The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume I Part 42

Love, however sudden, as when we fall in love at first sight, (which is, perhaps, always the case of love in its highest sense,) is yet an act of the will, and that too one of its primary, and therefore ineffable acts.

This is most important; for if it be not true, either love itself is all a romantic 'hum', a mere connection of desire with a form appropriated to excite and gratify it, or the mere repet.i.tion of a daydream;--or if it be granted that love has a real, distinct, and excellent being, I know not how we could attach blame and immorality to inconstancy, when confined to the affections and a sense of preference.

Either, therefore, we must brutalize our notions with Pope:--

l.u.s.t, thro' some certain strainers well refin'd, Is gentle love and charms all woman-kind:

or we must dissolve and thaw away all bonds of morality by the irresistible shocks of an irresistible sensibility with Sterne.

WEDDED UNION.

The well-spring of all sensible communion is the natural delight and need, which undepraved man hath to transfuse from himself into others, and to receive from others into himself, those things, wherein the excellency of his kind doth most consist; and the eminence of love or marriage communion is, that this mutual transfusion can take place more perfectly and totally in this, than in any other mode.

Prefer person before money, good-temper with good sense before person; and let all, wealth, easy temper, strong understanding and beauty, be as nothing to thee, unless accompanied by virtue in principle and in habit.

Suppose competence, health, and honesty; then a happy marriage depends on four things:--1. An understanding proportionate to thine, that is, a recipiency at least of thine:--2. natural sensibility and lively sympathy in general:--3. steadiness in attaching and retaining sensibility to its proper objects in its proper proportions:--4. mutual liking; including person and all the thousand obscure sympathies that determine conjugal liking, that is, love and desire to A. rather than to B. This seems very obvious and almost trivial: and yet all unhappy marriages arise from the not honestly putting, and sincerely answering each of these four questions: any one of them negatived, marriage is imperfect, and in hazard of discontent.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HOBBES AND SPINOSA.

In the most similar and nearest points there is a difference, but for the most part there is an absolute contrast, between Hobbes and Spinosa.

Thus Hobbes makes a state of war the natural state of man from the essential and ever continuing nature of man, as not a moral, but only a frightenable, being:--Spinosa makes the same state a necessity of man out of society, because he must then be an undeveloped man, and his moral being dormant; and so on through the whole.

THE END MAY JUSTIFY THE MEANS.

Whatever act is necessary to an end, and ascertained to be necessary and proportionate both to the end and the agent, takes its nature from that end. This premised, the proposition is innocent that ends may justify means. Remember, however, the important distinction:--'Unius facti diversi fines esse possunt: unius actionis non possunt'.

I have somewhere read this remark:--'Omne meritum est voluntarium, aut voluntate originis, aut origine voluntatis'. Quaintly as this is expressed, it is well worth consideration, and gives the true meaning of Baxter's famous saying,--"h.e.l.l is paved with good intentions."

NEGATIVE THOUGHT.

On this calm morning of the 13th of November, 1809, it occurs to me, that it is by a negation and voluntary act of no thinking that we think of earth, air, water, &c. as dead. It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness, that we should be brought to this negative state, and that this state should pa.s.s into custom; but it is likewise necessary that at times we should awake and step forward; and this is effected by those extenders of our consciousness--sorrow, sickness, poetry, and religion. The truth is, we stop in the sense of life just when we are not forced to go on, and then adopt a permission of our feelings for a precept of our reason.

MAN'S RETURN TO HEAVEN.

Heaven bestows light and influence on this lower world, which reflects the blessed rays, though it cannot recompense them. So man may make a return to G.o.d, but no requital.

YOUNG PRODIGIES.

Fair criticism on young prodigies and Rosciuses in verse, or on the stage, is arraigned,--

as the envious sneaping frost That bites the first-born infants of the spring.

If there were no better answer, the following a good heart would scarcely admit;--but where nine-tenths of the applause have been mere wonderment and miracle-l.u.s.t ('Wundursucht') these verses are an excellent accompaniment to other arguments:--

Well, say it be!--Yet why of summer boast, Before the birds have natural cause to sing?

Why should we joy in an abortive birth?

At Christmas I no more desire a rose, Than wish a snow in May's new budding shows; But like of each thing that in reason grows.

'Love's Labours Lost'. [1]

[Footnote 1: Slightly altered. Ed.]

WELCH NAMES.

The small number of surnames, and those Christian names and patronymics, not derived from trades, &c. is one mark of a country either not yet, or only recently, unfeudalized. Hence in Scotland the Mackintoshes, Macaulays, and so on. But the most remarkable show of this I ever saw, is the list of subscribers to Owen's Welch Dictionary. In letter D.

there are 31 names, 21 of which are 'Davis' or 'Davies', and the other three are not Welchmen. In E. there are 30; 16 'Evans'; 6 'Edwards'; 1 'Edmonds'; I 'Egan', and the remainder 'Ellis'. In G. two-thirds are 'Griffiths'. In H. all are 'Hughes' and 'Howell'. In I. there are 66; all 'Jonesses'. In L. 3 or 4 'Lewises'; 1 'Lewellyn'; all the rest 'Lloyds'. M. four-fifths 'Morgans'. O. entirely 'Owen'. R. all 'Roberts'

or 'Richards'. T. all 'Thomases'. V. all 'Vaughans';--and W. 64 names, 56 of them 'Williams'.

GERMAN LANGUAGE.

The real value of melody in a language is considerable as subadditive; but when not jutting out into consciousness under the friction of comparison, the absence or inferiority of it is, as privative of pleasure, of little consequence. For example, when I read Voss's translation of the Georgics, I am, as it were, reading the original poem, until something particularly well expressed occasions me to revert to the Latin; and then I find the superiority, or at least the powers, of the German in all other respects, but am made feelingly alive, at the same time, to its unsmooth mixture of the vocal and the organic, the fluid and the substance, of language. The fluid seems to have been poured in on the corpuscles all at once, and the whole has, therefore, curdled, and collected itself into a lumpy soup full of knots of curds inisled by interjacent whey at irregular distances, and the curd lumpets of various sizes.

It is always a question how far the apparent defects of a language arise from itself or from the false taste of the nation speaking it. Is the practical inferiority of the English to the Italian in the power of pa.s.sing from grave to light subjects, in the manner of Ariosto, the fault of the language itself? Wieland in his Oberon, broke successfully through equal difficulties. It is grievous to think how much less careful the English have been to preserve than to acquire. Why have we lost, or all but lost, the 'ver' or 'for' as a prefix,--'fordone', 'forwearied', &c.; and the 'zer' or 'to',-'zerreissen', to rend, &c.

'Jugend', 'Jungling': 'youth', 'youngling'; why is that last word now lost to common use, and confined to sheep and other animals?

[Greek: En to phronein maedhen aedistos bios.] Soph.

His life was playful from infancy to death, like the snow which in a calm day falls, but scarce seems to fall, and plays and dances in and out till the very moment that it gently reaches the earth.

THE UNIVERSE.

It surely is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the s.p.a.ces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent.

HARBEROUS.