The Life and Times of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Complete Autobiographical Works
"O Youth! for years so many and sweet,
'Tis known, that Thou and I were one."
S. T. C.
PAST AND PRESENT
"We should judge of absent things by the absent. Objects which are present are apt to produce perceptions too strong to be impartially compared with those recalled only by the memory." Sir J. Stewart.
True! and O how often the very opposite is true likewise, namely, that the objects of memory are, often, so dear and vivid, that present things are injured by being compared with them, vivid from dearness!
LOVE
Love, a myrtle wand, is transformed by the Aaron touch of jealousy into a serpent so vast as to swallow up every other stinging woe, and makes us mourn the exchange.
Love that soothes misfortune and buoys up to virtue—the pillow of sorrows, the wings of virtue.
Disappointed love not uncommonly causes misogyny, even as extreme thirst is supposed to be the cause of hydrophobia.
Love transforms the soul into a conformity with the object loved.
DUTY AND EXPERIENCE
From the narrow path of virtue Pleasure leads us to more flowery fields, and there Pain meets and chides our wandering. Of how many pleasures, of what lasting happiness, is Pain the parent and Woe the womb!
Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.
Misfortunes prepare the heart for the enjoyment of happiness in a better state. The life of a religious benevolent man is an April day. His pains and sorrows [what are they but] the fertilising rain? The sunshine blends with every shower, and look! how full and lovely it lies on yonder hill!
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