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

Works of W. WORDSWORTH, p. 133.

      THE NORTHERN EASTER Easter Sunday, 1805

      The English and German climates and that of northern France possess, among many others, this one little beauty of uniting the mysteries of positive with those of natural religion—in celebrating the symbolical resurrection of the human soul in that of the Crucified, at the time of the actual resurrection of the "living life" of nature.

      SPIRITUAL RELIGION

      Religion consists in truth and virtue, that is, the permanent, the forma efformans, in the flux of things without, of feelings and images within. Well, therefore, does the Scripture speak of the Spirit as praying to the Spirit, "The Lord said to my Lord." God is the essence as well as the object of religion.

      A SUPPOSITION Wednesday, April 17, 1805

      I would not willingly kill even a flower, but were I at the head of an army, or a revolutionary kingdom, I would do my duty; and though it should be the ordering of the military execution of a city, yet, supposing it to be my duty, I would give the order—and then, in awe, listen to the uproar, even as to a thunderstorm—the awe as tranquil, the submission to the inevitable, to the unconnected with myself, as profound. It should be as if the lightning of heaven passed along my sword and destroyed a man.

      ENTHUSIASM

      Does the sober judgement previously measure out the banks between which the stream of enthusiasm shall rush with its torrent-sound? Far rather does the stream itself plough up its own channel and find its banks in the adamant rocks of nature!

      ADHÆSIT PAVIMENTO COR

      There are times when my thoughts—how like music! O that these times were more frequent! But how can they be, I being so hopeless, and for months past so incessantly employed in official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing, and so forth?

      THE REALISATION OF DEATH

      John Tobin dead, and just after the success of his play! and Robert Allen dead suddenly!

      O when we are young we lament for death only by sympathy, or with the general feeling with which we grieve for misfortunes in general, but there comes a time (and this year is the time that has come to me) when we lament for death as death, when it is felt for itself, and as itself, aloof from all its consequences. Then comes the grave-stone into the heart with all its mournful names, then the bell-man's or clerk's verses subjoined to the bills of mortality are no longer common-place.

      [John Tobin the dramatist died December 7, 1804. His play entitled "The Honeymoon" was published in 1805.

      Robert Allen, Coleridge's contemporary and school-friend, held the post of deputy-surgeon to the 2nd Royals, then on service in Portugal. He was a friend of Dr. (afterwards Sir J.) Stoddart, with whom Coleridge stayed on his first arrival at Malta. See Letters of Charles Lamb, Macmillan, 1888, i. 188.]

      LOVE AND DUTY

      Würde, worthiness, VIRTUE, consist in the mastery over the sensuous and sensual impulses; but love requires INNOCENCE. Let the lover ask his heart whether he can endure that his mistress should have struggled with a sensual impulse for another man, though she overcame it from a sense of duty to him. Women are LESS offended with men, in part, from the vicious habits of men, and, in part, from the difference of bodily constitution. Yet, still, to a pure and truly loving woman this must be a painful thought. That he should struggle with and overcome ambition, desire of fortune, superior beauty, &c., or with objectless desire of any kind, is pleasing, but not that he has struggled with positive, appropriated desire, that is, desire with an object. Love, in short, requires an absolute peace and harmony between all parts of human nature, such as it is; and it is offended by any war, though the battle should be decided in favour of the worthier. This is, perhaps, the final cause of the rarity of true love, and the efficient and immediate cause of its difficulty. Ours is a life of probation. We are to contemplate and obey duty for its own sake, and in order to do this, we, in our present imperfect state of being, must see it not merely abstracted from but in direct opposition to the wish, the inclination. Having perfected this, the highest possibility of human nature, man may then with safety harmonise all his being with this—he may love. To perform duties absolutely from the sense of duty is the ideal, which, perhaps, no human being ever can arrive at, but which every human being ought to try to draw near unto. This is, in the only wise, and, verily, in a most sublime sense, to see God face to face, which, alas! it seems too true that no man can do and live, that is, a human life. It would become incompatible with his organization, or rather, it would transmute it, and the process of that transmutation, to the senses of other men, would be called death. Even as to the caterpillar, in all probability, the caterpillar dies, and he either, which is most probable, does not see (or, at all events, does not see the connection between the caterpillar and) the butterfly, the beautiful Psyche of the Greeks.

      HAPPINESS MADE PERFECT

      Those who in this life love in perfection, if such there be, in proportion as their love has no struggles, see God darkly and through a veil. For when duty and pleasure are absolutely co-incident, the very nature of our organisation necessitates that duty will be contemplated as the symbol of pleasure, instead of pleasure being (as in a future life we have faith it will be) the symbol of duty. For herein lies the distinction between human and angelic happiness. Humanly happy I call him who in enjoyment finds his duty; angelically happy he, who seeks and finds his duty in enjoyment.

      Happiness in general may be defined, not the aggregate of pleasurable sensations—for this is either a dangerous error and the creed of sensualists, or else a mere translation or wordy paraphrase—but the state of that person who, in order to enjoy his nature in the highest manifestation of conscious feeling, has no need of doing wrong, and who, in order to do right, is under no necessity of abstaining from enjoyment.

      [Vide Life of S. T. C., by James Gillman, 1838, pp. 176-78.]

      THOUGHT AND THINGS

      Thought and reality are, as it were, two distinct corresponding sounds, of which no man can say positively which is the voice and which the echo.

      Oh, the beautiful fountain or natural well at Upper Stowey! The images of the weeds which hung down from its sides appear as plants growing up, straight and upright, among the water-weeds that really grow from the bottom of the well, and so vivid was the image, that for some moments, and not till after I had disturbed the water, did I perceive that their roots were not neighbours, and they side-by-side companions. So ever, then I said, so are the happy man's thoughts and things, [or in the language of the modern philosophers] his ideas and impressions.

      SUPERSTITION

      The two characteristics which I have most observed in Roman Catholic mummery processions, baptisms, etc., are, first, the immense noise and jingle-jingle as if to frighten away the dæmon common-sense; and, secondly, the unmoved, stupid, uninterested faces of the conjurers. I have noticed no exception. Is not the very nature of superstition in general, as being utterly sensuous, cold except where it is sensual? Hence the older form of idolatry, as displayed in the Greek mythology, was, in some sense, even preferable to the Popish. For whatever life did and could exist in superstition it brought forward and sanctified in its rites of Bacchus, Venus, etc. The papist by pretence of suppression warps and denaturalises. In the pagan [ritual, superstition] burnt with a bright flame, in the popish it consumes the soul with a smothered fire that stinks in darkness and smoulders like gum that burns but is incapable of light.

      ILLUSION Sunday Midnight, May 12, 1805

      At the Treasury, La Valetta, Malta, in the room the windows of which directly face the piazzas and vast saloon built for the archives and Library and now used as the Garrison Ball-room, sitting at one corner of a large parallelogram table well-littered with books, in a red arm-chair, at the other corner of which (diagonally)

      Mr. Dennison had been sitting—he and I having conversed for a long time,