Part 9 (1/2)
The old stump of the tree, with briar-roses and bramble leaves wreathed round and round--a bramble arch--a foxglove in the centre.
The palm, still faithful to forsaken deserts, an emblem of hope.
The stedfast rainbow in the fast-moving, fast-hurrying hail-mist! What a congregation of images and feelings, of fantastic permanence amidst the rapid change of tempest--quietness the daughter of storm.
[Sidenote: ”POEM ON SPIRIT, OR ON SPINOZA”]
I would make a pilgrimage to the deserts of Arabia to find the man who could make me understand how the _one can be many_. Eternal, universal mystery! It seems as if it were impossible, yet it _is_, and it is everywhere! It is indeed a contradiction in _terms_, and only in terms.
It is the co-presence of feeling and life, limitless by their very essence, with form by its very essence limited, determinable, definite.
[Sidenote: TRANS-SUBSTANTIATION]
Meditate on trans-substantiation! What a conception of a miracle! Were one a Catholic, what a sublime oration might one not make of it?
Perpetual, [Greek: pan]topical, yet offering no violence to the sense, exercising no domination over the free-will--a miracle always existing, yet perceived only by an act of the free-will--the beautiful fuel of the fire of faith--the fire must be pre-existent or it is not fuel, yet it feeds and supports and is necessary to feed and support the fire that converts it into his own nature.
[Sidenote: THE DANGER OF THE MEAN]
Errors beget opposite errors, for it is our imperfect nature to run into extremes. But this trite, because ever-recurring, truth is not the whole. Alas! those are endangered who have avoided the extremes, as if among the Tartars, in opposition to a faction that had unnaturally lengthened their noses into monstrosity, there should arise another who had cut off theirs flat to the face, Socinians in physiognomy. The few who retained their noses as nature made them and reason dictated would a.s.suredly be persecuted by the noseless party as adherents of the rhinocerotists or monster-nosed men, which is the case of those [Greek: archaspistai] [braves] of the English Church, called Evangelicals.
Excess of Calvinism produced Arminianism, and those not in excess must therefore be Calvinists!
[Sidenote: ALAS! THEY HAD BEEN FRIENDS IN YOUTH]
To a former friend who pleaded how near he formerly had been, how near and close a friend! Yes! you were, indeed, near to my heart and native to my soul--a part of my being and its natural, even as the chaff to corn. But since that time, through whose fault I will be mute, I have been thrashed out by the flail of experience. Because you have been, therefore, never more can you be a part of the grain.
[Sidenote: Oct. 31, 1803 AVE PH[OE]BE IMPERATOR]
The full moon glided behind a black cloud. And what then? and who cared?
It was past seven o'clock in the morning. There is a small cloud in the east, not larger than the moon and ten times brighter than she! So pa.s.ses night, and all her favours vanish in our minds ungrateful!
[Sidenote: THE ONE AND THE GOOD]
In the chapter on abstract ideas I might introduce the subject by quoting the eighth Proposition of Proclus' ”Elements of Theology.” The whole of religion seems to me to rest on and in the question: The One and The Good--are these words or realities? I long to read the schoolmen on the subject.
[Sidenote: A MORTAL AGONY OF THOUGHT]
There are thoughts that seem to give me a power over my own life. I could kill myself by persevering in the thought. Mem., to describe as accurately as may be the approximating symptoms. I met something very like this observation where I should least have expected such a coincidence of sentiment, such sympathy with so wild a feeling of mine--in p. 71 of Blount's translation of ”The Spanish Rogue,” 1623.
CHAPTER III