DRIP DRIP DRIP DRIP
The ear-deceiving imitation of a steady soaking rain, while the sky is in full uncurtainment of sprinkled stars and milky stream and dark blue interspace. The rain had held up for two hours or more, but so deep was the silence of the night that the drip from the leaves of the garden trees copied a steady shower.
REMEDIUM AMORIS
So intense are my affections, and so despotically am I governed by them (not indeed so much as I once was, but still far, far too much) that I should be the most wretched of men if my love outlived my esteem. But this, thank Heaven! is the antidote. The bitterer the tear of anguish at the clear detection of misapplied attachment, the calmer I am afterwards. It is a funeral tear for an object no more.
THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER
February 23, 1816.
I thought I expressed my thoughts well when I said, "There is no superstition but what has a religion as its base [or radical], and religion is only reason, seen perspectively by a finite intellect."
THE POWER OF WORDS
It is a common remark, in medical books for instance, that there are certain niceties which words, from their always abstract and so far general nature, cannot convey. Now this I am disposed to deny, that is, in any comparative sense. In my opinion there is nothing which, being equally known as any other thing, may not be conveyed by words with equal clearness. But the question of the source of the remark is, to whom? If I say that in jaundice the skin looks yellow, my words have no meaning for a man who has no sense of colours. Words are but remembrances, though remembrance may be so excited, as by the a priori powers of the mind to produce a tertium aliquid. The utmost, therefore that should be said is that every additament of perception requires a new word, which (like all other words) will be intelligible to all who have seen the subject recalled by it, and who have learnt that such a word or phrase was appropriated to it; and this may be attained either by a new word, as platinum, titanium, osmium, etc., for the new metals, or an epithet peculiarising the application of an old word. For instance, no one can have attended to the brightness of the eyes in a healthy person in high spirits and particularly delighted by some occurrence, and that of the eye of a person deranged or predisposed to derangement, without observing the difference; and, in this case, the phrase "a maniacal glitter of the eye" conveys as clear a notion as that jaundice is marked by yellow. There is, doubtless, a difference, but no other than that of the commencement of particular knowledge by the application of universal knowledge (that is to all who have the senses and common faculties of men), and the next step of knowledge when it particularises itself. But the defect is not in words, but in the imperfect knowledge of those to whom they are addressed. Then proof is obvious. Desire a physician or metaphysician, or a lawyer to mention the most perspicuous book in their several knowledges. Then bid them read that book to a sensible carpenter or shoemaker, and a great part will be as unintelligible as a technical treatise on carpentering to the lawyer or physician, who had not been brought up in a carpenter's shop or looked at his tools.
I have dwelt on this for more reasons than one: first, because a remark that seems at first sight the same, namely, that "everything clearly perceived may be conveyed in simple common language," without taking in the "to whom?" is the disease of the age—an arrogant pusillanimity, a hatred of all information that cannot be obtained without thinking; and, secondly, because the pretended imperfection of language is often a disguise of muddy thoughts; and, thirdly, because to the mind itself it is made an excuse for indolence in determining what the fact or truth is which is the premise. For whether there does or does not exist a term in our present store of words significant thereof—if not, a word must be made—and, indeed, all wise men have so acted from Moses to Aristotle and from Theophrastus to Linnæus.
The sum, therefore, is this. The conveyal of knowledge by words is in direct proportion to the stores and faculties of observation (internal or external) of the person who hears or reads them. And this holds equally whether I distinguish the green grass from the white lily and the yellow crocus, which all who have eyes understand, because all are equal to me in the knowledge of the facts signified—or of the difference between the apprehensive, perceptive, conceptive, and conclusive powers which I might [try to enunciate to] Doctors of Divinity and they would translate the words by Abra Ca Dabra.
FLOWERS OF SPEECH Sunday, April 30, 1816
Reflections on my four gaudy flower-pots, compared with the former flower-poems. After a certain period, crowded with counterfeiters of poetry, and illustrious with true poets, there is formed for common use a vast garden of language, all the showy and all the odorous words and clusters of words are brought together, and to be plucked by mere mechanic and passive memory. In such a state, any man of common poetical reading, having a strong desire (to be?—O no! but—) to be thought a poet will present a flower-pot gay and gaudy, but the composition! That is wanting. We carry on judgment of times and circumstances into our pleasures. A flower-pot which would have enchanted us before flower gardens were common, for the very beauty of the component flowers, will be rightly condemned as common-place, out of place (for such is a common-place poet)—it involves a contradiction both in terms and thought. So Homer's Juno, Minerva, etc., are read with delight—but Blackmore? This is the reason why the judgment of those who are newlings in poetic reading is not to be relied on. The positive, which belongs to all, is taken as the comparative, which is the individual's praise. A good ear which had never heard music—with what raptures would it praise one of Shield's or Arne's Pasticcios and Centos! But it is the human mind it praises, not the individual. Hence it may happen (I believe has happened) that fashionableness may produce popularity. "The Beggar's Petition" is a fair instance, and what if I dared to add Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"?
SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS
Men who direct what they call their understanding or common-sense by rules abstracted from sensuous experience in moral and super-sensuous truths remind one of the zemmi (mus τυφλος or typhlus), "a kind of rat in which the skin (conjunctiva) is not even transparent over the eye, but is there covered with hairs as in the rest of the body. The eye (= the understanding), which is scarcely the size of the poppy-seed, is perfectly useless." An eel (murœna cœcilia) and the myxine (gastobranchus cœcus) are blind in the same manner, through the opacity of the conjunctiva.
INSECTS
Sir G. Staunton asserts that, in the forests of Java, spiders' webs are found of so strong a texture as to require a sharp-cutting instrument to make way through them. Pity that he did not procure a specimen and bring it home with him. It would be a pleasure to see a sailing-boat rigged with them—twisting the larger threads into ropes and weaving the smaller into a sort of silk canvas resembling the indestructible white cloth of the arindy or palma Christi silkworm.
The Libellulidæ fly all ways without needing to turn their bodies—onward, backward, right and left—with more than swallow-rivalling rapidity of wing, readiness of evolution, and indefatigable continuance.
The merry little gnats (Tipulidæ minimæ) I have myself often watched in an April shower, evidently "dancing the hayes" in and out between the falling drops, unwetted, or, rather, un-down-dashed by rocks of water many times larger than their whole bodies.
OF STYLE Sunday, January