Anima Poetæ

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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

CHAPTER V

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.

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.

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.

[Vide Life of S. T. C., by James Gillman, 1838, p. 223.]

How villainously these metallic pencils have degenerated, not only in the length and quantity, but what is far worse, in the quality of the metal! This one appears to have no superiority over the worst sort sold by the Maltese shopkeepers.

Blue sky through the glimmering interspaces of the dark elms at twilight rendered a lovely deep yellow-green—all the rest a delicate blue.

The hay-field in the close hard by the farm-house—babe, and totterer little more [than a babe]—old cat with her eyes blinking in the sun and little kittens leaping and frisking over the hay-lines.

What an admirable subject for an Allston would Tycho Brahe be, listening with religious awe to the oracular gabble of the idiot, whom he kept at his feet, and used to feed with his own hands!

The sun-flower ought to be cultivated, the leaves being excellent fodder, the flowers eminently melliferous, and the seeds a capital food for poultry, none nourishing quicker or occasioning them to lay more eggs.

Serpentium allapsus timet. Quære—allapse of serpents. Horace.—What other word have we? Pity that we dare not Saxonise as boldly as our forefathers, by unfortunate preference, Latinised. Then we should have on-glide, angleiten; onlook anschauen, etc.

I moisten the bread of affliction with the water of adversity.

If kings are gods on earth, they are, however, gods of earth.

Parisatis poisoned one side of the knife with which he carved, and eat of the same joint the next slice unhurt—a happy illustration of affected self-inclusion in accusation.

It is possible to conceive a planet without any general atmosphere, but in which each living body has its peculiar atmosphere. To hear and understand, one man joins his atmosphere to that of another, and, according to the sympathies of their nature, the aberrations of sound will be greater or less, and their thoughts more or less intelligible. A pretty allegory might be made of this.

Two faces, each of a confused countenance. In the eyes of the one, muddiness and lustre were blended; and the eyes of the other were the same, but in them there was a red fever that made them appear more fierce. And yet, methought, the former struck a greater trouble, a fear and distress of the mind; and sometimes all the face looked meek and mild, but the eye was ever the same.

[Qu. S. T. C. and De Quincey?]

Shadow—its being subsists in shaped and definite nonentity.

Plain sense, measure, clearness, dignity, grace over all—these made the genius of Greece.

Heu! quam miserum ab illo lædi, de quo non possis queri! Eheu! quam miserrimum est ab illo lædi, de quo propter amorem non possis queri!

Observation from Bacon after reading Mr. Sheridan's speech on Ireland: "Things will have their first or second agitation; if they be not tossed on the arguments of council, they will be tossed on the waves of fortune."

The death of an immortal has been beautifully compared to an Indian fig, which at its full height declines its branches to the earth, and there takes root again.

The blast rises and falls, and trembles at its height.

A passionate woman may be likened to a wet candle spitting flame.

TO LOVE.

It is a duty, nay, it is a religion to that power to shew that, though it makes all things—wealth, pleasure, ambition—worthless, yea, noisome for themselves; yet for itself can it produce all efforts, even if only to secure its name from scoffs as the child and parent of slothfulness. Works, therefore, of general profit—works of abstruse thought [will be born of love]; activity, and, above all, virtue and chastity [will come forth from his presence].

The moulting peacock, with only two of his long tail-feathers remaining, and those sadly in tatters, yet, proudly as ever, spreads out his ruined fan in the sun and breeze.

Yesterday I saw seven or eight water-wagtails following a feeding horse in the pasture, fluttering about and hopping close by his hoofs, under his belly, and even so as often to tickle his nostrils with their pert tails. The horse shortens the grass and they get the insects.

Sic accipite, sic credite, ut mereamini intelligere: fides enim debet præcedere intellectum, ut sit intellectus fidei præmium.

S. August. Sermones De Verb. Dom.

Yet should a friend think foully of that wherein the pride of thy spirit's purity is in shrine.

[So receive, so believe [divine ideas] that ye may earn the right to understand them. For faith should go before understanding, in order that understanding may be the reward of faith.]

Ὁτε ενθουσιασμος επινευσιν τινα θειαν ἑχειν δοκει και τω μαντικω γενει πλησιαζειν. Strabo Geographicus.

