative from indolence.” But in a poem, still more

in a lyric poem—and the Nurse in ROMEO AND JULIET alone prevents
me from extending the remark even to dramatic poetry, if indeed even the
Nurse can be deemed altogether a case in point—it is not possible to imitate
truly a dull and garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of
dullness and garrulity. However this may be, I dare assert, that the parts—
(and these form the far larger portion of the whole)—which might as well
or still better have proceeded from the poet’s own imagination, and have
been spoken in his own character, are those which have given, and which
will continue to give, universal delight; and that the passages exclusively
appropriate to the supposed narrator, such as the last couplet of the third
stanza [64]; the seven last lines of the tenth [65]; and the five following
stanzas, with the exception of the four admirable lines at the
commencement of the fourteenth, are felt by many unprejudiced and
unsophisticated hearts, as sudden and unpleasant sinkings from the height to
which the poet had previously lifted them, and to which he again re-elevates
both himself and his reader.

If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice of
characters was to be directed, not only a priori, from grounds of reason, but
both from the few instances in which the poet himself need be supposed to
have been governed by it, and from the comparative inferiority of those
instances; still more must I hesitate in my assent to the sentence which
immediately follows the former citation; and which I can neither admit as
particular fact, nor as general rule. “The language, too, of these men has
been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from
all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men
hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of
language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and
the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the
action of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and
unelaborated expressions.” To this I reply; that a rustic’s language, purified
from all provincialism and grossness, and so far reconstructed as to be made
consistent with the rules of grammar—(which are in essence no other than
the laws of universal logic, applied to psychological materials)—will not
differ from the language of any other man of common sense, however
learned or refined he may be, except as far as the notions, which the rustic
has to convey, are fewer and more indiscriminate. This will become still

clearer, if we add the consideration—(equally important though less
obvious)—that the rustic, from the more imperfect development of his
faculties, and from the lower state of their cultivation, aims almost solely to
convey insulated facts, either those of his scanty experience or his
traditional belief; while the educated man chiefly seeks to discover and
express those connections of things, or those relative bearings of fact to
fact, from which some more or less general law is deducible. For facts are
valuable to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the
indwelling law, which is the true being of things, the sole solution of their
modes of existence, and in the knowledge of which consists our dignity and
our power.

As little can I agree with the assertion, that from the objects with which the
rustic hourly communicates the best part of language is formed. For first, if
to communicate with an object implies such an acquaintance with it, as
renders it capable of being discriminately reflected on, the distinct
knowledge of an uneducated rustic would furnish a very scanty vocabulary.
The few things and modes of action requisite for his bodily conveniences
would alone be individualized; while all the rest of nature would be
expressed by a small number of confused general terms. Secondly, I deny
that the words and combinations of words derived from the objects, with
which the rustic is familiar, whether with distinct or confused knowledge,
can be justly said to form the best part of language. It is more than probable,
that many classes of the brute creation possess discriminating sounds, by
which they can convey to each other notices of such objects as concern their
food, shelter, or safety. Yet we hesitate to call the aggregate of such sounds
a language, otherwise than metaphorically. The best part of human
language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the
mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to
internal acts, to processes and results of imagination, the greater part of
which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man; though in
civilized society, by imitation and passive remembrance of what they hear
from their religious instructors and other superiors, the most uneducated
share in the harvest which they neither sowed, nor reaped. If the history of
the phrases in hourly currency among our peasants were traced, a person
not previously aware of the fact would be surprised at finding so large a
number, which three or four centuries ago were the exclusive property of

the universities and the schools; and, at the commencement of the
Reformation, had been transferred from the school to the pulpit, and thus
gradually passed into common life. The extreme difficulty, and often the
impossibility, of finding words for the simplest moral and intellectual
processes of the languages of uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the
weightiest obstacle to the progress of our most zealous and adroit
missionaries. Yet these tribes are surrounded by the same nature as our
peasants are; but in still more impressive forms; and they are, moreover,
obliged to particularize many more of them. When, therefore, Mr.
Wordsworth adds, “accordingly, such a language”—(meaning, as before,
the language of rustic life purified from provincialism)—“arising out of
repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far
more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it
by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and
their art in proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of
expression;” it may be answered, that the language, which he has in view,
can be attributed to rustics with no greater right, than the style of Hooker or
Bacon to Tom Brown or Sir Roger L’Estrange. Doubtless, if what is
peculiar to each were omitted in each, the result must needs be the same.
Further, that the poet, who uses an illogical diction, or a style fitted to excite
only the low and changeable pleasure of wonder by means of groundless
novelty, substitutes a language of folly and vanity, not for that of the rustic,
but for that of good sense and natural feeling.

Here let me be permitted to remind the reader, that the positions, which I
controvert, are contained in the sentences—“a selection of the real language
of men;”—“the language of these men” (that is, men in low and rustic life)
“has been adopted; I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is
possible, to adopt the very language of men.”

“Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there
neither is, nor can be, any essential difference:” it is against these
exclusively that my opposition is directed.

I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of the word
“real.” Every man’s language varies, according to the extent of his
knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or quickness of his

feelings. Every man’s language has, first, its individualities; secondly, the
common properties of the class to which he belongs; and thirdly, words and
phrases of universal use. The language of Hooker, Bacon, Bishop Taylor,
and Burke differs from the common language of the learned class only by
the superior number and novelty of the thoughts and relations which they
had to convey. The language of Algernon Sidney differs not at all from that,
which every well-educated gentleman would wish to write, and (with due
allowances for the undeliberateness, and less connected train, of thinking
natural and proper to conversation) such as he would wish to talk. Neither
one nor the other differ half as much from the general language of
cultivated society, as the language of Mr. Wordsworth’s homeliest
composition differs from that of a common peasant. For “real” therefore,
we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis. And this, we have proved,
is no more to be found in the phraseology of low and rustic life than in that
of any other class. Omit the peculiarities of each and the result of course
must be common to all. And assuredly the omissions and changes to be
made in the language of rustics, before it could be transferred to any species
of poem, except the drama or other professed imitation, are at least as
numerous and weighty, as would be required in adapting to the same
purpose the ordinary language of tradesmen and manufacturers. Not to
mention, that the language so highly extolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in
every county, nay in every village, according to the accidental character of
the clergyman, the existence or non-existence of schools; or even, perhaps,
as the exciteman, publican, and barber happen to be, or not to be, zealous
politicians, and readers of the weekly newspaper pro bono publico. Anterior
to cultivation the lingua communis of every country, as Dante has well
observed, exists every where in parts, and no where as a whole.

Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addition of the words,
“in a state of excitement.” For the nature of a man’s words, where he is
strongly affected by joy, grief, or anger, must necessarily depend on the
number and quality of the general truths, conceptions and images, and of
the words expressing them, with which his mind had been previously
stored. For the property of passion is not to create; but to set in increased
activity. At least, whatever new connections of thoughts or images, or—
(which is equally, if not more than equally, the appropriate effect of strong
excitement)—whatever generalizations of truth or experience the heat of

passion may produce; yet the terms of their conveyance must have pre-
existed in his former conversations, and are only collected and crowded
together by the unusual stimulation. It is indeed very possible to adopt in a
poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and other blank counters,
which an unfurnished or confused understanding interposes at short
intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject, which is still slipping from
him, and to give him time for recollection; or, in mere aid of vacancy, as in
the scanty companies of a country stage the same player pops backwards
and forwards, in order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the
procession of Macbeth, or Henry VIII. But what assistance to the poet, or
ornament to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture.
Nothing assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more widely from
the apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in which the
passion is greater and of longer endurance than to be exhausted or satisfied
by a single representation of the image or incident exciting it. Such
repetitions I admit to be a beauty of the highest kind; as illustrated by Mr.
Wordsworth himself from the song of Deborah. At her feet he bowed, he
fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he
fell down dead. Judges v. 27.

