Samuel Coleridge - The Complete Essays, Lectures & Letters of S. T. Coleridge (Illustrated)

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deadly sick.

Human happiness, like the aloe, is a flower of slow growth.

What we must do let us love to do. It is a noble chymistry that turns necessity into pleasure.

INFANCY AND INFANTS

1. The first smile—what kind of reason it displays. The first smile after sickness.

2. Asleep with the polyanthus held fast in its hand, its bells dropping over the rosy face.

3. Stretching after the stars.

4. Seen asleep by the light of glowworms.

5. Sports of infants; their excessive activity, the means being the end. Nature, how lovely a school-mistress!... Children at houses of industry.

6. Infant beholding its new-born sister.

7. Kissing itself in the looking-glass.

8. The Lapland infant seeing the sun.

9. An infant's prayer on its mother's lap. Mother directing a baby's hand. (Hartley's "love to Papa," scrawls pothooks and reads what he meant by them.)

10. The infants of kings and nobles. ("Princess unkissed and foully husbanded!")

11. The souls of infants, a vision ( vide Swedenborg ).

12. Some tales of an infant.

13. Στοργη. The absurdity of the Darwinian system (instanced by) birds and alligators.

14. The wisdom and graciousness of God in the infancy of the human species—its beauty, long continuance, etc. (Children in the wind—hair floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated trees below which they played. The elder whirling for joy the one in petticoats, a fat baby eddying half-willingly, half by the force of the gust, driven backward, struggling forward—both drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their hymn of joy.) [ Letters of S. T. C. , 1895, i. 408.]

15. Poor William seeking his mother, in love with her picture, and having that union of beauty and filial affection that the Virgin Mary may be supposed to give.

POETRY

Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent and severe correction, may be cowed into dullness!

Peculiar, not far-fetched; natural, but not obvious; delicate, not affected; dignified, not swelling; fiery, but not mad; rich in imagery, but not loaded with it—in short, a union of harmony and good sense, of perspicuity and conciseness. Thought is the body of such an ode, enthusiasm the soul, and imagery the drapery.

Dr. Darwin's poetry is nothing but a succession of landscapes or paintings. It arrests the attention too often, and so prevents the rapidity necessary to pathos.

The elder languages were fitter for poetry because they expressed only prominent ideas with clearness, the others but darkly.... Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with Gray's "Bard" and Collins' Odes. The "Bard" once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure. From this cause it is that what I call metaphysical poetry gives me so much delight.

[Compare Lecture vi. 1811-12, Bell & Co., p. 70; and Table Talk , Oct. 23, 1833, Bell & Co., p. 264.]

COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS

Poetry which excites us to artificial feelings makes us callous to real ones.

The whale is followed by waves. I would glide down the rivulet of quiet life, a trout.

Australis [Southey] may be compared to an ostrich. He cannot fly, but he has such other qualities that he needs it not.

Mackintosh intertrudes not introduces his beauties.

Snails of intellect who see only by their feelers.

Pygmy minds, measuring others by their own standard, cry What a monster , when they view a man!

Our constitution is to some like cheese—the rotten parts they like the best.

Her eyes sparkled as if they had been cut out of a diamond-quarry in some Golconda of Fairyland, and cast such meaning glances as would have vitrified the flint in a murderer's blunderbuss.

[A task] as difficult as to separate two dew-drops blended together on a bosom of a new-blown rose.

I discovered unprovoked malice in his hard heart, like a huge toad in the centre of a marble rock.

Men anxious for this world are like owls that wake all night to catch mice.

At Genoa the word Liberty is engraved on the chains of the galley slaves and the doors of prisons.

Gratitude, worse than witchcraft, conjures up the pale, meagre ghosts of dead forgotten kindnesses to haunt and trouble [his memory].

The sot, rolling on his sofa, stretching and yawning, exclaimed, " Utinam hoc esset laborare. "

Truth still more than Justice [is] blind, and needs Wisdom for her guide.

OF THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE

[A Proof of] the severity of the winter—the kingfisher [by] its slow, short flight permitting you to observe all its colours, almost as if it had been a flower.

Little daisy—very late Spring, March. Quid si vivat? Do all things in faith. Never pluck a flower again! Mem.

May 20, 1799

The nightingales in a cluster or little wood of blossomed trees, and a bat wheeling incessantly round and round! The noise of the frogs was not unpleasant, like the humming of spinning wheels in a large manufactory—now and then a distinct sound, sometimes like a duck, and, sometimes, like the shrill notes of sea-fowl.

[This note was written one day later than S. T. C.'s last letter from Germany, May 19, 1799.]

O Heavens! when I think how perishable things, how imperishable thoughts seem to be! For what is forgetfulness? Renew the state of affection or bodily feeling [so as to be the] same or similar, sometimes dimly similar, and, instantly, the trains of forgotten thoughts rise from their living catacombs!

[Sockburn] October 1799

Few moments in life are so interesting as those of our affectionate reception from a stranger who is the dear friend of your dear friend! How often you have been the subject of conversation, and how affectionately!

[The note commemorates his first introduction to Mary and Sarah Hutchinson.]

Friday evening, Nov, 27, 1799

The immoveableness of all things through which so many men were moving—a harsh contrast compared with the universal motion, the harmonious system of motions in the country, and everywhere in Nature. In the dim light London appeared to be a huge place of sepulchres through which hosts of spirits were gliding.

Ridicule the rage for quotations by quoting from "My Baby's Handkerchief." Analyse the causes that the ludicrous weakens memory, and laughter, mechanically, makes it difficult to remember a good story.

Sara sent twice for the measure of George's 1neck. He wondered that Sara should be such a fool, as she might have measured William's or Coleridge's—as "all poets' throttles were of one size."

Hazlitt, the painter, told me that a picture never looked so well as when the pallet was by the side of it. Association, with the glow of production.