Though Genius, like the fire on the altar, can only be kindled from heaven, yet it will perish unless supplied with appropriate fuel to feed it; or if it meet not with the virtues whose society alone can reconcile it to earth, it will return whence it came, or, at least, lie hid as beneath embers, till some sudden and awakening gust of regenerating Grace, αναζωπυρει, rekindles and reveals it anew.

[Now the inspiration of genius seems to bear the stamp of Divine assent, and to attain to something of prophetic strain.]

I trust you are very happy in your domestic being—very; because, alas! I know that to a man of sensibility and more emphatically if he be a literary man, there is no medium between that and "the secret pang that eats away the heart." ... Hence, even in dreams of sleep, the soul never is, because it either cannot or dare not be any one thing, but lives in approaches touched by the outgoing pre-existent ghosts of many feelings. It feels for ever as a blind man with his protruded staff dimly through the medium of the instrument by which it pushes off, and in the act of repulsion—(O for the eloquence of Shakspere, who alone could feel and yet know how to embody those conceptions with as curious a felicity as the thoughts are subtle!)—as if the finger which I saw with eyes, had, as it were, another finger, invisible, touching me with a ghostly touch, even while I feared the real touch from it. What if, in certain cases, touch acted by itself, co-present with vision, yet not coalescing? Then I should see the finger as at a distance, and yet feel a finger touching which was nothing but it, and yet was not it. The two senses cannot co-exist without a sense of causation. The touch must be the effect of that finger [which] I see, and yet it is not yet near to me, and therefore it is not it, and yet it is it. Why it is is in an imaginary pre-duplication!

N.B.—There is a passage in the second part of Wallenstein expressing, not explaining, the same feeling. "The spirits of great events stride on before the events"—it is in one of the last two or three scenes:—

[Wallenstein, Part II., act v. sc. 1. P. W., 1893, p. 351.]

It is worth noting and endeavouring to detect the Law of the Mind, by which, in writing earnestly while we are thinking, we omit words necessary to the sense. It will be found, I guess, that we seldom omit the material word, but generally the word by which the mind expresses its modification of the verbum materiale. Thus, in the preceding page, 7th line, medium is the materiale: that was its own brute, inert sense—but the no is the mind's action, its use of the word.

I think this a hint of some value. Thus, the is a word in constant combination with the passive or material words; but to is an act of the mind, and I had written the detect instead of to detect. Again, when my sense demanded "the" to express a distinct modification of some verbum materiale, I remember to have often omitted it in writing. The principle is evident—the mind borrows the materia from without, and is passive with regard to it as the mere subject "stoff"—a simple event of memory takes place; but having the other in itself, the inward Having with its sense of security passes for the outward Having—or is all memory an anxious act, and thereby suspended by vivid security? or are both reasons the same? or if not, are they consistent, and capable of being co-or sub-ordinated? It will be lucky if some day, after having written on for two or three sheets rapidly and as a first copy, without correcting, I should by chance glance on this note, not having thought at all about it during or before the time of writing; and then to examine every word omitted.

To spend half-an-hour in Cuthill's shop, examining Stephen's Thesaurus, in order to form an accurate idea of its utilities above Scapula, and to examine the Budæo-Tusan-Constantine, whether it be the same or as good as Constantine, and the comparative merits of Constantine with Scapula.

3. To examine Bosc relatively to Brunck, and to see after the new German Anthologia.

4. Before I quit town, to buy Appendix (either No. 1430 or 1431), 8s. or 18s. What a difference! ten shillings, because the latter, the Parma Anacreon, is on large paper, green morocco; the former is neat in red morocco, but the type the same.

5. To have a long morning's ramble with De Quincey, first to Egerton's, and then to the book haunts.

6. To see if I can find that Arrian with Epictetus which I admired so much at Mr. Leckie's.

7. To find out D'Orville's Daphnis, and the price. Is there no other edition? no cheap German?

8. To write out the passage from Strada's Prolusions at Cuthill's.

9. Aristotle's Works, and to hunt for Proclus.

10. In case of my speedy death, it would answer to buy a £100 worth of carefully-chosen books, in order to attract attention to my library and to give accession to the value of books by their co-existing with co-appurtenants—as, for instance, Plato, Aristotle; Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus: Schoolmen, Interscholastic; Bacon, Hobbes; Locke, Berkeley; Leibnitz, Spinoza; Kant and the critical Fichte, and Wissenschaftslehre, Schelling, &c.