CHAPTER XVIII
Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially different
from that of prose—Origin and elements of metre—Its necessary
consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the metrical writer in
the choice of his diction.

I conclude, therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; and that, were it not
impracticable, it would still be useless. For the very power of making the
selection implies the previous possession of the language selected. Or
where can the poet have lived? And by what rules could he direct his
choice, which would not have enabled him to select and arrange his words
by the light of his own judgment? We do not adopt the language of a class
by the mere adoption of such words exclusively, as that class would use, or
at least understand; but likewise by following the order, in which the words
of such men are wont to succeed each other. Now this order, in the
intercourse of uneducated men, is distinguished from the diction of their
superiors in knowledge and power, by the greater disjunction and separation
in the component parts of that, whatever it be, which they wish to
communicate. There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that surview,
which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he is to convey,
appertaining to any one point; and by this means so to subordinate and
arrange the different parts according to their relative importance, as to
convey it at once, and as an organized whole.

Now I will take the first stanza, on which I have chanced to open, in the
Lyrical Ballads. It is one the most simple and the least peculiar in its
language.
“In distant countries have I been,
And yet I have not often seen
A healthy man, a man full grown,
Weep in the public roads, alone.
But such a one, on English ground,
And in the broad highway, I met;
Along the broad highway he came,
His cheeks with tears were wet

Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad;
And in his arms a lamb he had.”

The words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks of life; and of
course not less so in the hamlet and cottage than in the shop, manufactory,
college, or palace. But is this the order, in which the rustic would have
placed the words? I am grievously deceived, if the following less compact
mode of commencing the same tale be not a far more faithful copy. “I have
been in a many parts, far and near, and I don’t know that I ever saw before a
man crying by himself in the public road; a grown man I mean, that was
neither sick nor hurt,” etc., etc. But when I turn to the following stanza in
The Thorn:
“At all times of the day and night
This wretched woman thither goes;
And she is known to every star,
And every wind that blows
And there, beside the Thorn, she sits,
When the blue day-light’s in the skies,
And when the whirlwind’s on the hill,
Or frosty air is keen and still,
And to herself she cries,
Oh misery! Oh misery!
Oh woe is me! Oh misery!”

and compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with that which I
can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life, from such a narrator, as is
supposed in the note to the poem; compare it either in the succession of the
images or of the sentences; I am reminded of the sublime prayer and hymn
of praise, which Milton, in opposition to an established liturgy, presents as a
fair specimen of common extemporary devotion, and such as we might
expect to hear from every self-inspired minister of a conventicle! And I
reflect with delight, how little a mere theory, though of his own
workmanship, interferes with the processes of genuine imagination in a man
of true poetic genius, who possesses, as Mr. Wordsworth, if ever man did,
most assuredly does possess,
“The Vision and the Faculty divine.”

One point then alone remains, but that the most important; its examination
having been, indeed, my chief inducement for the preceding inquisition.

“There neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language
of prose and metrical composition.” Such is Mr. Wordsworth’s assertion.
Now prose itself, at least in all argumentative and consecutive works,
differs, and ought to differ, from the language of conversation; even as [66]
reading ought to differ from talking. Unless therefore the difference denied
be that of the mere words, as materials common to all styles of writing, and
not of the style itself in the universally admitted sense of the term, it might
be naturally presumed that there must exist a still greater between the
ordonnance of poetic composition and that of prose, than is expected to
distinguish prose from ordinary conversation.

There are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of literature, of
apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public wonder as new and
startling truths, but which, on examination, have shrunk into tame and
harmless truisms; as the eyes of a cat, seen in the dark, have been mistaken
for flames of fire. But Mr. Wordsworth is among the last men, to whom a
delusion of this kind would be attributed by anyone, who had enjoyed the
slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and character. Where an
objection has been anticipated by such an author as natural, his answer to it
must needs be interpreted in some sense which either is, or has been, or is
capable of being controverted. My object then must be to discover some
other meaning for the term “essential difference” in this place, exclusive of
the indistinction and community of the words themselves. For whether there
ought to exist a class of words in the English, in any degree resembling the
poetic dialect of the Greek and Italian, is a question of very subordinate
importance. The number of such words would be small indeed, in our
language; and even in the Italian and Greek, they consist not so much of
different words, as of slight differences in the forms of declining and
conjugating the same words; forms, doubtless, which having been, at some
period more or less remote, the common grammatic flexions of some tribe
or province, had been accidentally appropriated to poetry by the general
admiration of certain master intellects, the first established lights of
inspiration, to whom that dialect happened to be native.

Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of individuation,
the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing, as that particular thing.
It is equivalent to the idea of a thing, whenever we use the word, idea, with

philosophic precision. Existence, on the other hand, is distinguished from
essence, by the superinduction of reality. Thus we speak of the essence, and
essential properties of a circle; but we do not therefore assert, that any
thing, which really exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too, without any
tautology we contend for the existence of the Supreme Being; that is, for a
reality correspondent to the idea. There is, next, a secondary use of the word
essence, in which it signifies the point or ground of contra-distinction
between two modifications of the same substance or subject. Thus we
should be allowed to say, that the style of architecture of Westminster
Abbey is essentially different from that of St. Paul, even though both had
been built with blocks cut into the same form, and from the same quarry.
Only in this latter sense of the term must it have been denied by Mr.
Wordsworth (for in this sense alone is it affirmed by the general opinion)
that the language of poetry (that is the formal construction, or architecture,
of the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of prose. Now
the burden of the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the supporters of
the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth, in consequence, assigns as the proof
of his position, “that not only the language of a large portion of every good
poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with
reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but
likewise that some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be
found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written. The
truth of this assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages from
almost all the poetical writings, even of Milton himself.” He then quotes
Gray’s sonnet—
“In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire.
These ears, alas! for other notes repine;
A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
To warm their little loves the birds complain:
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more, because I weep in vain.”

and adds the following remark:—“It will easily be perceived, that the only
part of this Sonnet which is of any value, is the lines printed in italics; it is
equally obvious, that, except in the rhyme, and in the use of the single word
`fruitless’ for fruitlessly, which is so far a defect, the language of these lines
does in no respect differ from that of prose.”

An idealist defending his system by the fact, that when asleep we often
believe ourselves awake, was well answered by his plain neighbour, “Ah,
but when awake do we ever believe ourselves asleep?” Things identical
must be convertible. The preceding passage seems to rest on a similar
sophism. For the question is not, whether there may not occur in prose an
order of words, which would be equally proper in a poem; nor whether
there are not beautiful lines and sentences of frequent occurrence in good
poems, which would be equally becoming as well as beautiful in good
prose; for neither the one nor the other has ever been either denied or
doubted by any one. The true question must be, whether there are not
modes of expression, a construction, and an order of sentences, which are in
their fit and natural place in a serious prose composition, but would be
disproportionate and heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and, vice versa,
whether in the language of a serious poem there may not be an arrangement
both of words and sentences, and a use and selection of (what are called)
figures of speech, both as to their kind, their frequency, and their occasions,
which on a subject of equal weight would be vicious and alien in correct
and manly prose. I contend, that in both cases this unfitness of each for the
place of the other frequently will and ought to exist.

