Part 21 (1/2)
Plain sense, measure, clearness, dignity, grace over all--these made the genius of Greece.
Heu! quam miserum ab illo laedi, de quo non possis queri! Eheu! quam miserrimum est ab illo laedi, de quo propter amorem non possis queri!
Observation from Bacon after reading Mr. Sheridan's speech on Ireland: ”Things will have their first or second agitation; if they be not tossed on the arguments of council, they will be tossed on the waves of fortune.”
The death of an immortal has been beautifully compared to an Indian fig, which at its full height declines its branches to the earth, and there takes root again.
The blast rises and falls, and trembles at its height.
A pa.s.sionate woman may be likened to a wet candle spitting flame.
TO LOVE.
It is a duty, nay, it is a religion to that power to shew that, though it makes all things--wealth, pleasure, ambition--worthless, yea, noisome for themselves; yet for _it_self can it produce all efforts, even if only to secure its name from scoffs as the child and parent of slothfulness. Works, therefore, of general profit--works of abstruse thought [will be born of love]; activity, and, above all, virtue and chast.i.ty [will come forth from his presence].
The moulting peac.o.c.k, with only two of his long tail-feathers remaining, and those sadly in tatters, yet, proudly as ever, spreads out his ruined fan in the sun and breeze.
Yesterday I saw seven or eight water-wagtails following a feeding horse in the pasture, fluttering about and hopping close by his hoofs, under his belly, and even so as often to tickle his nostrils with their pert tails. The horse shortens the gra.s.s and they get the insects.
Sic accipite, sic credite, ut mereamini intelligere: fides enim debet praecedere intellectum, ut sit intellectus fidei praemium.
_S. August. Sermones De Verb. Dom._
Yet should a friend think foully of that wherein the pride of thy spirit's purity is in shrine.
O the agony! the agony!
Nor Time nor varying Fate, Nor tender Memory, old or late, Nor all his Virtues, great though they be, Nor all his Genius can free His friend's soul from the agony!
[So receive, so believe [divine ideas] that ye may earn the right to understand them. For faith should go before understanding, in order that understanding may be the reward of faith.]
[Greek: Hote enthousiasmos epineusin tina theian hechein dokei kai to mantiko genei plesiazein.] _Strabo Geographicus._
Though Genius, like the fire on the altar, can only be kindled from heaven, yet it will perish unless supplied with appropriate fuel to feed it; or if it meet not with the virtues whose society alone can reconcile it to earth, it will return whence it came, or, at least, lie hid as beneath embers, till some sudden and awakening gust of regenerating Grace, [Greek: anazopyrei], rekindles and reveals it anew.
[Now the inspiration of genius seems to bear the stamp of Divine a.s.sent, and to attain to something of prophetic strain.]
[Sidenote: FALLINGS FROM US, VANIs.h.i.+NGS]
I trust you are very happy in your domestic being--very; because, alas!
I know that to a man of sensibility and more emphatically if he be a literary man, there is _no_ medium between that and ”the secret pang that eats away the heart.” ... Hence, even in dreams of sleep, the soul never _is_, because it either cannot or dare not be any _one_ thing, but lives in _approaches_ touched by the outgoing pre-existent ghosts of many feelings. It feels for ever as a blind man with his protruded staff dimly through the medium of the instrument by which it pushes off, and in the act of repulsion--(O for the eloquence of Shakspere, who alone could feel and yet know how to embody those conceptions with as curious a felicity as the thoughts are subtle!)--as if the finger which I saw with eyes, had, as it were, another finger, invisible, touching me with a ghostly touch, even while I feared the real touch from it. What if, in certain cases, touch acted by itself, co-present with vision, yet not coalescing? Then I should see the finger as at a distance, and yet feel a finger touching which was nothing but it, and yet was not it. The two senses cannot co-exist without a sense of causation. The _touch_ must be the effect of that finger [which] I see, and yet it is not yet near to me, and therefore it is not it, and yet it is it. Why it is is in an imaginary pre-duplication!