[The first edition of Robert Constantin's Lexicon Græco-Lat. was published at Geneva in 1564. A second ed. post correctiones G. Budæi et J. Tusani, at Basle, in 1584.]

Our mortal existence, what is it but a stoppage in the blood of life, a brief eddy from wind or concourse of currents in the ever-flowing ocean of pure Activity, who beholds pyramids, yea, Alps and Andes, giant pyramids, the work of fire that raiseth monuments, like a generous victor o'er its own conquest, the tombstones of a world destroyed! Yet these, too, float adown the sea of Time, and melt away as mountains of floating ice.

Has every finite being (or only some) the temptation to become intensely and wholly conscious of its distinctness and, as a result, to be betrayed into the wretchedness of division? Grosser natures, wholly swallowed up in selfishness which does not rise to self-love, never even acquire that sense of distinctness, while, to others, love is the first step to re-union. It is a by-word that religious enthusiasm borders on and tends to sensuality—possibly because all our powers work together, and as a consequence of striding too vastly up the ladder of existence, a great round of the ladder is omitted, namely, love to some, Eine verschiedene, of our own kind. Then let Religion love, else will it not only partake of, instead of being partaken by, and so co-adunated with, the summit of love, but will necessarily include the nadir of love, that is, appetite. Hence will it tend to dissensualise its nature into fantastic passions, the idolatry of Paphian priestesses.

Time, space, duration, action, active passion passive, activeness, passiveness, reaction, causation, affinity—here assemble all the mysteries known. All is known-unknown, say, rather, merely known. All is unintelligible, and yet Locke and the stupid adorers of that fetish earth-clod take all for granted. By the bye, in poetry as well as metaphysics, that which we first meet with in the dawn of our mind becomes ever after fetish, to the many at least. Blessed he who first sees the morning star, if not the sun, or purpling clouds his harbingers. Thence is fame desirable to a great man, and thence subversion of vulgar fetishes becomes a duty.

Rest, motion! O ye strange locks of intricate simplicity, who shall find the key? He shall throw wide open the portals of the palace of sensuous or symbolical truth, and the Holy of Holies will be found in the adyta. Rest = enjoyment and death. Motion = enjoyment and life. O the depth of the proverb, "Extremes meet"!

The "break of the morning"—and from inaction a nation starts up into motion and wide fellow-consciousness! The trumpet of the Archangel—and a world with all its troops and companies of generations starts up into a hundredfold expansion, power multiplied into itself cubically by the number of all its possible acts—all the potential springing into power. Conceive a bliss from self-conscience, combining with bliss from increase of action; the first dreaming, the latter dead-asleep in a grain of gunpowder—conceive a huge magazine of gunpowder and a flash of lightning awakes the whole at once. What an image of the resurrection, grand from its very inadequacy. Yet again, conceive the living, moving ocean—its bed sinks away from under and the whole world of waters falls in at once on a thousand times vaster mass of intensest fire, and the whole prior orbit of the planet's successive revolutions is possessed by it at once (Potentia fit actus) amid the thunder of rapture.

Form is factitious being, and thinking is the process; imagination the laboratory in which the thought elaborates essence into existence. A philosopher, that is, a nominal philosopher without imagination, is a coiner. Vanity, the froth of the molten mass, is his stuff, and verbiage the stamp and impression. This is but a deaf metaphor—better say that he is guilty of forgery. He presents the same sort of paper as the honest barterer, but when you carry it to the bank it is found to be drawn to Outis, Esq. His words had deposited no forms there, payable at sight—or even at any imaginable time from the date of the draft.

The sky, or rather say, the æther at Malta, with the sun apparently suspended in it, the eye seeming to pierce beyond and, as it were, behind it—and, below, the æthereal sea, so blue, so ein zerflossenes, the substantial image, and fixed real reflection of the sky! O! I could annihilate in a deep moment all possibility of the needle-point, pin's-head system of the atomists by one submissive gaze!

A dewdrop, the pearl of Aurora, is indeed a true unio. I would that unio were the word for the dewdrop, and the pearl be called unio marinus.

O for the power to persuade all the writers of Great Britain to adopt the ver, zer, and al of the German! Why not verboil, zerboil; verrend, zerrend? I should like the very words verflossen, zerflossen, to be naturalised:

I do not know, whether I am in earnest or in sport while I recommend this ver and zer; that is, I cannot be sure whether I feel, myself, anything ridiculous in the idea, or whether the feeling that seems to imply this be not the effect of my anticipation of and sympathy with the ridicule of, perhaps, all my readers.

