More Pages from a Journal

This morning as I walked by the sea, a man was preaching on the sands to about a dozen people, and I stopped for a few minutes to listen.  He told us that we were lying under the wrath of God, that we might die at any moment, and that if we did not believe in the Lord Jesus we should be damned everlastingly.  ‘Believe in the Lord,’ he shouted, ‘believe or you will be lost; you can do nothing of yourselves; you must be saved by grace alone, by blood, without blood is no remission of sins.  Some of you think, no doubt, you are good people, and you may be, as the world goes, but your righteousness is as filthy rags, you are all wounds and bruises and putrefying sores; the devil will have you if you don’t turn to the Lord, and you will go down to the bottomless, brimstone pit, where shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth for ever and ever.  Believe,’ he roared, ‘now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation.’

Sunny clouds lay in the blue above him, and at his feet summer waves were breaking peacefully on the shore, the sound of their soft, musical plash filling up his pauses and commenting on his texts.

In 1802 Lady B. was living at M— Park.  She was a proud, handsome, worldly woman about fifty-five years old, a widow with no children, but she had a favourite nephew who was at the Park for the larger part of the year and was the heir to her property.  She had been gay in her youth, was the leader of society in her county, and when she passed middle life still followed the hounds.  She was a good landlord, respected and even beloved by her tenantry, and a staunch Tory in politics.  The new evangelical school of Newton and Romaine she detested bitterly, as much in fact as she detested Popery.  The nephew, however, came under Newton’s influence and was converted.  His aunt was in despair.  She could not conquer her affection for him, but she almost raved when she reflected that the inheritor of her estates was a pious Methodist, as she called him.  She had a good-looking, confidential maid who had lived with her for years.  In one of her fits she told this maid that she would give half of what she possessed if her nephew were like other young men.  ‘I don’t want him to be a sot or to gamble away my money,’ she cried, ‘but there’s not much else I should mind if he were but a man.’

A few days afterwards she spoke to her maid again.  ‘Look you here, Jarvis, I shall go distracted.  This morning he began to speak to me about my soul—the brave boy that he used to be, talking of my soul to me!  Listen to what I tell you and be reasonable.  I know perfectly well, and so do you, that before he took up with this sickening cant he was in love with you and you were in love with him.  I saw it all and said nothing.  I understand there’s no more flirting now.  Ah, well, his blood is red yet; I’ve not forgotten what five-and-twenty is, and he’ll come if you whistle.  You can’t marry him, of course, but you can and shall live comfortably afterwards for all that, and when he has done what all other young fellows do there will be an end to the prayer-meetings.’

The girl was a little staggered, but after a time her mistress’s suggestion ceased to shock her, for the nephew was a handsome fellow capable of raising passion in a woman.  What the aunt had said was really true.  She now threw the girl in his way.  She was sent to him with messages when he was alone, and one evening when he had gone over to a prayer-meeting in the town about two miles away, she was directed to go there on an errand, to contrive to be late, and to return with him.  She had half an hour to spare and was curious to know what the prayer-meeting was like.  She stood close to the inner door, which was slightly ajar, and heard her master praying earnestly.  He rose and spoke to the little congregation for five minutes.  When he had finished she started for home, and he came up with her before she had passed the last house.  It was nearly dark, but he recognised her by a light from a window, and asked her what she was doing in the town at that hour.  She excused herself by unexpected detention, and they went on together.  About half a mile further at the top of the hill was the stile of the pathway that was a short cut to the park.  From that point there was an extensive view over the plain eastwards, and the rising moon was just emerging from a line of silvered clouds.  They were both struck with the beauty of the spectacle and stood still gazing at it.

Suddenly she dropped on her knees and with violent sobbing called upon God to help her.  He lifted her up, and when she was calmer she told him everything.  They went on their way in silence.  Now comes the remarkable part of the story.  It was he who would have been the tempter and she had saved him.  When they reached the Park he found his aunt ill, and in a fortnight she was dead.  In less than two years nephew and maid were married.  His strict evangelicalism relaxed a little, but they were both faithful to their Friend.  Lovers also they were to the last, and they died in the same month after each of them had passed seventy-five years.

I fancy I read a long while ago somewhere in Wesley’s Journal that an attempt was made to ruin him or one of his friends with a woman, but I think she was a bad woman.  If there is anything of the kind in the Journal it shows that Lady B’s plot is not incredible.