And first from the origin of metre. This I would trace to the balance in the
mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the
workings of passion. It might be easily explained likewise in what manner
this salutary antagonism is assisted by the very state, which it counteracts;
and how this balance of antagonists became organized into metre (in the
usual acceptation of that term), by a supervening act of the will and
judgment, consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure. Assuming
these principles, as the data of our argument, we deduce from them two
legitimate conditions, which the critic is entitled to expect in every metrical
work. First, that, as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of
increased excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the

natural language of excitement. Secondly, that as these elements are formed
into metre artificially, by a voluntary act, with the design and for the
purpose of blending delight with emotion, so the traces of present volition
should throughout the metrical language be proportionately discernible.
Now these two conditions must be reconciled and co- present. There must
be not only a partnership, but a union; an interpenetration of passion and of
will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose. Again, this union
can be manifested only in a frequency of forms and figures of speech,
(originally the offspring of passion, but now the adopted children of power),
greater than would be desired or endured, where the emotion is not
voluntarily encouraged and kept up for the sake of that pleasure, which such
emotion, so tempered and mastered by the will, is found capable of
communicating. It not only dictates, but of itself tends to produce a more
frequent employment of picturesque and vivifying language, than would be
natural in any other case, in which there did not exist, as there does in the
present, a previous and well understood, though tacit, compact between the
poet and his reader, that the latter is entitled to expect, and the former bound
to supply this species and degree of pleasurable excitement. We may in
some measure apply to this union the answer of Polixenes, in the Winter’s
Tale, to Perdita’s neglect of the streaked gilliflowers, because she had heard
it said,
“There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares
With great creating nature.
POL. Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; so, o’er that art,
Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art,
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock;
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art,
Which does mend nature,—change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.”

Secondly, I argue from the effects of metre. As far as metre acts in and for
itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general
feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the continued
excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still
gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one

moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their
aggregate influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during
animated conversation, they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed.
Where, therefore, correspondent food and appropriate matter are not
provided for the attention and feelings thus roused there must needs be a
disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a
stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.

The discussion on the powers of metre in the preface is highly ingenious
and touches at all points on truth. But I cannot find any statement of its
powers considered abstractly and separately. On the contrary Mr.
Wordsworth seems always to estimate metre by the powers, which it exerts
during, (and, as I think, in consequence of) its combination with other
elements of poetry. Thus the previous difficulty is left unanswered, what the
elements are, with which it must be combined, in order to produce its own
effects to any pleasurable purpose. Double and tri-syllable rhymes, indeed,
form a lower species of wit, and, attended to exclusively for their own sake,
may become a source of momentary amusement; as in poor Smart’s distich
to the Welsh Squire who had promised him a hare:
“Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader!
Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallow’d her?”

But for any poetic purposes, metre resembles, (if the aptness of the simile
may excuse its meanness), yeast, worthless or disagreeable by itself, but
giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is proportionally
combined.

The reference to THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD by no means satisfies
my judgment. We all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the
feelings of our childhood. This ballad, therefore, we read under such
recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to us
poems, which Mr. Wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the
opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament. Before the invention of
printing, and in a still greater degree, before the introduction of writing,
metre, especially alliterative metre, (whether alliterative at the beginning of
the words, as in PIERCE PLOUMAN, or at the end, as in rhymes)
possessed an independent value as assisting the recollection, and

consequently the preservation, of any series of truths or incidents. But I am
not convinced by the collation of facts, that THE CHILDREN IN THE
WOOD owes either its preservation, or its popularity, to its metrical form.
Mr. Marshal’s repository affords a number of tales in prose inferior in
pathos and general merit, some of as old a date, and many as widely
popular. TOM HICKATHRIFT, JACK THE GIANT-KILLER, GOODY
TWO-SHOES, and LITTLE RED RIDING-HOOD are formidable rivals.
And that they have continued in prose, cannot be fairly explained by the
assumption, that the comparative meanness of their thoughts and images
precluded even the humblest forms of metre. The scene of GOODY TWO-
SHOES in the church is perfectly susceptible of metrical narration; and,
among the thaumata thaumastotata even of the present age, I do not
recollect a more astonishing image than that of the “whole rookery, that
flew out of the giant’s beard,” scared by the tremendous voice, with which
this monster answered the challenge of the heroic TOM HICKATHRIFT!

If from these we turn to compositions universally, and independently of all
early associations, beloved and admired; would the MARIA, THE MONK,
or THE POOR MAN’S ASS of Sterne, be read with more delight, or have a
better chance of immortality, had they without any change in the diction
been composed in rhyme, than in their present state? If I am not grossly
mistaken, the general reply would be in the negative. Nay, I will confess,
that, in Mr. Wordsworth’s own volumes, the ANECDOTE FOR FATHERS,
SIMON LEE, ALICE FELL, BEGGARS, and THE SAILOR’S MOTHER,
notwithstanding the beauties which are to be found in each of them where
the poet interposes the music of his own thoughts, would have been more
delightful to me in prose, told and managed, as by Mr. Wordsworth they
would have been, in a moral essay or pedestrian tour.

Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore excites
the question: Why is the attention to be thus stimulated? Now the question
cannot be answered by the pleasure of the metre itself; for this we have
shown to be conditional, and dependent on the appropriateness of the
thoughts and expressions, to which the metrical form is superadded. Neither
can I conceive any other answer that can be rationally given, short of this: I
write in metre, because I am about to use a language different from that of
prose. Besides, where the language is not such, how interesting soever the

reflections are, that are capable of being drawn by a philosophic mind from
the thoughts or incidents of the poem, the metre itself must often become
feeble. Take the last three stanzas of THE SAILOR’S MOTHER, for
instance. If I could for a moment abstract from the effect produced on the
author’s feelings, as a man, by the incident at the time of its real occurrence,
I would dare appeal to his own judgment, whether in the metre itself he
found a sufficient reason for their being written metrically?
And, thus continuing, she said,
“I had a Son, who many a day
Sailed on the seas; but he is dead;
In Denmark he was cast away;
And I have travelled far as Hull to see
What clothes he might have left, or other property.

The Bird and Cage they both were his
’Twas my Son’s Bird; and neat and trim
He kept it: many voyages
This Singing-bird hath gone with him;
When last he sailed he left the Bird behind;
As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind.

He to a Fellow-lodger’s care
Had left it, to be watched and fed,
Till he came back again; and there
I found it when my Son was dead;
And now, God help me for my little wit!
I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it.”

If disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make the
rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an
equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes at
all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would further ask whether, but
for that visionary state, into which the figure of the woman and the
susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet’s imagination,—(a
state, which spreads its influence and colouring over all, that co-exists with
the exciting cause, and in which
“The simplest, and the most familiar things
Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them,”) [67]

I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall in
these verses from the preceding stanza?

“The ancient spirit is not dead;
Old times, thought I, are breathing there;
Proud was I that my country bred
Such strength, a dignity so fair:
She begged an alms, like one in poor estate;
I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate.”

