Sunny clouds lay in the blue above him, and at his feet summer waves were breaking peacefully on the shore, the sound of their soft, musical plash filling up his pauses and commenting on his texts.



CONVERSION



In 1802 Lady B. was living at M—- Park. She was a proud, handsome, worldly woman about fifty-five years old, a widow with no children, but she had a favourite nephew who was at the Park for the larger part of the year and was the heir to her property. She had been gay in her youth, was the leader of society in her county, and when she passed middle life still followed the hounds. She was a good landlord, respected and even beloved by her tenantry, and a staunch Tory in politics. The new evangelical school of Newton and Romaine she detested bitterly, as much in fact as she detested Popery. The nephew, however, came under Newton's influence and was converted. His aunt was in despair. She could not conquer her affection for him, but she almost raved when she reflected that the inheritor of her estates was a pious Methodist, as she called him. She had a good-looking, confidential maid who had lived with her for years. In one of her fits she told this maid that she would give half of what she possessed if her nephew were like other young men. 'I don't want him to be a sot or to gamble away my money,' she cried, 'but there's not much else I should mind if he were but a man.'

A few days afterwards she spoke to her maid again. 'Look you here, Jarvis, I shall go distracted. This morning he began to speak to me about my soul—the brave boy that he used to be, talking of my soul to ME! Listen to what I tell you and be reasonable. I know perfectly well, and so do you, that before he took up with this sickening cant he was in love with you and you were in love with him. I saw it all and said nothing. I understand there's no more flirting now. Ah, well, his blood is red yet; I've not forgotten what five-and-twenty is, and he'll come if you whistle. You can't marry him, of course, but you can and shall live comfortably afterwards for all that, and when he has done what all other young fellows do there will be an end to the prayer-meetings.'

The girl was a little staggered, but after a time her mistress's suggestion ceased to shock her, for the nephew was a handsome fellow capable of raising passion in a woman. What the aunt had said was really true. She now threw the girl in his way. She was sent to him with messages when he was alone, and one evening when he had gone over to a prayer-meeting in the town about two miles away, she was directed to go there on an errand, to contrive to be late, and to return with him. She had half an hour to spare and was curious to know what the prayer-meeting was like. She stood close to the inner door, which was slightly ajar, and heard her master praying earnestly. He rose and spoke to the little congregation for five minutes. When he had finished she started for home, and he came up with her before she had passed the last house. It was nearly dark, but he recognised her by a light from a window, and asked her what she was doing in the town at that hour. She excused herself by unexpected detention, and they went on together. About half a mile further at the top of the hill was the stile of the pathway that was a short cut to the park. From that point there was an extensive view over the plain eastwards, and the rising moon was just emerging from a line of silvered clouds. They were both struck with the beauty of the spectacle and stood still gazing at it.

Suddenly she dropped on her knees and with violent sobbing called upon God to help her. He lifted her up, and when she was calmer she told him everything. They went on their way in silence. Now comes the remarkable part of the story. It was he who would have been the tempter and she had saved him. When they reached the Park he found his aunt ill, and in a fortnight she was dead. In less than two years nephew and maid were married. His strict evangelicalism relaxed a little, but they were both faithful to their Friend. Lovers also they were to the last, and they died in the same month after each of them had passed seventy-five years.

I fancy I read a long while ago somewhere in Wesley's Journal that an attempt was made to ruin him or one of his friends with a woman, but I think she was a bad woman. If there is anything of the kind in the Journal it shows that Lady B's plot is not incredible.



JULY



It is a cool day in July, and the shaded sunlight slowly steals and disappears over the landscape. There are none of those sudden flashes which come when the clouds are more sharply defined and the blue is more intense. I have wandered from the uplands down to the river. The fields are cleared of the hay, and the bright green of the newly mown grass increases the darkness of the massive foliage of the bordering elms. The cows are feeding in the rich level meadows and now and then come to the river to drink. It is overhung with alders, and two or three stand on separate little islands held together by roots. The winter floods biting into the banks have cut miniature cliffs, and at their base grow the forget-me-not, the willow-herb, and flowering rush. A brightly-plumaged bird, too swift to be recognised—could it be a kingfisher?—darts along the margin of the stream and disappears in its black shadows. The wind blows gently from the west: it is just strong enough to show the silver sides of the willow leaves. The sound of the weir, although so soft, is able to exclude the clacking of the mill and all intermittent, casual noises. For two hours it has filled my ears and brought a deeper repose than that of mere silence. It is not uniform, for the voices of innumerable descending threads of water with varying impulses can be distinguished, but it is a unity. Myriads of bubbles rise from the leaping foam at the bottom, float away for a few yards and then break.

It is the very summit of the year, the brief poise of perfection. In two or three weeks the days will be noticeably shorter, the harvest will begin, and we shall be on our way downwards to autumn, to dying leaves and to winter.



A SUNDAY MORNING IN NOVEMBER



The walk from the high moorland to the large pond or lake lies through a narrow grassy lane. About half-way down it turns sharply to the left; in front are the bluish-green pine woods. Across the corner of them, confronting me, slants a birch with its white bark and delicate foliage, light-green and yellow in relief against the sombre background. Fifty yards before I reach the wood its music is perceptible, something like the tones of an organ heard outside a cathedral. In another minute the lane enters: it is dark, but the ruddy stems catch the sun, and in open patches are small beeches responding to it with intense golden-brown. Along the edge of the path, springing from the mossy bank they grow to a greater height. A pine has pushed itself between the branches of one of them as if on purpose to show off the splendour of its sister's beauty. It is stiller than it was outside; the murmur descends from aloft. There was a frost last night and the leaves will soon fall. A beech leaf detaches itself now and then and flutters peacefully and waywardly to the ground, careless whether it finds its grave in the bracken or on the road where it will be trodden underfoot. The bramble is beginning to turn to blood. It is strange that leaves should show such character. Here is a corner on which there are not two of the same tint, but they spring from the same root, and the circumstances of light and shade under which they have developed are almost exactly similar.

It is eleven o'clock, and with the mounting sun the silence has become complete save when it is broken by the heavy, quick flap of the wood-pigeon or the remonstrance of a surprised magpie. Service is just beginning all over England in churches and the chapels belonging to a hundred sects. In the village two miles away the Salvation Army drum is beating, but it cannot penetrate these recesses. Stay! a faint vibration from it comes over the hill, but now it has gone. A fox, unaware of any human being, walks from one side of the lane to the other, stopping in the middle. There is a breath of wind and the low solemn song begins again above me.



UNDER BEACHY HEAD: DECEMBER



At the top of the hill the north-westerly wind blows fresh, but here under the cliffs the sun strikes warm as in June. There is not a cloud in the sky, and behind me broken, chalk pinnacles intensely white rise into the clear blue, which is bluer by their contrast. In front lies the calm, light-sapphire ocean with a glittering sun- path on it broadening towards the horizon. All recollection of bare trees and dead leaves has gone. The tide is drawing down and has left bare a wide expanse of smooth untrodden sand through which ridges run of chalk rock black with weed. The sand is furrowed by little rivulets from the abandoned pools above, and at its edge long low waves ripple over it, flattening themselves out in thin sheets which invade one another with infinitely complex, graceful curves. I look southward: there is nothing between me and the lands of heat but the water. It unites me with them.

It is wonderful that winter should suddenly abdicate and summer resume her throne. On a morning like this there is no death, the sin of the world is swallowed up; theological and metaphysical problems cease to have any meaning. Men and books make me painfully aware of my littleness and defects, but here on the shore in silence complete save for the music of the ebbing sea, they vanish.

When I am again in London and at work the dazzling light will not be extinguished, and will illuminate the dreary darkness of the city.



24TH DECEMBER



My housekeeper and her husband have begged for a holiday from this morning till Boxing-day, and I could not refuse. I can do without them for so short a time. I might have spent the Christmas with one of my children, but they live far away and travelling is now irksome to me. I was seventy years old a month past. Besides, they are married and have their own friends, of whom I know nothing. I have locked the door of my cottage and shall walk to No-man's Corner.

It is a dark day; the sky is covered evenly with a thick cloud. There is no wind except a breath now and then from the north-east. It is not a frost, but it is cold, and a thick mist covers the landscape. It is no thicker in the river bottom than on the hills; it is everywhere the same. The field-paths are in many places a foot deep in mud, for the autumn has been wet. They are ploughing the Ten Acres, and the plough is going along the top ridge so that horses and men are distinctly outlined, two men and four horses, but the pace is slow, for the ground is very heavy. I can just hear the ploughman talking to his team. The upturned earth is more beautiful in these parts than I have seen it elsewhere—a rich, reddish brown, for there is iron in it. The sides of the clods which are smoothed by the ploughshare shine like silver even in this dull light. I pass through the hop-garden. The poles are stacked and a beginning has just been made with the weeds. A little further on is the farmhouse. It lies in the hollow and there is no road to it, save a cart-track. The nearest hard road is half a mile distant. The footpath crosses the farmyard. The house is whitewashed plaster and black-timbered, and surrounded by cattle-pens in which the oxen and cows stand almost up to their knees in slush. A motionless ox looks over the bar of his pen and turns his eyes to me and my dog as we pass. It is now twelve, and it is the dinner-hour. The horses have stopped work and are steaming with sweat under the hayrick. The men are sitting in the barn. Leaving the farmyard I go down to the brook which steals round the wood and stop for a few minutes on the foot-bridge. I can hear the little stream in the gully about twenty feet below, continually changing its note, which nevertheless is always the same. In the wood not a leaf falls. O eternal sleep, death of the passions, the burial of failures, follies, bitter recollections, the end of fears, welcome sleep!



