Part 5 (1/2)

Great injury has resulted from the supposed incompatibility of one talent with another, judgment with imagination and taste, good sense with strong feeling, &c. If it be false, as a.s.suredly it is, the opinion has deprived us of a test which every man might apply. [Hence] Locke's opinions of Blackmore, Hume's of Milton and Shakspere.

[Sidenote: October 25, 1802]

I began to look through Swift's works. First volume, containing ”Tale of a Tub,” wanting. Second volume--the sermon on the Trinity, rank Socinianism, _purus putus Socinianism_, while the author rails against the Socinians for monsters.

The first sight of green fields with the numberless nodding gold cups, and the winding river with alders on its banks, affected me, coming out of a city confinement, with the sweetness and power of a sudden strain of music.

Mem. to end my preface with ”in short, speaking to the poets of the age, '_Primus vestrm non sum, neque imus_.' I am none of the best, I am none of the meanest of you.”--BURTON.

”Et pour moi, le bonheur n'a commence que lorsque je l'ai eu perdu. Je mettrais volontiers sur la porte du Paradis le vers que le Dante a mis sur celle de l'Enfer.

'Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate.'”

Were I Achilles, I would have had my leg cut off, and have got rid of my vulnerable heel.

In natural objects we feel ourselves, or think of ourselves, only by _likenesses_--among men, too often by _differences_. Hence the soothing, love-kindling effect of rural nature--the bad pa.s.sions of human societies. And why is difference linked with hatred?

[Sidenote: TRANSCRIPTS FROM MY VELVET-PAPER POCKET-BOOKS]

Regular post--its influence on the general literature of the country; turns two-thirds of the nation into writers.

Socinianism, moonlight; methodism, a stove. O for some sun to unite heat and light!

[Sidenote: Nov. 25, 1802]

I intend to examine minutely the nature, cause, birth and growth of the verbal imagination, in the possession of which Barrow excels almost every other writer of prose.

[Sidenote: Sunday, December 19]

Remember the pear trees in the lovely vale of Teme. Every season Nature converts me from some unloving heresy, and will make a Catholic of me at last.

A fine and apposite quotation, or a good story, so far from promoting, are wont to _damp_ the easy commerce of sensible chit-chat.

We imagine ourselves discoverers, and that we have struck a light, when, in reality, at most, we have but snuffed a candle.

A thief in the candle, consuming in a blaze the tallow belonging to the wick which has sunk out of sight, is an apt simile for a plagiarist from a dead author.

An author with a new play which has been hissed off the stage is not unlike a boy who has launched on a pond a s.h.i.+p of his own making, and tries to prove to his schoolfellows that it _ought_ to have sailed.