It is a cool day in July, and the shaded sunlight slowly steals and disappears over the landscape.  There are none of those sudden flashes which come when the clouds are more sharply defined and the blue is more intense.  I have wandered from the uplands down to the river.  The fields are cleared of the hay, and the bright green of the newly mown grass increases the darkness of the massive foliage of the bordering elms.  The cows are feeding in the rich level meadows and now and then come to the river to drink.  It is overhung with alders, and two or three stand on separate little islands held together by roots.  The winter floods biting into the banks have cut miniature cliffs, and at their base grow the forget-me-not, the willow-herb, and flowering rush.  A brightly-plumaged bird, too swift to be recognised—could it be a kingfisher?—darts along the margin of the stream and disappears in its black shadows.  The wind blows gently from the west: it is just strong enough to show the silver sides of the willow leaves.  The sound of the weir, although so soft, is able to exclude the clacking of the mill and all intermittent, casual noises.  For two hours it has filled my ears and brought a deeper repose than that of mere silence.  It is not uniform, for the voices of innumerable descending threads of water with varying impulses can be distinguished, but it is a unity.  Myriads of bubbles rise from the leaping foam at the bottom, float away for a few yards and then break.

It is the very summit of the year, the brief poise of perfection.  In two or three weeks the days will be noticeably shorter, the harvest will begin, and we shall be on our way downwards to autumn, to dying leaves and to winter.

The walk from the high moorland to the large pond or lake lies through a narrow grassy lane.  About half-way down it turns sharply to the left; in front are the bluish-green pine woods.  Across the corner of them, confronting me, slants a birch with its white bark and delicate foliage, light-green and yellow in relief against the sombre background.  Fifty yards before I reach the wood its music is perceptible, something like the tones of an organ heard outside a cathedral.  In another minute the lane enters: it is dark, but the ruddy stems catch the sun, and in open patches are small beeches responding to it with intense golden-brown.  Along the edge of the path, springing from the mossy bank they grow to a greater height.  A pine has pushed itself between the branches of one of them as if on purpose to show off the splendour of its sister’s beauty.  It is stiller than it was outside; the murmur descends from aloft.  There was a frost last night and the leaves will soon fall.  A beech leaf detaches itself now and then and flutters peacefully and waywardly to the ground, careless whether it finds its grave in the bracken or on the road where it will be trodden underfoot.  The bramble is beginning to turn to blood.  It is strange that leaves should show such character.  Here is a corner on which there are not two of the same tint, but they spring from the same root, and the circumstances of light and shade under which they have developed are almost exactly similar.

It is eleven o’clock, and with the mounting sun the silence has become complete save when it is broken by the heavy, quick flap of the wood-pigeon or the remonstrance of a surprised magpie.  Service is just beginning all over England in churches and the chapels belonging to a hundred sects.  In the village two miles away the Salvation Army drum is beating, but it cannot penetrate these recesses.  Stay! a faint vibration from it comes over the hill, but now it has gone.  A fox, unaware of any human being, walks from one side of the lane to the other, stopping in the middle.  There is a breath of wind and the low solemn song begins again above me.

At the top of the hill the north-westerly wind blows fresh, but here under the cliffs the sun strikes warm as in June.  There is not a cloud in the sky, and behind me broken, chalk pinnacles intensely white rise into the clear blue, which is bluer by their contrast.  In front lies the calm, light-sapphire ocean with a glittering sun-path on it broadening towards the horizon.  All recollection of bare trees and dead leaves has gone.  The tide is drawing down and has left bare a wide expanse of smooth untrodden sand through which ridges run of chalk rock black with weed.  The sand is furrowed by little rivulets from the abandoned pools above, and at its edge long low waves ripple over it, flattening themselves out in thin sheets which invade one another with infinitely complex, graceful curves.  I look southward: there is nothing between me and the lands of heat but the water.  It unites me with them.

It is wonderful that winter should suddenly abdicate and summer resume her throne.  On a morning like this there is no death, the sin of the world is swallowed up; theological and metaphysical problems cease to have any meaning.  Men and books make me painfully aware of my littleness and defects, but here on the shore in silence complete save for the music of the ebbing sea, they vanish.

When I am again in London and at work the dazzling light will not be extinguished, and will illuminate the dreary darkness of the city.

My housekeeper and her husband have begged for a holiday from this morning till Boxing-day, and I could not refuse.  I can do without them for so short a time.  I might have spent the Christmas with one of my children, but they live far away and travelling is now irksome to me.  I was seventy years old a month past.  Besides, they are married and have their own friends, of whom I know nothing.  I have locked the door of my cottage and shall walk to No-man’s Corner.