DREAMING



During the retreat from Moscow a French soldier was mortally wounded. His comrades tried to lift him into a waggon. 'No bandages, no brandy!' he cried; 'go, you cannot help me.' They hesitated, but seeing that he could not recover, and knowing that the enemy was hard upon them in pursuit, they left him. For half an hour he was alive and alone. The Emperor, whom he worshipped, was far away; his friends had fled; to remain would have been folly, and yet! It was late in the afternoon and bitterly cold. He looked with dim and closing eyes over the vast, dreary, snowy and silent plain. What were the images which passed before them? Were they of home, of the Emperor and the retreating army, of the crucifix and the figure thereon? Who can tell? Death is preceded by thoughts which life cannot anticipate. Perhaps his herald was a simple longing to be at rest, joy at his approach blotting out all bitterness and regret. Who can tell? But I dream and dream; the dying, wintry day, the dark, heavily-clouded sky, the snow, and the blood. A Cossack came up and drove his lance through him.



OURSELVES



Lord Bacon says that 'To be wise by rule and to be wise by experience are contrary proceedings; he that accustoms himself to the one unfits himself for the other.' It is singular how little attention, in the guidance of our lives, we pay to our own needs. It is a common falsehood of these times that all knowledge is good for everybody, the truth being that knowledge is good only if it helps us, and that if it does not help us it is bad. 'Whatever knowledge,' to quote from Bacon again, 'we cannot convert into food or medicine endangereth a dissolution of the mind and understanding.' We ought to turn aside from what we cannot manage, no matter how important it may seem to be. David refused Saul's helmet of brass and coat of mail. If he had taken the orthodox accoutrements and weapons he would have been encumbered and slain. He killed Goliath with the rustic sling and stone. No doubt if we determine to be ignorant of those things with which the world thinks it necessary that everybody should be familiar we shall be thought ill-educated, but our very ignorance will be a better education, provided it be a principled ignorance, than much which secures a local examination certificate or a degree. At the same time, if any study fits us, it should be pursued unflaggingly. We must not be afraid of the imputation of narrowness. Our subject will begin to be of most service to us when we have passed the threshold and can think for ourselves. If we devote ourselves, for example, to the works and biography of any great man, the pleasure and moral effect come when we have read him and re-read him and have traced every thread we can find, connecting him with his contemporaries. It is then, and then only, that we understand him and he becomes a living soul. Flesh and blood are given by details.

We are misled by heroes whom we admire, and the greater the genius the more perilous is its influence upon us if we allow it to be a dictator to us. It is really of little consequence to me what a saint or philosopher thought it necessary to do in order to protect and save himself. It is myself that I have to protect and save. Every man is prone to lean on some particular side and on that side requires special support. Every man has particular fears and troubles, and it is against these and not against the fears and troubles of others that he must provide remedies. A religion is but a general direction, and the real working Thirty-nine Articles or Assembly's Catechism each one of us has to construct on his own behalf.

A not insignificant advantage of loyalty to our Divine Director will be a more correct and generally a more lenient criticism of our fellow-creatures. We shall cease to judge them by standards which are not applicable to them. Much that we might erroneously consider wrong we shall discern to be a necessary effort to secure stability or even to preserve sanity. We shall pardon deviation from the obvious path. The boat which crosses the river may traverse obliquely the direct line to the point for which it is making, and if we reflect that perhaps a strong current besets it we shall not call the steersman a fool.



THE RIDDLE



Men had sinned against the gods, and had even denied their existence. Zeus had a mind to destroy them, but at last resolved to inflict on them a punishment worse than death. He sent Hermes to one of the chief cities with a scroll on which a few magic letters were written, and the wise men declared they contained a riddle. Its solution would bring immortal happiness. The whole human race, neglecting all ordinary pursuits, applied itself ceaselessly to the solution of the mystery. Professors were appointed to lecture on it, it was attacked on all sides by induction, deduction, and by flights of inspiration, but nobody was able to unravel it. At last a child, seeing the perplexity in which her father and mother were, took one of the copies of the scroll which were hung in all the public buildings of the city, and secretly set off to consult a distant oracle of Phoebus Apollo of which she had heard. She had to traverse thirsty deserts, and not till she was nearly dead did she reach the shrine. She told her story and handed in her scroll to a priestess, who disappeared in an inner chamber. In a few minutes the temple of the Sun-god was filled with blazing light, the child prostrated herself on the floor, and she heard the words, THERE IS NO RIDDLE. She lifted herself up, and, fortified with some food given her by the priestess, began her journey home. She was just able to struggle through the city gates and deliver the message before she fell down lifeless. It was not believed; the Secret, the Secret, everybody upheld it, the professors lectured, the mad inquisition and guesses continued, and the vengeance of Zeus is not yet satisfied.



AN EPOCH



I was no longer young: in fact I was well over sixty. The winter had been dark and tedious. For some reason or other I had not been able to read much, and I began to think there were signs of the coming end. Suddenly, with hardly any warning, spring burst upon us. Day after day we had clear, warm sunshine which deepened every contrast of colour, and at intervals we were blessed with refreshing rains. I spent most of my time out of doors on the edge of a favourite wood. All my life I had been a lover of the country, and had believed, if this is the right word, that the same thought, spirit, life, God, which was in everything I beheld, was also in me. But my creed had been taken over from books; it was accepted as an intellectual proposition. Most of us are satisfied with this kind of belief, and even call it religion. We are more content the more definite the object becomes, no matter whether or not it is in any intimate relationship with us, and we do not see that the moment God can be named he ceases to be God.

One morning when I was in the wood something happened which was nothing less than a transformation of myself and the world, although I 'believed' nothing new. I was looking at a great, spreading, bursting oak. The first tinge from the greenish-yellow buds was just visible. It seemed to be no longer a tree away from me and apart from me. The enclosing barriers of consciousness were removed and the text came into my mind, Thou in me and I in thee. The distinction of self and not-self was an illusion. I could feel the rising sap; in me also sprang the fountain of life up-rushing from its roots, and the joy of its outbreak at the extremity of each twig right up to the summit was my own: that which kept me apart was nothing. I do not argue; I cannot explain; it will be easy to prove me absurd, but nothing can shake me. Thou in me and I in thee. Death! what is death? There is no death: IN THEE it is impossible, absurd.



BELIEF



He has vanished, the God of the Church and the Schools: He has gone for us all except children and fools; Where He dwelt is the uttermost limit of cold, And a fathomless depth is the Heaven of old.

I turn from my books, and behold! I'm aware There's a girl in the room, just a girl over there. She stole in while I mused; and she watches the verge Of a low-lying cloud whence a star doth emerge.

A touch on her shoulder; I whisper a word, One more, and I know that the heavenly Lord Still loves and rejoices His creatures to meet: My faith still survives, for I kneel at her feet.



EXTRACTS FROM A DIARY ON THE QUANTOCKS



Spring 18—.

Walked from Holford to my lodgings on the hill. Never remember to have lived in such quietude. The cottage stands half a mile away from any house. Woke very early the next morning and went down to Alfoxden House, where Wordsworth and Dorothy lived a century ago. Here also came Coleridge. It was almost too much to remember that they had trodden those paths. I could hardly believe they were not there, and yet they were dead—such a strange overcoming sense of presence and yet of vanishedness.

A certain degree of ignorance is necessary for a summary essay on creatures of this order. The expression of Dorothy's soul is spread over large surfaces. Some people require much space and time, and the striking events of a life are often not those which are most significant. It is in small, spontaneous actions and their reiteration that character plainly appears. After prolonged acquaintance with Dorothy we see that she was great and we love her reverentially and passionately. She could look at a beautiful thing for an hour without reflection, but absorbed in its pure beauty—a most rare gift. For how long can we watch a birch tree against the sky? Here are two extracts from her journal in the very place where I now am. They are dated 26th January and 24th February 1798, in the winter it will be noticed. 'Sat in the sunshine. The distant sheep-bells; the sound of the stream; the woodman winding along the half-marked road with his laden pony; locks of wool still spangled with the dewdrops; the blue-grey sea, shaded with immense masses of cloud, not streaked; the sheep glittering in the sunshine.' . . . 'Went to the hill-top. Sat a considerable time overlooking the country towards the sea. The air blew pleasantly around us. . . . Scattered farmhouses, half-concealed by green, mossy orchards; fresh straw lying at the doors; haystacks in the fields. Brown fallows; the springing wheat, like a shade of green over the brown earth; and the choice meadow plots, full of sheep and lambs, of a soft and vivid green; a few wreaths of blue smoke, spreading along the ground; the oaks and beeches in the hedges retaining their yellow leaves; the distant prospect on the land side, islanded with sunshine; the sea, like a basin full to the margin; the dark, fresh- ploughed fields; the turnips, of a lively, rough green.' That bit about the farmhouses reminds me of two very early lines of Wordsworth which are a prophecy of his peculiar quality:-

'Calm is all nature as a resting wheel';

and

'By secret villages and lonely farms.' (first version.)

The image in the first line looks rude and unpoetical, but will be felt by anybody who has strolled observantly through a farmyard—say on a Sunday summer afternoon—and has noticed a disused wheel leaning against a wall. Wordsworth shows himself not afraid of the commonplace. A great object may gain by comparison with one which is superficially lower or even mean—nature with a cart-wheel.

