Part 28 (1/2)
[_P. W._, 1893, p. 187. See, too, Editor's _Note_, p. 638.]
[Sidenote: THE HAG NIGHTMARE]
Elucidation of my _all-zermalming_, [that is, all-crus.h.i.+ng] argument on the subject of ghosts, apparitions, &c.
Night-mare is, I think, always, even when it occurs in the midst of sleep, and not as it more commonly does after a waking interval, a state not of sleep, but of stupor of the outward organs of sense--not in words, indeed, but yet in fact distinguishable from the suspended power of the senses in true sleep, while the volitions of reason, that is the faculty of comparison, &c., are awake though disturbed. This stupor seems to be occasioned by some painful sensations of unknown locality (most often, I believe, in the lower bowel) which, withdrawing the attention to itself from the sense of other realities present, makes us asleep to them, indeed, but otherwise awake. And, whenever the derangement occasions an interruption in the circulation, aided, perhaps, by pressure, awkward position, &c., the part deadened, as the hand, the arm, or the foot and leg, or the side, transmits double touch as single touch, to which the imagination, therefore, the true inward creatrix, instantly out of the chaos of elements or shattered fragments of memory, puts together some form to fit it. And this [_imaginatio_]
derives an over-mastering sense of reality from the circ.u.mstance that the power of reason, being in good measure awake, most generally presents to us all the accompanying images very nearly as they existed the moment before, when we fell out of anxious wakefulness into this reverie. For example, the bed, the curtain, the room and its furniture, the knowledge of who lives in the next room, and so forth contribute to the illusion.... In short, the night-mare is not, properly, a dream, but a species of reverie, akin to somnambulism, during which the understanding and moral sense are awake, though more or less confused, and over the terrors of which the reason can exert no influence, because it is not true _terror_, that is, apprehension of danger, but is itself a specific sensation = _terror corporeus sive materialis_. The explanation and cla.s.sification of these strange sensations, the organic material a.n.a.logous (_ideas materiales intermedias_, as the Cartesians say) of Fear, Hope, Rage, Shame, and (strangest of all) Remorse, form at present the most difficult, and at the same time the most interesting problem of psychology, and are intimately connected with prudential morals, the science, that is, of morals not as the ground and law of duty, but in their relation to the empirical hindrances and focillations in the realising of the law by human beings. The solution of this problem would, perhaps, throw great doubt on the present [notion] that the forms and feelings of sleep are always the reflections and confused echoes of our waking thoughts and experiences.
[Sidenote: A MOMENT AND A MAGIC MIRROR]
What a swarm of thoughts and feelings, endlessly minute fragments, and, as it were, representations of all preceding and embryos of all future thought, lie compact in any one moment! So, in a single drop of water, the microscope discovers what motions, what tumult, what wars, what pursuits, what stratagems, what a circle-dance of death and life, death-hunting life, and life renewed and invigorated by death! The whole world seems here in a many-meaning cypher. What if our existence was but that moment? What an unintelligible, affrightful riddle, what a chaos of limbs and trunk, tailless, headless, nothing begun and nothing ended, would it not be? And yet scarcely more than that other moment of fifty or sixty years, were that our all? Each part throughout infinite diminution adapted to some other, and yet the whole a means to nothing--ends everywhere, and yet an end nowhere.
[Compare the three last lines of ”What is Life?”
Is very life by consciousness unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath, A war-embrace of wrestling life and death?
_P. W._, 1893, p. 173.]
[Sidenote: THAT INWARD EYE, THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE]
The love of Nature is ever returned double to us, not only the delighter in our delight, but by linking our sweetest, but of themselves perishable feelings to distinct and vivid images, which we ourselves, at times, and which a thousand casual recollections, recall to our memory.
She is the preserver, the treasurer of our joys. Even in sickness and nervous diseases, she has peopled our imagination with lovely forms which have sometimes overpowered the inward pain and brought with them their old sensations. And even when all men have seemed to desert us and the friend of our heart has pa.s.sed on, with one glance from his ”cold disliking eye”--yet even then the blue heaven spreads it out and bends over us, and the little tree still shelters us under its plumage as a second cope, a domestic firmament, and the low creeping gale will sigh in the heath-plant and soothe us by sound of sympathy till the lulled grief lose itself in fixed gaze on the purple heath-blossom, till the present beauty becomes a vision of memory.
[Sidenote: HESPERUS]
I have never seen the evening star set behind the mountains, but it was as if I had lost a hope out of my soul, as if a love were gone, and a sad memory only remained. O it was my earliest affection, the evening star! One of my first utterances in verse was an address to it as I was returning from the New River, and it looked newly bathed as well as I. I remember that the substance of the sonnet was that the woman whom I could ever love would surely have been emblemed in the pensive serene brightness of that planet, that we were both constellated to it, and would after death return thither.
[Sidenote: TO THE EVENING STAR]
TO THE EVENING STAR
O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze, I hail, sweet star, thy chaste effulgent glow; On thee full oft with fixed eye I gaze, Till I methinks, all spirit seem to grow.
O first and fairest of the starry choir, O loveliest 'mid the daughters of the night, Must not the maid I love like thee inspire _Pure_ joy and _calm_ delight?
Must she not be, as is thy placid sphere, Serenely brilliant? Whilst to gaze awhile Be all my wish 'mid Fancy's high career E'en till she quit this scene of earthly toil; Then Hope perchance might fondly sigh to join Her image in thy kindred orb, O star benign!
[First printed from MS. _Poetical and Dramatic Works_, 1877-80; _Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 11.]
[Sidenote: HEALTH, INDEPENDENCE, FRIENDs.h.i.+P]
Where health is--at least, though pain be no stranger, yet when the breath can rise, and turn round like a comet at its perihelion in its ellipse, and again descend, instead of being a Sisiphus's stone; and the chest can expand as by its own volition and the head sits firm yet mobile aloft, like the vane of a tower on a hill s.h.i.+ning in the blue air, and appropriating suns.h.i.+ne and moonlight whatever weight of clouds brood below--O when health and hope, and if not competence yet a debtless _unwealth, libera et laeta paupertas_, is his, a man may have and love many friends, but yet, if indeed they be friends, he lives with each a several and individual life.