It is a dark day; the sky is covered evenly with a thick cloud.  There is no wind except a breath now and then from the north-east.  It is not a frost, but it is cold, and a thick mist covers the landscape.  It is no thicker in the river bottom than on the hills; it is everywhere the same.  The field-paths are in many places a foot deep in mud, for the autumn has been wet.  They are ploughing the Ten Acres, and the plough is going along the top ridge so that horses and men are distinctly outlined, two men and four horses, but the pace is slow, for the ground is very heavy.  I can just hear the ploughman talking to his team.  The upturned earth is more beautiful in these parts than I have seen it elsewhere—a rich, reddish brown, for there is iron in it.  The sides of the clods which are smoothed by the ploughshare shine like silver even in this dull light.  I pass through the hop-garden.  The poles are stacked and a beginning has just been made with the weeds.  A little further on is the farmhouse.  It lies in the hollow and there is no road to it, save a cart-track.  The nearest hard road is half a mile distant.  The footpath crosses the farmyard.  The house is whitewashed plaster and black-timbered, and surrounded by cattle-pens in which the oxen and cows stand almost up to their knees in slush.  A motionless ox looks over the bar of his pen and turns his eyes to me and my dog as we pass.  It is now twelve, and it is the dinner-hour.  The horses have stopped work and are steaming with sweat under the hayrick.  The men are sitting in the barn.  Leaving the farmyard I go down to the brook which steals round the wood and stop for a few minutes on the foot-bridge.  I can hear the little stream in the gully about twenty feet below, continually changing its note, which nevertheless is always the same.  In the wood not a leaf falls.  O eternal sleep, death of the passions, the burial of failures, follies, bitter recollections, the end of fears, welcome sleep!

During the retreat from Moscow a French soldier was mortally wounded.  His comrades tried to lift him into a waggon.  ‘No bandages, no brandy!’ he cried; ‘go, you cannot help me.’  They hesitated, but seeing that he could not recover, and knowing that the enemy was hard upon them in pursuit, they left him.  For half an hour he was alive and alone.  The Emperor, whom he worshipped, was far away; his friends had fled; to remain would have been folly, and yet!  It was late in the afternoon and bitterly cold.  He looked with dim and closing eyes over the vast, dreary, snowy and silent plain.  What were the images which passed before them?  Were they of home, of the Emperor and the retreating army, of the crucifix and the figure thereon?  Who can tell?  Death is preceded by thoughts which life cannot anticipate.  Perhaps his herald was a simple longing to be at rest, joy at his approach blotting out all bitterness and regret.  Who can tell?  But I dream and dream; the dying, wintry day, the dark, heavily-clouded sky, the snow, and the blood.  A Cossack came up and drove his lance through him.

Lord Bacon says that ‘To be wise by rule and to be wise by experience are contrary proceedings; he that accustoms himself to the one unfits himself for the other.’  It is singular how little attention, in the guidance of our lives, we pay to our own needs.  It is a common falsehood of these times that all knowledge is good for everybody, the truth being that knowledge is good only if it helps us, and that if it does not help us it is bad.  ‘Whatever knowledge,’ to quote from Bacon again, ‘we cannot convert into food or medicine endangereth a dissolution of the mind and understanding.’  We ought to turn aside from what we cannot manage, no matter how important it may seem to be.  David refused Saul’s helmet of brass and coat of mail.  If he had taken the orthodox accoutrements and weapons he would have been encumbered and slain.  He killed Goliath with the rustic sling and stone.  No doubt if we determine to be ignorant of those things with which the world thinks it necessary that everybody should be familiar we shall be thought ill-educated, but our very ignorance will be a better education, provided it be a principled ignorance, than much which secures a local examination certificate or a degree.  At the same time, if any study fits us, it should be pursued unflaggingly.  We must not be afraid of the imputation of narrowness.  Our subject will begin to be of most service to us when we have passed the threshold and can think for ourselves.  If we devote ourselves, for example, to the works and biography of any great man, the pleasure and moral effect come when we have read him and re-read him and have traced every thread we can find, connecting him with his contemporaries.  It is then, and then only, that we understand him and he becomes a living soul.  Flesh and blood are given by details.

We are misled by heroes whom we admire, and the greater the genius the more perilous is its influence upon us if we allow it to be a dictator to us.  It is really of little consequence to me what a saint or philosopher thought it necessary to do in order to protect and save himself.  It is myself that I have to protect and save.  Every man is prone to lean on some particular side and on that side requires special support.  Every man has particular fears and troubles, and it is against these and not against the fears and troubles of others that he must provide remedies.  A religion is but a general direction, and the real working Thirty-nine Articles or Assembly’s Catechism each one of us has to construct on his own behalf.

