Part 7 (2/2)

This is just and profound, yet perfect beauty being an abstract of good, in and for that particular form excites in me no pa.s.sion but that of an admiration so quiet as scarcely to admit of the name _pa.s.sion_, but one that, partic.i.p.ating in the same root of soul, does yet spring up with excellences that I have not. To this I am driven by a desire of self-completion with a restless and inextinguishable love. G.o.d is not all things, for in this case He would be indigent of all; but all things are G.o.d, and eternally indigent of G.o.d. And in the original meaning of the word _essence_ as predicable of that concerning which you can say, This is he, or That is he (this or that rather than any other), in this sense of the word essence, I perfectly coincide with the Platonists and Plotinists that, if we add to the nature of G.o.d either essence or intellect or beauty, we deprive Him of being the Good himself, the only One, the purely and absolutely One.

[Sidenote: A MOON-SET Friday, Nov. 25, 1803, morning 45 minutes past]

After a night of storm and rain, the sky calm and white, by blue vapour thinning into formlessness instead of clouds, the mountains of height covered with snow, the secondary mountains black. The moon descending aslant the [V]^A, through the midst of which the great road winds, set exactly behind Whinlatter Point, marked A. She being an egg, somewhat uncouthly shaped, perhaps, but an ostrich's egg rather than any other (she is two nights more than a half-moon), she set behind the black point, fitted herself on to it like a cap of fire, then became a crescent, then a mountain of fire in the distance, then the peak itself on fire, one steady flame; then stars of the first, second and third magnitude, and vanis.h.i.+ng, upboiled a swell of light, and in the next second the whole sky, which had been _sable blue_ around the yellow moon, whitened and brightened for as large a s.p.a.ce as would take the moon half an hour to descend through.

[Sidenote: THE DEATH OF ADAM A DREAM Dec. 6, 1803]

Adam travelling in his old age came to a set of the descendants of Cain, ignorant of the origin of the world, and treating him as a madman, killed him. A sort of dream which I had this night.

[Sidenote: A MAN'S A MAN FOR ALL THAT]

We ought to suspect reasoning founded wholly on the difference of man from man, not on their commonnesses, which are infinitely greater. So I doubt the wisdom of the treatment of sailors and criminals, because it is wholly grounded on their vices, as if the vices formed the whole or major part of their being.

[Sidenote: A DEFENCE OF METAPHYSIC]

Abstruse reasoning is to the inductions of common sense what reaping is to delving. But the implements with which we reap, how are they gained?

by delving. Besides, what is common sense now was abstract reasoning with earlier ages.

[Sidenote: A SUNSET]

A beautiful sunset, the sun setting behind Newlands across the foot of the lake. The sky is cloudless, save that there is a cloud on Skiddaw, one on the highest mountains in Borrowdale, some on Helvellyn, and that the sun sets in a glorious cloud. These clouds are of various shapes, various colours, and belong to their mountains and have nothing to do with the sky. N.B.--There is something metallic, silver playfully and imperfectly gilt and highly polished, or, rather, something mother-of-pearlish, in the sun-gleams on ice, thin ice.

[Sidenote: EXTREMES MEET]

I have repeatedly said that I could make a volume if only I had noted down, as they occurred to my recollection, the instances of the proverb ”Extremes Meet.” This night, Sunday, December 11, 1803, half-past eleven, I have determined to devote the last nine pages of my pocket-book to a collection of the same.

1. The parching air Burns frore and cold performs the effect of fire.

_Paradise Lost_, ii. 594.

2. Insects by their smallness, the mammoth by its hugeness, terrible.

3. In the foam-islands in a fiercely boiling pool, at the bottom of a waterfall, there is sameness from infinite change.

4. The excess of humanity and disinterestedness in polite society, the desire not to give pain, for example, not to talk of your own diseases and misfortunes, and to introduce nothing but what will give pleasure, destroy all humanity and disinterestedness, by making it intolerable, through desuetude, to listen to the complaints of our equals, or of any, where the listening does not gratify or excite some vicious pride and sense of superiority.

5. It is difficult to say whether a perfectly unheard-of subject or a _crambe bis cocta_, if chosen by a man of genius, would excite in the higher degree the sense of novelty. Take, as an instance of the latter, the ”Orestes” of Sotheby.

6. Dark with excess of light.

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