It must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that those stanzas
furnish the only fair instance that I have been able to discover in all Mr.
Wordsworth’s writings, of an actual adoption, or true imitation, of the real
and very language of low and rustic life, freed from provincialisms.

Thirdly, I deduce the position from all the causes elsewhere assigned, which
render metre the proper form of poetry, and poetry imperfect and defective
without metre. Metre, therefore, having been connected with poetry most
often and by a peculiar fitness, whatever else is combined with metre must,
though it be not itself essentially poetic, have nevertheless some property in
common with poetry, as an intermedium of affinity, a sort, (if I may dare
borrow a well-known phrase from technical chemistry), of mordaunt
between it and the super-added metre. Now poetry, Mr. Wordsworth truly
affirms, does always imply passion: which word must be here understood in
its most general sense, as an excited state of the feelings and faculties. And
as every passion has its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its
characteristic modes of expression. But where there exists that degree of
genius and talent which entitles a writer to aim at the honours of a poet, the
very act of poetic composition itself is, and is allowed to imply and to
produce, an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and
demands a correspondent difference of language, as truly, though not
perhaps in as marked a degree, as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or
jealousy. The vividness of the descriptions or declamations in Donne or
Dryden, is as much and as often derived from the force and fervour of the
describer, as from the reflections, forms or incidents, which constitute their
subject and materials. The wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of their
motion. To what extent, and under what modifications, this may be admitted
to act, I shall attempt to define in an after remark on Mr. Wordsworth’s
reply to this objection, or rather on his objection to this reply, as already
anticipated in his preface.

Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the same argument in
a more general form, I adduce the high spiritual instinct of the human being
impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establishing
the principle that all the parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to
the more important and essential parts. This and the preceding arguments
may be strengthened by the reflection, that the composition of a poem is
among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists
either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically different, or of
the different throughout a base radically the same.

Lastly, I appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all countries and in all
ages, as authorizing the opinion, (deduced from all the foregoing,) that in
every import of the word essential, which would not here involve a mere
truism, there may be, is, and ought to be an essential difference between the
language of prose and of metrical composition.

In Mr. Wordsworth’s criticism of Gray’s Sonnet, the reader’s sympathy with
his praise or blame of the different parts is taken for granted rather perhaps
too easily. He has not, at least, attempted to win or compel it by
argumentative analysis. In my conception at least, the lines rejected as of no
value do, with the exception of the two first, differ as much and as little
from the language of common life, as those which he has printed in italics
as possessing genuine excellence. Of the five lines thus honourably
distinguished, two of them differ from prose even more widely, than the
lines which either precede or follow, in the position of the words.
“A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.”

But were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of which no man
ever doubted?—videlicet, that there are sentences, which would be equally
in their place both in verse and prose. Assuredly it does not prove the point,
which alone requires proof; namely, that there are not passages, which
would suit the one and not suit the other. The first line of this sonnet is
distinguished from the ordinary language of men by the epithet to morning.
For we will set aside, at present, the consideration, that the particular word
“smiling” is hackneyed, and, as it involves a sort of personification, not

quite congruous with the common and material attribute of “shining.” And,
doubtless, this adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional
description, where no particular attention is demanded for the quality of the
thing, would be noticed as giving a poetic cast to a man’s conversation.
Should the sportsman exclaim, “Come boys! the rosy morning calls you
up:” he will be supposed to have some song in his head. But no one
suspects this, when he says, “A wet morning shall not confine us to our
beds.” This then is either a defect in poetry, or it is not. Whoever should
decide in the affirmative, I would request him to re-peruse any one poem, of
any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from Aeschylus to
Shakespeare; and to strike out, (in thought I mean), every instance of this
kind. If the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him; or if he
continued to deem the work improved by their total omission; he must
advance reasons of no ordinary strength and evidence, reasons grounded in
the essence of human nature. Otherwise, I should not hesitate to consider
him as a man not so much proof against all authority, as dead to it.

The second line,
“And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;—”

has indeed almost as many faults as words. But then it is a bad line, not
because the language is distinct from that of prose; but because it conveys
incongruous images; because it confounds the cause and the effect; the real
thing with the personified representative of the thing; in short, because it
differs from the language of good sense! That the “Phoebus” is hackneyed,
and a school-boy image, is an accidental fault, dependent on the age in
which the author wrote, and not deduced from the nature of the thing. That
it is part of an exploded mythology, is an objection more deeply grounded.
Yet when the torch of ancient learning was re-kindled, so cheering were its
beams, that our eldest poets, cut off by Christianity from all accredited
machinery, and deprived of all acknowledged guardians and symbols of the
great objects of nature, were naturally induced to adopt, as a poetic
language, those fabulous personages, those forms of the [68]supernatural in
nature, which had given them such dear delight in the poems of their great
masters. Nay, even at this day what scholar of genial taste will not so far
sympathize with them, as to read with pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or
Spenser, what he would perhaps condemn as puerile in a modern poet?

I remember no poet, whose writings would safelier stand the test of Mr.
Wordsworth’s theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say, that the
style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from prose, and the
language of ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and that the stanzas are blots
in THE FAERY QUEEN?
“By this the northern wagoner had set
His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre,
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firme is fixt and sendeth light from farre
To all that in the wild deep wandering arre
And chearfull chaunticlere with his note shrill
Had warned once that Phoebus’ fiery carre
In hast was climbing up the easterne hill,
Full envious that night so long his roome did fill.”

“At last the golden orientall gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
And Phoebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate,
Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
And hurl’d his glist’ring beams through gloomy ayre:
Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway
He started up, and did him selfe prepayre
In sun-bright armes and battailous array;
For with that pagan proud he combat will that day.”

On the contrary to how many passages, both in hymn books and in blank
verse poems, could I, (were it not invidious), direct the reader’s attention,
the style of which is most unpoetic, because, and only because, it is the
style of prose? He will not suppose me capable of having in my mind such
verses, as
“I put my hat upon my head
And walk’d into the Strand;
And there I met another man,
Whose hat was in his hand.”

To such specimens it would indeed be a fair and full reply, that these lines
are not bad, because they are unpoetic; but because they are empty of all
sense and feeling; and that it were an idle attempt to prove that “an ape is
not a Newton, when it is self-evident that he is not a man.” But the sense
shall be good and weighty, the language correct and dignified, the subject
interesting and treated with feeling; and yet the style shall, notwithstanding
all these merits, be justly blamable as prosaic, and solely because the words

and the order of the words would find their appropriate place in prose, but
are not suitable to metrical composition. The CIVIL WARS of Daniel is an
instructive, and even interesting work; but take the following stanzas, (and
from the hundred instances which abound I might probably have selected
others far more striking):
“And to the end we may with better ease
Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to shew
What were the times foregoing near to these,
That these we may with better profit know.
Tell how the world fell into this disease;
And how so great distemperature did grow;
So shall we see with what degrees it came;
How things at full do soon wax out of frame.”

“Ten kings had from the Norman Conqu’ror reign’d
With intermix’d and variable fate,
When England to her greatest height attain’d
Of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state;
After it had with much ado sustain’d
The violence of princes, with debate
For titles and the often mutinies
Of nobles for their ancient liberties.”

“For first, the Norman, conqu’ring all by might,
By might was forc’d to keep what he had got;
Mixing our customs and the form of right
With foreign constitutions, he had brought;
Mast’ring the mighty, humbling the poorer wight,
By all severest means that could be wrought;
And, making the succession doubtful, rent
His new-got state, and left it turbulent.”