A not insignificant advantage of loyalty to our Divine Director will be a more correct and generally a more lenient criticism of our fellow-creatures.  We shall cease to judge them by standards which are not applicable to them.  Much that we might erroneously consider wrong we shall discern to be a necessary effort to secure stability or even to preserve sanity.  We shall pardon deviation from the obvious path.  The boat which crosses the river may traverse obliquely the direct line to the point for which it is making, and if we reflect that perhaps a strong current besets it we shall not call the steersman a fool.

Men had sinned against the gods, and had even denied their existence.  Zeus had a mind to destroy them, but at last resolved to inflict on them a punishment worse than death.  He sent Hermes to one of the chief cities with a scroll on which a few magic letters were written, and the wise men declared they contained a riddle.  Its solution would bring immortal happiness.  The whole human race, neglecting all ordinary pursuits, applied itself ceaselessly to the solution of the mystery.  Professors were appointed to lecture on it, it was attacked on all sides by induction, deduction, and by flights of inspiration, but nobody was able to unravel it.  At last a child, seeing the perplexity in which her father and mother were, took one of the copies of the scroll which were hung in all the public buildings of the city, and secretly set off to consult a distant oracle of Phœbus Apollo of which she had heard.  She had to traverse thirsty deserts, and not till she was nearly dead did she reach the shrine.  She told her story and handed in her scroll to a priestess, who disappeared in an inner chamber.  In a few minutes the temple of the Sun-god was filled with blazing light, the child prostrated herself on the floor, and she heard the words, There is no riddle.  She lifted herself up, and, fortified with some food given her by the priestess, began her journey home.  She was just able to struggle through the city gates and deliver the message before she fell down lifeless.  It was not believed; the Secret, the Secret, everybody upheld it, the professors lectured, the mad inquisition and guesses continued, and the vengeance of Zeus is not yet satisfied.

I was no longer young: in fact I was well over sixty.  The winter had been dark and tedious.  For some reason or other I had not been able to read much, and I began to think there were signs of the coming end.  Suddenly, with hardly any warning, spring burst upon us.  Day after day we had clear, warm sunshine which deepened every contrast of colour, and at intervals we were blessed with refreshing rains.  I spent most of my time out of doors on the edge of a favourite wood.  All my life I had been a lover of the country, and had believed, if this is the right word, that the same thought, spirit, life, God, which was in everything I beheld, was also in me.  But my creed had been taken over from books; it was accepted as an intellectual proposition.  Most of us are satisfied with this kind of belief, and even call it religion.  We are more content the more definite the object becomes, no matter whether or not it is in any intimate relationship with us, and we do not see that the moment God can be named he ceases to be God.

One morning when I was in the wood something happened which was nothing less than a transformation of myself and the world, although I ‘believed’ nothing new.  I was looking at a great, spreading, bursting oak.  The first tinge from the greenish-yellow buds was just visible.  It seemed to be no longer a tree away from me and apart from me.  The enclosing barriers of consciousness were removed and the text came into my mind, Thou in me and I in thee.  The distinction of self and not-self was an illusion.  I could feel the rising sap; in me also sprang the fountain of life up-rushing from its roots, and the joy of its outbreak at the extremity of each twig right up to the summit was my own: that which kept me apart was nothing.  I do not argue; I cannot explain; it will be easy to prove me absurd, but nothing can shake me.  Thou in me and I in thee.  Death! what is death?  There is no death: in thee it is impossible, absurd.

He has vanished, the God of the Church and the Schools:
He has gone for us all except children and fools;
Where He dwelt is the uttermost limit of cold,
And a fathomless depth is the Heaven of old.

I turn from my books, and behold! I’m aware
There’s a girl in the room, just a girl over there.
She stole in while I mused; and she watches the verge
Of a low-lying cloud whence a star doth emerge.

A touch on her shoulder; I whisper a word,
One more, and I know that the heavenly Lord
Still loves and rejoices His creatures to meet:
My faith still survives, for I kneel at her feet.

Spring 18–.

Walked from Holford to my lodgings on the hill.  Never remember to have lived in such quietude.  The cottage stands half a mile away from any house.  Woke very early the next morning and went down to Alfoxden House, where Wordsworth and Dorothy lived a century ago.  Here also came Coleridge.  It was almost too much to remember that they had trodden those paths.  I could hardly believe they were not there, and yet they were dead—such a strange overcoming sense of presence and yet of vanishedness.