Went over the hills to Bicknoller—a sunny, hazy day—and the Bristol Channel was in a mist. The note of the cuckoo was unceasing. Down in the valley at Bicknoller the hedges and banks of the lanes are in the most ardent stage of spring. Everything is pressing forward with joyous impetuosity, and yet is satisfied with what it is at the present moment and is completely at rest in it. Along this path to Bicknoller the Ancient Mariner was begun. The most wonderful piece of criticism on record is perhaps that of Mrs. Barbauld on the poem. She objected to it because it had no moral. Coleridge replied: 'In my judgment the poem had too much; and the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he MUST kill the aforesaid merchant, BECAUSE one of the date-shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.'

To the first draft of Youth and Age, written in 1823, there is a little prose introduction, a reminiscence of the Quantocks, which is a lovely example of the way in which one sensation gains by description in terms of another. ' . . . At earliest dawn . . . the first skylark . . . was a Song-Fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the Ear's eye, in full column or ornamented shaft of sound in the order of Gothic Extravaganza, out of sight, over the Cornfields on the descent of the Mountain on the other side—out of sight, tho' twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling star of silver.'

Coleridge! Coleridge! How empty do the sweeping judgments passed on him appear if we recollect that by Wordsworth, Dorothy, Charles and Mary Lamb, he was honoured and fervently loved. If a man is loved by any human being condemnation is rash, and we ought at least to be silent.

Wandered about Holford. The apple-trees are in full blossom. One of them was a particularly exquisite survival of youth in old age. Its head was a white-and-pink mass, but it leaned almost horizontally, battered and weather-worn.

Thunder off and on all day till the afternoon. A low grey mist covered the whole sky at five o'clock, and the landscape was uninteresting, but in ten minutes the mist thinned a little, so that the sun came through it and lighted up the torn vapour.

Went over to East Quantock's Head and came back across the hill. It was a dark day; the sky was overcast, and the moors were very lonely. The thought of London and other big cities over the horizon somewhat marred the solitude. Nevertheless there are the deserts of Arabia and Africa, the regions of the North and South Poles, the Ocean, and, encompassing the globe itself, silent, infinite space.

To Nether Stowey and Tom Poole's house. In the hideous church is a monument to him fairly appreciative, but disfigured by snobbism. 'His originality and grasp of mind,' says the inscription, 'counterbalanced the deficiencies of early education and secured him the friendship,' etc. His 'originality and grasp of mind'—his soul, that is to say, managed, when put in the scale, to turn it against those deficiencies which are made good to youths providentially directed to Eton and Oxford. According to the slab in the church, Poole died 8th September 1837, seventy-two years old. The house in which he lived in his later years is a pleasant place, but has been tortured into modern gentility. His revolving grate, which he turned round when he went out, has been replaced by an approved cast-iron 'register.' He was called 'Justice Poole' in the country round. Afterwards to Coleridge's cottage—small, somewhat squalid rooms. Pity, pity, almost to tears. The second edition of his poems was published while he was here in 1797. In a note added to Religious Musings in that edition he declares his belief in the Millennium; that 'all who in past ages have endeavoured to ameliorate the state of man, will rise and enjoy the fruits and flowers, the imperceptible seeds of which they had sown in their former life; and that the wicked will, during the same period, be suffering the remedies adapted to their several bad habits.' This period is to be 'followed by the passing away of this earth, and by our entering the state of pure intellect; when all creation shall rest from its labours.' The 'coadjutors of God' in Religious Musings are Milton, Newton, Hartley, and Priestley. In the beginning of 1798 Coleridge was preaching at the Unitarian Chapel at Shrewsbury. But on the 13th November 1797, at half-past four in the afternoon (let us be particular in dating such an event), he and Dorothy and her brother began their walk over these Quantock hills, and The Ancient Mariner was born. These are the facts, and rash indeed would anybody be who should attempt to deduce anything from them. Of all foolish criticism there is none more foolish than that which treats the mental movement of men like Coleridge or Wordsworth as if it were in an imaginary straight line. Excepting lines 123- 270, composed in the latter part of 1796, Coleridge wrote his contribution to Joan of Arc between 1794 and 1795. The Rose and Kisses were written in 1793, and On a Discovery Made Too Late in 1794. Could anybody, not knowing the dates, have believed that these three poems last-named, if not written before the Joan of Arc, were contemporaneous with it? In the Joan of Arc Coleridge is immature and led astray by politics, religion, and philosophy, but in the three little poems where he has subjects akin to him he is perfect, and could have done nothing better ten years later. Still more remarkable, Lewti, in its earliest form, cannot have been written later than 1794, for it was originally addressed to Mary Evans, from whom Coleridge parted in December 1794. As an example of the survival of his poetic power take Love's First Hope, written probably in 1824:

'O fair is Love's first hope to gentle mind! As Eve's first star thro' fleecy cloudlet peeping; And sweeter than the gentle south-west wind, O'er willowy meads, and shadow'd waters creeping, And Ceres' golden field;—the sultry hind Meets it with brow uplift, and stays his reaping.'

Coleridge was indebted to Sir Philip Sidney for the third and fourth lines, excepting 'o'er willowy meads,' but these three words and the first and last two lines are his own. Not only does his genius survive, but emotion as pure and deep as that of the Nether Stowey days or those preceding. There is no trace of the interval between them and those of 1824.

In the post-office at Kilve hangs an old trombone, a memento of the time when the village orchestra assisted in the service at the church. How well I remember those artists and their jealousies! The clarionet or 'clarnet,' as he called himself, caused much ill- feeling because he drowned the others, and the double-bass strove ineffectually to avenge himself. The churchyard yew is one of the largest I ever beheld—twenty feet in girth by measurement, four feet from the ground. A gay morning: heavy, white masses of clouds sailing over the hills; light most brilliant when the sun came out. How singularly beautiful is a definitely outlined white cloud when it is cut by the ridge of a hill!

Across the hills in a south-westerly storm of wind and rain to Bicknoller. A walk not to be forgotten: overcast sky, dark moors; clouds sweeping over them and obscuring them. I should not have found my way if I had not lost it when I went to Bicknoller before. I then put three stones at the point where I afterwards discovered I had gone astray. These three stones saved me to-day.

Whitsunday morning: sat at the open window between five and six: the hills opposite lay in the light of the eastern sun. Bicknoller church and the little old village were beneath me. Perfect quietude, save for the bells of Stogumber church ringing a peal two miles away. Earth has nothing to give compared with this peace. The air was so still that delicious mingled scents floated up from the garden and fields below. It was one of those days on which every sense is satisfied, and no mortal imperfection appears. Took the Excursion out of doors after breakfast, and read The Ruined Cottage.

Much of the religion by which Wordsworth lives is very indefinite. Look at the close of this poem:-

'I well remember that those very plumes, Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall By mist and silent rain-drops silver'd o'er, As once I pass'd, did to my heart convey So still an image of tranquillity, So calm and still, and look'd so beautiful Amid the uneasy thoughts which fill'd my mind, That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the grief The passing shows of Being leave behind, Appear'd an idle dream, that could not live Where meditation was. I turn'd away, And walk'd along my road in happiness.'

Because this religion is indefinite it is not therefore the less supporting.

Why, by the way, did Wordsworth expunge from Michael these wonderful lines?

'In his thoughts there were obscurities, Wonder, and admiration, things that wrought Not less than a religion in his heart.'

Something like them had been said before, but they ought to have been retained.

The changes in the sky in this Quantock country are as sudden and strange as in Cumberland. During a walk from Cleeve Abbey to Bicknoller it rained in torrents till within half a mile of the end of my journey. All at once it ceased, and the uniform sheet of rain-cloud broke into loose ragged masses swirling in different directions and variously lighted, the sun almost shining through some of the clefts between them. Cleeve Abbey, lying in the trough of a green valley through which runs a stream, the cloister garth and the Abbot's seat at the end of it, are most impressive. Under the turf lie the dead monks. A place like this begets half- unconscious dreaming which issues in nothing and is not wholesome. It would be better employment to learn something about the history of the abbey and about its architecture.

DETACHED QUANTOCK NOTES.

Ye Woods! that listen to the night-birds' singing, Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined, Save where your own imperious branches swinging, Have made a solemn music of the wind.'

These lines from France were written by Coleridge when he was a little over twenty-five years old. In the combination of two gifts, music and meaning, he is hardly surpassable at his best by any poet. Not an atom of meaning is sacrificed to gain a melody: in fact the melody adds to the meaning.

Here is another example showing how the poetic form with Coleridge is not a hindrance to expression, but aids it.

Gentle woman, for thy voice remeasures Whatever tones and melancholy pleasures The things of Nature utter; birds or trees, Or moan of ocean-gale in weedy caves, Or where the stiff grass 'mid the heath-plant waves, Murmur and music thin of sudden breeze.'

His similitudes are not mere external comparisons; the objects compared become MODES of unity. 'A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the ALIVE [italics C.'s] sea, most interestingly combined with the number of white seagulls, that, repeatedly, it seemed as if the foam-spit had taken life and wing, and had flown up.'

The intimations which are but whispered, the Presences which are but half-disclosed, are those which we should intently obey. The coarsely obvious has its own strength.

'She went forth alone Urged by the indwelling angel-guide, that oft, With dim inexplicable sympathies Disquieting the heart, shapes out Man's course To the predoomed adventure.'

Destiny of Nations.

Wordworth's habit of spending so much time in the open air and with the humble people around him gives to what he says the value of experience, distinguishable totally from the ideas of the literary man, which may be brilliant, but do not agree with the sun, moon and stars, and turn out to be nothing when we ask is the thing really SO.

Wordsworth's verses have been in the sun and wind. It is a test of good sane writing that we can read it out of doors.

