The Life and Times of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Complete Autobiographical Works. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

      Errors beget opposite errors, for it is our imperfect nature to run into extremes. But this trite, because ever-recurring, truth is not the whole. Alas! those are endangered who have avoided the extremes, as if among the Tartars, in opposition to a faction that had unnaturally lengthened their noses into monstrosity, there should arise another who had cut off theirs flat to the face, Socinians in physiognomy. The few who retained their noses as nature made them and reason dictated would assuredly be persecuted by the noseless party as adherents of the rhinocerotists or monster-nosed men, which is the case of those αρχασπισται [braves] of the English Church, called Evangelicals. Excess of Calvinism produced Arminianism, and those not in excess must therefore be Calvinists!

      ALAS! THEY HAD BEEN FRIENDS IN YOUTH

      To a former friend who pleaded how near he formerly had been, how near and close a friend! Yes! you were, indeed, near to my heart and native to my soul—a part of my being and its natural, even as the chaff to corn. But since that time, through whose fault I will be mute, I have been thrashed out by the flail of experience. Because you have been, therefore, never more can you be a part of the grain.

      Oct. 31, 1803 AVE PHŒBE IMPERATOR

      The full moon glided behind a black cloud. And what then? and who cared? It was past seven o'clock in the morning. There is a small cloud in the east, not larger than the moon and ten times brighter than she! So passes night, and all her favours vanish in our minds ungrateful!

      THE ONE AND THE GOOD

      In the chapter on abstract ideas I might introduce the subject by quoting the eighth Proposition of Proclus' "Elements of Theology." The whole of religion seems to me to rest on and in the question: The One and The Good—are these words or realities? I long to read the schoolmen on the subject.

      A MORTAL AGONY OF THOUGHT

      There are thoughts that seem to give me a power over my own life. I could kill myself by persevering in the thought. Mem., to describe as accurately as may be the approximating symptoms. I met something very like this observation where I should least have expected such a coincidence of sentiment, such sympathy with so wild a feeling of mine—in p. 71 of Blount's translation of "The Spanish Rogue," 1623.