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

OF A TOO WITTY BOOK

I like salt to my meat so well that I can scarce say grace over meat without salt. But salt to one's salt! Ay! a sparkling, dazzling, lit-up saloon or subterranean minster in a vast mine of rock-salt—what of it?—full of white pillars and aisles and altars of eye-dazzling salt. Well, what of it?—'twere an uncomfortable lodging or boarding-house—in short, all my eye . Now, I am content with a work if it be but my eye and Betty Martin, because, having never heard any charge against the author of the adage, candour obliges me to conclude that Eliza Martin is "sense for certain." In short, never was a metaphor more lucky, apt, ramescent, and fructiferous—a hundred branches, and each hung with a different graft-fruit—than salt as typical of wit—the uses of both being the same, not to nourish, but to season and preserve nourishment. Yea! even when there is plenty of good substantial meat to incorporate with, stout aitch-bone and buttock, still there may be too much; and they who confine themselves to such meals will contract a scorbutic habit of intellect ( i.e. , a scurvy taste), and, with loose teeth and tender gums, become incapable of chewing and digesting hard matters of mere plain thinking.

SPOOKS

It is thus that the Glanvillians reason. First, they assume the facts as objectively as if the question related to the experimentable of our senses. Secondly, they take the imaginative possibility—that is, that the [assumed] facts involve no contradiction, [as if it were] a scientific possibility. And, lastly, they [advocate] them as proofs of a spiritual world and our own immortality. This last [I hold to] be the greatest insult to conscience and the greatest incongruity with the objects of religion.

N.B.—It is amusing, in all ghost stories, etc., that the recorders are "the farthest in the world from being credulous," or "as far from believing such things as any man."

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye! and what then?

The more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it.

Floods and general inundations render for the time even the purest springs turbid.

For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full, adequate sympathy with joy, an angel's.

FOOTNOTES:

7A projected satire, of which, perhaps, the lines headed "A Character" were an instalment. See P. W. , 1893, pp. 195-642. Letters of S. T. C. , 1895, ii. 631.

Table of Contents

1819-1828

Where'er I find the Good, the True, the Fair,

I ask no names—God's spirit dwelleth there!

The unconfounded, undivided Three,

Each for itself, and all in each, to see

In man and Nature, is Philosophy.

S. T. C.

THE MOON'S HALO AN EMBLEM OF HOPE

The moon, rushing onward through the coursing clouds, advances like an indignant warrior through a fleeing army; but the amber halo in which she moves—O! it is a circle of Hope. For what she leaves behind her has not lost its radiance as it is melting away into oblivion, while, still, the other semi-circle catches the rich light at her approach, and heralds her ongress.

A COMPLEX VEXATION

It is by strength of mind that we are to untwist the tie or copula of the besom of affliction, which not nature but the strength of imagination had twisted round it, and thus resolve it into its component twigs, and conquer in detail "one down and t'other come on"! Dividendo diminuitur —which forms the true ground of the advantage accruing from communicating our griefs to another. We enable ourselves to see them each in its true magnitude.

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ENGLAND

After re-perusal of my inefficient, yet not feeble efforts in behalf of the poor little white slaves in the cotton-factories, I ask myself, "But still are we not better than the other nations of Christendom?" Yes—Perhaps. I don't know. I dare not affirm it. Better than the French certainly! Mammon versus Moloch and Belial. But Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Tyrol? No.

THE MEED OF PRAISE

There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, whether bard, musician, or artist, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-building or incubation—a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man. Alas! alas! alas!

THE GREAT UNKNOWN

Anonymity is now an artifice to acquire celebrity, as a black veil is worn to make a pair of bright eyes more conspicuous.

BOOK-LEARNING FOR LEGISLATORS

For the same reasons that we cannot now act by impulses, but must think, so now must every legislator be a man of sound book-learning, because he cannot, if he would, think or act from the simple dictates of unimproved but undepraved common sense. Newspapers, reviews, and the conversation of men who derive their opinions from newspapers and reviews will secure for him artificial opinions, if he does not secure them for himself from purer and more authentic sources. There is now no such being as a country gentleman. Like their relation, the Dodo, the race is extinct, or if by accident one has escaped, it belongs to the Museum, not to active life, or the purposes of active life.

THEISM AND ATHEISM

The more I read and reflect on the arguments of the truly philosophical theists and atheists, the more I feel convinced that the ultimate difference is a moral rather than an intellectual one, that the result is an x y z, an acknowledged insufficiency of the known to account for itself, and, therefore, a something unknown—that to which, while the atheist leaves it a blank in the understanding, the theist dedicates his noblest feelings of love and awe, and with which, by a moral syllogism, he connects and unites his conscience and actions. For the words goodness and wisdom are clearly only reflexes of the effect, just as when we call the unknown cause of cold and heat by the name of its effects, and know nothing further. For if we mean that a Being like man, with human goodness and intellect, only magnified, is the cause, that is, that the First Cause is an immense man (as according to Swedenborg and Zinzendorf), then come the insoluble difficulties of the incongruity of qualities whose very essence implies finiteness, with a Being ex hypothesi infinite.

THE MIND'S EYE

An excellent instance of the abstraction [from objects of the sense] that results from the attention converging to any one object, is furnished by the oily rags, broken saucers, greasy phials, dabs, crusts, and smears of paints in the laboratory of a Raphael, or a Claude Lorraine, or a Van Huysum, or any other great master of the beautiful and becoming. In like manner, the mud and clay in the modelling hand of a Chantrey—what are they to him whose total soul is awake, in his eye as a subject, and before his eye as some ideal of beauty objectively ? The various objects of the senses are as little the objects of his senses, as the ink with which the "Lear" was written, existed in the consciousness of a Shakspere.

A LAND OF BLISS

The humming-moth with its glimmer-mist of rapid unceasing motion before the humble-bee within the flowering bells and cups—and the eagle level with the clouds, himself a cloudy speck, surveys the vale from mount to mount. From the cataract flung on the vale, the broadest fleeces of the snowy foam light on the bank flowers or the water-lilies in the stiller pool below.

TIME AND ETERNITY