Will it be contended on the one side, that these lines are mean and
senseless? Or on the other, that they are not prosaic, and for that reason
unpoetic? This poet’s well-merited epithet is that of the “well-languaged
Daniel;” but likewise, and by the consent of his contemporaries no less than
of all succeeding critics, “the prosaic Daniel.” Yet those, who thus designate
this wise and amiable writer from the frequent incorrespondency of his
diction to his metre in the majority of his compositions, not only deem them
valuable and interesting on other accounts; but willingly admit, that there
are to be found throughout his poems, and especially in his EPISTLES and
in his HYMEN’S TRIUMPH, many and exquisite specimens of that style
which, as the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both. A fine

and almost faultless extract, eminent as for other beauties, so for its
perfection in this species of diction, may be seen in Lamb’s DRAMATIC
SPECIMENS, a work of various interest from the nature of the selections
themselves, (all from the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries),—and
deriving a high additional value from the notes, which are full of just and
original criticism, expressed with all the freshness of originality.

Among the possible effects of practical adherence to a theory, that aims to
identify the style of prose and verse,—(if it does not indeed claim for the
latter a yet nearer resemblance to the average style of men in the viva voce
intercourse of real life)—we might anticipate the following as not the least
likely to occur. It will happen, as I have indeed before observed, that the
metre itself, the sole acknowledged difference, will occasionally become
metre to the eye only. The existence of prosaisms, and that they detract
from the merit of a poem, must at length be conceded, when a number of
successive lines can be rendered, even to the most delicate ear,
unrecognizable as verse, or as having even been intended for verse, by
simply transcribing them as prose; when if the poem be in blank verse, this
can be effected without any alteration, or at most by merely restoring one or
two words to their proper places, from which they have been transplanted
[69] for no assignable cause or reason but that of the author’s convenience;
but if it be in rhyme, by the mere exchange of the final word of each line for
some other of the same meaning, equally appropriate, dignified and
euphonic.

The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark “that metre
paves the way to other distinctions,” is contained in the following words.
“The distinction of rhyme and metre is regular and uniform, and not, like
that produced by (what is usually called) poetic diction, arbitrary, and
subject to infinite caprices, upon which no calculation whatever can be
made. In the one case the reader is utterly at the mercy of the poet
respecting what imagery or diction he may choose to connect with the
passion.” But is this a poet, of whom a poet is speaking? No surely! rather
of a fool or madman: or at best of a vain or ignorant phantast! And might
not brains so wild and so deficient make just the same havoc with rhymes
and metres, as they are supposed to effect with modes and figures of
speech? How is the reader at the mercy of such men? If he continue to read

their nonsense, is it not his own fault? The ultimate end of criticism is much
more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass
judgment on what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible that
the two could be separated. But if it be asked, by what principles the poet is
to regulate his own style, if he do not adhere closely to the sort and order of
words which he hears in the market, wake, high-road, or plough-field? I
reply; by principles, the ignorance or neglect of which would convict him of
being no poet, but a silly or presumptuous usurper of the name. By the
principles of grammar, logic, psychology. In one word by such a knowledge
of the facts, material and spiritual, that most appertain to his art, as, if it
have been governed and applied by good sense, and rendered instinctive by
habit, becomes the representative and reward of our past conscious
reasonings, insights, and conclusions, and acquires the name of Taste. By
what rule that does not leave the reader at the poet’s mercy, and the poet at
his own, is the latter to distinguish between the language suitable to
suppressed, and the language, which is characteristic of indulged, anger? Or
between that of rage and that of jealousy? Is it obtained by wandering about
in search of angry or jealous people in uncultivated society, in order to copy
their words? Or not far rather by the power of imagination proceeding upon
the all in each of human nature? By meditation, rather than by observation?
And by the latter in consequence only of the former? As eyes, for which the
former has pre-determined their field of vision, and to which, as to its
organ, it communicates a microscopic power? There is not, I firmly believe,
a man now living, who has, from his own inward experience, a clearer
intuition, than Mr. Wordsworth himself, that the last mentioned are the true
sources of genial discrimination. Through the same process and by the same
creative agency will the poet distinguish the degree and kind of the
excitement produced by the very act of poetic composition. As intuitively
will he know, what differences of style it at once inspires and justifies; what
intermixture of conscious volition is natural to that state; and in what
instances such figures and colours of speech degenerate into mere creatures
of an arbitrary purpose, cold technical artifices of ornament or connection.
For, even as truth is its own light and evidence, discovering at once itself
and falsehood, so is it the prerogative of poetic genius to distinguish by
parental instinct its proper offspring from the changelings, which the
gnomes of vanity or the fairies of fashion may have laid in its cradle or
called by its names. Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease

to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be morphosis, not
poiaesis. The rules of the Imagination are themselves the very powers of
growth and production. The words to which they are reducible, present only
the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of
the superficial form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach
feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths. We find no
difficulty in admitting as excellent, and the legitimate language of poetic
fervour self-impassioned, Donne’s apostrophe to the Sun in the second
stanza of his PROGRESS OF THE SOUL.
“Thee, eye of heaven! this great Soul envies not;
By thy male force is all, we have, begot.
In the first East thou now beginn’st to shine,
Suck’st early balm and island spices there,
And wilt anon in thy loose-rein’d career
At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,
And see at night this western world of mine:
Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,
Who before thee one day began to be,
And, thy frail light being quench’d, shall long, long outlive
thee.”

Or the next stanza but one:
“Great Destiny, the commissary of God,
That hast mark’d out a path and period
For every thing! Who, where we offspring took,
Our ways and ends see’st at one instant: thou
Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow
Ne’er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,
And shew my story in thy eternal book,” etc.

As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of unaffected
warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudopoesy, or the startling
hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which bursts on the unprepared
reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to abstract terms. Such are the Odes
to jealousy, to Hope, to Oblivion, and the like, in Dodsley’s collection and
the magazines of that day, which seldom fail to remind me of an Oxford
copy of verses on the two SUTTONS, commencing with
“Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!”

It is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even poets of true,
though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mistaken theory deluded both
themselves and others in the opposite extreme. I once read to a company of
sensible and well-educated women the introductory period of Cowley’s
preface to his “Pindaric Odes,” written in imitation of the style and manner
of the odes of Pindar. “If,” (says Cowley), “a man should undertake to
translate Pindar, word for word, it would be thought that one madman had
translated another as may appear, when he, that understands not the
original, reads the verbal traduction of him into Latin prose, than which
nothing seems more raving.” I then proceeded with his own free version of
the second Olympic, composed for the charitable purpose of rationalizing
the Theban Eagle.
“Queen of all harmonious things,
Dancing words and speaking strings,
What god, what hero, wilt thou sing?
What happy man to equal glories bring?
Begin, begin thy noble choice,
And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice.
Pisa does to Jove belong,
Jove and Pisa claim thy song.
The fair first-fruits of war, th’ Olympic games,
Alcides, offer’d up to Jove;
Alcides, too, thy strings may move,
But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove?
Join Theron boldly to their sacred names;
Theron the next honour claims;
Theron to no man gives place,
Is first in Pisa’s and in Virtue’s race;
Theron there, and he alone,
Ev’n his own swift forefathers has outgone.”