A certain degree of ignorance is necessary for a summary essay on creatures of this order.  The expression of Dorothy’s soul is spread over large surfaces.  Some people require much space and time, and the striking events of a life are often not those which are most significant.  It is in small, spontaneous actions and their reiteration that character plainly appears.  After prolonged acquaintance with Dorothy we see that she was great and we love her reverentially and passionately.  She could look at a beautiful thing for an hour without reflection, but absorbed in its pure beauty—a most rare gift.  For how long can we watch a birch tree against the sky?  Here are two extracts from her journal in the very place where I now am.  They are dated 26th January and 24th February 1798, in the winter it will be noticed.  ‘Sat in the sunshine.  The distant sheep-bells; the sound of the stream; the woodman winding along the half-marked road with his laden pony; locks of wool still spangled with the dewdrops; the blue-grey sea, shaded with immense masses of cloud, not streaked; the sheep glittering in the sunshine.’ . . . ‘Went to the hill-top.  Sat a considerable time overlooking the country towards the sea.  The air blew pleasantly around us. . . . Scattered farmhouses, half-concealed by green, mossy orchards; fresh straw lying at the doors; haystacks in the fields.  Brown fallows; the springing wheat, like a shade of green over the brown earth; and the choice meadow plots, full of sheep and lambs, of a soft and vivid green; a few wreaths of blue smoke, spreading along the ground; the oaks and beeches in the hedges retaining their yellow leaves; the distant prospect on the land side, islanded with sunshine; the sea, like a basin full to the margin; the dark, fresh-ploughed fields; the turnips, of a lively, rough green.’  That bit about the farmhouses reminds me of two very early lines of Wordsworth which are a prophecy of his peculiar quality:—

‘Calm is all nature as a resting wheel’;

and

‘By secret villages and lonely farms.’

(first version.)

The image in the first line looks rude and unpoetical, but will be felt by anybody who has strolled observantly through a farmyard—say on a Sunday summer afternoon—and has noticed a disused wheel leaning against a wall.  Wordsworth shows himself not afraid of the commonplace.  A great object may gain by comparison with one which is superficially lower or even mean—nature with a cart-wheel.

Went over the hills to Bicknoller—a sunny, hazy day—and the Bristol Channel was in a mist.  The note of the cuckoo was unceasing.  Down in the valley at Bicknoller the hedges and banks of the lanes are in the most ardent stage of spring.  Everything is pressing forward with joyous impetuosity, and yet is satisfied with what it is at the present moment and is completely at rest in it.  Along this path to Bicknoller the Ancient Mariner was begun.  The most wonderful piece of criticism on record is perhaps that of Mrs. Barbauld on the poem.  She objected to it because it had no moral.  Coleridge replied: ‘In my judgment the poem had too much; and the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination.  It ought to have no more moral than the Arabian Nights’ tale of the merchant’s sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date-shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie’s son.’

To the first draft of Youth and Age, written in 1823, there is a little prose introduction, a reminiscence of the Quantocks, which is a lovely example of the way in which one sensation gains by description in terms of another.  ‘ . . .  At earliest dawn . . . the first skylark . . . was a Song-Fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the Ear’s eye, in full column or ornamented shaft of sound in the order of Gothic Extravaganza, out of sight, over the Cornfields on the descent of the Mountain on the other side—out of sight, tho’ twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling star of silver.’

Coleridge! Coleridge!  How empty do the sweeping judgments passed on him appear if we recollect that by Wordsworth, Dorothy, Charles and Mary Lamb, he was honoured and fervently loved.  If a man is loved by any human being condemnation is rash, and we ought at least to be silent.

Wandered about Holford.  The apple-trees are in full blossom.  One of them was a particularly exquisite survival of youth in old age.  Its head was a white-and-pink mass, but it leaned almost horizontally, battered and weather-worn.

Thunder off and on all day till the afternoon.  A low grey mist covered the whole sky at five o’clock, and the landscape was uninteresting, but in ten minutes the mist thinned a little, so that the sun came through it and lighted up the torn vapour.

Went over to East Quantock’s Head and came back across the hill.  It was a dark day; the sky was overcast, and the moors were very lonely.  The thought of London and other big cities over the horizon somewhat marred the solitude.  Nevertheless there are the deserts of Arabia and Africa, the regions of the North and South Poles, the Ocean, and, encompassing the globe itself, silent, infinite space.