To you there are many like me, yet to me there is none like you, and you are always like yourself. There are groves of night-flowers, yet the night-flower sees only the moon.

CHAPTER VI

Quære—whether we may not, nay ought not, to use a neutral pronoun relative, or representative, to the word "Person," where it hath been used in the sense of homo, mensch, or noun of the common gender, in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express either sex indifferently? If this be incorrect in syntax, the whole use of the word Person is lost in a number of instances, or only retained by some stiff and strange position of words, as—"not letting the person be aware, wherein offence has been given"—instead of—"wherein he or she has offended." In my [judgment] both the specific intention and general etymon of "Person" in such sentences, fully authorise the use of it and which instead of he, she, him, her, who, whom.

If love be the genial sun of human nature, unkindly has he divided his rays [in acting] on me and my beloved! On her hath he poured all his light and splendour, and my being doth he permeate with his invisible rays of heat alone. She shines and is cold like the tropic fire-fly—I, dark and uncomely, would better resemble the cricket in hot ashes. My soul, at least, might be considered as a cricket eradiating the heat which gradually cinerising the heart produces the embers and ashes from among which it chirps out of its hiding-place.

N.B.—This put in simple and elegant verse, [would pass] as an imitation of Marini, and of too large a part of the madrigals of Guarini himself.

Truth per se is like unto quicksilver, bright, agile, harmless. Swallow a pound and it will run through unaltered and only, perhaps, by its weight force down impurities from out the system. But mix and comminute it by the mineral acid of spite and bigotry, and even truth becomes a deadly poison—medicinal only when some other, yet deadlier, lurks in the bones.

O! many, many are the seeings, hearings, of pure love that have a being of their own, and to call them by the names of things unsouled and debased below even their own lowest nature by associations accidental, and of vicious accidents, is blasphemy. What seest thou yonder? The lovely countenance of a lovely maiden, fervid yet awe-suffering with devotion—her face resigned to bliss or bale; or a bit of flesh; or, rather, that which cannot be seen unless by him whose very seeing is more than an act of mere sight—that which refuses all words, because words being, perforce, generalities do not awake, but really involve associations of other words as well as other thoughts—but that which I see, must be felt, be possessed, in and by its sole self! What! shall the statuary Pygmalion of necessity feel this for every part of the insensate marble, and shall the lover Pygmalion in contemplating the living statue, the heart-adored maiden, breathing forth in every look, every movement, the genial life imbreathed of God, grovel in the mire and grunt the language of the swinish slaves of the Circe, of vulgar generality and still more vulgar association? The Polyclete that created the Aphrodite καλλιπυγος, thought in acts, not words—energy divinely languageless— δια τον Λογον, ου συν επεσι, through the Word, not with words. And what though it met with Imp-fathers and Imp-mothers and Fiendsips at its christening in ts parents' absence!

One of the causes of superstition, and also of enthusiasm, and, indeed, of all errors in matters of fact, is the great power with which the effect acts upon and modifies the remembrance of its cause, at times even transforming it in the mind. Let A have said a few words to B, which (by some change and accommodation of them to the event in the mind of B) have been remarkably fulfilled; and let B remind A of these words which he (A) had spoken, A will instantly forget all his mood, motive, and meaning, at the time of speaking them, nay, remember words he had never spoken, and throw back upon them, from the immediate event, an imagined fulfillment, a prophetic grandeur—himself, in his own faith, a seer of no small inspiration. We yet want the growth of a prophet and self-deceived wonder-worker step by step, through all the stages; and, yet, what ample materials exist for a true and nobly-minded psychologist! For, in order to make fit use of these materials, he must love and honour as well as understand human nature—rather, he must love in order to understand it.

O that sweet bird! where is it? It is encaged somewhere out of sight; but from my bedroom at the Courier office, from the windows of which I look out on the walls of the Lyceum, I hear it at early dawn, often, alas! lulling me to late sleep—again when I awake and all day long. It is in prison, all its instincts ungratified, yet it feels the influence of spring, and calls with unceasing melody to the Loves that dwell in field and greenwood bowers, unconscious, perhaps, that it calls in vain. O are they the songs of a happy, enduring day-dream? Has the bird hope? or does it abandon itself to the joy of its frame, a living harp of Eolus? O that I could do so!