One of the company exclaimed, with the full assent of the rest, that if the
original were madder than this, it must be incurably mad. I then translated
the ode from the Greek, and as nearly as possible, word for word; and the
impression was, that in the general movement of the periods, in the form of
the connections and transitions, and in the sober majesty of lofty sense, it
appeared to them to approach more nearly, than any other poetry they had
heard, to the style of our Bible, in the prophetic books. The first strophe will
suffice as a specimen:
“Ye harp-controlling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps!
What God? what Hero?

What Man shall we celebrate?
Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,
But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish,
The first-fruits of the spoils of war.
But Theron for the four-horsed car,
That bore victory to him,
It behoves us now to voice aloud:
The Just, the Hospitable,
The Bulwark of Agrigentum,
Of renowned fathers
The Flower, even him
Who preserves his native city erect and safe.”

But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation from
the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be precluded,
but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and verse, save that of
metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insight into the constitution of
the human mind, would be amply sufficient to prove, that such language
and such combinations are the native product neither of the fancy nor of the
imagination; that their operation consists in the excitement of surprise by
the juxta-position and apparent reconciliation of widely different or
incompatible things. As when, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the
image of a voice. Surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that this
compulsory juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation of impressive
or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any sympathy with the
modifying powers with which the genius of the poet had united and
inspirited all the objects of his thought; that it is therefore a species of wit, a
pure work of the will, and implies a leisure and self-possession both of
thought and of feeling, incompatible with the steady fervour of a mind
possessed and filled with the grandeur of its subject. To sum up the whole
in one sentence. When a poem, or a part of a poem, shall be adduced, which
is evidently vicious in the figures and centexture of its style, yet for the
condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it differs
from the style in which men actually converse, then, and not till then, can I
hold this theory to be either plausible, or practicable, or capable of
furnishing either rule, guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily
and more safely, as well as more naturally, have been deduced in the
author’s own mind from considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and
nature of things, confirmed by the authority of works, whose fame is not of
one country nor of one age.

CHAPTER XIX
Continuation—Concerning the real object which, it is probable, Mr.
Wordsworth had before him in his critical preface—Elucidation and
application of this.

It might appear from some passages in the former part of Mr. Wordsworth’s
preface, that he meant to confine his theory of style, and the necessity of a
close accordance with the actual language of men, to those particular
subjects from low and rustic life, which by way of experiment he had
purposed to naturalize as a new species in our English poetry. But from the
train of argument that follows; from the reference to Milton; and from the
spirit of his critique on Gray’s sonnet; those sentences appear to have been
rather courtesies of modesty, than actual limitations of his system. Yet so
groundless does this system appear on a close examination; and so strange
and overwhelming [70] in its consequences, that I cannot, and I do not,
believe that the poet did ever himself adopt it in the unqualified sense, in
which his expressions have been understood by others, and which, indeed,
according to all the common laws of interpretation they seem to bear. What
then did he mean? I apprehend, that in the clear perception, not
unaccompanied with disgust or contempt, of the gaudy affectations of a
style which passed current with too many for poetic diction, (though in truth
it had as little pretensions to poetry, as to logic or common sense,) he
narrowed his view for the time; and feeling a justifiable preference for the
language of nature and of good sense, even in its humblest and least
ornamented forms, he suffered himself to express, in terms at once too large
and too exclusive, his predilection for a style the most remote possible from
the false and showy splendour which he wished to explode. It is possible,
that this predilection, at first merely comparative, deviated for a time into
direct partiality. But the real object which he had in view, was, I doubt not,
a species of excellence which had been long before most happily
characterized by the judicious and amiable Garve, whose works are so
justly beloved and esteemed by the Germans, in his remarks on Gellert,
from which the following is literally translated. “The talent, that is required

in order to make, excellent verses, is perhaps greater than the philosopher is
ready to admit, or would find it in his power to acquire: the talent to seek
only the apt expression of the thought, and yet to find at the same time with
it the rhyme and the metre. Gellert possessed this happy gift, if ever any one
of our poets possessed it; and nothing perhaps contributed more to the great
and universal impression which his fables made on their first publication, or
conduces more to their continued popularity. It was a strange and curious
phaenomenon, and such as in Germany had been previously unheard of, to
read verses in which everything was expressed just as one would wish to
talk, and yet all dignified, attractive, and interesting; and all at the same
time perfectly correct as to the measure of the syllables and the rhyme. It is
certain, that poetry when it has attained this excellence makes a far greater
impression than prose. So much so indeed, that even the gratification which
the very rhymes afford, becomes then no longer a contemptible or trifling
gratification.” [71]

However novel this phaenomenon may have been in Germany at the time of
Gellert, it is by no means new, nor yet of recent existence in our language.
Spite of the licentiousness with which Spenser occasionally compels the
orthography of his words into a subservience to his rhymes, the whole
FAIRY QUEEN is an almost continued instance of this beauty. Waller’s
song GO, LOVELY ROSE, is doubtless familiar to most of my readers; but
if I had happened to have had by me the Poems of Cotton, more but far less
deservedly celebrated as the author of the VIRGIL TRAVESTIED, I should
have indulged myself, and I think have gratified many, who are not
acquainted with his serious works, by selecting some admirable specimens
of this style. There are not a few poems in that volume, replete with every
excellence of thought, image, and passion, which we expect or desire in the
poetry of the milder muse; and yet so worded, that the reader sees no one
reason either in the selection or the order of the words, why he might not
have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot
conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise
without loss or injury to his meaning.

But in truth our language is, and from the first dawn of poetry ever has
been, particularly rich in compositions distinguished by this excellence. The
final e, which is now mute, in Chaucer’s age was either sounded or dropt

indifferently. We ourselves still use either “beloved” or “belov’d” according
as the rhyme, or measure, or the purpose of more or less solemnity may
require. Let the reader then only adopt the pronunciation of the poet and of
the court, at which he lived, both with respect to the final e and to the
accentuation of the last syllable; I would then venture to ask, what even in
the colloquial language of elegant and unaffected women, (who are the
peculiar mistresses of “pure English and undefiled,”) what could we hear
more natural, or seemingly more unstudied, than the following stanzas from
Chaucer’s TROILUS AND CRESEIDE.
“And after this forth to the gate he wente,
Ther as Creseide out rode a ful gode pass,
And up and doun there made he many’ a wente,
And to himselfe ful oft he said, Alas!
Fro hennis rode my blisse and my solas
As woulde blisful God now for his joie,
I might her sene agen come in to Troie!
And to the yondir hil I gan her Bide,
Alas! and there I toke of her my leve
And yond I saw her to her fathir ride;
For sorow of whiche mine hert shall to-cleve;
And hithir home I came whan it was eve,
And here I dwel, out-cast from ally joie,
And steal, til I maie sene her efte in Troie.
“And of himselfe imaginid he ofte
To ben defaitid, pale and woxin lesse
Than he was wonte, and that men saidin softe,
What may it be? who can the sothe gesse,
Why Troilus hath al this hevinesse?
And al this n’ as but his melancolie,
That he had of himselfe suche fantasie.
Anothir time imaginin he would
That every wight, that past him by the wey,
Had of him routhe, and that thei saien should,
I am right sory, Troilus wol dey!
And thus he drove a daie yet forth or twey,
As ye have herde: suche life gan he to lede
As he that stode betwixin hope and drede:
For which him likid in his songis shewe
Th’ encheson of his wo as he best might,
And made a songe of words but a fewe,
Somwhat his woful herte for to light,
And whan he was from every mann’is sight
With softe voice he of his lady dere,
That absent was, gan sing as ye may here:

******

This song, when he thus songin had, ful Bone
He fil agen into his sighis olde
And every night, as was his wonte to done;
He stode the bright moone to beholde
And all his sorowe to the moone he tolde,
And said: I wis, whan thou art hornid newe,
I shall be glad, if al the world be trewe!”