To Nether Stowey and Tom Poole’s house.  In the hideous church is a monument to him fairly appreciative, but disfigured by snobbism.  ‘His originality and grasp of mind,’ says the inscription, ‘counterbalanced the deficiencies of early education and secured him the friendship,’ etc.  His ‘originality and grasp of mind’—his soul, that is to say, managed, when put in the scale, to turn it against those deficiencies which are made good to youths providentially directed to Eton and Oxford.  According to the slab in the church, Poole died 8th September 1837, seventy-two years old.  The house in which he lived in his later years is a pleasant place, but has been tortured into modern gentility.  His revolving grate, which he turned round when he went out, has been replaced by an approved cast-iron ‘register.’  He was called ‘Justice Poole’ in the country round.  Afterwards to Coleridge’s cottage—small, somewhat squalid rooms.  Pity, pity, almost to tears.  The second edition of his poems was published while he was here in 1797.  In a note added to Religious Musings in that edition he declares his belief in the Millennium; that ‘all who in past ages have endeavoured to ameliorate the state of man, will rise and enjoy the fruits and flowers, the imperceptible seeds of which they had sown in their former life; and that the wicked will, during the same period, be suffering the remedies adapted to their several bad habits.’  This period is to be ‘followed by the passing away of this earth, and by our entering the state of pure intellect; when all creation shall rest from its labours.’  The ‘coadjutors of God’ in Religious Musings are Milton, Newton, Hartley, and Priestley.  In the beginning of 1798 Coleridge was preaching at the Unitarian Chapel at Shrewsbury.  But on the 13th November 1797, at half-past four in the afternoon (let us be particular in dating such an event), he and Dorothy and her brother began their walk over these Quantock hills, and The Ancient Mariner was born.  These are the facts, and rash indeed would anybody be who should attempt to deduce anything from them.  Of all foolish criticism there is none more foolish than that which treats the mental movement of men like Coleridge or Wordsworth as if it were in an imaginary straight line.  Excepting lines 123–270, composed in the latter part of 1796, Coleridge wrote his contribution to Joan of Arc between 1794 and 1795.  The Rose and Kisses were written in 1793, and On a Discovery Made Too Late in 1794.  Could anybody, not knowing the dates, have believed that these three poems last-named, if not written before the Joan of Arc, were contemporaneous with it?  In the Joan of Arc Coleridge is immature and led astray by politics, religion, and philosophy, but in the three little poems where he has subjects akin to him he is perfect, and could have done nothing better ten years later.  Still more remarkable, Lewti, in its earliest form, cannot have been written later than 1794, for it was originally addressed to Mary Evans, from whom Coleridge parted in December 1794.  As an example of the survival of his poetic power take Love’s First Hope, written probably in 1824:

‘O fair is Love’s first hope to gentle mind!
As Eve’s first star thro’ fleecy cloudlet peeping;
And sweeter than the gentle south-west wind,
O’er willowy meads, and shadow’d waters creeping,
And Ceres’ golden field;—the sultry hind
Meets it with brow uplift, and stays his reaping.’

Coleridge was indebted to Sir Philip Sidney for the third and fourth lines, excepting ‘o’er willowy meads,’ but these three words and the first and last two lines are his own.  Not only does his genius survive, but emotion as pure and deep as that of the Nether Stowey days or those preceding.  There is no trace of the interval between them and those of 1824.

In the post-office at Kilve hangs an old trombone, a memento of the time when the village orchestra assisted in the service at the church.  How well I remember those artists and their jealousies!  The clarionet or ‘clarnet,’ as he called himself, caused much ill-feeling because he drowned the others, and the double-bass strove ineffectually to avenge himself.  The churchyard yew is one of the largest I ever beheld—twenty feet in girth by measurement, four feet from the ground.  A gay morning: heavy, white masses of clouds sailing over the hills; light most brilliant when the sun came out.  How singularly beautiful is a definitely outlined white cloud when it is cut by the ridge of a hill!

Across the hills in a south-westerly storm of wind and rain to Bicknoller.  A walk not to be forgotten: overcast sky, dark moors; clouds sweeping over them and obscuring them.  I should not have found my way if I had not lost it when I went to Bicknoller before.  I then put three stones at the point where I afterwards discovered I had gone astray.  These three stones saved me to-day.

Whitsunday morning: sat at the open window between five and six: the hills opposite lay in the light of the eastern sun.  Bicknoller church and the little old village were beneath me.  Perfect quietude, save for the bells of Stogumber church ringing a peal two miles away.  Earth has nothing to give compared with this peace.  The air was so still that delicious mingled scents floated up from the garden and fields below.  It was one of those days on which every sense is satisfied, and no mortal imperfection appears.  Took the Excursion out of doors after breakfast, and read The Ruined Cottage.

Much of the religion by which Wordsworth lives is very indefinite.  Look at the close of this poem:—

‘I well remember that those very plumes,
Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall
By mist and silent rain-drops silver’d o’er,
As once I pass’d, did to my heart convey
So still an image of tranquillity,
So calm and still, and look’d so beautiful
Amid the uneasy thoughts which fill’d my mind,
That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief
The passing shows of Being leave behind,
Appear’d an idle dream, that could not live
Where meditation was.  I turn’d away,
And walk’d along my road in happiness.’

