A MOMENT AND A MAGIC MIRROR
What a swarm of thoughts and feelings, endlessly minute fragments, and, as it were, representations of all preceding and embryos of all future thought, lie compact in any one moment! So, in a single drop of water, the microscope discovers what motions, what tumult, what wars, what pursuits, what stratagems, what a circle-dance of death and life, death-hunting life, and life renewed and invigorated by death! The whole world seems here in a many-meaning cypher. What if our existence was but that moment? What an unintelligible, affrightful riddle, what a chaos of limbs and trunk, tailless, headless, nothing begun and nothing ended, would it not be? And yet scarcely more than that other moment of fifty or sixty years, were that our all? Each part throughout infinite diminution adapted to some other, and yet the whole a means to nothing—ends everywhere, and yet an end nowhere.
[Compare the three last lines of "What is Life?"
Is very life by consciousness unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling life and death?
P. W., 1893, p. 173.]
THAT INWARD EYE, THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE
The love of Nature is ever returned double to us, not only the delighter in our delight, but by linking our sweetest, but of themselves perishable feelings to distinct and vivid images, which we ourselves, at times, and which a thousand casual recollections, recall to our memory. She is the preserver, the treasurer of our joys. Even in sickness and nervous diseases, she has peopled our imagination with lovely forms which have sometimes overpowered the inward pain and brought with them their old sensations. And even when all men have seemed to desert us and the friend of our heart has passed on, with one glance from his "cold disliking eye"—yet even then the blue heaven spreads it out and bends over us, and the little tree still shelters us under its plumage as a second cope, a domestic firmament, and the low creeping gale will sigh in the heath-plant and soothe us by sound of sympathy till the lulled grief lose itself in fixed gaze on the purple heath-blossom, till the present beauty becomes a vision of memory.
HESPERUS
I have never seen the evening star set behind the mountains, but it was as if I had lost a hope out of my soul, as if a love were gone, and a sad memory only remained. O it was my earliest affection, the evening star! One of my first utterances in verse was an address to it as I was returning from the New River, and it looked newly bathed as well as I. I remember that the substance of the sonnet was that the woman whom I could ever love would surely have been emblemed in the pensive serene brightness of that planet, that we were both constellated to it, and would after death return thither.
TO THE EVENING STAR
TO THE EVENING STAR
O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze,
I hail, sweet star, thy chaste effulgent glow;
On thee full oft with fixed eye I gaze,
Till I methinks, all spirit seem to grow.
O first and fairest of the starry choir,
O loveliest 'mid the daughters of the night,
Must not the maid I love like thee inspire
Pure joy and calm delight? Must she not be, as is thy placid sphere, Serenely brilliant? Whilst to gaze awhile Be all my wish 'mid Fancy's high career E'en till she quit this scene of earthly toil; Then Hope perchance might fondly sigh to join Her image in thy kindred orb, O star benign!
[First printed from MS. Poetical and Dramatic Works, 1877-80; Poetical Works, 1893, p. 11.]
HEALTH, INDEPENDENCE, FRIENDSHIP
Where health is—at least, though pain be no stranger, yet when the breath can rise, and turn round like a comet at its perihelion in its ellipse, and again descend, instead of being a Sisiphus's stone; and the chest can expand as by its own volition and the head sits firm yet mobile aloft, like the vane of a tower on a hill shining in the blue air, and appropriating sunshine and moonlight whatever weight of clouds brood below—O when health and hope, and if not competence yet a debtless unwealth, libera et læta paupertas, is his, a man may have and love many friends, but yet, if indeed they be friends, he lives with each a several and individual life.
SELF-ABSORPTION AND SELFISHNESS
One source of calumny (I say source, because allophoby from hëautopithygmy is the only proper cause) may be found in this—every man's life exhibits two sorts of selfishness, those which are and those which are not objects of his own consciousness. A is thinking, perhaps, of some plan in which he may benefit another, and during this absorption consults his own little bodily comforts blindly—occupies the best place at the fire-side, or asks at once, "Where am I to sit?" instead of first inquiring after the health of another. Now the error lies here, that B, in complaining of A, first takes for granted either that these are acts of conscious selfishness in A, or, if he allows the truth, yet considers them just as bad (and so perhaps they may be in a certain sense), but forgets that his own life presents the same, judges of his own life exclusively by his own consciousness, that of another by conscious and unconscious in a lump. A monkey's anthropomorph attitudes we take for anthropic.
SELF-ADVERTISING PHILANTHROPY
Try not to become disgusted with active benevolence, or despondent because there is a philanthropy-trade. It is a sort of benefit-club of virtue, supported by the contributions of paupers in virtue, founded by genuine enthusiasts who gain a reputation for the thing—then slip in successors who know how to avail themselves of the influence and connections derived thereby—quite gratuitous, however, and bustling-active—but yet bribe high to become the unpaid physicians of the dispensary at St. Luke's Hospital, and bow and scrape and intrigue, Carlyleise and Knappise for it. And such is the [case with regard to] the slave trade. The first abolitionists were the good men who laboured when the thing seemed desperate—it was virtue for its own sake. Then the quakers, Granville Sharp, etc.—then the restless spirits who are under the action of tyrannical oppression from images, and, gradually, mixed vanity and love of power with it—the politicians + saints = Wilberforce. Last come the Scotchmen—and Brougham is now canvassing more successfully for the seat of Wilberforce, who retires with great honour and regret, from infirmities of age and enoughness. It is just as with the great original benefactors and founders of useful plans, Raleigh, Sir Hugh Middleton, etc.—men of genius succeeded by sharpers, but who often can better carry on what they never could have first conceived—and this, too, by their very want of those qualities and virtues which were necessary to the discovery.
"BUT LOVE IS INDESTRUCTIBLE"
All mere passions, like spirits and apparitions,