If Wordsworth's love of clouds and mountains ended there it would be no better than the luxury of a refined taste. But it does not end there. It affects the whole of his relationships with men and women, and is therefore most practical.

In Wordsworth what we expect does not come, but in its place the unexpected. In the twelfth book of the Prelude he tells us:

There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence, depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight In trivial occupations, and the round Of ordinary intercourse, our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired; A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced, That penetrates, enables us to mount, When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks Among those passages of life that give Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how, The mind is lord and master—outward sense The obedient servant of her will.'

He then gives us one of these 'passages,' and what is it? A day when as a child he saw

'A naked pool that lay beneath the hills, The beacon on the summit, and, more near, A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head, And seemed with difficult steps to force her way Against the blowing wind.'

It was, as he says, an 'ordinary sight,' but

'Colours and words that are unknown to man'

would have failed him

'To paint the visionary dreariness'

which invested what he saw.

Years afterwards, when he revisited the spot, the 'loved one at his side,' there fell on it

'A spirit of pleasure and youth's golden gleam; And think ye not with radiance more sublime For these remembrances, and for the power They had left behind? So feeling comes in aid Of feeling, and diversity of strength Attends us, if but once we have been strong.'

This was the experience, then, of 'distinct pre-eminence' in whose recollection his mind was 'nourished and invisibly repaired.' It is in such a moment that the soul's strength is shown; when common objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which they are a suggestion. Although he expands here and elsewhere he does not elaborate. He stops where the fact ends and shuns abstractions.

'So taught, so trained, we boldly face All accidents of time and place; Whatever props may fail, Trust in that sovereign law can spread New glory o'er the mountain's head, Fresh beauty through the vale.'

This is from The Wishing-Gate Destroyed, a late poem, not published till 1842, when Wordsworth was seventy-two years old. It is his Nicene and Apostles' Creed and Thirty-Nine Articles. Trust, with no credentials but its own existence, and yet they are indisputable.

'Is it that Man is soon deprest? A thoughtless Thing! who, once unblest, Does little on his memory rest, Or on his reason.'

To the Daisy.

An example of Wordsworth's wisdom disclosing itself in his simplest pieces. For one sad conclusion to which the reason leads us, the uncontrolled, baseless procedure in the brain which we call thinking, but is really day-dreaming, leads us to a score. Reason on the whole is sanative.

'Blest Statesman He, whose Mind's unselfish will Leaves him at ease among grand thoughts: whose eye Sees that, apart from magnanimity, Wisdom exists not, nor the humbler skill Of Prudence, disentangling good and ill With patient care.'

Exist not. We are befooled by words. We conceive wisdom, prudence, and magnanimity as distinct entities, without intercommunication. If we could but see things as they are without the tyranny of definition!

Wordsworth has a singular power of expressing articulately that which would be mere mist without him, but is of vital importance.



GODWIN AND WORDSWORTH



(Reprinted from The Pilot, 20th April 1901. With added postscript.)

Dr. Emile Legouis, in his singularly interesting book, La Jeunesse de William Wordsworth, well translated into English by Mr. T. W. Matthews (Dent and Co., 1897), calls attention to the influence on Wordsworth in his early years of Godwin's Political Justice. On reading Political Justice now, it is difficult to understand why Wordsworth should have been so much affected by it. Its philosophy, if philosophy it can be called, is simply the denial of any rule of conduct or of any belief which the understanding cannot prove, and the inclusion of man in the necessity which controls inanimate nature. 'All vice is nothing more than error and mistake' (i. 31). {205} 'We differ from the inferior animals in the greater facility with which we arrange our sensations, and compare, prefer, and judge' (i. 57). 'Justice . . . is coincident with utility' (i. 121). 'If my mother were in a house on fire, and I had a ladder outside with which I could save her, she would not, because she was my mother, have any greater claim than the other inmates on my exertions' (i. 83). 'But,' says an objector, 'your mother nourished you in the helplessness of infancy.' 'When she first subjected herself,' replies Godwin, 'to the necessity of these cares, she was probably influenced by no particular motives of benevolence to her future offspring. . . . It is the disposition of the mind . . . that entitles to respect,' and consequently justice demands that I should rescue the most meritorious person first.' All moral science may be reduced to this one head, calculation of the future' (ii. 468), and consequently a promise is not an obligation. The statement that it is essential that we should be able to depend on engagements 'would be somewhat more accurate if we said "that it was essential to various circumstances of human intercourse, that we should be known to bestow a steady attention upon the quantities of convenience or inconvenience, of good or evil, that might arise to others from our conduct"' (i. 156). The understanding is supreme in us, and 'depravity would have gained little ground in the world, if every man had been in the exercise of his independent judgment' (i. 174). Reason (the Godwinian Reason) is sufficient to control or even extinguish the strongest of all passions. Marriage having been denounced as 'the most odious of all monopolies' (ii. 850), Godwin is reminded that half a dozen men perhaps might feel for a woman 'the same preference that I do.' 'This,' says he, 'will create no difficulty. We may all enjoy her conversation; and we shall be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse as a very trivial object.' It was impossible not to acknowledge that the understanding often finds the problem rather abstruse of deciding whether an action will or will not secure ultimately the largest balance of happiness. Calvin was no fool, and yet he deliberately came to the conclusion that in burning Servetus he was promoting the welfare of mankind; but 'Calvin was unacquainted with the principles of justice, and therefore could not practise them. The duty of no man can exceed his capacity' (i. 102). As to Godwin's necessarianism, it is perhaps hardly worth while to cite passages in order to explain it. It is of the usual type, incontrovertible if the question is to be settled by common logic. 'Volition is that state of an intellectual being in which, the mind being affected in a certain manner by the apprehension of an end to be accomplished, a certain motion of the organs and members of the animal frame is found to be produced' (i. 297). 'A knife has a capacity of cutting. In the same manner a human being has a capacity of walking, though it may be no more true of him than of the inanimate substance, that he has the power of exercising or not exercising that capacity' (i. 308). 'A knife is as capable as a man of being employed in the purposes of virtue, and the one is no more free than the other as to its employment. The mode in which a knife is made subservient to these purposes is by material impulse. The mode in which a man is made subservient is by inducement and persuasion. But both are equally the affair of necessity. The man differs from the knife, just as the iron candlestick differs from the brass one; he has one more way of being acted upon. This additional way in man is motive, in the candlestick is magnetism' (i. 309).

At first sight it is, as I have said, a wonder that Wordsworth should have been much impressed by such doctrines as these, but the evidence is strong that for a time they lay upon him like a nightmare. I will not quote the Borderers for a reason which will be seen presently, but the testimony of Hazlitt, Coleridge, the Prelude, and the Excursion is decisive. "Throw aside your books of chemistry," said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, "and read Godwin on Necessity"' (Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age, p. 49, 3rd edition). Now it is a question, important historically, but more important to ourselves privately, whether Wordsworth's temporary subjugation by Political Justice was due to pure intellectual conviction. I think not. Coleridge noticed that Wordsworth suffered much from hypochondria. He complains that during the Scotch tour in 1803 'Wordsworth's hypochondriacal feelings keep him silent and self-centred.' He again says to Richard Sharp, in 1804, that Wordsworth has 'occasional fits of hypochondriacal uncomfortableness, from which, more or less, and at longer or shorter intervals, he has never been wholly free from his very childhood,' and that he has a 'hypochondriacal graft in his nature.' Wordsworth himself speaks of times when -

' . . . fears and fancies thick upon me came; Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not nor could name.'

He is haunted with

' . . . the fear that kills,'

and he thinks of Chatterton and his end.

During 1793, 1794, and part of 1795, this tendency to hypochondria must have been greatly encouraged. His hopes in the Revolution had begun to fail, but the declaration of war against France made him wretched. He wandered about from place to place, unable to conjecture what his future would be. 'I have been doing nothing,' he tells Matthews, 'and still continue to do nothing. What is to become of me I know not.' He proposed to start a Republican magazine to be called the Philanthropist, and we find him inquiring whether he could get work on the London newspapers. Hypochondriacal misery is apt to take an intellectual shape. The most hopeless metaphysics or theology which we happen to encounter fastens on us, and we mistake for an unbiased conviction the form which the disease assumes. The Political Justice found in Wordsworth the aptest soil for germination; it rooted and grew rapidly.

'So I fared, Dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds Like culprits to the bar; calling the mind, Suspiciously, to establish in plain day Her titles and her honours; now believing, Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground Of obligation, what the rule and whence The sanction; till, demanding formal PROOF, And seeking it in everything, I lost All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, Yielded up moral questions in despair. This was the crisis of that strong disease, This the soul's last and lowest ebb; I drooped, Deeming our blessed reason of least use Where wanted most: "The lordly attributes Of will and choice," I bitterly exclaimed, "What are they but a mockery of a Being Who hath in no concerns of his a test Of good and evil; knows not what to fear Or hope for, what to covet or to shun: And who, if those could be discerned, would yet Be little profited, would see, and ask, Where is the obligation to enforce?"'