Because this religion is indefinite it is not therefore the less supporting.

Why, by the way, did Wordsworth expunge from Michael these wonderful lines?

‘In his thoughts there were obscurities,
Wonder, and admiration, things that wrought
Not less than a religion in his heart.’

Something like them had been said before, but they ought to have been retained.

The changes in the sky in this Quantock country are as sudden and strange as in Cumberland.  During a walk from Cleeve Abbey to Bicknoller it rained in torrents till within half a mile of the end of my journey.  All at once it ceased, and the uniform sheet of rain-cloud broke into loose ragged masses swirling in different directions and variously lighted, the sun almost shining through some of the clefts between them.  Cleeve Abbey, lying in the trough of a green valley through which runs a stream, the cloister garth and the Abbot’s seat at the end of it, are most impressive.  Under the turf lie the dead monks.  A place like this begets half-unconscious dreaming which issues in nothing and is not wholesome.  It would be better employment to learn something about the history of the abbey and about its architecture.

Detached Quantock Notes.

Ye Woods! that listen to the night-birds’ singing,
Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined,
Save where your own imperious branches swinging,
Have made a solemn music of the wind.’

These lines from France were written by Coleridge when he was a little over twenty-five years old.  In the combination of two gifts, music and meaning, he is hardly surpassable at his best by any poet.  Not an atom of meaning is sacrificed to gain a melody: in fact the melody adds to the meaning.

Here is another example showing how the poetic form with Coleridge is not a hindrance to expression, but aids it.

Gentle woman, for thy voice remeasures
Whatever tones and melancholy pleasures
The things of Nature utter; birds or trees,
Or moan of ocean-gale in weedy caves,
Or where the stiff grass ’mid the heath-plant waves,
Murmur and music thin of sudden breeze.’

His similitudes are not mere external comparisons; the objects compared become modes of unity.  ‘A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the alive [italics C.’s] sea, most interestingly combined with the number of white seagulls, that, repeatedly, it seemed as if the foam-spit had taken life and wing, and had flown up.’

The intimations which are but whispered, the Presences which are but half-disclosed, are those which we should intently obey.  The coarsely obvious has its own strength.

   ‘She went forth alone
Urged by the indwelling angel-guide, that oft,
With dim inexplicable sympathies
Disquieting the heart, shapes out Man’s course
To the predoomed adventure.’

Destiny of Nations.

Wordworth’s habit of spending so much time in the open air and with the humble people around him gives to what he says the value of experience, distinguishable totally from the ideas of the literary man, which may be brilliant, but do not agree with the sun, moon and stars, and turn out to be nothing when we ask is the thing really so.

Wordsworth’s verses have been in the sun and wind.  It is a test of good sane writing that we can read it out of doors.

If Wordsworth’s love of clouds and mountains ended there it would be no better than the luxury of a refined taste.  But it does not end there.  It affects the whole of his relationships with men and women, and is therefore most practical.

In Wordsworth what we expect does not come, but in its place the unexpected.  In the twelfth book of the Prelude he tells us:

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life that give
Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,
The mind is lord and master—outward sense
The obedient servant of her will.’

He then gives us one of these ‘passages,’ and what is it?  A day when as a child he saw

‘A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
The beacon on the summit, and, more near,
A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind.’

It was, as he says, an ‘ordinary sight,’ but

‘Colours and words that are unknown to man’

would have failed him

‘To paint the visionary dreariness’

which invested what he saw.

Years afterwards, when he revisited the spot, the ‘loved one at his side,’ there fell on it

‘A spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam;
And think ye not with radiance more sublime
For these remembrances, and for the power
They had left behind?  So feeling comes in aid
Of feeling, and diversity of strength
Attends us, if but once we have been strong.’

This was the experience, then, of ‘distinct pre-eminence’ in whose recollection his mind was ‘nourished and invisibly repaired.’  It is in such a moment that the soul’s strength is shown; when common objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which they are a suggestion.  Although he expands here and elsewhere he does not elaborate.  He stops where the fact ends and shuns abstractions.

‘So taught, so trained, we boldly face
All accidents of time and place;
   Whatever props may fail,
Trust in that sovereign law can spread
New glory o’er the mountain’s head,
   Fresh beauty through the vale.’

This is from The Wishing-Gate Destroyed, a late poem, not published till 1842, when Wordsworth was seventy-two years old.  It is his Nicene and Apostles’ Creed and Thirty-Nine Articles.  Trust, with no credentials but its own existence, and yet they are indisputable.

