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

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Название Coleridge and Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads & Other Poems
Автор произведения William Wordsworth
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isbn 9788027229819



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snatches of impatience, that half-seem, and only seem that half, to baffle its upward rush—the eternal unity of individualities whose essence is in their distinguishableness, even as thought and fancies in the mind; the points of so many cherubic swords snatched back, but never discouraged, still fountaining upwards:—flames self-snatched up heavenward, if earth supply the fuel, heaven the dry light air—themselves still making the current that will fan and spread them—yet all their force in vain, if of itself—and light dry air, heaped fuel, fanning breeze as idle, if no inward spark lurks there, or lurks unkindled. Such a spark, O man! is thy Free Will—the star whose beams are Virtue!

      CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

       1805

      Alone, alone, all, all alone,

       Alone on a wide, wide sea!

       And never a saint took pity on

       My soul in agony.

      S. T. C.

      THE SENSE OF MAGNITUDE Tuesday, Jan. 15, 1805

      This evening there was the most perfect and the brightest halo circling the roundest and brightest moon I ever beheld. So bright was the halo, so compact, so entire a circle, that it gave the whole of its area, the moon itself included, the appearance of a solid opaque body, an enormous planet. It was as if this planet had a circular trough of some light-reflecting fluid for its rim (that is the halo) and its centre (that is the moon) a small circular basin of some fluid that still more copiously reflected, or that even emitted light; and as if the interspatial area were somewhat equally substantial but sullen. Thence I have found occasion to meditate on the nature of the sense of magnitude and its absolute dependence on the idea of substance; the consequent difference between magnitude and spaciousness, the dependence of the idea on double-touch, and thence to evolve all our feelings and ideas of magnitude, magnitudinal sublimity, &c., from a scale of our own bodies. For why, if form constituted the sense, that is, if it were pure vision, as a perceptive sense abstracted from feeling in the organ of vision, why do I seek for mountains, when in the flattest countries the clouds present so many and so much more romantic and spacious forms, and the coal-fire so many, so much more varied and lovely forms? And whence arises the pleasure from musing on the latter? Do I not, more or less consciously, fancy myself a Lilliputian to whom these would be mountains, and so, by this factitious scale, make them mountains, my pleasure being consequently playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics or picture-writing—"phantoms of sublimity," which I continue to know to be phantoms? And form itself, is not its main agency exerted in individualising the thing, making it this and that, and thereby facilitating the shadowy measurement of it by the scale of my own body?

      STRAY THOUGHTS FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"

      The least things, how they evidence the superiority of English artisans! Even the Maltese wafers, for instance, that stick to your mouth and fingers almost so as to make it impossible to get them off without squeezing them into a little pellet, and yet will not stick to the paper.

      Everyone of tolerable education feels the imitability of Dr. Johnson's and other-such's style, the inimitability of Shakspere's, &c. Hence, I believe, arises the partiality of thousands for Johnson. They can imagine themselves doing the same. Vanity is at the bottom of it. The number of imitators proves this in some measure.

      Jan. 22, 1805.

      I had not moved from my seat, and wanted the stick of sealing-wax, nearly a whole one, for another letter. I could not find it, it was not on the table—had it dropped on the ground? I searched and searched everywhere, my pockets, my fobs, impossible places—literally it had vanished, and where was it? It had stuck to my elbow, I having leaned upon it ere it had grown cold! A curious accident, and in no way similar to that of the butcher and his steel in his mouth which he was seeking for. Mine was true accident.

      The maxims which govern the Courts of Admiralty, their "betwixt and between" of positive law and the dictates of right reason, resemble the half-way inter jus et æquitatem of Roman jurisprudence. It were worth while to examine the advantages of this as far as it is a real modification, its disadvantages as far as it appears a jumble.

      Seeing a nice bed of glowing embers with one junk of firewood well placed, like the remains of an old edifice, and another well-nigh mouldered one corresponding to it, I felt an impulse to put on three pieces of wood that exactly completed the perishable architecture, though it was eleven o'clock, though I was that instant going to bed, and there could be, in common ideas, no possible use in it. Hence I seem (for I write not having yet gone to bed) to suspect that this disease of totalising, of perfecting, may be the bottom impulse of many, many actions, in which it never is brought forward as an avowed or even agnised as a conscious motive.

      Mem.—to collect facts for a comparison between a wood and a coal fire, as to sights and sounds and bodily feeling.

      I have read somewhere of a sailor who dreamt that an encounter with the enemy was about to take place, and that he should discover cowardice during action. Accordingly he awakes his brother the Captain, and bids him prepare for an engagement. At daybreak a ship is discovered on the horizon and the sailor, mindful of his dream, procures himself to be tied to a post. At the close of the day he is released unwounded but dead from fright. Apply this incident to Miss Edgeworth's Tales, and all similar attempts to cure faults by detailed forewarnings, which leave on the similarly faulty an impression of fatality that extinguishes hope.

      What precedes to the voice follows to the eye, as 000.1 and 100. A, B, C—were they men, you would say that "C" went first, but being letters, things of voice and ear in their original, we say that "A" goes first.

      There are many men who, following, made 1 = 1000, being placed at head, become useless cyphers, mere finery for form's sake.

      Feb. 1, 1805, Friday, Malta

      Of the millions that use the pen, how many (query) understand the story of this machine, the action of the slit, eh? I confess, ridiculous as it must appear to those