In the autumn of 1795, Wordsworth, helped by the modest legacy of Raisley Calvert, was able to move with Dorothy to Racedown, and he immediately set to work on the Borderers, which I take to be the beginning of recovery. It was obviously written to exhibit the character of Oswald, the villain. He is one of a band of outlaws, and is jealous of the appointment of Marmaduke as chief. His revenge is a determination to make Marmaduke as guilty as himself. Marmaduke is in love with Idonea, and Oswald, partly by inventing lies about her blind father, Herbert, and partly by dexterous sophistry derived from Political Justice, endeavours to persuade Marmaduke to kill him. Marmaduke hesitates, but is finally overpowered. Although he cannot himself murder Herbert, he draws him to a desolate moor and leaves him to perish. Oswald then recounts his own story. When he was on a voyage to Syria he had believed on false evidence, that some wrong had been done to him by his captain, and accordingly contrived that he should be left to die in agony on a barren island. Oswald discovered that he had been deceived, but he declares exultantly to Marmaduke that, after being somewhat stunned, he found himself emancipated:-

'Life stretched before me smooth as some broad way Cleared for a monarch's progress. Priests might spin Their veil, but not for me—'twas in fit place Among its kindred cobwebs.'

He concludes by avowing impudently that Herbert is innocent and that the impulse which prompted the monstrous perfidy of procuring his death was -

'I would have made us equal once again.'

This is the commentary by Wordsworth on Godwin's parable by which he illustrates the simplicity of action in what we call the soul. 'When a ball upon a billiard-board is struck,' etc. etc. 'Exactly similar to this . . . are the actions of the human mind' (i. 306-7). Lacy, one of the freebooters asks Wallace:-

'But for the motive?'

and Wallace replies:-

'Natures such as his Spin motives out of their own bowels, Lacy!'

The Borderers is stuffed full with Godwinism. 'Remorse,' exclaims Oswald,

'It cannot live with thought; think on, think on, And it will die. What! In this universe, Where the least things control the greatest, where The faintest breath that breathes can move a world; What! feel remorse, where, if a cat had sneezed, A leaf had fallen, the thing had never been Whose very shadow gnaws us to the vitals.'

So Godwin: 'We shall, therefore, no more be disposed to repent of our own faults than of the faults of others' (i. 315). The noxious thing is now, however, with Wordsworth no longer subject but object, and when a man can cast loose the enemy and survey him, victory is three parts achieved.

There is no evidence that Wordsworth attempted any reasoned confutation of Political Justice. It was falsified in him by Racedown, by better health, by the society of his beloved sister, and finally by the friendship with Coleridge, although there was but little intimacy with him till the summer of 1797, and the Borderers was finished in 1796. This, then, is the moral—to repeat what has been said before—that certain beliefs, at any rate with men of Wordsworth's stamp, are sickness, and that with the restoration of vitality and the influx of joy they disappear.

One other observation. Wordsworth never afterwards vexed himself with free will, necessity, and the like. He knew such matters were not for him. Many problems may appear to be of great consequence, but it is our duty to avoid them if our protecting genius warns us away.

POSTSCRIPT

The most singular portion of Political Justice is that which deals with Population, and some notice of it, by way of postscript, may be pardoned, for it cannot be neglected in our estimate of Godwin, and it is a curious instance of the futility of attempting to comprehend character without searching into corners and examination of facts which, judged by external bulk, are small. These small facts may contain principles which are constituent of the man. The chapter on Population occupies a few pages at the end of the second volume of the Political Justice.

Godwin would like to see property equalised, or common, and he tries to answer the argument that excessive population would ensue. He quotes (ii. 862) a reported conjecture of Franklin's that 'mind will one day become omnipotent over matter.' If over matter, which is outside us, thinks Godwin, why not over our own bodies, 'in a word, why may not man be one day immortal' (ii. 862). He points out that the mind already has great power over the body, that it can conquer pain, assist in the cure of disease, and successfully resist old age.

'Why is it that a mature man soon loses that elasticity of limb which characterises the heedless gaiety of youth? Because he desists from youthful habits. He assumes an air of dignity incompatible with the lightness of childish sallies. He is visited and vexed with all the cares that rise out of our mistaken institutions, and his heart is no longer satisfied and gay. Hence his limbs become stiff and unwieldy. This is the forerunner of old age and death' (ii. 863-64). 'Medicine may reasonably be stated to consist of two branches, the animal and intellectual. The latter of these has been infinitely too much neglected' (ii. 869). We may look forward to a time when we shall be 'indifferent to the gratifications of sense. They please at present by their novelty, that is because we know not how to estimate them. They decay in the decline of life indirectly because the system refuses them, but directly and principally because they no longer excite the ardour and passion of mind . . . The gratifications of sense please at present by their imposture. We soon learn to despise the mere animal function, which, apart from the delusions of intellect, would be nearly the same in all cases; and to value it, only as it happens to be relieved by personal charms or mental excellence. We absurdly imagine that no better road can be found to the sympathy and intercourse of minds. But a very slight degree of attention might convince us that this is a false road, full of danger and deception. Why should I esteem another, or by another be esteemed? For this reason only, because esteem is due, and only so far as it is due.

'The men therefore who exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population will cease to propagate, for they will no longer have any motive, either of error or duty, to induce them. In addition to this they will perhaps be immortal. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence her career at the end of every thirty years. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government. These latter articles are at no great distance; and it is not impossible that some of the present race of men may live to see them in part accomplished. But, besides this, there will be no disease, no anguish, no melancholy, and no resentment. Every man will seek with ineffable ardour the good of all' (ii. 870-72).

A very curious vein, not golden indeed but copper, let us say, is hidden away in the earthy mass of Godwin. The dull, heavy-featured creature sees an apocalyptic vision and becomes poetical. It is partly absurd, but not because it is ideal, and there are lineaments in it of the true Utopia. Godwin probably would have denounced the Revelation of St. John the Divine as superstitious nonsense, but he saw before him a kind of misty, distorted reflection of the New Jerusalem, in which there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, where there shall be no more curse, no night, no candle, no light of the sun. It might have been thought that it was impossible to establish a connection between Patmos and Skinner Street, but the first postulate of Euclid's elements holds good universally, 'that a straight line may be drawn from any one point to any other point.'



NOTES



Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim Credebat libris.—HOR. Sat., II. i. 30.

Nothing is more dangerous than a mass of discontent which does not know what remedy is to be sought. All sorts of cures will be tried, many of them mere quackery, and their failure will make matters worse.

Whatever may be the meaning of the process of the world, however disheartening some steps in its evolution may be, they are necessary, and without them, perhaps, some evil could not thoroughly have been worked out.

People often manifest a diseased desire to express their will. A theory is adopted, not because the facts force it upon them, but because its adoption shows their power. The larger, the freer the nature, the less there is of this action of the will, the more the mind is led.

A mere dream, a vague hope may be more potent than certainty in a lesser matter. The faintest vision of God is more determinative of life than a gross earthly certainty.

The more nearly the performer on a musical instrument approaches perfection, the larger is that part of his execution which is unconscious. Consciousness arises with defect, or sense of something to be overcome. How conscious we are when striving to think and work in ill-health!

The highest education is that which teaches us to guide ourselves by motives which are intangible, remote, incapable of direct and material appreciation.

Weak minds find confirmation of their beliefs in the discovery of the same beliefs in other people. They do not take the trouble to find out how their neighbours obtained these beliefs. If they are current at the time, the probability is that the coincidence is worthless as any evidence of validity.

The certainty which comes of intelligent conviction is a tempered certainty. Its possessor knows the difficulty of the path by which he has reached it, and the reasons which on his way have appeared so potent against it. Fanaticism is the accompaniment of conclusions which are not the result of reason.

To understand a thing is to understand all its laws. The thing is then nothing but law, and mere matter seems to disappear.

What is it which governs the selection of truths which make up religions? Why are this and that chosen? Has not the selection a damaging effect upon the great body of truth?

Every action should be an end in itself as well as a means. The end of getting up in the morning, as Goethe says, is getting up.

We are always searching for something extraordinary which shall give life its pleasure and value. The extraordinary must be contributed by our own minds and feelings.

The real object in any human being of my love and worship is that which is not in any table of virtues, nor can I in any way describe it: it is something which perpetually escapes, which is not to be found in anything said or done.

It is a common mistake to demand a definition of that which can have none. We loosely cover a mass of phenomena which are diverse with a single word. For example, we puzzle over a definition of life, but there is no such thing as life in the sense of a single, distinct entity.

Religion has done harm by assigning an artificial urgency to insoluble problems. We are all told that we must be certain on matters concerning which the wisest man is ignorant. When we begin to reflect and to doubt, the urgency unhappily remains and we are distressed.

I know a man who had to encounter three successive trials of all the courage and inventive faculty in him. If he had failed in one he would have been ruined. The odds were desperate against him in each, and against ultimate victory were overwhelming. Nevertheless he made the attempt and was triumphant almost by a miracle in each struggle. How often calculation is folly and cowardice!

Before we can hear the Divine Voice we must shut out all other voices, so that we may be able to listen, to discern its faintest whisper. The most precious messages are those which are whispered.

A negative may be really positive. It depends on the extent of that which the negative excludes. If I say of hydrogen that it is not oxygen, nothing is gained. If I say it is not a fluid nor a solid, more is gained. So in the determinations of Spirit, God, etc., although we use negatives, the results may be of value.

True mental training is a discipline compelling us to DWELL on that which is presented to us, to discover what unites it to other objects and what differentiates it from them. To the untrained mind creation is a blur. The moral effect on a child of teaching it to express distinction by significant words is great.

'Ought' is a singular instance of the confusion wrought by words and of their inefficiency. There is no single 'ought' and therefore no science of the obligation it implies. 'Ought' in the phrase 'you ought to speak the truth' refers to an instinct in us to report veraciously what we see. 'Ought' of self-sacrifice refers to love, and 'ought' of sobriety to the subordination of desires, to a difference in their authority of which we can give no account, excepting that we are creatures fashioned in a certain way.