Assuredly a thrush or blackbird encaged in London is a far less shocking spectacle, its encagement a more venial defect of just feeling, than (which yet one so often sees) a bird in a gay cage in the heart of the country—yea, as if at once to mock both the poor prisoner and its kind mother, Nature—in a cage hung up in a tree, where the free birds after a while, when the gaudy dungeon is no longer a scare, crowd to it, perch on the wires, drink the water, and peck up the seeds. But of all birds I most detest to see the nightingale encaged, and the swallow, and the cuckoo. Motiveless! monstrous! But the robin! O woes' woe! woe!—he, sweet cock-my-head-and-eye, pert-bashful darling, that makes our kitchen its chosen cage.

If we take into consideration the effect of the climates of the North, Gothic, in contra-distinction to Greek and Græco-Roman architecture, is rightly so named. Take, for instance, a rainy, windy day, or sleet, or a fall of snow, or an icicle-hanging frost, and then compare the total effect of the South European roundnesses and smooth perpendicular surface with the ever-varying angles and meeting-lines of the North-European or Gothic styles.

[The above is probably a dropped sentence from the report of the First or Second Lecture of the 1818 series. See Coleridge's Works (Harper and Brothers, 1853), iv. 232-239.]

The demagogues address the lower orders as if they were negroes—as if each individual were an inseparable part of the order, always to remain, nolens volens, poor and ignorant. How different from Christianity, which for ever calls on us to detach ourselves spiritually not merely from our rank, but even from our body, and from the whole world of sense!

The one mighty main defect of female education is that everything is taught but reason and the means of retaining affection. This—this—O! it is worth all the rest told ten thousand times:—how to greet a husband, how to receive him, how never to recriminate—in short, the power of pleasurable thoughts and feelings, and the mischief of giving pain, or (as often happens when a husband comes home from a party of old friends, joyous and full of heart) the love-killing effect of cold, dry, uninterested looks and manners.

Let me record the following important remark of Stuart, with whom I never converse but to receive some distinct and rememberable improvement (and if it be not remembered, it is the defect of my memory—which, alas! grows weaker daily—or a fault from my indolence in not noting it down, as I do this)—that there is a period in a man's life, varying in various men, from thirty-five to forty-five, and operating most strongly in bachelors, widowers, or those worst and miserablest widowers, unhappy husbands, in which a man finds himself at the top of the hill, and having attained, perhaps, what he wishes, begins to ask himself, What is all this for?—begins to feel the vanity of his pursuits, becomes half-melancholy, gives in to wild dissipation or self-regardless drinking; and some, not content with these (not slow) poisons, destroy themselves, and leave their ingenious female or female-minded friends to fish out some motive for an act which proceeded from a motive-making impulse, which would have acted even without a motive (even as the terror[E] in nightmare is a bodily sensation, and though it most often calls up consonant images, yet, as I know by experience, can take effect equally without any); or, if not so, yet like gunpowder in a smithy, though it will not go off without a spark, is sure to receive one, if not this hour, yet the next. I had felt this truth, but never saw it before clearly: it came upon me at Malta under the melancholy, dreadful feeling of finding myself to be man, by a distinct division from boyhood, youth, and "young man." Dreadful was the feeling—till then life had flown so that I had always been a boy, as it were; and this sensation had blended in all my conduct, my willing acknowledgment of superiority, and, in truth, my meeting every person as a superior at the first moment. Yet if men survive this period, they commonly become cheerful again. That is a comfort for mankind, not for me!

My inner mind does not justify the thought that I possess a genius, my strength is so very small in proportion to my power. I believe that I first, from internal feeling, made or gave light and impulse to this important distinction between strength and power, the oak and the tropic annual, or biennial, which grows nearly as high and spreads as large as the oak, but in which the wood, the heart is wanting—the vital works vehemently, but the immortal is not with it. And yet, I think, I must have some analogue of genius; because, among other things, when I am in company with Mr. Sharp, Sir J. Mackintosh, R. and Sydney Smith, Mr. Scarlett, &c. &c., I feel like a child, nay, rather like an inhabitant of another planet. Their very faces all act upon me, sometimes, as if they were ghosts, but more often as if I were a ghost among them—at all times as if we were not consubstantial.