‘Is it that Man is soon deprest?
A thoughtless Thing! who, once unblest,
Does little on his memory rest,
   Or on his reason.’

To the Daisy.

An example of Wordsworth’s wisdom disclosing itself in his simplest pieces.  For one sad conclusion to which the reason leads us, the uncontrolled, baseless procedure in the brain which we call thinking, but is really day-dreaming, leads us to a score.  Reason on the whole is sanative.

‘Blest Statesman He, whose Mind’s unselfish will
Leaves him at ease among grand thoughts: whose eye
Sees that, apart from magnanimity,
Wisdom exists not, nor the humbler skill
Of Prudence, disentangling good and ill
With patient care.’

Exist not.  We are befooled by words.  We conceive wisdom, prudence, and magnanimity as distinct entities, without intercommunication.  If we could but see things as they are without the tyranny of definition!

Wordsworth has a singular power of expressing articulately that which would be mere mist without him, but is of vital importance.

(Reprinted from The Pilot, 20th April 1901.  With added postscript.)

The most singular portion of Political Justice is that which deals with Population, and some notice of it, by way of postscript, may be pardoned, for it cannot be neglected in our estimate of Godwin, and it is a curious instance of the futility of attempting to comprehend character without searching into corners and examination of facts which, judged by external bulk, are small.  These small facts may contain principles which are constituent of the man.  The chapter on Population occupies a few pages at the end of the second volume of the Political Justice.

Godwin would like to see property equalised, or common, and he tries to answer the argument that excessive population would ensue.  He quotes (ii. 862) a reported conjecture of Franklin’s that ‘mind will one day become omnipotent over matter.’  If over matter, which is outside us, thinks Godwin, why not over our own bodies, ‘in a word, why may not man be one day immortal’ (ii. 862).  He points out that the mind already has great power over the body, that it can conquer pain, assist in the cure of disease, and successfully resist old age.

‘Why is it that a mature man soon loses that elasticity of limb which characterises the heedless gaiety of youth?  Because he desists from youthful habits.  He assumes an air of dignity incompatible with the lightness of childish sallies.  He is visited and vexed with all the cares that rise out of our mistaken institutions, and his heart is no longer satisfied and gay.  Hence his limbs become stiff and unwieldy.  This is the forerunner of old age and death’ (ii. 863–64).  ‘Medicine may reasonably be stated to consist of two branches, the animal and intellectual.  The latter of these has been infinitely too much neglected’ (ii. 869).  We may look forward to a time when we shall be ‘indifferent to the gratifications of sense.  They please at present by their novelty, that is because we know not how to estimate them.  They decay in the decline of life indirectly because the system refuses them, but directly and principally because they no longer excite the ardour and passion of mind . . . The gratifications of sense please at present by their imposture.  We soon learn to despise the mere animal function, which, apart from the delusions of intellect, would be nearly the same in all cases; and to value it, only as it happens to be relieved by personal charms or mental excellence.  We absurdly imagine that no better road can be found to the sympathy and intercourse of minds.  But a very slight degree of attention might convince us that this is a false road, full of danger and deception.  Why should I esteem another, or by another be esteemed?  For this reason only, because esteem is due, and only so far as it is due.

‘The men therefore who exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population will cease to propagate, for they will no longer have any motive, either of error or duty, to induce them.  In addition to this they will perhaps be immortal.  The whole will be a people of men, and not of children.  Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence her career at the end of every thirty years.  There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government.  These latter articles are at no great distance; and it is not impossible that some of the present race of men may live to see them in part accomplished.  But, besides this, there will be no disease, no anguish, no melancholy, and no resentment.  Every man will seek with ineffable ardour the good of all’ (ii. 870–72).

A very curious vein, not golden indeed but copper, let us say, is hidden away in the earthy mass of Godwin.  The dull, heavy-featured creature sees an apocalyptic vision and becomes poetical.  It is partly absurd, but not because it is ideal, and there are lineaments in it of the true Utopia.  Godwin probably would have denounced the Revelation of St. John the Divine as superstitious nonsense, but he saw before him a kind of misty, distorted reflection of the New Jerusalem, in which there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, where there shall be no more curse, no night, no candle, no light of the sun.  It might have been thought that it was impossible to establish a connection between Patmos and Skinner Street, but the first postulate of Euclid’s elements holds good universally, ‘that a straight line may be drawn from any one point to any other point.’

Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim
Credebat libris.—Hor.  Sat., II. i. 30.

Nothing is more dangerous than a mass of discontent which does not know what remedy is to be sought.  All sorts of cures will be tried, many of them mere quackery, and their failure will make matters worse.