In the presence of some people we inevitably depart from ourselves: we are inaccurate, say things we do not feel, and talk nonsense. When we get home we are conscious that we have made fools of ourselves. Never go near these people.

What cardboard puppets are the creations of fiction compared with a common man or woman intimately known!

How much of what I say is an echo; how little is myself! Sometimes it seems as if my real self were nothing and that what stands for it were a mere miscellany of odds and ends picked up here and there. What a Self is the Jesus of the Gospels!

A cousin of mine had an evening class of poor girls. She was trying to explain to them the words 'liquid' and 'solid.'

'You walked over the bridge; it was a hard road.'

'Yes, teacher.'

'If you had gone down by the side of the bridge you could not have walked across there?'

'No, teacher.'

'If you were to try and were to put your feet on the water, where would you go?'

'To hell, teacher.'

The association of the question, 'Where would you go?' was too strong.

This sunset, which is common to the whole county, is more to me than anything exclusively mine.

If emotion be profound, symbolism, as a means of expression, is indispensable.

There would be no objection to 'telling the truth' about Burns, Byron, and Shelley if it could be told. But it cannot be told. We are informed that they did this or that, and the thing they did is to us what it would be if done by ourselves.

We are most vain of that which is least ourselves, of that which is acquired, put on, stuck in. It is not correct to say that a woman is vain of her beauty.

Controversy is demoralising. Never suffer yourself to become an advocate. Never rely on controversy to convince. Say what you have to say and leave it. DO it if you wish to persuade.

People are often unkind, not from malignity, but from ineptitude.

It is of the greatest importance continually to bear in mind that the violation of a law personal to myself is as immoral as the violation of a general law, and may be more mischievous.

To die is easy when we are in perfect health. On a fine spring morning, out of doors, on the downs, mind and body sound and exhilarated, it would be nothing to lie down on the turf and pass away.

What we want is wise counsel on particular occasions. Principles we can get by the bushel anywhere. The reason why our friends are so useless is that they will not take trouble. The selection and the application of the principle are difficult.

It is terrible to live with a person who has a strong, narrow sense of duty without further-reaching thought or love by which the rigidity of duty may be softened.

By the third, which is neither ourselves nor the object, do we recognise it. The third is the celestial light.

It is appalling to reflect that there are enormous masses of human energy which can find no proper outlet. The consequence is mischief either through expression in any direction and at any cost, or through suppression. We want an organisation of energy, one of the noblest offices of a true church.

The tyranny of the imagination is perhaps that which is most to be dreaded. By strength of will we can prevent an act, but no strength of will is able to prevent the invasion of self-created pictures. The only remedies are health and indifference to them when they present themselves. If we worry ourselves about them they become worse. If we let them alone they fade and we forget them.

Thinking much upon insoluble problems is apt to breed superstition even in the strongest minds. The failure of the reason weakens our reliance on it, and the difference between the incomprehensible and the absurd is very fine.

In this howling Bedlam of voices, it is of no use to talk or write— no man, if he has anything to say, can be heard. He is reviewed to- day and forgotten to-morrow. To soothe the pangs of a single sufferer, to drain a poor man's cottage and give him wholesome drinking water, are good things done of which we can be sure.

Life is a matter of small virtues, but we have to bring them to perfection. This may be done by great principles. The humblest act may proceed from that which is beyond the stars.

What a vile antithesis is that between a man and his faults! If I love a man, I do not love his faults, for they are abstractions, but I love the man IN his faults. Are they not truly himself? He is often more himself in his faults than in his virtues.

We should not talk as if we were responsible for the effect of what we say. We are responsible for saying it, and for nothing more. A higher power is responsible for the effect which is to follow from each cause.

Wisdom for old age.—Check the propensity to dwell on what you have thought before. Try to get new ideas into your head. Beware of giving trouble or asking for sympathy. Do everything yourself, which you have been in the habit of doing, so long as you can move a muscle, and when you cannot, secure, if possible, paid help: watch what the most devoted of friends or relatives say of continued attendance on the sick: note the relief when the sick man dies. Let not the thought sadden you that six weeks after you are in your grave those to whom you are now dear will be laughing and living just as if you had never existed. Why should they not? Are you of such consequence that they should for ever wear mourning for you? A slow march as you are carried to the churchyard, but when a handful of earth has been thrown on your coffin, let everybody go home to draw up the blinds and open the windows. So much dead already, all passion, so many capacities for enjoyment, why care for this miserable residuum, this poor empty I?

Clear vision is not often the cause of distress. It is rather the cloud of imagination distorting what is before us and preventing distinct view. Science, removing the heavens to an infinite distance, destroying traditions, abolishing our little theologies, does not disturb our peace so seriously as that vague dreaming in which there is no thinking.

Ah, it is not a quarrel which is so deadly! It is the strange transformation of what were once thought to be charms and virtues. The soft blue eyes are now simply silly; innocence is stupidity; docility is incapacity of resolution; the sweet, even temper is absence of passion.

Is it true that less evidence is necessary to prove an event which is probable than one that is improbable? The probability of an event is no evidence that it actually happened. Its probability may be the reason why we should examine the evidence more closely, because witnesses are more likely, in the case of a probable event, to refrain from scrutiny than in the case of one not probable. I sit at my window and see a whitish object with four legs in a field. I am short-sighted, but I at once say 'a cow,' and take no pains to ascertain whether it is a cow or not. If I had seen a white object apparently with three legs only, I should have gone out, inspected it closely, and should have called other people to look at it.

I pray for a gift which perhaps would be miraculous: simply to be able to see that field of waving grass as I should see it if association and the 'film of custom' did not obscure it.

Why do we admire intellect when it is united with even diabolic disregard of moral laws? Partly because it stands out more prominently; partly because it triumphs over obstacles; but mainly because we are all more or less in sympathy with insurrection and the assertion of individuality.

As we move higher, personality becomes of less consequence. We do not live in the 'I,' but in truths. Something of a metaphysical hint here.

Principles are dangerous tools for a fool. What awful mischief they have done!

Never was there a time in which men were less governed by ideas. The Church and the sects are neither Calvinist nor Arminian, orthodox nor rational, and in politics an idea damns a measure at once.

We have no capitalised happiness, nothing on which to draw when temporary sources fail.

A decided bent or twist, is not unsuitable in a man, but I do not care for it in a woman. I love that equipoise in the faces of the Greek women in the old statues and sculptures. It appears also in some pictures of the Virgin.

The duty of the State as to toleration cannot be decided by an appeal to rights. Everybody admits that government is sometimes justified in suppressing what is honestly believed. But if government had not been resisted we should have had no Christianity. The vindication of the authority of the State is a vindication of persecution, and if we dispute this authority we cannot logically disallow dangerous licence. There is no way out of the difficulty so long as we generalise. Toleration is an abstraction, nothing but a word. What we have to decide is, whether it is wise or unwise to send to prison the people now before us who preach bigamy, assassination of kings, or theological heresy.

When we struggle to see more than we possibly can see we undervalue what we indubitably see.

There is but little thinking, or perhaps it is more correct to say but little reflection, in the Bible. There is profound sympathy with a few truths, but ideas are not sought for their own sake. Carlyle is Biblical. It has been said scoffingly that he is no thinker. It is his glory that he is not.

What we have toiled after painfully often lies unused. No opportunity occurs for saying or doing a tithe of it. The hour demands its own special wisdom.

When we really love we cannot believe that our love is mortal. We feel, not only that it is immortal, but that it is eternal, in the sense in which Spinoza uses the word. It is not the attraction of something entirely limited and personal to that which is also limited and personal.

We think of rest as natural to bodies, and motion as something added. But the new doctrine is that motion is primary. Nothing is at rest, and, so far as we know, rest has never been. It is an astounding conception.

There is a certain distance at which each person whom we know is naturally placed from us. It varies with each, and we must not attempt to alter it. We may clasp him who is close, and we are not to pull closer him who is more remote.

Many people would be much better if they would let themselves be as good as they really are. They seem to take delight in making themselves less.

We are much misled by characters in fiction or on the stage, for they are always more consistent than men and women in real life. Real men and women are seldom controlled for twenty-four hours by the same motives or principles. If my friend is mean to-day, let me not doubt his generosity to-morrow. Let me joyously believe in it when the morrow comes.

What a pest is the re-appearance in us of discarded conclusions! It would be of service if we could keep a register of those things which, after careful examination, we have determined to be false.

Acting from the strongest motives, even if they are bad, is perhaps not so dangerous as acting from none. The evils which arise through deeds done from conspicuous motives attract attention, but the vast sum of misery caused by mere idle, irresolute swaying hither and thither passes unnoticed.

Pig-headedness is often a sign of weakness of will. The pig-headed person knows he is weak, and to convince himself and others of his resolution holds to any chance purpose with tenacity. The less reasonable the purpose is, the more obstinately he clings to it, because, by so doing, he shows as he thinks his strength of volition.

If we desire peace we must get beyond the notion of personality. Nothing of any value is bound up with it: it is an illusion.

Intense feeling gives intellectual precision. The man who feels profoundly the beauty of a cloud is the man who can describe it. But the first effect of intense feeling is often to break up false precision. The ideas of God, life, personality, right and wrong, are examples.

The blue sky is more beautiful because we know it is not painted opacity, but transparent.

The slowness of the change in the sky is exquisite, the dying out of the light in the clouds after sunset. The quiet abiding of the grey cloud as darkness thickens is wonderful.

June—Sky and sea pure blue. The blue tint suffuses the distant vessels. One large sailing ship with sails all set is so blue that it differs only by a shade from sky and sea.

