Part 6 (1/2)

[Sidenote: October, 1803]

A smile, as foreign or alien to, as detached from the gloom of the countenance, as I have seen a small spot of light travel slowly and sadly along the mountain's breast, when all beside has been dark with the storm.

[Sidenote: A PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM.]

Never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former--we know it _a priori_--but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with probability, have antic.i.p.ated.

[Sidenote: WORDSWORTH AND THE PRELUDE]

I am sincerely glad that he has bidden farewell to all small poems, and is devoting himself to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it deifies, his attention and feelings within the sacred circle and temple-walls of great objects and elevated conceptions. In those little poems, his own corrections coming of necessity so often--at the end of every fourteen or twenty lines, or whatever the poem might chance to be--wore him out; difference of opinion with his best friends irritated him, and he wrote, at times, too much with a sectarian spirit, in a sort of bravado. But now he is at the helm of a n.o.ble bark; now he sails right onward; it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he drives before it, unfretted by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails, hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only disease is the having been out of his element; his return to it is food to famine; it is both the specific remedy and the condition of health.

[Sidenote: THE INCOMMUNICABLE]

Without drawing, I feel myself but half invested with language. Music, too, is wanting to me. But yet, though one should unite poetry, draftsman's skill, and music, the greater and, perhaps, n.o.bler, certainly _all_ the subtler, parts of one's nature must be _solitary_.

Man exists herein to himself and to G.o.d alone--yea! in how much only to G.o.d! how much lies _below_ his own consciousness!

The tree or sea-weed like appearance of the side of the mountain, all white with snow, made by little bits of snow loosened. Introduce this and the stones leaping rabbit-like down on my sopha of sods. [_Vide_ p.

60.]

The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato.

[Sidenote: TIME AN ELEMENT OF GRIEF]

Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens. It either stupefies me, and I, perhaps, look at a merry-make and dance-the-hay of flies, or listen entirely to the loud click of the great clock, or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense of philosophical self-complacency.

For a thing at the moment is but a thing of the moment; it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself through the whole mult.i.tude of shapes and thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged, between [not one of]

which and it some new thought is not engendered. Now this is a work of time, but the body feels it quicker with me.

[Sidenote: THE POET AND THE SPIDER]

On St. Herbert's Island, I saw a large spider with most beautiful legs, floating in the air on his back by a single thread which he was spinning out, and still, as he spun, heaving on the air, as if the air beneath was a pavement elastic to his strokes. From the top of a very high tree he had spun his line; at length reached the bottom, tied his thread round a piece of gra.s.s, and reascended to spin another--a net to hang, as a fisherman's sea-net hangs, in the sun and wind to dry.

[Sidenote: THE COMMUNICABLE]

One excellent use of communication of sorrow to a friend is this, that in relating what ails us, we ourselves first know exactly what the real grief is, and see it for itself in its own form and limits. Unspoken grief is a misty medley of which the real affliction only plays the first fiddle, blows the horn to a scattered mob of obscure feelings.

Perhaps, at certain moments, a single, almost insignificant sorrow may, by a.s.sociation, bring together all the little relicts of pain and discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from infancy.

[Sidenote: NOSCITUR A SOCIIS]

One may best judge of men by their pleasures. Who has not known men who have pa.s.sed the day in honourable toil with honour and ability, and at night sought the vilest pleasure in the vilest society? This is the man's self. The other is a trick learnt by heart (for we may even learn the power of extemporaneous elocution and instant action as an automatic trick); but a man's pleasures--children, books, friends, nature, the Muse--O these deceive not.