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

"ONE MUSIC AS BEFORE, BUT VASTER"

The shattering of long and deep-rooted associations always places the mind in an angry state, and even when our own understandings have effected the revolution, it still holds good, only we apply the feeling to and against our former faith and those who still hold it—[a tendency] shown in modern infidels. Great good, therefore, of such revolution as alters, not by exclusion, but by an enlargement that includes the former, though it places it in a new point of view.

TO ALLSTON

After the formation of a new acquaintance, found, by some weeks' or months' unintermitted communion, worthy of all our esteem, affection and, perhaps, admiration, an intervening absence, whether we meet again or only write, raises it into friendship, and encourages the modesty of our nature, impelling us to assume the language and express all the feelings of an established attachment.

MORBID SENTIMENT

The thinking disease is that in which the feelings, instead of embodying themselves in acts , ascend and become materials of general reasoning and intellectual pride. The dreadful consequences of this perversion [may be] instanced in Germany, e.g. , in Fichte versus Kant, Schelling versus Fichte and in Verbidigno [Wordsworth] versus S. T. C. Ascent where nature meant descent, and thus shortening the process—viz., feelings made the subjects and tangible substance of thought, instead of actions, realizations, things done , and as such externalised and remembered. On such meagre diet as feelings, evaporated embryos in their progress to birth , no moral being ever becomes healthy.

"PHANTOMS OF SUBLIMITY"

Empires, states, &c., may be beautifully illustrated by a large clump of coal placed on a fire—Russia, for instance—or of small coal moistened, and by the first action of the heat of any government not absolutely lawless, formed into a cake, as the northern nations under Charlemagne—then a slight impulse from the fall of accident, or the hand of patriotic foresight, splits [the one] into many, and makes each [fragment] burn with its own flame, till at length all burning equally, it becomes again one by universal similar action—then burns low, cinerises, and without accession of rude materials goes out.

A MILD WINTER

Winter slumbering soft, seemed to smile at visions of buds and blooms, and dreamt so livelily of spring, that his stern visage had relaxed and softened itself into a dim likeness of his dream. The soul of the vision breathed through and lay like light upon his face.

But, heavens! what an outrageous day of winter this is and has been! Terrible weather for the last two months, but this is horrible! Thunder and lightning, floods of rain, and volleys of hail, with such frantic winds. December 1806.

[This note was written when S. T. C. was staying with Wordsworth at the Hall Farm, Coleorton.]

MOONLIGHT GLEAMS AND MASSY GLORIES

In the first [entrance to the wood] the spots of moonlight of the wildest outlines, not unfrequently approaching so near to the shape of man and the domestic animals most attached to him as to be easily confused with them by fancy and mistaken by terror, moved and started as the wind stirred the branches, so that it almost seemed like a flight of recent spirits, sylphs and sylphids dancing and capering in a world of shadows. Once, when our path was over-canopied by the meeting boughs, as I halloed to those a stone-throw behind me, a sudden flash of light dashed down, as it were, upon the path close before me, with such rapid and indescribable effect that my life seemed snatched away from me—not by terror but by the whole attention being suddenly and unexpectedly seized hold of—if one could conceive a violent blow given by an unseen hand, yet without pain or local sense of injury, of the weight falling here or there, it might assist in conceiving the feeling. This I found was occasioned by some very large bird, who, scared by my noise, had suddenly flown upward, and by the spring of his feet or body had driven down the branch on which he was aperch.

FOOTNOTES:

2When instead of the general feeling of the lifeblood in its equable individual motion, and the consequent wholeness of the one feeling of the skin, we feel as if a heap of ants were running over us— the one corrupting into ten thousand —so in araneosis , instead of the one view of the air, or blue sky, a thousand specks, etc., dance before the eye. The metaphor is as just as, of a metaphor, anyone has a right to claim, but it is clumsily expressed.

3I have the same anxiety for my friend now in England as for myself, that is to be, or may be, two months hence.

4"A prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times without being seen by them."

Table of Contents

September 1806—December 1807

Alas! for some abiding-place of love,

O'er which my spirit, like the mother dove,

Might brood with warming wings!

S. T. C.

DREAMS AND SHADOWS

I had a confused shadow rather than an image in my recollection, like that from a thin cloud, as if the idea were descending, though still in some measureless height.

As when the taper's white cone of flame is seen double, till the eye moving brings them into one space and then they become one—so did the idea in my imagination coadunate with your present form soon after I first gazed upon you.

And in life's noisiest hour

There whispers still the ceaseless love of thee,

The heart's self-solace and soliloquy.

You mould my hopes, you fashion me within,

And to the leading love-throb in my heart

Through all my being, all my pulses beat.

You lie in all my many thoughts like light,

Like the fair light of dawn, or summer light,

On rippling stream, or cloud-reflecting lake—

And looking to the Heaven that beams above you,

How do I bless the lot that made me love you!

KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING

In all processes of the understanding the shortest way will be discovered the last and this, perhaps, while it constitutes the great advantage of having a teacher to put us on the shortest road at the first, yet sometimes occasions a difficulty in the comprehension, inasmuch as the longest way is more near to the existing state of the mind, nearer to what if left to myself, on starting the thought, I should have thought next. The shortest way gives me the knowledge best, but the longest makes me more knowing .

PARTISANS AND RENEGADES

When a party man talks as if he hated his country, saddens at her prosperous events, exults in her disasters and yet, all the while, is merely hating the opposite party, and would himself feel and talk as a patriot were he in a foreign land [ he is a party man]. The true monster is he (and such alas! there are in these monstrous days, "vollendeter Sündhaftigkeit"), who abuses his country when out of his country.

POPULACE AND PEOPLE

Oh the profanation of the sacred word the People ! Every brutal Burdett-led mob, assembled on some drunken St. Monday of faction, is the People forsooth, and each leprous ragamuffin, like a circle in geometry, is, at once, one and all, and calls its own brutal self, " us the People." And who are the friends of the People? Not those who would wish to elevate each of them, or, at least, the child who is to take his place in the flux of life and death, into something worthy of esteem and capable of freedom, but those who flatter and infuriate them, as they are . A contradiction in the very thought! For if, really, they are good and wise, virtuous and well-informed, how weak must be the motives of discontent to a truly moral being—but if the contrary, and the motives for discontent proportionably strong, how without guilt and absurdity appeal to them as judges and arbiters? He alone is entitled to a share in the government of all, who has learnt to govern himself. There is but one possible ground of a right of freedom—viz., to understand and revere its duties.