It is not true that guileless people are the most easily deceived. S. G. is not sharp-witted, but she is transparent as a pool of rain on meadow grass, and consequently it is impossible to deceive her, and ridiculous to attempt it: her eyes forbid it. She does not infer insincerity: it is automatically rejected.

July.—North-easterly wind, strong: hateful in the streets and even in the house: dust everywhere. Inclined to shut the windows and stay indoors, but went out for a long walk up to the flag-staff. A perfect day for that view. The bay all shades of blue; here and there deep, and, inshore, the blue is broken with pure white from the tops of the waves: the yellow beach to the farthest point clasping the sea like an arm. So beautiful that it gives pain: it is not possible to extend oneself to it.

Whether truth does or does not lie in the mean depends on the selection of the extremes. A mechanical choice of the mean is stupidity.

The Athanasian Creed is not objectionable because of its damnatory clauses. Neglect to observe the finest distinctions continually involves damnation. The difference between a vice and a virtue may be a hair-line. The true reason for rejecting the Creed is that it is manufactured, that it is not a statement of what is seen and felt to be true. There is nevertheless a certain dogmatic pride in it, a desire to affirm as offensively as possible.

The peace which orthodox religion is said to bring is obtained by clipping the Infinite and reducing it to a finite. The joy of INCLUSION is great but false.

'And thy fats shall overflow with new wine'—Proverbs iii. 10, Revised Version. Called on A. in London. I forget how it came about, but in course of conversation he asked me if 'fats' were not a mistake for 'vats.' I told him it was not, turning up the word in the dictionary as an equivalent to 'vats.' Called on his sister, who was staying three or four miles away and had come up to town that afternoon from the country where she lived. That very evening she asked me the same question her brother had asked. She had not seen him, nor held any communication with him on the subject, nor had it been suggested to them by any person or book. Moreover, neither of them is a frequent reader of the Bible. Yesterday I told the story to A. in his sister's presence. She confirmed it, and A., who is accustomed to scientific investigation, was quite unable to account for it. If a jury were trying a prisoner charged with murder, and an equally singular concurrence of circumstances were in evidence against him, they would not hesitate to hang him.

If you are very short-sighted or half blind, it is safer in the twilight to shut the eyes and depend entirely on the touch in moving about.

The books on the adjustment of astronomical instruments say that if there is a slight error, it is better always to make allowance for it than to attempt to correct it.

The sun, we say, is the cause of heat, but the heat IS the sun, here on this window-ledge.

The contact of a SYSTEM of philosophy or religion with reality is that of a tangent with a circle. It touches the circle at one point, but instantly the circle edges away.

In every man there is something of the Universal Spirit, strangely limited by that which is finite and personal, but still there. Occasionally it makes itself known in a word, look, or gesture, and then he becomes one with the stars and sea.

We cannot really understand a religion unless we have believed it.

We ought to cultivate strength of will by doing what we have once decided to do. Subsequent reasons for not doing it may appear plausible, but it will generally be better to adhere to our first resolution. The advantage gained by change will not be equal to that derived from persistence.

Never be afraid of being commonplace. Never turn aside from the truth because it is commonplace.

A nightmare is not scattered while we are asleep. It disappears simply by—WAKING.

Cursed temperament.—A long drought broke up. The grass had been burnt, and the cattle were dying for want of water. In one week two inches of rain fell.

A. 'What a blessing this rain is!'

B. 'Yes, but a reaction is sure to follow. I've noticed that after weather like this we always have a spell of dry, northerly winds.'

The prompter which urges us on from one point to another, never discouraged by failure to see in the present moment what it seemed to possess when we pursued it, or rather, not permitting us to stop to find out if there be any failure—this it is by which we live. When it departs it is time to die.

January.—The wind is north-west after yesterday's fog and rain from the south. Suddenly and silently, just after sunset, the whole south-western sky has blazed up, passing from glowing flame-colour on the horizon to carmine on the zenith. Between the promontories of cloud are lakes and gulfs of the tenderest green and blue. What magnificent pomp, fit to celebrate the death of a god for the world's salvation! But there is nothing below to explain it. It must be a spectacle displayed for celestial reasons altogether hidden.

Much misunderstanding would be prevented if we were to say exactly what we believe and not modify it to suit, as we suppose, the person to whom we speak.

Humour people sometimes in what you do, but not in the expression of your convictions. Go a mile out of your way to please an obstinate friend, but utter with precision what you believe. It is in the sharpness and finish that its value lies.

Everybody in these civilised, intercommunicative days seems arrested: everybody is a compromise. It is rare that we meet with a person who has been let alone, whose own particular self has been developed free from intrusion.

People believe the truth more readily if something difficult of belief or incredible is mixed with it.

I want no more beliefs. What I want is active strength in those I have. I know there is no ghost round the corner, but I dare not go.

There is always a point in our insistence or persuasion when it is most effective, and generally it is much lower than we suppose. One degree above it is waste and impediment.

Keep a watch upon your tongue when you are in particularly good health.

Early morning before sunrise: the valley was filled with mist; red clouds in the sky. For a minute or two the mist took the colour, but fainter, of the clouds. What patience is required in order to see! The sun had not risen, the grass in the field was obviously green, but not without intent fixture of the eyes upon it was the dark, twilight shade of green recognised which was its peculiar meaning and beauty. To most of us, perhaps not to artists, it is more difficult to look than to think.

The just judgment is not that of the judge who has no interest in it. The most unjust judgments are due to indifference.

The sun is setting in crimson, delicate blue and green. I think of the earth as a revolving ball. 'This was the Creator's design, or, if we prefer so to speak, this was the law, that there should be a ball and that it should turn on its axis. But just as surely was it the design or law that there should be these colours, crimson, blue, and green, and that I should be affected by them. This affection was rolled up in the primal impulse which started the planet and is as necessary as its revolution.

Zeal in proselytising is often due to an uneasy suspicion that we only half-believe.

We should take pains to be polite to those whom we love. Politeness preserves love, is a kind of sheath to it.

The hornbeam hedge is coming into leaf in patches although all parts of each side face the same point of the compass. The leaves of some patches are fully expanded, while in others they are only in bud. The dry, brown, dead leaves of last year have remained through the winter and early spring, but they are dropping off now that the new leaves begin to shoot.

We ought not to expect every child to be religious. The religious temper is an endowment like that for painting or poetry.

A. and B. meet on the road. B. is a retired official and has nothing to do.

B. 'Meant to have come to see you several times' (has not called for nine months), 'but I have so many engagements.' (Shows a basket.) 'Look here, just had to take some eggs to C. for my wife.'

'If a man turns to Christ, nothing in him is to be left behind. Every passion must be brought to Him to be transformed by Him. Otherwise the man does not come, but only a part of him.' [Said to me years ago by a pious friend now dead.]

The real proportion between vice and virtue in a man is often misjudged because the vice is before us continually, while the virtue does not obtrude.

If you are to live in happiness and peace with the woman you love, you must not permit the daily course of life to have its way unchecked. There must be hours of removal to a distance when in silence you create anew her ideal and proper form, when you think of her as sculptured in white marble.

Blacksmiths forging one on this side of the anvil and the other on the opposite side. Each keeps his own time, not regulating his stroke by watching his mate.

There is in man an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever you like to call it. If a course is not cut for it, it turns the ground round it into a swamp.

Went into the cathedral and heard morning service. Miracle of miracles! Into the soul of a carpenter's son more than eighteen centuries ago came a thought, and it is returned to us to-day in majestic architecture, music of voice and organ.

Disbelief in Christianity is not so much to be dreaded as its acceptance with a complete denial of it in society and politics.

The love that has lasted for years; which has resisted all weakness and defect; has been constant in all moods and circumstances better and worse; has exacted nothing; has been content with silence; always soft and easy as the circumambient air, a love with no reserve; what is there in any relationship to person or thing worth a straw compared with it!

We ought to endeavour to give our dreams reality, but in Reality we should preserve the dream.

If her unhappiness does not destroy my happiness, and if her happiness does not make me happy, I do not love her.

There are problems which cannot be solved, for directly we have stated them, as we suppose, they elude the statement and are outside. Who can say what is the meaning of the question, 'Does God exist?'

There is always a multitude of reasons both in favour of doing a thing and against doing it. The art of debate lies in presenting them; the art of life in neglecting ninety-nine hundredths of them.

How beautiful is a rapid rivulet trying to clear itself from stirred-up mud.

The most foolish things we say are said from another person's point of view and not from our own.

On a siding at one of the stations on the Great Western Railway were a number of old engines waiting to be broken up. There they stood, uncleaned, their bright parts rusted and indistinguishable from the others. Some were back to back and some front to front. There they stood and saw the expresses rush past them with their new engines.

Went out this afternoon to call on C. and his wife. They are certainly the most cultivated people I know. They travel a good deal, and each of them can speak two or three languages besides English. They read the best books, and do not read those which are bad. Some friends were there, and I was entertained with intelligent criticism of literature, music, and pictures, and learned much that was worth knowing. But I came away unsatisfied, and rather dazed. On my way back—it was a singularly warm, clear evening in February—I turned in to see an old lady who lives near me. She was sitting wrapped up at her wide-open window, looking at the light that was still left in the south-west. I said, of course, that I hoped she would not take cold. 'Oh no,' she replied, 'I often sit here, and so long as I keep myself warm I come to no harm. I cannot read by candlelight, and I am thankful that this room faces the south. I know the stars much better than when I was young.' I took the chair beside her, and for ten minutes neither of us spoke, but I was not conscious for an instant of the disagreeable feeling that silence must be broken, and search be made for something with which to break it. If two persons are friends in the best sense of the word, they are not uncomfortable if they do not talk when they are together. Presently she told me that she had received news that morning of the birth of a granddaughter. She was much pleased. The mother already had two sons and desired a girl. I stayed for about half an hour, and went home in debt to her for peace.

