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

THE IDEA OF GOD

Did you deduce your own being? Even that is less absurd than the conceit of deducing the Divine being? Never would you have had the notion, had you not had the idea—rather, had not the idea worked in you like the memory of a name which we cannot recollect and yet feel that we have and which reveals its existence in the mind only by a restless anticipation and proves its a priori actuality by the almost explosive instantaneity with which it is welcomed and recognised on its re-emersion out of the cloud, or its re-ascent from the horizon of consciousness.

APHORISMS AND ADAGES

I should like to know whether or how far the delight I feel, and have always felt, in adages or aphorisms of universal or very extensive application is a general or common feeling with men, or a peculiarity of my own mind. I cannot describe how much pleasure I have derived from "Extremes meet," for instance, or "Treat everything according to its nature," and, the last, "Be"! In the last I bring all inward rectitude to its test, in the former all outward morality to its rule, and in the first all problematic results to their solution, and reduce apparent contraries to correspondent opposites. How many hostile tenets has it enabled me to contemplate as fragments of truth, false only by negation and mutual exclusion?

IGNORE THYSELF July 12, 1822

I have myself too often of late used the phrase "rational self-love" the same as "enlightened self-love." O no more of this! What have love, reason or light to do with self , except as the dark and evil spirit which it is given to them to overcome! Soul-love , if you please. O there is more stuff of thought in our simple and pious fore-elders' adjuration, "Take pity of your poor soul!" than in all the volumes of Paley, Rochefoucauld, and Helvetius!

RUGIT LEO

N.B.—The injurious manner in which men of genius are treated, not only as authors, but even when they are in social company. A is believed to be, or talked of as, a man of unusual talent. People are anxious to meet him. If he says little or nothing, they wonder at the report, never considering whether they themselves were fit either to excite, or if self-excited to receive and comprehend him. But with the simplicity of genius he attributes more to them than they have, and they put questions that cannot be answered but by a return to first principles, and then they complain of him as not conversing, but lecturing. "He is quite intolerable," "Might as well be hearing a sermon." In short, in answer to some objection, A replies, "Sir, this rests on the distinction between an idea and an image , and, likewise, its difference from a perfect conception ." "Pray, sir, explain." Because he does not and cannot [state the case as concisely as if he had been appealed to about a hand at] whist, 'tis "Lord! how long he talks," and they never ask themselves, Did this man force himself into your company? Was he not dragged into it? What is the practical result? That the man of genius should live as much as possible with beings that simply love him, from relationship or old association, or with those that have the same feelings with himself; but in all other company he will do well to cease to be the man of genius, and make up his mind to appear dull or commonplace as a companion, to be the most silent except upon the most trivial subjects of any in the company, to turn off questions with a joke or a pun as not suiting a wine-table, and to trust only to his writings.

A BROKEN HEART

Few die of a broken heart , and these few (the surgeons tell us) know nothing of it, and, dying suddenly, leave to the dissector the first discovery. O this is but the shallow remark of a hard and unthinking prosperity! Have you never seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet cohering by the rind? The fibres, half of them actually broken and the rest sprained and, though tough, unsustaining? O many, many are the broken-hearted for those who know what the moral and practical heart of the man is!

VOX HIEMALIS Thursday, Sept. 30, 1824

Now the breeze through the stiff and brittle-becoming foliage of the trees counterfeits the sound of a rushing stream or water-flood suddenly sweeping by. The sigh, the modulated continuousness of the murmur is exchanged for the confusion of overtaking sounds—the self-evolution of the One, for the clash or stroke of ever-commencing contact of the multitudinous, without interspace, by confusion. The short gusts rustle and the ear feels the unlithesome dryness, before the eye detects the coarser, duller, though deeper green, deadened and not [yet] awakened into the hues of decay—echoes of spring from the sepulchral vault of winter. The aged year, conversant with the forms of its youth and forgetting all the intervals, feebly reproduces them [as it were, from], memory.

CONSTANCY Friday, June 9, 1826

"Constancy lives in realms above." This exclusion of constancy from the list of earthly virtues may be a poet's exaggeration, but, certainly, it is of far rarer occurrence in all relations of life than the young and warm-hearted are willing to believe, but in cases of exclusive attachment (that is, in Love, properly so-called, and yet distinct from Friendship), and in the highest form of the Virtue, it is so rare that I cannot help doubting whether an instance of mutual constancy in effect ever existed. For there are two sorts of constancy, the one negative, where there is no transfer of affection, where the bond of attachment is not broken though it may be attenuated to a thread—this may be met with, not so seldom, and, where there is goodness of heart, it may be expected—but the other sort, or positive constancy, where the affection endures in the same intensity with the same or increased tenderness and nearness , of this it is that I doubt whether once in an age an instance occurs where A feels it toward B , and B feels it towards A , and vice versâ .

FLOWERS AND LIGHT April 18, 1826

Spring flowers, I have observed, look best in the day, and by sunshine: but summer and autumnal flower-pots by lamp or candle-light. I have now before me a flower-pot of cherry-blossoms, polyanthuses, double violets, periwinkles, wall-flowers, but how dim and dusky they look! The scarlet anemone is an exception, and three or four of them with all the rest of the flower-glass sprays of white blossoms, and one or two periwinkles for the sake of the dark green leaves, green stems, and flexible elegant form, make a lovely group both by sun and by candle-light.

Grove, Highgate.

THE BREATH OF SPRING Feb. 28, 1827

What an interval! Heard the singing birds this morning in our garden for the first time this year, though it rained and blew fiercely; but the long frost has broken up, and the wind, though fierce, was warm and westerly.

THE IDEA OF LIFE May 5, 1827

To the right understanding of the most awfully concerning declaration of Holy Writ there has been no greater obstacle than the want of insight into the nature of Life—what it is and what it is not. But in order to this, the mind must have been raised to the contemplation of the Idea —the life celestial, to wit—or the distinctive essence and character of the Holy Spirit. Here Life is Love —communicative, outpouring love. Ergo , the terrestrial or the Life of Nature ever the shadow and opposite of the Divine is appropriative, absorbing appetence . But the great mistake is, that the soul cannot continue without life; for, if so, with what propriety can the portion of the reprobate soul be called Death? What if the natural life have two possible terminations—true Being and the falling back into the dark Will?