Another exquisite master of this species of style, where the scholar and the
poet supplies the material, but the perfect well-bred gentleman the
expressions and the arrangement, is George Herbert. As from the nature of
the subject, and the too frequent quaintness of the thoughts, his TEMPLE;
or SACRED POEMS AND PRIVATE EJACULATIONS are Comparatively
but little known, I shall extract two poems. The first is a sonnet, equally
admirable for the weight, number, and expression of the thoughts, and for
the simple dignity of the language. Unless, indeed, a fastidious taste should
object to the latter half of the sixth line. The second is a poem of greater
length, which I have chosen not only for the present purpose, but likewise
as a striking example and illustration of an assertion hazarded in a former
page of these sketches namely, that the characteristic fault of our elder poets
is the reverse of that, which distinguishes too many of our more recent
versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct
and natural language; the other in the most fantastic language conveying the
most trivial thoughts. The latter is a riddle of words; the former an enigma
of thoughts. The one reminds me of an odd passage in Drayton’s IDEAS
As other men, so I myself do muse,
Why in this sort I wrest invention so;
And why these giddy metaphors I use,
Leaving the path the greater part do go;
I will resolve you: I am lunatic! [72]

The other recalls a still odder passage in THE SYNAGOGUE: or THE
SHADOW OF THE TEMPLE, a connected series of poems in imitation of
Herbert’s TEMPLE, and, in some editions, annexed to it.
O how my mind
Is gravell’d!
Not a thought,
That I can find,
But’s ravell’d
All to nought!

Short ends of threds,
And narrow shreds
Of lists,
Knots, snarled ruffs,
Loose broken tufts
Of twists,
Are my torn meditations ragged clothing,
Which, wound and woven, shape a suit for nothing:
One while I think, and then I am in pain
To think how to unthink that thought again.

Immediately after these burlesque passages I cannot proceed to the extracts
promised, without changing the ludicrous tone of feeling by the
interposition of the three following stanzas of Herbert’s.
VIRTUE.

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box, where sweets compacted lie
My music shews, ye have your closes,
And all must die.

THE BOSOM SIN:
A SONNET BY GEORGE HERBERT.

Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round,
Parents first season us; then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers,
Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises;
Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
The sound of Glory ringing in our ears
Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.

LOVE UNKNOWN.

Dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad
And in my faintings, I presume, your love
Will more comply than help. A Lord I had,
And have, of whom some grounds, which may improve,
I hold for two lives, and both lives in me.
To him I brought a dish of fruit one day,
And in the middle placed my heart. But he
(I sigh to say)
Look’d on a servant, who did know his eye,
Better than you know me, or (which is one)
Than I myself. The servant instantly,
Quitting the fruit, seiz’d on my heart alone,
And threw it in a font, wherein did fall
A stream of blood, which issued from the side
Of a great rock: I well remember all,
And have good cause: there it was dipt and dyed,
And wash’d, and wrung: the very wringing yet
Enforceth tears. “Your heart was foul, I fear.”
Indeed ’tis true. I did and do commit
Many a fault, more than my lease will bear;
Yet still ask’d pardon, and was not denied.
But you shall hear. After my heart was well,
And clean and fair, as I one eventide
(I sigh to tell)
Walk’d by myself abroad, I saw a large
And spacious furnace flaming, and thereon
A boiling caldron, round about whose verge
Was in great letters set AFFLICTION.
The greatness shew’d the owner. So I went
To fetch a sacrifice out of my fold,
Thinking with that, which I did thus present,
To warm his love, which, I did fear, grew cold.
But as my heart did tender it, the man
Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand,
And threw my heart into the scalding pan;
My heart that brought it (do you understand?)
The offerer’s heart. “Your heart was hard, I fear.”
Indeed ’tis true. I found a callous matter
Began to spread and to expatiate there:
But with a richer drug than scalding water
I bath’d it often, ev’n with holy blood,
Which at a board, while many drank bare wine,
A friend did steal into my cup for good,
Ev’n taken inwardly, and most divine
To supple hardnesses. But at the length
Out of the caldron getting, soon I fled
Unto my house, where to repair the strength
Which I had lost, I hasted to my bed:

But when I thought to sleep out all these faults,
(I sigh to speak)
I found that some had stuff’d the bed with thoughts,
I would say thorns. Dear, could my heart not break,
When with my pleasures ev’n my rest was gone?
Full well I understood who had been there:
For I had given the key to none but one:
It must be he. “Your heart was dull, I fear.”
Indeed a slack and sleepy state of mind
Did oft possess me; so that when I pray’d,
Though my lips went, my heart did stay behind.
But all my scores were by another paid,
Who took my guilt upon him. “Truly, Friend,
“For aught I hear, your Master shews to you
“More favour than you wot of. Mark the end.
“The font did only what was old renew
“The caldron suppled what was grown too hard:
“The thorns did quicken what was grown too dull:
“All did but strive to mend what you had marr’d.
“Wherefore be cheer’d, and praise him to the full
“Each day, each hour, each moment of the week
“Who fain would have you be new, tender quick.”

CHAPTER XX
The former subject continued—The neutral style, or that common to Prose
and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from Chaucer, Herbert, and others.

I have no fear in declaring my conviction, that the excellence defined and
exemplified in the preceding chapter is not the characteristic excellence of
Mr. Wordsworth’s style; because I can add with equal sincerity, that it is
precluded by higher powers. The praise of uniform adherence to genuine,
logical English is undoubtedly his; nay, laying the main emphasis on the
word uniform, I will dare add that, of all contemporary poets, it is his alone.
For, in a less absolute sense of the word, I should certainly include Mr.
Bowies, Lord Byron, and, as to all his later writings, Mr. Southey, the
exceptions in their works being so few and unimportant. But of the specific
excellence described in the quotation from Garve, I appear to find more,
and more undoubted specimens in the works of others; for instance, among
the minor poems of Mr. Thomas Moore, and of our illustrious Laureate. To
me it will always remain a singular and noticeable fact; that a theory, which
would establish this lingua communis, not only as the best, but as the only
commendable style, should have proceeded from a poet, whose diction,
next to that of Shakespeare and Milton, appears to me of all others the most
individualized and characteristic. And let it be remembered too, that I am
now interpreting the controverted passages of Mr. Wordsworth’s critical
preface by the purpose and object, which he may be supposed to have
intended, rather than by the sense which the words themselves must convey,
if they are taken without this allowance.

A person of any taste, who had but studied three or four of Shakespeare’s
principal plays, would without the name affixed scarcely fail to recognise as
Shakespeare’s a quotation from any other play, though but of a few lines. A
similar peculiarity, though in a less degree, attends Mr. Wordsworth’s style,
whenever he speaks in his own person; or whenever, though under a feigned
name, it is clear that he himself is still speaking, as in the different dramatis
personae of THE RECLUSE. Even in the other poems, in which he
purposes to be most dramatic, there are few in which it does not

occasionally burst forth. The reader might often address the poet in his own
words with reference to the persons introduced:
“It seems, as I retrace the ballad line by line
That but half of it is theirs, and the better half is thine.”

Who, having been previously acquainted with any considerable portion of
Mr. Wordsworth’s publications, and having studied them with a full feeling
of the author’s genius, would not at once claim as Wordsworthian the little
poem on the rainbow?
“The Child is father of the Man, etc.”

Or in the LUCY GRAY?
“No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor;
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door.”

Or in the IDLE SHEPHERD-BOYS?
“Along the river’s stony marge
The sand-lark chants a joyous song;
The thrush is busy in the wood,
And carols loud and strong.
A thousand lambs are on the rocks,
All newly born! both earth and sky
Keep jubilee, and more than all,
Those boys with their green coronal;
They never hear the cry,
That plaintive cry! which up the hill
Comes from the depth of Dungeon-Ghyll.”

Need I mention the exquisite description of the Sea-Loch in THE BLIND
HIGHLAND BOY. Who but a poet tells a tale in such language to the little
ones by the fire-side as—
“Yet had he many a restless dream;
Both when he heard the eagle’s scream,
And when he heard the torrents roar,
And heard the water beat the shore
Near where their cottage stood.

Beside a lake their cottage stood,

Not small like our’s, a peaceful flood;
But one of mighty size, and strange;
That, rough or smooth, is full of change,
And stirring in its bed.

For to this lake, by night and day,
The great Sea-water finds its way
Through long, long windings of the hills,
And drinks up all the pretty rills
And rivers large and strong:

Then hurries back the road it came
Returns on errand still the same;
This did it when the earth was new;
And this for evermore will do,
As long as earth shall last.
And, with the coming of the tide,
Come boats and ships that sweetly ride,
Between the woods and lofty rocks;
And to the shepherds with their flocks
Bring tales of distant lands.”

I might quote almost the whole of his RUTH, but take the following
stanzas:
But, as you have before been told,
This Stripling, sportive, gay, and bold,
And, with his dancing crest,
So beautiful, through savage lands
Had roamed about with vagrant bands
Of Indians in the West.

The wind, the tempest roaring high,
The tumult of a tropic sky,
Might well be dangerous food
For him, a Youth to whom was given
So much of earth—so much of heaven,
And such impetuous blood.

Whatever in those climes he found
Irregular in sight or sound
Did to his mind impart
A kindred impulse, seemed allied
To his own powers, and justified
The workings of his heart.

Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought,
The beauteous forms of nature wrought,
Fair trees and lovely flowers;

The breezes their own languor lent;
The stars had feelings, which they sent
Into those magic bowers.

Yet in his worst pursuits, I ween,
That sometimes there did intervene
Pure hopes of high intent
For passions linked to forms so fair
And stately, needs must have their share
Of noble sentiment.”

But from Mr. Wordsworth’s more elevated compositions, which already
form three-fourths of his works; and will, I trust, constitute hereafter a still
larger proportion;—from these, whether in rhyme or blank verse, it would
be difficult and almost superfluous to select instances of a diction peculiarly
his own, of a style which cannot be imitated without its being at once
recognised, as originating in Mr. Wordsworth. It would not be easy to open
on any one of his loftier strains, that does not contain examples of this; and
more in proportion as the lines are more excellent, and most like the author.
For those, who may happen to have been less familiar with his writings, I
will give three specimens taken with little choice. The first from the lines on
the BOY OF WINANDER-MERE,—who
“Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him.—And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
With long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of mirth and jocund din! And when it chanced,
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene [73]
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.”

The second shall be that noble imitation of Drayton [74] (if it was not rather
a coincidence) in the lines TO JOANNA.
—“When I had gazed perhaps two minutes’ space,
Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.

The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
Took up the Lady’s voice, and laughed again!
That ancient woman seated on Helm-crag
Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar
And the tall Steep of Silver-How sent forth
A noise of laughter; southern Lougbrigg heard,
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone.
Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
Carried the lady’s voice!—old Skiddaw blew
His speaking trumpet!—back out of the clouds
From Glaramara southward came the voice:
And Kirkstone tossed it from its misty head!”

The third, which is in rhyme, I take from the SONG AT THE FEAST OF
BROUGHAM CASTLE, upon the restoration of Lord Clifford, the
Shepherd, to the Estates and Honours of his Ancestors.
———“Now another day is come,
Fitter hope, and nobler doom;
He hath thrown aside his crook,
And hath buried deep his book;
Armour rusting in his halls
On the blood of Clifford calls,—
‘Quell the Scot,’ exclaims the Lance!
Bear me to the heart of France,
Is the longing of the Shield—
Tell thy name, thou trembling Field!—
Field of death, where’er thou be,
Groan thou with our victory!
Happy day, and mighty hour,
When our Shepherd, in his power,
Mailed and horsed, with lance and sword,
To his ancestors restored,
Like a re-appearing Star,
Like a glory from afar,
First shall head the flock of war!”

“Alas! the fervent harper did not know,
That for a tranquil Soul the Lay was framed,
Who, long compelled in humble walks to go,
Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed.

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”

The words themselves in the foregoing extracts, are, no doubt, sufficiently
common for the greater part.—But in what poem are they not so, if we
except a few misadventurous attempts to translate the arts and sciences into
verse? In THE EXCURSION the number of polysyllabic (or what the
common people call, dictionary) words is more than usually great. And so
must it needs be, in proportion to the number and variety of an author’s
conceptions, and his solicitude to express them with precision.—But are
those words in those places commonly employed in real life to express the
same thought or outward thing? Are they the style used in the ordinary
intercourse of spoken words? No! nor are the modes of connections; and
still less the breaks and transitions. Would any but a poet—at least could
any one without being conscious that he had expressed himself with
noticeable vivacity—have described a bird singing loud by, “The thrush is
busy in the wood?”—or have spoken of boys with a string of club-moss
round their rusty hats, as the boys “with their green coronal?”—or have
translated a beautiful May-day into “Both earth and sky keep jubilee!”—or
have brought all the different marks and circumstances of a sealoch before
the mind, as the actions of a living and acting power? Or have represented
the reflection of the sky in the water, as “That uncertain heaven received
into the bosom of the steady lake?” Even the grammatical construction is
not unfrequently peculiar; as “The wind, the tempest roaring high, the
tumult of a tropic sky, might well be dangerous food to him, a youth to
whom was given, etc.” There is a peculiarity in the frequent use of the
asymartaeton (that is, the omission of the connective particle before the last
of several words, or several sentences used grammatically as single words,
all being in the same case and governing or governed by the same verb) and
not less in the construction of words by apposition (“to him, a youth”). In
short, were there excluded from Mr. Wordsworth’s poetic compositions all,
that a literal adherence to the theory of his preface would exclude, two
thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry must be erased. For a far
greater number of lines would be sacrificed than in any other recent poet;
because the pleasure received from Wordsworth’s poems being less derived
either from excitement of curiosity or the rapid flow of narration, the
striking passages form a larger proportion of their value. I do not adduce it
as a fair criterion of comparative excellence, nor do I even think it such; but
merely as matter of fact. I affirm, that from no contemporary writer could
so many lines be quoted, without reference to the poem in which they are