Bacon observes that whatever the mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion. Naturally so, because it is nearly certain to be something merely personal to ourselves.

Excepting in one word, the betrayal of Jesus, the defection of Peter, the examination before Pilate and Herod, and the crucifixion, are recorded, as Spedding notices, without any vituperation. The excepted word, not named by Spedding, is 'blasphemously' (Luke xxii. 65). {250}

Coleridge says that great minds are never wrong but in consequence of being right, which is perfectly true; but it may be added that they are also right through being wrong.

'When he is moderate and regular in any of these things, out of a sense of Christian sobriety and self-denial, that he may offer unto God a more reasonable and holy life, then it is, that the smallest rule of this kind is naturally the beginning of great piety. For the smallest rule in these matters is of great benefit, as it teaches us some part of the government of ourselves, as it keeps up a tenderness of mind, as it presents God often to our thoughts, and brings a sense of religion into the ordinary actions of our common life.'—(Law's Serious Call.) Men are restrained by fear of consequences, but it is Law's rule which gives strength and dignity. Living in a certain way because Perfection demands it produces a result different from that obtained by living in the same way through fear of injury to health.

Man is the revelation of the Infinite, and it does not become finite in him. It remains the Infinite.

Luther says somewhere, 'Do not anxiously search for the pillars which are to keep the sky from falling.' Many of us have been afraid all our lives that the sky would fall, and have anxiously searched for the pillars. There are none, and yet the sky will not fall.

Idolatry is the worship of that which is non-significant. The worship of one God, as Coleridge says, may be idolatry.

What a man is conscious of, is not himself, but that which is not himself. Without a belief in the existence of an external world, I could not believe in my own existence.

The dialectic of Socrates is positive in so far as it shows the futility of reasoning as a means of reaching the truth. If we wish to know whether courage is knowledge, we must face imminent danger.

The omnipotence of God—that is to say, absolute omnipotence, a power which knows no resistance—is an utterly inconceivable abstraction. Yet much speculation is based on it.

There is a great reserve of incomprehensibility in all the few friends for whom I really care. It is better that it should be so. What would a comprehensible friend be worth? The impenetrable background gives the beauty to that which is in front of it. The most unfathomable also of my friends are those who are most sincere and luminous.

Note on a picture.—The sea-shore; low cliffs topped with grass; a small cove; the open sea, calm, intensely blue; sky also deep blue, but towards the horizon there are soft, white clouds. On a little sandy ridge sit a brown fisher-boy and fisher-girl, immortal as the sea, cliffs, and clouds which are a setting or frame for them.

The strength of the argument in favour of a philosophy or religion is proportionate to the applicability of the philosophy or religion to life. If in all situations we find it ready, it is true.

Bacon observes that 'interpretations' of Nature, that is to say real generalisations elicited from facts by a just and methodical process, 'cannot suddenly strike the understanding' like 'anticipations' collected from a few instances. I have often noticed that 'striking' is seldom a sign of truth, and that those things which are most true, the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables for example, do not 'strike.'

We foolishly exaggerate ingratitude to us. Ought we to require of those whom we have served, that they should be always confessing their obligations to us? Why should we care about neglect? 'Seek Him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is His name,'

The worship of the idol is often more passionate than that of God. People prostrate themselves in ecstasy before the idol, and remain unmoved in the presence of a starry night. A starry night does not provoke hysterics. The adoration of the veritably divine is calm.

'It is a sad thing,' said she, 'that so kind and good a man should be an infidel.' 'It is a sad thing to me,' said her terrible sister, 'that an infidel should be what you call kind and good.'

Plus sapit vulgus, quia tantum, quantum opus est, sapit. {254} Quoted by Montaigne (Of Presumption) from Lactantius. Characteristic of Montaigne and true, so far that a man can know nothing thoroughly unless the knowledge be a necessity.

'Certainty of knowledge,' says Dr. Johnson in the Idler (No. 84), 'not only excludes mistake, but fortifies veracity. . . . That which is fully known cannot be falsified but with reluctance of understanding, and alarm of conscience: of understanding, the lover of truth; of conscience, the sentinel of virtue.'

At the present day we are chiefly taken up with that which is beyond our grasp. Our literature is the newspapers, and nine-tenths of what we read in them morning and evening we do not understand. Everybody is expected to take sides in politics, but not one person in a thousand can give an intelligible account of political questions. The difficulty of so doing is much increased by the absence of systematic information. We get leading articles and columns of telegrams, but seldom concise exposition or carefully edited and connected history.

An object is of importance to us in inverse proportion to the square of the distance, but men worry themselves about the news from China and will not give five minutes' thought in a week to their own souls or to those of wife or child. It is pathetic to see how excited they become about remote events which cannot affect their happiness one iota. Why should we not occupy ourselves with that which is definite when there is so much of it? Political problems confront us, but if they are too big for us, let us avoid them by every means in our power. If we are in doubt we ought not to vote. The question which we are incapable of settling will be settled better by Time than by the intermeddling of ignorance.

In religion, and science also, we dare not say I DO NOT KNOW. We must always be dabbling in matters on which we can come to no conclusion worth a rotten nut. We busy ourselves with essays on the dates and composition of the books of the Old Testament and cannot tell the story of Joshua or Saul; we listen to lectures on radium, or the probable exhaustion of the sun's energy, and have never learned the laws of motion. Few people estimate properly the evil of habitual intercourse with that which is vague and indeterminate. The issues before us not being clearly cut and comprehensible, the highest faculties of our minds are not exercised. We lazily wander over the surface without coming to a definite conclusion. Perhaps we pick up by chance some irrational notion, which we defend with obstinacy, for we are more dogmatic concerning that which we cannot prove than we are concerning a truth which is incontrovertible. The former is our own personal property, the latter is common. One step further, and by constantly affirming and denying when we have no demonstration, lying becomes easy.

There is much which is called criticism that is poisonous, not because it is mistaken, but because it invites people to assert beyond their knowledge or capacity. A popular lecturer discusses the errors of Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, or George Eliot before an audience but superficially acquainted with the works of these great authors and not qualified to pass judgment upon them. He is considered 'cheap' if he does not balance

'His wit all see-saw between that and this, Now high, now low, now master up, now miss.'

If we will be content with admiring, we are on much surer ground. It is by admiration and not by criticism that we live, and the main purpose of criticism should be to point out something to admire, which we should not have noticed. One great advantage of studying Nature is that we are not tempted to criticise her. We go to the Academy, and for a whole morning contrast faults with merits. If the time so spent had been passed in the fields with the clouds we should have gone home less conceited.

It is an awful thought that behind human speech, incapable by its very nature of anything but approximate expression, and distorted by weakness and wilfulness, lies the TRUTH as it is, exact without qualification.

The long apprenticeship has ended in little or nothing. What I was fifty years ago I am now; certainly no better, with no greater self- control, with no greater magnanimity. How much I might have gained had I taken life as an art I cannot say.

I have been looking at a cabinet of flies. Hundreds of them, each different, were arranged in order and named. Some I had to examine through a microscope. Their beauty was marvellous, but more marvellous was their variety. The differences, although the type was preserved, seemed inexhaustible, and all reasons for them broke down. If a particular modification is an advantage, why is it confined to one species? Why this range of colour? Why these purely fantastic forms? The only word we can say with certainty is that Nature is infinite and tends to infinite expression. Verum ego me satis clare ostendisse puto, a summa Dei potentia sive infinita natura infinita infinitis modis, hoc est, omnia necessario effluxisse, vel semper eadem necessitate sequi; eodem modo, ac ex natura trianguli ab aeterno et in aeternum sequitur ejus tres angulos aequari duobus rectis. Quare Dei omnipotentia actu ab aeterno fuit et in aeternum in eadem actualitate manebit.

Johnson is religious through and through, but there are passages in the Rambler and Idler dark as starless, moonless midnight. 'None would have recourse to an invisible power, but that all other subjects have eluded their hopes . . . That misery does not make all virtuous, experience too certainly informs us; but it is no less certain that of what virtue there is, misery produces far the greatest part.'

There is seldom in life any occasion for great virtues, and we must not be disappointed if it passes without great passion. We must expect to be related to one another by nothing more than ordinary bonds and satisfied if human beings give us pleasure without excitement.

I have good reason to believe that I am passing on life's journey through what almost all wayfarers therein have had to pass through, but nobody has told me of it.

How wonderful is the withdrawal of heat! It silently departs, the iron grows cold, but the heat spreads and lives!

'Who knows, though he sees the snow-cold blossom shed, If haply the heart that burned within the rose, The spirit in sense, the life of life be dead? If haply the wind that slays with storming snows Be one with the wind that quickens?' SWINBURNE, A Reminiscence.

With increase of reading we have fallen into a fireside, dilettante culture of ideas as an intellectual pleasure. Amos and Isaiah do not deal in ideas. Their strength lies in love and hatred, in the keenness and depth of their division between right and wrong. They repeat the work of God the Creator: chaotic sameness becomes diverse; the heavenly firmament mounts on high; there is Light and there is Darkness.



SHAKESPEARE



'Glory to thee in the highest, thou confidant of our Creator!' (Landor, Imaginary Conversations, Delille and Landor).

2 Henry VI. iii. 3.—The lines beginning with the one which follows are not in the old play and are Shakespeare's own: