Coleridge's Writings: On the Sublime (Coleridge's Writings)

Coleridge’s Writings On the Sublime Volume 5 Edited by David Vallins Coleridge’s Writings General Editor: John Beer V...

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Coleridge’s Writings On the Sublime Volume 5

Edited by David Vallins

Coleridge’s Writings General Editor: John Beer Volume 5: On the Sublime

COLERIDGE’S WRITINGS Myriad-minded in his intellectual interests, Coleridge often passed quickly from one subject to another, so that the range and mass of the materials he left can be bewildering to later readers. Coleridge’s Writings is a series addressed to those who wish to have a guide to his important statements on particular subjects. Each volume presents his writings in a major field of human knowledge or thought, tracing the development of his ideas. Connections are also made with relevant writings in the period, suggesting the extent to which Coleridge was either summing up, contributing to or reacting against current developments. Each volume is produced by a specialist in the field; the general editor is John Beer, Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, who has published various studies of Coleridge’s thought and poetry. Volume 1 ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY edited by John Morrow Volume 2 ON HUMANITY edited by Anya Taylor Volume 3 ON LANGUAGE edited by A.C. Goodson Volume 4 ON RELIGION AND PSYCHOLOGY edited by John Beer Volume 5 ON THE SUBLIME edited by David Vallins

Coleridge’s Writings Volume 5 On the Sublime Edited by

David Vallins Lecturer in English University of Hiroshima Japan

Editorial matter and selection © David Vallins 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–97250–3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834. On the sublime/edited by David Vallins. p. cm.— (Coleridge’s writings; v. 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–97250–3 1. Sublime, The. 2. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834— Criticism and interpretation. 3. Sublime, The, in literature. I. Vallins, David. II. Title. PR4472.V35 2003 821′.7—dc21 2003048281 10 12

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Yea (saith an enlightened physician), there is but one principle, which alone reconciles the man with himself, with others and with the world; which regulates all relations, tempers all passions, and gives power to overcome or support all suffering; and which is not to be shaken by aught earthly, for it belongs not to the earth—namely, the principle of religion, the living and substantial faith ‘which passeth all understanding,’ as the cloud-piercing rock, which overhangs the strong-hold of which it had been the quarry and remains the foundation. This elevation of the spirit above the semblances of custom and the senses to a world of spirit, this life in the idea, even in the supreme and godlike, which alone merits the name of life, and without which our organic life is but a state of somnambulism; this it is which affords the sole sure anchorage in the storm, and at the same time the substantiating principle of all true wisdom, the satisfactory solution of all the contradictions of human nature, of the whole riddle of the world. (Friend [CC], 1: 523–4)

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Contents Foreword

ix

Acknowledgements

xi xiii

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1

1 ‘These soul-ennobling views’: Enlightenment and Sublimity in Coleridge’s Early Writings

13

2 ‘A stirring & inquietude of Fancy’: Coleridge and the Sublimity of Landscape

35

3 ‘A grand feeling of the unimaginable’: Transcendence in Literature and the Visual Arts i. General ii. Individual authors and texts iii. The visual arts

81 83 88 108

4 ‘That life-ebullient stream’: Coleridge and Romantic Psychology i. Evolution ii. ‘Thought’ and ‘things’ iii. Reason and understanding iv. Politics and society v. Love vi. The psychology of the sublime

111 114 124 131 144 146 151

5 ‘An intuitive beholding’: Aspects of the Sublime in Coleridge’s Religious Thought

155

Notes

170

Bibliography

186

Index

194

vii


Foreword The appearance of hitherto unpublished material during the last hundred years has brought out more fully the range and complexity of Coleridge’s intelligence and knowledge. Complete publication of the Notebooks and Collected Works, together with that of the previously assembled Collected Letters, have made it increasingly evident that this was the most extraordinary English mind of the time. The specialist or more general student who wishes to know what Coleridge had to say on a particular subject may, however, find the sheer mass of materials bewildering, since in his less formal writings he passed quickly from one subject to another. Coleridge’s Writings is a series addressed to such readers. In each volume a particular area of Coleridge’s interest is explored, with an attempt to present his most significant statements and to show the development of his thought on the subject in question. Among the various interests attracting Coleridge during his career, poetry, and the appreciation and criticism of literature, remained constant presences and the achievement of the sublime a dominant aspiration. The tragedies of Shakespeare marked one recent peak, while the work of Milton, who had come closest to producing an English form of epic poetry, called for emulation—and even supplementation, given the advances in knowledge and thought that had taken place since his death. The sublime was an ideal which could be aimed for not only poetically but intellectually: indeed, Coleridge remained unsure whether his aim should be to write an epic poem (the chief remaining subject for such an attempt being, he thought, ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’) or an opus maximum in philosophy (to be called the ‘Assertion of Religion’, perhaps). The loftiness of his aims was recognized in his circle—as is suggested by Southey’s rather withering description of The Ancient Mariner as a ‘Dutch attempt at German sublimity’. Coleridge’s subsequent attempts at demonstrating the sublimity of Nature, evident in many notebook descriptions, emerge openly in a poem such as the ‘Hymn before Sunrise’. As can be seen from the latter, however, a strong religious element was becoming increasingly bound up for him with ix

x

Foreword

the quality. Meanwhile, in his lectures and works of criticism, he was exploring the extent to which it had informed works of art in more than one medium, ranging from the achievements of Shakespeare and Milton to the work of cathedral architects. Since his psychological investigations had led him to enquire into the extent to which it should be thought of as a mental, or psychic, concept, moreover, this too was a theme constantly to be traced in his intellectual speculations and notably in his religious writing. Above all, any link between the human mind and the divine called, in his view, for an attitude of devotion. His Biographia Literaria ends in a turn of adoration towards the heavenly sublime which is to be repeated and elaborated in the last and culminating section of his major religious work, Aids to Reflection. Further volumes in the series will contain more sidelights on this preoccupation. Volumes on the range of his criticism, on Shakespeare and on the Bible will all refer to it at times, while a volume on Nature and Vision will supplement what is presented here, particularly by focusing on his capacity for analysis and minute observation in nature as well as his ability to range sweepingly over what she has to offer. The present volume, by focusing so firmly on the Sublime itself, will thus act as a firm and central guide to ideas that permeate much of the rest of his work. As always, the editorial work in the Princeton edition will be found invaluable by the reader who wishes to inquire further into particular passages. J.B.B. General Editor

Acknowledgements Firstly, this volume would not have come into being without the initial suggestion and continuing guidance of the series-editor, John Beer, to whom I owe a particular debt of gratitude. Secondly, the University of Hong Kong and, more recently, the University of Hiroshima have provided me with extensive facilities for research, as well as the opportunity to travel to libraries and conferences overseas, and I am grateful to my colleagues in both these institutions. Thirdly, Eleanor Birne and Emily Rosser at Palgrave Macmillan have given me valuable assistance and advice, as well as enthusiastic support for the project. Fourthly, my research assistants—Lorraine Wong in Hong Kong, and Sheila Lewis in London—provided significant help at an early stage of the project. I am also grateful to the anonymous reader of my initial proposal for the volume, whose knowledge and enthusiasm provided valuable guidance and encouragement. And the numerous Coleridge scholars with whom I have discussed related topics at successive Coleridge Summer Conferences have always been a key forum for testing my ideas and approaches. I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce a number of passages from Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs (copyright © Oxford University Press, 1956–71), to The British Library for permission to reproduce a number of passages from Coleridge’s notebooks and to the estate of Kathleen Coburn for permission to reproduce a passage from Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from his Published and Unpublished Prose Writings, ed. Kathleen Coburn. London: R.K.P., 1951.

xi



AR (CC) S.T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection. Ed. John Beer, CC 9 (1993). Ashe

S.T. Coleridge, Lectures and Notes on Shakespere and Other English Poets. Ed. T. Ashe. London: George Bell, 1884.

BL (CC)

Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, CC 7 (1983).

BL

The British Library

CC

The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. General ed. Kathleen Coburn. Associate ed. Bart Winer. Princeton N.J. and London, 1969–

CJ

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement. Trans. J.C. Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1928; 1952.

CL

Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–71.

CLE

S.T. Coleridge, Letters. Ed. E.H. Coleridge. 2 vols. London: Heinemann, 1895.

CLU

Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. E.L. Griggs. 2 vols. London: Constable, 1932.

CIS

Inquiring Spirit: a New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and Unpublished Prose Writings. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951.

CM

S.T. Coleridge, Marginalia. Ed. George Whalley et al. 6 vols. CC 12 (1980–2001).

CN

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn et al. 5 vols. London: Routledge, 1957–2002.

CPW

S.T. Coleridge, Poetical Works. Ed. E.H. Coleridge. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1912. xiii

xiv


CPW (CC)

S.T. Coleridge, Poetical Works. Ed. J.C.C. Mays. 3 pts. in 6 vols. CC 16 (2001).

C&S

S.T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State. Ed. John Barrell. London: Dent, 1972.

C&S (CC)

S.T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State. Ed. John Colmer. CC 10, (1976).

C&S (1839)

S.T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State and Lay Sermons. Ed. H.N. Coleridge. London: William Pickering, 1839.

C17thC

Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century. Ed. R.F. Brinkley. Durham, N.C.: Duke U.P., 1955.

ELH

English Literary History

EOT

S.T. Coleridge, Essays on His Times in ‘The Morning Post’ and ‘The Courier’, Ed. David V. Erdman. 3 vols. CC 3, (1977).

Friend (CC)

S.T. Coleridge, The Friend. Ed. Barbara E. Rooke. 2 vols. CC 4, (1969).

JHI

Journal of the History of Ideas

Lects 1795

S.T. Coleridge, Lectures (1795) On Politics and Religion. Ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann. CC 1, (1971).

Lects 1808–19 S.T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–19 On Literature. Ed. R.A. Foakes. 2 vols. CC 5, (1987). Lects 1818–19 S.T. Coleridge. Lectures 1818–19 On the History of Philosophy. Ed. J.R. de.J. Jackson. 2 vols. CC 8, (2000). LS (CC)

S.T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons. Ed. R.J. White. CC 6, (1972).

MC

Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism. Ed. T.M. Raysor. London: Constable, 1936.

NTPM

S.T. Coleridge, Notes, Theological, Political, and Miscellaneous. Ed. Derwent Coleridge. London: Moxon, 1853.


xv

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

PLects

The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. London: Pilot, 1949.

PMLA

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

SC

Coleridge’s Shakespearian Criticism. Ed. T.M. Raysor. 2 vols. London: Constable, 1930.

Shedd

The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. W.G.T. Shedd. 7 vols. New York. Harper, 1884.

STI

F.W.J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism. Trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1978.

SWF

S.T. Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments. Ed. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson. CC 11, (1995).

TL

Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life. Ed. Seth B. Watson. London: John Churchill, 1848.

TT

Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. H.N. Coleridge. London: John Murray, 1836.

TT (CC)

S.T. Coleridge, Table Talk. Ed. Carl Woodring, CC 14, (1990).

TW

R.B. Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer. London: Duckworth, 1903.

Watchman

S.T. Coleridge, The Watchman. Ed. Lewis Patton. CC 2, (1970).

W&C

Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper. Ed. E.L. Griggs. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P., 1939.

WMemoirs

Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of Wordsworth. 2 vols. London: Moxon, 1851.

William

xvi


WPW

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1940–1949.

word

Text struck out thus indicates a deletion in Coleridge’s manuscript.

Indicates an insertion between the lines in Coleridge’s manuscript.

[]

In passages from Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, indicates an insertion by the editor.

Introduction

No other British Romantic focuses so consistently as Coleridge on the importance of transcending the material, the everyday, or the mundanely comprehensible in favour of a confrontation with the infinite forces which, like many of his contemporaries, he sees as underlying both human consciousness and the natural world. Wordsworth’s evocations—particularly in The Prelude and the ‘Intimations’ ode, as well as ‘Tintern Abbey’—of the sublime emotions through which we recognize the divine spirit informing the universe are perhaps still better-known than the numerous passages of Coleridge’s early poems which evoke an analogous intuition. Yet the number and variety of texts and contexts in which Coleridge emphasizes the grandeur of the forces underlying human experience, and associates this intuition not only with elevation and excitement, but also with a liberating sense of calmness and of freedom from merely temporal concerns, is in fact far greater than in the case of Wordsworth. Coleridge, indeed, is the foremost British advocate of the aesthetic of transcendence with which Romanticism is so often associated—not only in the sense of recommending that aesthetic more powerfully and philosophically than any other British author, but also in his influence on other writers of the period, of whom Wordsworth is of course the most prominent. It is, indeed, among the numerous testimonies to his influence and achievement in these respects that historicist interpreters of Romantic idealism—most notably Jerome McGann—should have directed their critiques of Romantic ‘ideology’ primarily at Coleridge, correctly identifying him as the principal British advocate of the post-Kantian philosophies 1

2

Introduction

which culminate in the works of Hegel.1 Similarly in his own period, Coleridge was prominent among those whom the younger generation of Romantic authors identified as promoting idealist values associated with an opposition to the French critique of aristocratic and religious authority. 2 At the same time, however, it is primarily in response to Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s example that Shelley, in particular, seeks to formulate an interpretation of the sublime which eschews ideal concerns in favour of a more modern sense of the sublimity of the forces revealed by natural science—an aim which implicitly asserts the value of the emotions expressed by Coleridge, while rejecting his interpretations of them.3 That Coleridge’s sublime emotions should have been so closely associated not only with philosophy and religion, but also with political concerns, moreover, highlights both the diversity of the contexts in which he expresses such emotions, and at least one of the reasons why Wordsworthian sublimity is more firmly anchored in the imaginations of many readers. Coleridge’s sublime, that is, is not only the Wordsworthian feeling of a divine spirit animating the physical world and the human mind, but also a sense of the vital importance of questioning every form of received opinion, and shaping the practical world of society and politics around the renewed feeling of our own transcendent immateriality which that intellectual struggle engenders. Above all, it is the feeling of mental activity—of striving to comprehend and express intuitions which always resist full encapsulation in language—that Coleridge registers, and seeks to reproduce, in his analyses of science, psychology, morality, metaphysics, and politics, as well as in his poetry and aesthetic writings. In order to understand the unity of Coleridge’s writings, or the enduring concerns expressed in the progression from the Conversation Poems to Aids to Reflection and On the Constitution of the Church and State, indeed, we must first recognize the supreme importance he consistently attaches to the activity of pursuing, and seeking to express, the meaning of our experience. Both in the speculations of his early verse and in his later analytical prose, Coleridge continually evokes—and at the same time seeks to stimulate—a religious fervour whose function was explicitly to free himself and his readers from the limitations of a world unenlivened by mental effort and activity. The emotions he describes as resulting from that activity, however, are almost identical to those which Kant associates with an attempt

Introduction

3

to comprehend the size of a mountain which resists encapsulation in a single intuition, or with the feeling of our inward security and transcendence which is produced by a confrontation with irresistible forces in the natural world.4 Coleridge himself, indeed, both illustrates and explains the similarity between these emotions in describing how the ‘intellectual movement connected with looking forward’ involves a feeling of ‘hope’ resembling that produced by a view of mountain summits stretching into the distance.5 Just as, in Kant’s theory, mountains produce the sense of ‘a supersensible substrate (transcending both nature and our faculty of thought) which is great beyond every standard of sense’, that is, so Coleridge’s attempt to understand the origin of consciousness produces the feeling of a truth which, in Wlecke’s words, ‘infinitely recedes from adequate comprehension’.6 Yet far from focusing repeatedly on the same inaccessible or inexpressible truths, Coleridge emphasizes the necessity of a continual development and progression of consciousness in order to free himself from the limitations of the external world. Only through such productive activity, he suggests, can we experience the ‘life-ebullient stream’ of creative energy which underlies and shapes all aspects of our consciousness.7 Rather than being primarily an expression of political or social conservatism (as some critics suggest), therefore, Coleridge’s idealism serves the emotional imperative of freeing himself from the sense of imprisonment and even despair which he found was produced by an exclusive focus on material things, or by an absence of mental activity and engagement. In case this seem either a selfish or a solipsistic concern, however, one should also point out that this aim is consistently associated by Coleridge with a sense of hope, and that this hope is often focused on the liberation of human beings in general from practical tyranny, as well as from the limitations of conventional opinion. 8 The irresistible force of Coleridge’s own inquisitive intellect undoubtedly made him more sympathetic to those who were similarly uncomfortable with the intellectual stasis or subjection which he associated with empiricist or scientific world-views;9 yet in exhorting his readers to envisage higher ideals than material ones he is, I would argue, less concerned with preserving the economic and political advantages of his class than with a form of emotional survival which cannot be separated from the experience of the sublime. 10

4

Introduction

For Coleridge as much as for any Romantic, indeed, the feeling of the sublime is the feeling of life itself, intuited through the medium of our own mental activity and striving. In his early writings, moreover, this feeling is often closely associated with the expectation of an improvement in society, and especially with the increasing freedom and knowledge celebrated by many eighteenth-century thinkers, and which Coleridge himself connects with the ideal of democratic liberation from aristocracy and tyranny. 11 As his own experience of financial and personal misfortune, as well as of the war with France, continued, however, his aspirations increasingly turned towards the spiritual and religious transcendence which is treated so sceptically by McGann, yet which—in combination with his continuing political, scientific, and literary interests—makes him both the most challenging and the most diverse of British Romantic authors. While recognizing the conservative, and even anti-democratic, implications of his later political thought, therefore, we should also recognize the unique force and vividness with which he expresses the Romantic quest for higher ideals than those of practical power and material prosperity. In a world ever-more focused on precisely the latter concerns, moreover, Coleridge’s emphasis on the uniquely human values of spiritual calm and identification with the indefinable essence of one’s fellow human beings and of the natural world has considerably more relevance than a historicist emphasis on its classcontext might lead one to expect. 12 Though Shelley’s version of the sublime rejects Coleridgean metaphysics, indeed, his humanistic emphasis on the importance of recognizing the power of imagination in the discoveries of science, and preserving its influence in their application, clearly owes much to Coleridge’s theory of imagination, and similarly celebrates the indefinable, creative power underlying all aspects of perception, thought, and creativity, in opposition to the negative effects of industrial development. 13 Hence we should not be discouraged by Coleridge’s intellectualism, nor the poetic obscurity often surrounding his references to ‘sublime ideas’, from recognizing the vigour and unique diversity with which he expresses the values that chiefly define Romanticism, separating it equally from the empiricist outlook most prominent in eighteenth-century authors, and from the scientific materialism which, in Victorian writing, increasingly conflicts with and suppresses the Romantic inheritance.

Introduction

5

This volume, therefore, aims to demonstrate the centrality of the aesthetic of the sublime not only in many of Coleridge’s poems but also in his prose writings on landscape, literature, the visual arts, psychology, metaphysics, religion, and politics. Chapter 1 focuses on those passages of his early writings—primarily in verse, though occasionally in prose—which most vividly illustrate his early enthusiasm for liberty, equality, and the philosophical and religious ‘enlightenment’ of humanity. These passages—dating from between 1794 and 1798—combine a celebration of social and political ‘progress’ with expressions of faith in a benevolent deity who renders the universe generally progressive, and whose aim of increasing human happiness will itself be advanced by an optimistic faith in His benevolence and wisdom. Coleridge’s theories in these writings are at once materialist in their Hartleian vision of the physical or mechanical processes underlying the progressiveness of humanity, and Neoplatonic in their celebration of ascending stages of enlightenment and spirituality. This paradoxical nexus of theories and traditions, moreover, is itself combined with an almost tangible excitement at the prospect of Britain’s beginning to follow the ideals of French ‘liberty’, and sweeping away the antiquated institutions and beliefs of earlier ages. Though philosophically paradoxical, however, this hybrid vision not only echoes Hartley’s philosophy (whose combination of materialist, Neoplatonic, and Christian elements is well-documented),14 but also—and more substantially— Priestley’s combination of Hartley’s theories with an enthusiasm for philosophical enlightenment and an emphasis on the self-fulfilling quality of a faith in the intrinsic progressiveness of nature and humanity.15 Coleridge in these writings, therefore, is perhaps as paradoxically eclectic as in any of his later works, yet also presents his youthfully-optimistic vision with a degree of vividness and passion as great as in any of his later writings, and which is perhaps rendered still more intense by its association with so unambiguously radical a programme. These writings, indeed, often problematize the view of Coleridge as primarily a conservative writer, and highlight the extent to which his later visions of transcendence are anticipated in his early celebrations of a ‘progress’ which is not only spiritual and intellectual, but also democratic and egalitarian. Chapter 2 explores those of Coleridge’s landscape-descriptions— mainly dating from between 1800 and 1805—which most closely

6

Introduction

reflect the values of the Romantic sublime as defined by Kant and (to a significant extent) by Burke. Their most prominent foci are the landscapes of the Lake District, of Scotland, and of the Mediterranean regions which Coleridge visited in 1804–6; and the contrast which these locations presented with his early surroundings is almost tangible in the excitement—and, sometimes, the almost Burkeian ‘terror’— with which he associates them. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of these passages, indeed, is the vividness with which they combine an emphasis on the grandeur, remoteness, wildness, and savagery of mountain regions with a degree of individuality in describing their forms and the emotions they produce which anchors them firmly in the experience of an observer unusually sensitive to the effects of outward forms as well as to the subleties of feeling and logical argument. In his descriptions of Glen Coe as of the Sierra Nevada or the mountains of Morocco looming in the distance on his journey to Malta, indeed, Coleridge is so intensely visual a writer that McGann’s emphasis on his suppression or exclusion of material reality—be it that of ‘history’, or of the material conditions of life more generally— seems to demand some reassessment.16 The intense physicality of these and many other passages of Coleridge’s writing, moreover, highlights the extent to which his spiritual and religious concerns arise as a response to practical circumstances of diverse kinds, including the bodily sufferings which his notebooks also record in great detail, and which were among the reasons for his journey to Malta.17 If his fascination with the sublimity of mountains represents a flight from such misfortunes, however, it also shares the unembarrassed and seemingly spontaneous emotional vividness of his early response to the work of Schiller, which he described as producing so genuine a sense of fear that he ‘tremble[d] like an Aspen Leaf’.18 Coleridge’s response to the landscapes which his age defined as most sublime, that is, at once exemplifies the characteristic values of Romantic aesthetics, and communicates their menacing or awesome qualities with such physical and emotional detail as to make them a compelling aspect of the reader’s own experience. As with many of his evocations of sublime feeling, therefore, Coleridge’s landscape-descriptions combine elements unique to their historical (and literary-historical) context with a force and individuality which raises them well above the merely generic. Here as elsewhere, indeed, the distinctiveness of his writing consists primarily in the directness with which the perceptions,

Introduction

7

thoughts, and emotions it invokes reflect contemporary theories— and most prominently those of Kant—as to the structure and meaning of the sublime experience, while at the same time being firmly anchored in the concrete and the sensory. Chapter 3 explores Coleridge’s writings on the sublime effects of diverse forms of literature in verse and prose—including his own poetry as well as the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Schiller, and others—additionally comparing these with his less extensive discussions of sublimity in the visual arts. As the passages collected in this chapter demonstrate, the ‘faculty that forms the many into one’, or ‘the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect’ (as Coleridge variously describes imagination) is as central a concept in his analyses of the sublime effects of Shakespeare or Milton as in his discussions of the ways in which the act of perception itself transforms the ‘raw data’ of sensuous impressions into organically unified wholes. 19 What the sublime effects he discovers in these authors ultimately depend on, indeed, is precisely their capacity to achieve a ‘balance or reconciliation’ of ideas with images and of passion with logical or poetic form, and thus to direct the reader’s attention away from the ‘fixities and definites’ of empirical perception, promoting instead that ‘strong working of the mind’ which Coleridge sees as underlying any intuition of ultimate truths.20 As Coleridge himself puts it in a comparison of the beautiful and sublime, ‘No object of Sense is sublime in itself; but only as far as I make it a symbol of some Idea.’ ‘Nothing that has a shape,’ he continues, ‘can be called sublime except by metaphor. . . . So true it is, that those objects, whose shape most recedes from shapeliness are commonly the exciting occasions’ (SWF, 1: 597). Hence his repeated emphasis—particularly in discussions of Milton, and other seventeenth-century authors, though also of his own sometimes complex prose-style—on the achievement of an organically-evolving combination of ideas within each sentence or paragraph, which at once evokes the author’s depth of thought or understanding, and involves the reader in striving to grasp its elusive meaning.21 Not only the sublime ideas expressed by the author, indeed, but also the author himself quite frequently becomes the focus of Coleridge’s discussions of sublimity in literature—most prominently in the case of Shakespeare, whom he even described as ‘deriving his genius immediately from heaven—independent of earthly or natural

8

Introduction

influence’.22 In the case of Wordsworth, however, Coleridge particularly praises those passages of his poems which most vividly evoke the expansion of consciousness that Wordsworth (like Coleridge himself) associates with an intuition of fundamental truths. Despite his doubts over the appropriateness of describing a six-year-old child as a ‘philosopher’, indeed, the ‘Intimations’ ode is prominent among the poems which Coleridge uses to illustrate the imaginative power expressed in Wordsworth’s finest work, while the ‘high’ or ‘elevated’ style of ‘Tintern Abbey’ and other poems is described as revealing ‘the gift of IMAGINATION in the highest and strictest sense of the word’, and as making him the ‘nearest of all modern writers to Shakespear [sic] and Milton’.23 In contrast, Coleridge’s early response to the work of Schiller reveals considerable enthusiasm for the more sophisticated German examples of Gothic ‘terror’—a response which differs sharply from his more negative views of Gothic fiction in English, such as Lewis’s The Monk or Radcliffe’s The Italian.24 In an early letter to Southey, indeed, Coleridge even suggests that Schiller’s Die Räuber is more sublime than any of the works of Milton, 25 though his taste for the sublimity of ‘terror’ seems increasingly to have been replaced by more philosophical and religious forms of transcendence as his career continued. An emphasis on organic unity again informs Coleridge’s less numerous discussions of the visual arts—for example in his description of Raphael’s Galatea as achieving ‘the balance, the perfect reconciliation . . . [of] the two conflicting principles of the FREE LIFE, and . . . the confining FORM’, in which the latter is ‘fused and . . . almost volatilized by the interpenetration and electrical flashes of the former’ (SWF, 1: 374). As this passage shows, Coleridge’s principle of ‘coadunation’ or ‘reducing multitude into unity’ not only connects his literary criticism with his discussions of the visual arts, but also highlights the close connections between his critical and metaphysical opinions: the ‘life’ that informs Raphael’s painting, that is, ‘interpenetrates’ its ‘confining forms’ in a way closely resembling the effects of that ‘life’ which, according to Coleridge’s Theory of Life, ‘discloses itself from within as a principle of unity in the many’ (SWF, 1: 510). Yet we should also note his remark on the relatively ‘narrow limit of painting, as compared with the boundless power of poetry’. ‘Painting’, he continued, ‘cannot go beyond a certain point’, whereas ‘poetry rejects all control, all confinement’, ideally achieving

Introduction

9

‘the substitution of a grand feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image’.26 Chapter 4 explores the role of the sublime in Coleridge’s psychological theories, and especially his increasing opposition to the materialist views of mental functioning proposed by eighteenth-century philosophers such as Locke and Hartley. As I have shown elsewhere, even Coleridge’s earliest references to Hartley place far more emphasis on the increasingly spiritual forms of consciousness he describes as resulting from the unconscious association of ideas, than on the materialist theories which he uses to account for this process.27 As his thought and reading developed, however, Coleridge increasingly became the most vigorous British opponent of those systems which sought to explain our ideas as the products of unconscious reactions to external forces, rather than as elements in a conscious reflective process involving an attempt to give logical expression to intuitive convictions. In addition to stressing individual freedom—not only in the process of thinking, but also in the moral choices which empiricism tended to problematize—Coleridge suggests that every act of thought involves an attempt to articulate intuitions which always resist full or adequate expression. Hence not only the individual will, but also the convictions which we strive to express in the process of thinking or writing, acquire a sublime quality which Coleridge contrasts with Hartley’s emphasis on the purely physical origin of ideas, stressing what he sees as empiricists’ failure to question the spontaneous appearances of perception, or indeed to explain how consciousness could arise out of matter. These two central foci of his psychology— individual freedom, and the intuition of a truth exceeding the limitations of the concrete or perceptible—are combined with particular vividness in his evocations of the ‘stream’, or flowing, of life itself— the indefinable creative process underlying and continually manifested in our perceptions and interpretations of the world.28 As Hazlitt pointed out, indeed, despite his emphasis on the individual will, Coleridge cannot easily be convicted of the ‘egotism’ often associated with Romanticism in general, and with his own writings in particular.29 Every individual, he argues, chooses whether to accept a ‘lower’ and more imitative existence resembling the automatism described by Hartley, or whether to engage in critical reflection which raises us to a higher level of being, and ultimately allows us a direct intuition of the truths of religious faith.30 In making these choices,

10

Introduction

therefore, we also choose whether to remain isolated from each other as a fragmented mass of conflicting selves, or whether to achieve a fuller recognition of our ultimate identity as parts of an infinite unity originating in God. 31 Hence Coleridge’s psychological theories, as much as his writings on the aesthetics of landscape or of literature, depend on the idea of an infinite shaping power which is beyond comprehension or definition, yet is most fully and productively manifested in our efforts to comprehend it. It is, indeed, precisely this Neoplatonic vision of a universal shaping force that underlies his hierarchical theory of imagination in Biographia Literaria, as well as his broader emphasis on the importance of fulfilling our potential for far greater degrees of spiritual insight and creative achievement than those envisaged by empiricists.32 This chapter, therefore, treats the psychological and metaphysical theories of Coleridge’s middle period in combination, illustrating the ways in which his concepts of the mind as well as of the deity manifest this key preoccupation with seeking to express the shaping force which underlies all human thought, as well as the physical world of nature. The passages which most vividly express this fascination with the indefinableness of ‘life’ or ‘spirit’ are arranged in a number of sections according to the context in which they occur. The first of these sections illustrates Coleridge’s preoccupation with the gradual ‘ascent’, or evolution, of both nature and humanity towards higher levels of insight and virtue; the second illustrates his persistent interest in the distinction or opposition between surface appearances and the spiritual forces underlying them; the third illustrates the recurrent emphasis— especially in the writings of his middle and later periods—on the importance of transcending the mundane ‘understanding’ through contemplating ideas of Reason (though the discussions of this topic whose significance is primarily theological are included in the last chapter); the fourth section groups those passages which evoke his fascination with the view of society as intrinsically hierarchical, and as naturally governed by those of greatest insight or genius; the fifth highlights his emphasis on the sublimity of love and its ideal transcendence both of self and of a physicality detached from spiritual values; and the last section groups a number of passages exploring the psychology of the experience of the sublime, in terms of its emotional value as well as the psychological mechanisms through which it arises.

Introduction

11

As the passages grouped in Chapter 5 demonstrate, however, Coleridge’s metaphysical opinions underwent several major changes after his discovery of Kant and Schelling. Most importantly, his writings from around 1818 onwards increasingly celebrate a religious faith which, rather than arising from the ‘restlessly forward driving dynamic’ of German idealism in the form of an intuition of sublimely incomprehensible truths, consists of a circling series of reflections on the relationship between God, the human mind, and the physical world, principally in terms of his all-inclusive concept of the logos or ‘divine Word’.33 This shift in Coleridge’s patterns of thought, as well as in his central concepts, is paralleled by a change in the variety of feeling which his works express, and chiefly by a replacement of the pleasures of ‘scent, patience, discrimination, and free Activity’ involved in the dialectical pursuit of truth with the ‘Joy, Gaudium, [or] . . . Peace of God which passeth all understanding’ which he associated with the tranquil after-effects of intellectual exertion.34 At the same time, however, Coleridge consistently emphasizes the ultimate unity of human and divine—whether through the speculative metaphors of the Conversation Poems, or through his enduring interest in the concept of a ‘Reason’ through which we can intuit that unity of self and other which is only perfectly achieved in the ‘self-comprehending Being’ of God.35 Whereas Kant reserves judgement on the existence (or otherwise) of a reality corresponding to the metaphysical ideas involved in the sublime experience, moreover, Coleridge’s evocations of religious conviction—and especially of the elevation which results from contemplating an infinite and divine power that always resists full comprehension—show no such uncertainty. 36 The pleasure (or ‘happiness’) which he associates with intellectual inquiry, indeed, is often that of religious faith—whether it be the ‘intuitive beholding of truth in its eternal and immutable source’ described by St. Paul, or the obscurer approaches to such delight involved in finding ‘the end in the means’ of intellectual inquiry—or in other words in the activity of thinking rather than the elusive (because sublime) truths which he claimed it should pursue.37 Hence Coleridge’s writings on the sublimity of religious truth provide an appropriate context in which to survey the varieties of sublime feeling which he associated with intellectual inquiry and religious conviction—from the ‘Gladness of intellectual Activity’ to a sense of religious enlightenment resembling the ‘perfection and final bliss of the glorified spirit’.38 More than those

12

Introduction

of any other British Romantic, indeed, his writings on diverse topics are shaped by a vision of progress towards a confrontation with the incomprehensible essence of being, thus giving the fullest impression in English of the diverse contexts and significances of the Romantic sublime.

1 ‘These soul-ennobling views’:1 Enlightenment and Sublimity in Coleridge’s Early Writings

The passages—mainly in verse—collected in this chapter all date from the period between 1789, when Coleridge was still a pupil at Christ’s Hospital, to 1798, when he had started to renounce his earlier revolutionary and democratic zeal in favour of what McFarland calls ‘a pure transcendence divorced from political situation’.2 Between these dates, however, Coleridge’s writing is often characterized by a youthful enthusiasm for political and social change—as well as for the philosophical and religious ‘enlightenment’ of his fellow-men of all classes—that remains impressive in its vigour, intensity, and passion. The Coleridge represented in these passages, indeed, is far from being the deluded adherent of radical principles which their author later represented himself as having once been, 3 being characterized rather by an idealism which has much in common with his later reflections on the ‘ascent’ of humanity to higher states of being through philosophical and religious insight, and man’s gradual liberation of himself from the ‘passivity’ of mere conformance to the impressions of the senses or the received opinions and values of his age. The early Coleridge’s vision of revolutionary change, that is, not only combines social and political with religious and intellectual aims, but is also characterized by an enthusiastic vision of spiritual ascent or upward progression which links his interest in the ‘Enlightenment’ values of late-eighteenth-century authors such as Priestley with the Romanticidealist theories he later derived from Schelling.4 Coleridge’s rejection of aristocracy and all forms of tyranny, moreover, is repeatedly linked in these passages to a vision of the expansion both of scientific knowledge and of religious or spiritual insight which substantially 13

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Enlightenment and Sublimity in the Early Writings

distinguishes his values from the scientific anti-clericalism which formed so important a part of the French Enlightenment and of the revolution and its aftermath. 5 In poems such as ‘Religious Musings’ (1796), indeed, scientific empiricism is combined with an almost Neoplatonic vision of broadening insight and ascent towards union with the deity through the basically Hartleian theory that the effect of the association of ideas is naturally and necessarily to intensify our consciousness of God until the self is literally indistinguishable from its divine origin;6 yet Coleridge distinctively combines this hybrid vision with a zeal for equality and democracy which represents these ideals as an intrinsic part of Christian (rather than anti-clerical) teachings. Despite the pressure Coleridge later felt to renounce his earlier ‘Jacobinical’ leanings,7 therefore, much of the enthusiasm for ‘freedom’ expressed in these passages is also evident in his later idealist thought and in his vision of human beings’ gradual ascent from a preoccupation with the physical world to an insight into their own reflective processes and their dependence on an ultimately religious faith in the continuity of consciousness and the ‘inspiration’ of the human mind by the divine Reason. 8 Coleridge’s focus in these early writings, that is, is by no means only on political freedom and social equality, but also on liberating the mind from its ignorance both of scientific truths and of the power of God working in all human beings to promote forms of insight which bring them closer to the deity Himself. Hence, in comparing these early writings with his later idealist and theological ones—in which the zeal for equality is, though not wholly absent, at least less prominent—we should not confine our interpretation to the often-invoked opposition between ‘materialist’ and ‘idealist’ visions, but should rather recognize the ways in which both of these at different times formed the primary vehicle for Coleridge’s expression of his vision of humanity’s sublime ascent to ever-greater degrees of freedom, knowledge, and happiness. The last passage in this chapter—from ‘France: An Ode’ (1798)— however, highlights the incipient doubts as to the attainableness of these ideals—at least in the practical, political sense evoked in most of these selections—which Coleridge felt following the increasingly violent and tyrannical aftermath of the French revolution. The transition evoked in this poem—from a zeal for political liberty to an identification of untrammelled ‘nature’ as the surest home of ‘freedom’—indeed, again demonstrates the extent and nature

Enlightenment and Sublimity in the Early Writings 15

of the continuity between the early, ‘radical’ Coleridge and the later idealist and religious thinker.

‘Destruction of the Bastile’ (1789?) 9 I HEARD’ST thou yon universal cry, And dost thou linger still on Gallia’s shore? Go, Tyranny! beneath some barbarous sky Thy terrors lost and ruin’d power deplore! What tho’ through many a groaning age Was felt thy keen suspicious rage, Yet Freedom rous’d by fierce Disdain Has wildly broke thy triple chain, And like the storm which Earth’s deep entrails hide, At length has burst its way and spread the ruins wide. * * * * * * * IV In sighs their sickly breath was spent; each gleam Of Hope had ceas’d the long long day to cheer; Or if delusive, in some flitting dream, It gave them to their friends and children dear— Awaked by lordly Insult’s sound To all the doubled horrors round, Oft shrunk they from Oppression’s band While Anguish rais’d the desperate hand For silent death; or lost the mind’s controll, Thro’ every burning vein would tides of Frenzy roll. V But cease, ye pitying bosoms, cease to bleed! Such scenes no more demand the tear humane; I see, I see! glad Liberty succeed With every patriot virtue in her train! And mark yon peasant’s raptur’d eyes;

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Secure he views his harvests rise; No fetter vile the mind shall know, And Eloquence shall fearless glow. Yes! Liberty the soul of Life shall reign, Shall throb in every pulse, shall flow thro’ every vein! VI Shall France alone a Despot spurn? Shall she alone, O Freedom, boast thy care? Lo, round thy standard Belgia’s heroes burn, Tho’ Power’s blood-stain’d streamers fire the air, And wider yet thy influence spread, Nor e’er recline thy weary head, Till every land from pole to pole Shall boast one independent soul! And still, as erst, let favour’d Britain be First ever of the first and freest of the free! (CPW, 1: 10–11)

‘Life’ (1789)10 As late I journey’d o’er the extensive plain Where native Otter sports his scanty stream, Musing in torpid woe a Sister’s pain, The glorious prospect woke me from the dream. At every step it widen’d to my sight— Wood, Meadow, verdant Hill, and dreary Steep, Following in quick succession of delight,— Till all—at once—did my eye ravish’d sweep! May this (I cried) my course through Life portray! New scenes of Wisdom may each step display, And Knowledge open as my days advance! Till what time Death shall pour the undarken’d ray, My eye shall dart thro’ infinite expanse, And thought suspended lie in Rapture’s blissful trance. (CPW, 1: 11–12)


‘Pantisocracy’ (1794)11 No more my visionary soul shall dwell On joys that were; no more endure to weigh The shame and anguish of the evil day, Wisely forgetful! O’er the ocean swell Sublime of Hope, I seek the cottag’d dell Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray, And dancing to the moonlight roundelay, The wizard Passions weave an holy spell. Eyes that have ach’d with Sorrow! Ye shall weep Tears of doubt-mingled joy, like theirs who start From Precipices of distemper’d sleep, On which the fierce-eyed Fiends their revels keep, And see the rising Sun, and feel it dart New rays of pleasance trembling to the heart. (CPW, 1: 68–9)

From ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ (1794–95) ‘To the Honourable Mr. Erskine’12 WHEN British Freedom for an happier land Spread her broad wings, that flutter’d with affright, ERSKINE! thy voice she heard, and paus’d her flight Sublime of hope, for dreadless thou didst stand (Thy censer glowing with the hallow’d flame) A hireless Priest before the insulted shrine, And at her altar pour the stream divine Of unmatch’d eloquence. Therefore thy name Her sons shall venerate, and cheer thy breast With blessings heaven-ward breath’d. And when the doom Of Nature bids thee die, beyond the tomb Thy light shall shine: as sunk beneath the West Though the great Summer Sun eludes our gaze, Still burns wide Heaven with his distended blaze. (CPW, 1: 79–80)

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‘La Fayette’ 13 As when far off the warbled strains are heard That soar on Morning’s wing the vales among; Within his cage the imprison’d Matin Bird Swells the full chorus with a generous song: He bathes no pinion in the dewy light, No Father’s joy, no Lover’s bliss he shares. Yet still the rising radiance cheers his sight— His fellows’ Freedom soothes the Captive’s cares! Thou, FAYETTE! who didst wake with startling voice Life’s better Sun from that long wintry night, Thus in thy Country’s triumphs shalt rejoice And mock with raptures high the Dungeon’s might: For lo! the Morning struggles into Day, And Slavery’s spectres shriek and vanish from the ray! (CPW, 1: 82)

‘Koskiusko’14 O WHAT a loud and fearful shriek was there, As though a thousand souls one death-groan pour’d! Ah me! they saw beneath a Hireling’s sword Their KOSKIUSKO fall! Through the swart air (As pauses the tir’d Cossac’s barbarous yell Of Triumph) on the chill and midnight gale Rises with frantic burst or sadder swell The dirge of murder’d Hope! while Freedom pale Bends in such anguish o’er her destin’d bier, As if from eldest time some Spirit meek Had gather’d in a mystic urn each tear That ever on a Patriot’s furrow’d cheek Fit channel found; and she had drain’d the bowl In the mere wilfulness, and sick despair of soul! (CPW, 1: 82–3)


From ‘Political Lecture at Bristol, 1795’15 There is a third class among the friends of freedom, who possess not the wavering character of the first description, nor the ferocity last delineated. They pursue the interests of freedom steadily, but with narrow and self-centering views: they anticipate with exultation the abolition of privileged orders, and of acts that persecute by exclusion from the rights of citizenship. Whatever is above them they are most willing to drag down; but every proposed alteration that would elevate their poorer brethren, they rank among the dreams of visionaries; as if there were anything in the superiority of lord to gentleman so mortifying in the barrier, so fatal to happiness in the consequences, as the more real distinction of master and servant, of rich man and of poor. Wherein am I made worse by my ennobled neighbor? Do the childish titles of aristocracy detract from my domestic comforts, or prevent my intellectual acquisitions? But those institutions of society which should condemn me to the necessity of twelve hours’ daily toil, would make my soul a slave, and sink the rational being in the mere animal. It is a mockery of our fellowcreatures’ wrongs to call them equal in rights, when by the bitter compulsion of their wants we make them inferior to us in all that can soften the heart, or dignify the understanding. Let us not say that this is the work of time—that it is impracticable at present, unless we each in our individual capacities do strenuously and perseveringly endeavor to diffuse among our domestics those comforts and that illumination which far beyond all political ordinances are the true equalizers of men. We turn with pleasure to the contemplation of that small but glorious band, whom we may truly distinguish by the name of thinking and disinterested patriots. These are the men who have encouraged the sympathetic passions till they have become irresistible habits, and made their duty a necessary part of their self-interest, by the long-continued cultivation of that moral taste which derives our most exquisite pleasures from the contemplation of possible perfection, and proportionate pain from the perception of existing depravity. Accustomed to regard all the affairs of man as a process, they never hurry and they never pause. Theirs is not that twilight of political knowledge which gives us just light enough to place one foot before the other: as they advance the scene still opens upon them, and they

20


press right onward with a vast and various landscape of existence around them. Calmness and energy mark all their actions. Convinced that vice originates not in the man, but in the surrounding circumstances; not in the heart, but in the understanding; the Christian patriot is hopeless concerning no one;—to correct a vice or generate a virtuous conduct, he pollutes not his hands with the scourge of coercion; but by endeavoring to alter circumstances would remove, or by strengthening the intellect disarm, the temptation. The unhappy children of vice and folly, whose tempers are adverse to their own happiness as well as to the happiness of others, will at times awaken a natural pang; but he looks forward with gladdened heart to that glorious period when justice shall have established the universal fraternity of love. These soul-ennobling views bestow the virtues which they anticipate. He whose mind is habitually impressed with them soars above the present state of humanity, and may be justly said to dwell in the presence of the Most High. (Shedd, 2: 301–3)

From ‘Religious Musings’ (1794–96) 16 THIS is the time, when most divine to hear, The voice of Adoration rouses me, As with a Cherub’s trump: and high upborne, Yea, mingling with the Choir, I seem to view The vision of the heavenly multitude, Who hymned the song of Peace o’er Bethlehem’s fields! Yet thou more bright than all the Angel-blaze, That harbingered thy birth, Thou Man of Woes! Despiséd Galilaean! For the Great Invisible (by symbols only seen) With a peculiar and surpassing light Shines from the visage of the oppressed good man, When heedless of himself the scourgéd saint Mourns for the oppressor. Fair the vernal mead, Fair the high grove, the sea, the sun, the stars; True impress each of their creating Sire! Yet nor high grove, nor many-colour’d mead,


Nor the green ocean with his thousand isles, Nor the starred azure, nor the sovran sun, E’er with such majesty of portraiture Imaged the supreme beauty uncreate, As thou, meek Saviour! at the fearful hour When thy insulted anguish winged the prayer Harped by Archangels, when they sing of mercy! Which when the Almighty heard from forth his throne Diviner light filled Heaven with ecstasy! Heaven’s hymnings paused: and Hell her yawning mouth Closed a brief moment. Lovely was the death Of Him whose life was Love! Holy with power He on the thought-benighted Sceptic beamed Manifest Godhead, melting into day What floating mists of dark idolatry Broke and misshaped the omnipresent Sire: And first by Fear uncharmed the drowséd Soul. Till of its nobler nature it ’gan feel Dim recollections; and thence soared to Hope, Strong to believe whate’er of mystic good The Eternal dooms for His immortal sons. From Hope and firmer Faith to perfect Love Attracted and absorbed: and centered there God only to behold, and know, and feel, Till by exclusive consciousness of God All self-annihilated it shall make God its Identity: God all in all! We and our Father one! And blest are they, Who in this fleshly World, the elect of Heaven, Their strong eye darting through the deeds of men, Adore with steadfast unpresuming gaze Him Nature’s essence, mind, and energy! And gazing, trembling, patiently ascend Treading beneath their feet all visible things As steps, that upward to their Father’s throne Lead gradual—else nor glorified nor loved.

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They nor contempt embosom nor revenge: For they dare know of what may seem deform The Supreme Fair sole operant: in whose sight All things are pure, his strong controlling love Alike from all educing perfect good. Their’s too celestial courage, inly armed— Dwarfing Earth’s giant brood, what time they muse On their great Father, great beyond compare! And marching onwards view high o’er their heads His waving banners of Omnipotence. Who the Creator love, created Might Dread not: within their tents no Terrors walk. For they are holy things before the Lord Aye unprofaned, though Earth should league with Hell; God’s altar grasping with an eager hand Fear, the wild-visag’d, pale, eye-starting wretch, Sure-refug’d hears his hot pursuing fiends Yell at vain distance. Soon refresh’d from Heaven He calms the throb and tempest of his heart. His countenance settles; a soft solemn bliss Swims in his eye—his swimming eye uprais’d: And Faith’s whole armour glitters on his limbs! And thus transfigured with a dreadless awe, A solemn hush of soul, meek he beholds All things of terrible seeming: yea, unmoved Views e’en the immitigable ministers That shower down vengeance on these latter days. For kindling with intenser Deity From the celestial Mercy-seat they come, And at the renovating wells of Love Have fill’d their vials with salutary wrath, To sickly Nature more medicinal Than what soft balm the weeping good man pours Into the lone despoiléd traveller’s wounds! Thus from the Elect, regenerate through faith, Pass the dark Passions and what thirsty cares Drink up the spirit, and the dim regards Self-centre. Lo they vanish! or acquire New names, new features—by supernal grace


Enrobed with Light, and naturalised in Heaven. As when a shepherd on a vernal morn Through some thick fog creeps timorous with slow foot, Darkling he fixes on the immediate road His downward eye: all else of fairest kind Hid or deformed. But lo! the bursting Sun! Touched by the enchantment of that sudden beam Straight the black vapour melteth, and in globes Of dewy glitter gems each plant and tree; On every leaf, on every blade it hangs! Dance glad the new-born intermingling rays, And wide around the landscape streams with glory! There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind, Omnific. His most holy name is Love. Truth of subliming import! with the which Who feeds and saturates his constant soul, He from his small particular orbit flies With blest outstarting! From himself he flies, Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze Views all creation; and he loves it all, And blesses it, and calls it very good! This is indeed to dwell with the Most High! Cherubs and rapture-trembling Seraphim Can press no nearer to the Almighty’s throne. But that we roam unconscious, or with hearts Unfeeling of our universal Sire, And that in His vast family no Cain Injures uninjured (in her best-aimed blow Victorious Murder a blind Suicide) Haply for this some younger Angel now Looks down on Human Nature: and, behold! A sea of blood bestrewed with wrecks, where mad Embattling Interests on each other rush With unhelmed rage! ’Tis the sublime of man, Our noontide Majesty, to know ourselves Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole! This fraternises man, this constitutes

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Our charities and bearings. But ’tis God Diffused through all, that doth make all one whole; This the worst superstition, him except Aught to desire, Supreme Reality! The plenitude and permanence of bliss! O Fiends of Superstition! not that oft The erring Priest hath stained with brother’s blood Your grisly idols, not for this may wrath Thunder against you from the Holy One! But o’er some plain that steameth to the sun, Peopled with Death; or where more hideous Trade Loud-laughing packs his bales of human anguish; I will raise up a mourning, O ye Fiends! And curse your spells, that film the eye of Faith, Hiding the present God; whose presence lost, The moral world’s cohesion, we become An Anarchy of Spirits! Toy-bewitched, Made blind by lusts, disherited of soul, No common centre Man, no common sire Knoweth! A sordid solitary thing, Mid countless brethren with a lonely heart Through courts and cities the smooth savage roams Feeling himself, his own low self the whole; When he by sacred sympathy might make The whole one Self! Self, that no alien knows! Self, far diffused as Fancy’s wing can travel! Self, spreading still! Oblivious of its own, Yet all of all possessing! This is Faith! This the Messiah’s destined victory! . . . O ye numberless, Whom foul Oppression’s ruffian gluttony Drives from Life’s plenteous feast! O thou poor Wretch Who nursed in darkness and made wild by want, Roamest for prey, yea thy unnatural hand Dost lift to deeds of blood! O pale-eyed form, The victim of seduction, doomed to know Polluted nights and days of blasphemy; Who in loathed orgies with lewd wassailers


Must gaily laugh, while thy remembered Home Gnaws like a viper at thy secret heart! O agéd Women! ye who weekly catch The morsel tossed by law-forced charity, And die so slowly, that none call it murder! O loathly suppliants! ye, that unreceived Totter heart-broken from the closing gates Of the full Lazar-house; or, gazing, stand, Sick with despair! O ye to Glory’s field Forced or ensnared, who, as ye gasp in death, Bleed with new wounds beneath the vulture’s beak! O thou poor widow, who in dreams dost view Thy husband’s mangled corse, and from short doze Start’st with a shriek; or in thy half-thatched cot Waked by the wintry night-storm, wet and cold Cow’rst o’er thy screaming baby! Rest awhile Children of Wretchedness! More groans must rise, More blood must stream, or ere your wrongs be full. Yet is the day of Retribution nigh: The Lamb of God hath opened the fifth seal: And upward rush on swiftest wing of fire The innumerable multitude of wrongs By man on man inflicted! Rest awhile, Children of Wretchedness! The hour is nigh And lo! the Great, the Rich, the Mighty Men, The Kings and the Chief Captains of the World, With all that fixed on high like stars of Heaven Shot baleful influence, shall be cast to earth, Vile and down-trodden, as the untimely fruit Shook from the fig-tree by a sudden storm. Even now the storm begins: each gentle name, Faith and meek Piety, with fearful joy Tremble far off—for lo! the Giant Frenzy Uprooting empires with his whirlwind arm Mocketh high Heaven; burst hideous from the cell Where the old Hag, unconquerable, huge, Creation’s eyeless drudge, black Ruin, sits Nursing the impatient earthquake.

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O return! Pure Faith! meek Piety! The abhorréd Form Whose scarlet robe was stiff with earthly pomp, Who drank iniquity in cups of gold, Whose names were many and all blasphemous, Hath met the horrible judgment! Whence that cry? The mighty army of foul Spirits shrieked Disherited of earth! For she hath fallen On whose black front was written Mystery; She that reeled heavily, whose wine was blood; She that worked whoredom with the Daemon Power, And from the dark embrace all evil things Brought forth and nurtured: mitred Atheism! And patient Folly who on bended knee Gives back the steel that stabbed him; and pale Fear Haunted by ghastlier shapings than surround Moon-blasted Madness when he yells at midnight! Return pure Faith! return meek Piety! The kingdoms of the world are your’s: each heart Self-governed, the vast family of Love Raised from the common earth by common toil Enjoy the equal produce. Such delights As float to earth, permitted visitants! When in some hour of solemn jubilee The massy gates of Paradise are thrown Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies, And odours snatched from beds of Amaranth, And they, that from the crystal river of life Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales! The favoured good man in his lonely walk Perceives them, and his silent spirit drinks Strange bliss which he shall recognise in heaven. And such delights, such strange beatitudes Seize on my young anticipating heart When that blest future rushes on my view! For in his own and in his Father’s might The Saviour comes! While as the Thousand Years Lead up their mystic dance, the Desert shouts!


Old Ocean claps his hands! The mighty Dead Rise to new life, whoe’er from earliest time With conscious zeal had urged Love’s wondrous plan, Coadjutors of God. To Milton’s trump The high groves of the renovated Earth Unbosom their glad echoes: inly hushed, Adoring Newton his serener eye Raises to heaven: and he of mortal kind Wisest, he first who marked the ideal tribes Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain. Lo! Priestley there, patriot, and saint, and sage, Him, full of years, from his loved native land Statesmen blood-stained and priests idolatrous By dark lies maddening the blind multitude Drove with vain hate. Calm, pitying he retired, And mused expectant on these promised years. O Years! the blest pre-eminence of Saints! Ye sweep athwart my gaze, so heavenly bright, The wings that veil the adoring Seraphs’ eyes, What time they bend before the Jasper Throne Reflect no lovelier hues! Yet ye depart, And all beyond is darkness! Heights most strange, Whence Fancy falls, fluttering her idle wing. For who of woman born may paint the hour, When seized in his mid course, the Sun shall wane Making noon ghastly! Who of woman born May image in the workings of his thought, How the black-visaged, red-eyed Fiend outstretched Beneath the unsteady feet of Nature groans, In feverous slumbers—destined then to wake, When fiery whirlwinds thunder his dread name And Angels shout, Destruction! How his arm The last great Spirit lifting high in air Shall swear by Him, the ever-living One, Time is no more! Believe thou, O my soul, Life is a vision shadowy of Truth; And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave,

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Shapes of a dream! The veiling clouds retire, And lo! the Throne of the redeeming God Forth flashing unimaginable day Wraps in one blaze earth, heaven, and deepest hell. Contemplant Spirits! ye that hover o’er With untired gaze the immeasurable fount Ebullient with creative Deity! And ye of plastic power, that interfused Roll through the grosser and material mass In organizing surge! Holies of God! (And what if Monads of the infinite mind?) I haply journeying my immortal course Shall sometime join your mystic choir! Till then I discipline my young and novice thought In ministeries of heart-stirring song, And aye on Meditation’s heaven-ward wing Soaring aloft I breathe the empyreal air Of Love, omnific, omnipresent Love, Whose day-spring rises glorious in my soul As the great Sun, when he his influence Sheds on the frost-bound waters—The glad stream Flows to the ray and warbles as it flows. (CPW, 1:108–25)

‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ (1796) 17 Low was our pretty Cot: our tallest Rose Peep’d at the chamber-window. We could hear At silent noon, and eve, and early morn, The Sea’s faint murmur. In the open air Our Myrtles blossom’d; and across the porch Thick Jasmins twined: the little landscape round Was green and woody, and refresh’d the eye. It was a spot which you might aptly call The Valley of Seclusion! Once I saw (Hallowing his Sabbath-day by quietness) A wealthy son of Commerce saunter by, Bristowa’s citizen: methought, it calm’d


His thirst of idle gold, and made him muse With wiser feelings: for he paus’d, and look’d With a pleas’d sadness, and gaz’d all around, Then eyed our Cottage, and gaz’d round again, And sigh’d, and said, it was a Blesséd Place. And we were bless’d. Oft with patient ear Long-listening to the viewless sky-lark’s note (Viewless, or haply for a moment seen Gleaming on sunny wings) in whisper’d tones I’ve said to my Belovéd, ‘Such, sweet Girl! The inobtrusive song of Happiness, Unearthly minstrelsy! then only heard When the Soul seeks to hear; when all is hush’d, And the Heart listens!’ But the time, when first From that low Dell, steep up the stony Mount I climb’d with perilous toil and reach’d the top, Oh! what a goodly scene! Here the bleak mount, The bare bleak mountain speckled thin with sheep; Grey clouds, that shadowing spot the sunny fields; And river, now with bushy rocks o’er-brow’d, Now winding bright and full, with naked banks; And seats, and lawns, the Abbey and the wood, And cots, and hamlets, and faint city-spire; The Channel there, the Islands and white sails, Dim coasts, and cloud-like hills, and shoreless Ocean— It seem’d like Omnipresence! God, methought, Had built him there a Temple: the whole World Seem’d imag’d in its vast circumference: No wish profan’d my overwhelméd heart. Blest hour! It was a luxury,—to be! Ah! quiet Dell! dear Cot, and Mount sublime! I was constrain’d to quit you. Was it right, While my unnumber’d brethren toil’d and bled, That I should dream away the entrusted hours On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use? Sweet is the tear that from some Howard’s eye Drops on the cheek of one he lifts from earth:

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And he that works me good with unmov’d face, Does it but half: he chills me while he aids, My benefactor, not my brother man! Yet even this, this cold beneficence. Praise, praise it, O my Soul! oft as thou scann’st The sluggard Pity’s vision-weaving tribe! Who sigh for Wretchedness, yet shun the Wretched, Nursing in some delicious solitude Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies! I therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand, Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight Of Science, Freedom, and the Truth in Christ. Yet oft when after honourable toil Rests the tir’d mind, and waking loves to dream, My spirit shall revisit thee, dear Cot! Thy Jasmin and thy window-peeping Rose, And Myrtles fearless of the mild sea-air. And I shall sigh fond wishes—sweet Abode! Ah!—had none greater! And that all had such! It might be so—but the time is not yet. Speed it, O Father! Let thy Kingdom come! (CPW, 1: 106–8) ‘Verses Addressed to J. Horne Tooke and the Company Who Met on June 28th , 1796, to Celebrate His Poll at the Westminister Election (1796)’18 BRITONS! when last ye met, with distant streak So faintly promis’d the pale Dawn to break; So dim it stain’d the precincts of the Sky E’en Expectation gaz’d with doubtful Eye. But now such fair Varieties of Light O’ertake the heavy sailing Clouds of Night; Th’ Horizon kindles with so rich a red, That tho’ the Sun still hides his glorious head Th’ impatient Matin-bird, assur’d of Day, Leaves his low nest to meet its earliest ray; Loud the sweet song of Gratulation sings, And high in air claps his rejoicing wings! Patriot and Sage! whose breeze-like Spirit first


The lazy mists of Pedantry dispers’d (Mists in which Superstition’s pigmy band Seem’d Giant Forms, the Genii of the Land!), Thy struggles soon shall wak’ning Britain bless, And Truth and Freedom hail thy wish’d success. Yes Tooke! tho’ foul Corruption’s wolfish throng Outmalice Calumny’s imposthum’d Tongue, Thy Country’s noblest and determin’d Choice, Soon shalt thou thrill the Senate with thy voice; With gradual Dawn bid Error’s phantoms flit, Or wither with the lightning’s flash of Wit; Or with sublimer mien and tones more deep, Charm sworded Justice from mysterious Sleep, ‘By violated Freedom’s loud Lament, Her Lamps extinguish’d and her Temple rent; By the forc’d tears her captive Martyrs shed; By each pale Orphan’s feeble cry for bread; By ravag’d Belgium’s corse-impeded Flood, And Vendee steaming still with brothers’ blood!’ And if amid the strong impassion’d Tale, Thy Tongue should falter and thy Lips turn pale; If transient Darkness film thy aweful Eye, And thy tir’d Bosom struggle with a sigh: Science and Freedom shall demand to hear Who practis’d on a Life so doubly dear; Infus’d the unwholesome anguish drop by drop, Pois’ning the sacred stream they could not stop! Shall bid thee with recover’d strength relate How dark and deadly is a Coward’s Hate: What seeds of death by wan Confinement sown, When Prison-echoes mock’d Disease’s groan! Shall bid th’ indignant Father flash dismay, And drag the unnatural Villain into Day Who to the sports of his flesh’d Ruffians left Two lovely Mourners of their Sire bereft! ‘Twas wrong, like this, which Rome’s first Consul bore, So by th’ insulted Female’s name he swore Ruin (and rais’d her reeking dagger high) Not to the Tyrants but the Tyranny! (CPW, 1: 150–1)

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From ‘The Destiny of Nations: A Vision’ (1796) AUSPICIOUS R EVERENCE! Hush all meaner song, Ere we the deep preluding strain have poured To the Great Father, only Rightful King, Eternal Father! King Omnipotent! To the Will Absolute, the One, the Good! The I AM, the Word, the Life, the Living God! Such symphony requires best instrument. Seize, then, my soul! from Freedom’s trophied dome The Harp which hangeth high between the Shields Of Brutus and Leonidas! With that Strong music, that soliciting spell, force back Man’s free and stirring spirit that lies entranced. For what is Freedom, but the unfettered use Of all the powers which God for use had given? But chiefly this, him First, him Last to view Through meaner powers and secondary things Effulgent, as through clouds that veil his blaze. For all that meets the bodily sense I deem Symbolical, one mighty alphabet For infant minds; and we in this low world Placed with our backs to bright Reality, That we may learn with young unwounded ken The substance from its shadow. Infinite Love, Whose latence is the plenitude of All, Thou with retracted beams, and self-eclipse Veiling, revealest thine eternal Sun. But some there are who deem themselves most free When they within this gross and visible sphere Chain down the wingéd thought, scoffing ascent, Proud in their meanness: and themselves they cheat With noisy emptiness of learnéd phrase, Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences, Self-working tools, uncaused effects, and all Those blind Omniscients, those Almighty Slaves, Untenanting creation of its God.


But Properties are God: the naked mass (If mass there be, fantastic guess or ghost) Acts only by its inactivity. Here we pause humbly. Others boldlier think That as one body seems the aggregate Of atoms numberless, each organized; So by a strange and dim similitude Infinite myriads of self-conscious minds Are one all-conscious Spirit, which informs With absolute ubiquity of thought (His one eternal self-affirming act!) All his involvéd Monads, that yet seem With various province and apt agency Each to pursue its own self-centering end. Some nurse the infant diamond in the mine; Some roll the genial juices through the oak; Some drive the mutinous clouds to clash in air, And rushing on the storm with whirlwind speed, Yoke the red lightnings to their volleying car. Thus these pursue their never-varying course, No eddy in their stream. Others, more wild, With complex interests weaving human fates, Duteous or proud, alike obedient all, Evolve the process of eternal good. . . . (CPW, 1: 131–3)

From ‘France: An Ode’ (1798)19 The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game They burst their manacles and wear the name Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain! O Liberty! with profitless endeavour Have I pursued thee, many a weary hour; But thou nor swell’st the victor’s strain, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. Alike from all, howe’er they praise thee,

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(Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee) Alike from Priestcraft’s harpy minions, And factious Blasphemy’s obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! And there I felt thee!—on that sea-cliff’s verge, Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above, Had made one murmur with the distant surge! Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, And shot my being through earth, sea, and air, Possessing all things with intensest love, O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there. (CPW, 1: 247)

2 ‘A stirring & inquietude of Fancy’:1 Coleridge and the Sublimity of Landscape

Perhaps the most striking fact about Coleridge’s evocations—mainly in prose, though occasionally in poetry—of the sublimity of landscapes is that they date almost exclusively from his twenty-third to his thirty-fourth year—that is, from the period immediately following his final departure from Cambridge in December 1794 to that of his return from Malta to England, via Italy, in 1805–6. Relatively few of his writings from before this period have been preserved; yet the fact that almost none of his writings after 1805 should place significant emphasis on landscape as the stimulus of sublime feeling, focusing rather on metaphysical, religious, or literary sources of such emotion, is surely of considerable significance. His famous description, in Biographia Literaria, of how—after an early period of poetic creativity, as well as ‘love of nature’—he ‘sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart’ (BL [CC], 1:17), indeed, suggests the possibility of a close connection between the diminution of his activity as a poet and the transference of his attention from landscapes (as well as, of course, their revelation of a divine informing spirit) to more ‘abstruse’ metaphysical and psychological topics. As Morton Paley (among others) has noted, however, Coleridge’s poetic creativity did not in fact cease so dramatically in 1802 (or thereabouts) as his account in Biographia suggests;2 and the diminution of his interest in the sublimity of nature shortly after this date seems in fact more 35

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Coleridge and the Sublimity of Landscape

sudden and more absolute. Part of the reason for its diminution, moreover, is perhaps apparent from the nature of the passages that follow, as well as from Coleridge’s inclusion, in Biographia, of ‘the love of nature’ among those ‘feelings of the heart’ which it was too painful to stimulate or reawaken by poetic expression. From his first visit to North Wales in 1794 to his visits to Mount Etna in 1804–5, 3 that is, what chiefly characterizes Coleridge’s evocations of sublime landscapes is a sense of enthusiastic—even passionate—excitement of a kind that is often explicitly (and always implicitly) associated with a sense of novelty and discovery, or of encountering new and thrillingly invigorating sights and experiences. Coleridge’s enthusiasm for landscapes—and primarily, of course, for mountainous ones—is, in other words, essentially youthful in character; and, as the coincidence of this enthusiasm with wider Romantic taste suggests, is often specifically associated with seeing directly, or for himself, those natural phenomena described and depicted in so many literary works and paintings of the period. In many cases, indeed, Coleridge visits or explores mountainous regions literally as an aesthetic tourist, and his descriptions of those landscapes are often attempts to achieve an almost pictorial vividness and detail in recording his experiences. Whether the diminishing novelty of such experiences, or the close connection of the feelings they inspired with the romantic ones (primarily for Sara Hutchinson) which he found it necessary to suppress or to transcend through more ‘abstruse’ reflections was the primary reason for Coleridge’s abandonment of landscape-tourism is a question I will not attempt to answer here. Yet even in these relatively early writings there is often an explicit sense that the sublimity associated with landscapes is due (as Kant most famously suggested) to the intuition of something that lies beyond or behind them and which the mind can never know or comprehend so clearly or directly as any part of the physical world.4 Not only the mountain which (in Kant’s famous image) exceeds the power of ‘comprehension’ to grasp it in a single intuition, 5 that is, but also the splendour of waterfalls, sunsets, or of vistas which similarly evoke an infinite and ungraspable distance, prompt in Coleridge reflections on the noumenal force underlying and (in his increasingly post-Kantian vision) shaping and informing those physical ‘vestiges’ of a spiritual or divine essence. 6 Not only the sense of an infinite underlying power, indeed, but also that of our own ultimate participation in or


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unity with the essence which these splendid vistas half-conceal and half-reveal, is often implied in Coleridge’s fascinated investigation of the emotional and intuitive significance of his aesthetic experiences of landscape. And in continually reaching through landscape or the physical world to that which seems to lie beyond it he seems also to imply that though the fascination of landscape has its rightful—and magnificent—place in his development, it will also come to have its limitations for him, and ultimately be replaced by an exploration of the psychological and metaphysical truths underlying these experiences. That this change should ultimately have occurred, indeed, is perhaps all the more comprehensible in an author who so persistently emphasizes the importance of never remaining satisfied with a single interpretation or conclusion, and especially of questioning ‘appearances’ and investigating their foundations.7 All of these aspects of Coleridge’s early fascination with the sublimity of landscape are abundantly evident in the passages that follow, and which are mainly records of his first encounters with the hills and mountains of various different regions: the mountains of North Wales which he visited in the summer of 1794; the Peak District of Derbyshire which he visited in the summer of 1796; the Quantock hills of Somerset to which he moved in December of the same year; the Lake District, which he first visited in 1799 and explored extensively from that year until 1802; the Highlands of Scotland, which he visited (partly with the Wordsworths) in the summer of 1803; and finally, the various landscapes, including the mountains of Italy and the coasts of Morocco, which he encountered on his voyage to Malta in 1804 and his return-journey to Britain in 1805–6. To these must be added the notably imaginative ‘Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni’, famously based at least partly on the German–Danish poet Friederike Brun’s ‘Chamonix beym Sonnenaufgange’, Coleridge himself having never visited Chamonix. 8 In combination, I would argue, these passages represent possibly the best and fullest evocation in English of the Romantic aesthetic of the sublime in its application to landscape.

From a letter to Robert Southey, 13 July 1794 9 From Llangunnog we walked over the mountains to Bala—most sublimely terrible! It was scorchingly hot. I applied my mouth ever

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and anon to the side of the rocks and sucked in draughts of water cold as ice, and clear as infant diamonds in their embryo dew! The rugged and stony clefts are stupendous, and in winter must form cataracts most astonishing. At this time of the year there is just water enough dashed down over them to ‘soothe, not disturb the pensive traveller’s ear.’ I slept by the side of one an hour or more. As we descended the mountain, the sun was reflected in the river, that winded through the valley with insufferable brightness; it rivalled the sky. (CLE, 1: 79)

From a letter to Josiah Wade, 22 August 179610 Monday I accompanied Mrs. E. to Oakover, with Miss W[illet], to the thrice lovely valley of Ham [Ilam]; a vale hung by beautiful woods all round, except just at its entrance, where, as you stand at the other end of the valley, you see a bare bleak mountain, standing as it were to guard the entrance. It is without exception the most beautiful place I ever visited, and from thence we proceeded to Dove-Dale, without question, tremendously sublime. Here we dined in a cavern, by the side of a divine little spring. We returned to Derby quite exhausted with the rapid succession of delightful emotions. (CL, 1: 229)

From ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ (1797)11 Now, my friends emerge Beneath the wide wide Heaven – and view again The many-steepled tract magnificent Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea, With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad, My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined And hunger’d after Nature, many a year,


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In the great City pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence. (CPW, 1: 179–80)

From his notebook, November 179912 Scale force—The first fall a thin broad white ribbon from a stupendous Height, uninterrupted tho’ not unimpinged by, the perpendicular Rock down which it falls, or rather paralel with which there is no pool at the bottom, but a common shallow brook over small flattish pebbles—but the chasm thro’ which it flows, is stupendous—so wildly wooded that the mosses & wet weeds & perilous Tree increase the . . . Horror of the rocks which ledge only enough to interrupt not stop your fall—& the Tree—O God! to think of a poor Wretch hanging with one arm from it/The lower Fall i.e. from the Brook is broader; but very low in comparison & only markworthy as combining admirably. Before the great fall there are six falls, each higher than the other, the chasm still gradually deepening, till the great fall, of which the Heighth & Depth is sudden & out of all comparison/I never saw Trees on rock Zigzag in their Lines more beautifully—Trees white in bark & more than half over patched with blackish Moss—Then the green moss upon the rocks mingled with flats & little precipices of the grey Rock—& Trees again. * * *

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Sunday Morning left our bad Inn, & went down the lake by the opposite shore—the hoar-frost on the ground, the lake calm & would have been mirrorlike but that it had been breathed on by the mist—& that shapely white Cloud, the Day-moon, hung over the snowy mountain opposite to us—./We passed the first Great Promontory, & What a scene! Where I stand, on the shore is a triangular Bay, taking in the whole of the water view—on the other shore is a straight deep wall of Mist/& one third of the bare mountains stands out from behind it—the top of the wall only in the sun—the rest black—& now it is all one deep wall of white vapour, save that black streaks shaped like strange creatures, seem to move in it & down it, in opposite direction to the motion of the great Body!—& over the forke of the Cliff behind, in shape so like a cloud, the Sun sent cutting it his thousand silky Hairs of amber & green Light—I step two paces, and have lost the Glory, but the edge has exactly the soft richness of the silver edge of a cloud behind which the Sun is travelling!—The fog has now closed over the Lake, & we wander in darkness, save that the mist is here & there prettily color’d by the wither’d fern, over which it hovers— * * * Now as we return the fog begins to clear off from the Lake, still however leaving straggling Detachments on it—, & clings viscously to the Hill/—all the objects on the opposite Coast are hidden, and all those hidden are reflected in the Lake, Trees, & the Castle, 〈Lyulph’s Tower,〉 & the huge Cliff that dwarfs it!—Divine!—The reflection of the huge pyramidal Crag is still hidden, & the image in the water still brighter/ / but the Lyulph’s Tower gleams like a Ghost, dim & shadowy—& the bright Shadow thereof how beautiful it is cut across by that Tongue of breezy water—now the Shadow is suddenly gone—and the Tower itself rises emerging out of the mist, two-thirds wholly hidden, the turrets quite clear—& a moment all is snatched away—Realities & Shadows— (BL Add. MS 47, 501 ff20v–38)

From a letter to Dorothy Wordsworth, November 179913 You can feel, what I cannot express for myself, how deeply I have been impressed by a world of scenery absolutely new to me. At Rydal


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and Grasmere I received, I think, the deepest delight; yet HawesWater, through many a varying view, kept my eyes dim with tears; and, the evening approaching, Derwent-Water, in diversity of harmonious features, in the majesty of its beauties, and in the beauty of its majesty. . . . and the black crags close under the snowy mountains, whose snows were pinkish with the setting sun, and the reflections from the rich clouds that floated over some and rested upon others!— it was to me a vision of a fair country: why were you not with us? (WMemoirs, 1: 148)

From a letter to William Godwin, 21 May 180014 I left Wordsworth on the 4th of this month. If I cannot procure a suitable house at Stowey I return to Cumberland and settle at Keswick, in a house of such a prospect, that if according to you and Hume, impressions and ideas constitute our being, I shall have a tendency to become a god, so sublime and beautiful will be the series of my visual existence. But whether I continue here or migrate thither, I shall be in a beautiful country, and have house-room and heart-room for you, and you must come and write your next work at my house. (CLU, 1: 138)

From a letter to Samuel Purkis, 29 July 180015 DEAR PURKIS I write to you from the Leads of Greta Hall, a Tenement in the possession of S.T. Coleridge, Esq. Gentleman—Poet and Philosopher in a mist—this Greta Hall is a House on a Small eminence, a furlong from Keswick in the country of Cumberland. Yes—my dear Sir! here I am— with Skiddaw at my back—on my right hand the Bassenthwaite Water with it’s majestic Case of Mountains, all of simplest outline—looking slant, direct over the feather of this infamous Pen, I see the Sun setting—my God! what a scene! Right before me is a great Camp of single Mountains—each in shape resembles a Giant’s Tent; and to the left, but closer to it far than the Bassenthwaite Water to my right, is the lake of Keswick, with it’s Islands and white sails, and glossy

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Lights of Evening—crowned with green meadows, but the three remaining sides are encircled by the most fantastic Mountains, that ever Earthquakes made in sport; as fantastic, as if Nature had laughed herself into the convulsion, in which they were made. Close behind me at the foot of Skiddaw flows the Greta, I hear it’s murmuring distinctly—then it curves round almost in a semicircle, and is now catching the purple Lights of the scattered Clouds above it directly before me— (CLU, 1: 149)

From his notebook August 1800 16 Sunset lights slanted Newland Hollandows—smoke flame over Wanthwaite & under that mass a wedge of light on the cliff—but soon the whole of Wanthwaite drunk with a black-hued scarlet—the distances of Borrodale duskily colored long after the set, & the end of the Lake . . . was crimsoned during the Sunset. As I sate on the side of Skiddaw at one ° clock in the noon of this day saw the shore of the Lake & those of its island hemmed with silver in the misty, cloudy, rain-spatter’d Lake—II ° clock at night— that conical Volcano of coal, half an inch high, . . . ejaculating its inverted cone of smoke—the smoke in what a furious wind, this way, that way—& what a noise! The poet’s eye in his tipsy hour Hath a magnifying power Or rather he diverts his eyes/his soul emancipates his eyes Of the accidents of size/ In unctuous cones of kindling Coal Or smoke from his Pipe’s bole His eye can see Phantoms of sublimity. (BL Add. MS 47, 502 ffl1v–12) * * *


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September 180017 After the so unusual continuance of fine weather the rain seems to have come at last—. Lodore & the fall in Borrodale whiten conspicuously—yet ever and anon the Sun is on the Hills & Mounts, the universal mist not dissipated but attenuated—& sometimes the mist will dissolve wholly from some field or eminence, that stands out from the rest of the Landscape, bright & newbathed—Now the Hills are all in mist but the Vale all bathed & clean, one column of watry Sunshine falls upon the Grange.—To the inverted arch in Newlands clear; at the Arch a wall of impenetrable Darkness—A pelting shower.— Clear;—& a road of silver brightness from the woods far over the Lake to the other side of the Island.—Vanishes—beautiful appearance of moving mist, over Newlands—in long dividuous flakes the interspaces filled up by a thinner mist—all in sunlight.— (BL Add. MS 47, 518 ff12v–13) * * * Sept. 29, 1800—after a most tremendous storm of Hail/the lower Half of the lake bright silver/over it & intercepting Borrodale a thick palpable Blue up to the moon/save that at the very top of the blue the clouds rolled lead-coloured—small detachments of these clouds running in thick flakes near the moon, & drinking its light in amber & white.—The Moon in a clear azure sky—the Mountains seen indeed, and only seen—I never saw aught so sublime! (BL Add. MS 47, 502 ff57v–58) * * * October 180018 White Water Dash, at the top of a Horse shoe valley. . . . The Dash a precipice of white rock & purple Screes almost perpendicular/The Dash laves its feet/b.b.b.—A semicircular Bason of craggy rocks, not very high, variegated with Screes, heath, & moss—/—this is the upper part of the valley—/The Dash itself is by no means equal to the Churn milk at East dale, or the Wythburn Fall—this I wrote standing

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under b.b.b. & seeing the whole Dash—but when I went over & descended to the bottom, there I only saw the real Fall, & the Curve of the steep slope & retracted—It is indeed so seen a fine thing—it falls parallel with a fine black rock for 30 feet, & is more shattered, more completely atomized & white than any I have ever seen—the pool likewise is formed by a few high large stones, and not a yard in breadth, of course as white as the fall itself—/Standing at the bottom you have no view of the Precipice on the right of which the Dash comes down—the Fall of the Dash is in a Horse-shoe Bason of its own wildly people with small ashes standing out of the rocks. ./Crossed the stream close by the white pool, stood on the other side, in a complete Spray-rain/Here it assumes, I think, a still finer appearance—You see the vast ruggedness & angular points & upright Cones of the black rock—The fall assumes a variety & complexity—some parts rushing in wheels, other parts perpendicular, some in white horse-tails—white on toward the right edge of the black two or three leisurely Fillets have escaped out of the Turmoil/Turning your back on the Waterfall you look over into up an Bassenthwaite arc off the Top In short, go close to it and tis well worth seeing/About 20 yards the Beck forms two other Waterfalls, both pleasing, & both singular— N.B. The precipice, which of course when you are at the bottom loses its perpendicularity, has a row of fine pyramidal rocks on its top of it—I ought to say, appears when you are at the second Waterfall to have them—for only one is on the Top—/Ascend/and over this wch I have been describing as if it were the only yet another far finer, & above that another/they are the finest Water furies, I ever beheld/ (BL Add. MS 47, 502 ff59v–62v) * * *

November 180019 Nov. 6. Morning—Behind the Grange & the mountain above the Grange a thick Blanket of white wooly cloud—which thinning here & there shewed bits & edges of the Mountains behind in the most sublime style (BL Add. MS 47, 518 f13)


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From a letter to Thomas Poole, 1 February 1801 20 Believe me, often and often in my walks amid these sublime landscapes I have trod the ground impatiently, irritated that you were not with me. Poor dear Mrs. Robinson! you have heard of her Death. She wrote me a most affecting, heart-rending letter a few weeks before she died, to express what she called her Death bed affection and esteem for me. The very last lines of her letter are indeed sublime.—‘My little cottage is retired and comfortable. There I mean to remain (if indeed I live so long) till Christmas. But it is not surrounded with the romantic scenery of your chosen retreat: it is not, my dear Sir! the nursery of sublime thoughts—the abode of Peace—the solitude of Nature’s Wonders. O! Skiddaw!—I think, if I could but once contemplate thy Summit, I should never quit the Prospect it would present till my eyes were closed for ever!’ (CLU, 1: 171)

From a letter to William Sotheby, 19 July 180221 My dear sir! ought I to make an apology for troubling you with such a long, verse-cramm’d letter? Oh, that instead of it, I could but send to you the image now before my eyes, over Bassenthwaite. The sun is setting in a glorious, rich, brassy light, on the top of Skiddaw, and one third adown it is a huge, enormous mountain of cloud, with the outlines of a mountain. This is of a starchy grey, but floating past along it, and upon it, are various patches of sack-like clouds, bags and woolsacks, of a shade lighter than the brassy light. Of the clouds that hide the setting sun,—a fine yellow-red, somewhat more than sandy light, and these, the farthest from the sun, are suffused with the darkness of a stormy colour. Marvellous creatures! how they pass along! (CLE, 1: 384)

From a letter to Sara Hutchinson, 1–4 August 1802 22 Well! I passed a bulging roundish-headed green Hill to my Left, (and to the left of it was a frightful Crag) with a very high round-head

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right before me; this latter is called Ennerdale-Dodd, and bisects the ridge between Ennerdale & Buttermere & Crummock—I took it on my right hand, & came to the top of the bulging green Hill, on which I found a small Tarn, called Flatern [Floutern] Tarn, about 100 yds. in length, & not more than 7 or 8 in breadth, but O! what a grand Pecipice it lay at the foot of! The half of this Precipice . . . nearest to Ennerdale was black, with green moss-cushions on the Ledges; the half nearest to Buttermere a pale pink, & divided from the black part by a great streamy Torrent of crimson Shiver, & Screes. . . . I never saw a more heart-raising Scene. I turned & looked on the Scene which I had left behind, a marvellous group of mountains, wonderfully & admirably arranged—not a single minute object to interrupt the oneness of the view, excepting those two green Fields in Buttermere—but before me the glorious Sea with the high Coast & Mountains of the Isle of Mann, perfectly distinct—& three Ships in view. A little further on, the Lake of Ennerdale (the lower part of it) came in view. . . . The further Bank & the higher part, steep, lofty, bare bulging Crags; the nether Bank green & pastoral, with Houses in the shelter of their own dear Trees.—On the opposite Shore in the middle & narrow part of the Lake there bulges out a huge Crag, called angling Stone / being a famous Station for anglers—and the reflection of this Crag in the Water is admirable—pillars or rather it looks like the pipes of some enormous Organ in a rich golden Color. . . . the mountains at the head of this Lake & Wast-dale are the Monsters of the Country, bare bleak Heads, evermore doing deeds of Darkness, weather-plots, & stormconspiracies in the Clouds—their names are Herd house, Bowness, Wha Head, Great Gavel, the Steeple, the Pillar, & Seat Allian [Seatallan]. . . . Wed. Afternoon 1/2 past 8, Augt. 4th. 1802— Wastdale, a mile & half below the Foot of the Lake, at an Alehouse without a Sign, 20 strides from the Door, under the Shade of a huge Sycamore Tree. . . . The Lake itself seen from it’s Foot appears indeed of too regular shape . . . (In reality however the Lake widens as it ascends, and at the heads is very considerably broader than at the foot.) But yet, in spite of this it is a marvellous sight / a sheet of water between 3 & 4 miles in length, the whole (or very nearly the whole) of it’s right Bank formed by the Screes, or facing of bare Rock of enormous Height, two thirds of it’s height downwards absolutely perpendicular; & then slanting off in Screes, or Shiver, consisting of fine


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red Streaks running in broad Stripes thro’ a stone colour—slanting off from the Perpendicular, as steep as the meal newly ground from the Miller’s spout. . . .When I first came the Lake was a perfect Mirror; & what must have been the Glory of the reflections in it! This huge facing of Rock said to be half a mile in perpendicular height, with deep Ravin[e]s the whole winded [wrinkled?] & torrent-worn, except where the pink-striped Screes come in, as smooth as silk / all this reflected, turned into Pillars, dells, and a whole new-world of Images in the water! The head of the Lake is crowned by three huge pyramidal mountains, Yewbarrow, Sca’ Fell, & the great Gavel; Yewbarrow & Sca’ Fell nearly opposite to each other, yet so that the Ness (or Ridge-line, like the line of a fine Nose,) of Sca’ Fell runs in behind that of Yewbarrow, while the Ness of great Gavel is still farther back, between the two others, & of course, instead of running athwart the Vale it directly faces you. . . . Thursday Morning, Augt. 5th—went down the Vale almost to the water head, & ascended the low Reach between Sca’ Fell and the Screes, and soon after I had gained it’s height came in sight Burnmoor Water, a large Tairn . . . it’s Tail towards Sca’ Fell, at its head a gap forming an inverted arch with Black Coomb & a peep of the Sea seen thro’ it.—It lies directly at the Back of the Screes, & the stream that flows from it down thro’ the gap, is called the Mite—and runs thro’ a Vale of it’s own called Miterdale, parallel with the lower part of Wastdale, and divided from it by the high Ridge called Ireton Fells. I ascended Sca’ Fell by the side of a torrent, and climbed & rested, rested & climbed, ‘till I gained the very summit of Sca’ Fell— believed by the Shepherds here to be higher than either Helvellyn or Skiddaw—Even to Black Coomb—before me all the Mountains die away, running down westward to the Sea, apparently in eleven Ridges & three parallel Vales with their three Rivers, seen from their very Sources to their falling into the Sea, where they form (excepting their Screw-like flexures) the Trident of the Irish Channel at Ravenglass—O my God! what enormous Mountains these are close by me, & yet below the Hill I stand on / Great Gavel, Kirk Fell, Green Crag, & behind the Pillar, then the Steeple, then the Hay Cock—on the other side & behind me, Great End, Esk Carse [Hause], Bow-fell & close to my back two huge Pyramids, nearly as high as Sca’ Fell itself, & indeed parts & parts of Sca’ Fell known far & near by these

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names, the hither one of Broad Crag, and the next to it but divided from it by a low Ridge Doe Crag, which is indeed of itself a great Mountain of stones from a pound to 20 Ton weight embedded in wooly Moss. And here I am lounded—so fully lounded—that tho’ the wind is strong, & the Clouds are hast’ning hither from the Sea—and the whole air seaward has a lurid Look—and we shall certainly have Thunder—yet here (but that I am hunger’d & provisionless) here I could lie warm, and wait methinks for tomorrow’s Sun / and on a nice Stone Table am I now at this moment writing to you—between 2 and 3 o’Clock as I guess / surely the first Letter ever written from the Top of Sca’ Fell! But O! what a look down just under my Feet! The frightfullest Cove that might ever be seen / huge perpendicular Precipices, and one Sheep upon it’s only Ledge, that surely must be crag!. . . Just by it & joining together, rise two huge Pillars of bare leadcolored stone— / I am no measurer / but their height & depth is terrible. I know how unfair it is to judge of these Things by a comparison of past Impressions with present—but I have no shadow of hesitation in saying that the Coves & Precipices of Helvellin are nothing to these! . . . I must now drop down, how I may into Eskdale—that lies under to my right—the upper part of it the wildest & savagest surely of all the Vales that were ever seen from the Top of an English Mountain / and the lower part the loveliest.— (CL, 2: 836–41)

From his notebook, August 180223 I descended from Sca fell and went backward from Wastdale to another Point, a great mountain of Stones, from a pound to 20 Ton/climbed up them, and am now lownded on the other side, with Hollow Stones beneath me, the frightfullest Cove, with huge Precipice Walls—caps Helvellin hollow/that Gap I saw in the Air was the Steeple, and one of the Ennerd Fells—from the spot, that lownds me, I see Derwentwater plainly O for a better & less hazy day—the Castle Crag, & the River had the weather been tolerably I could have seen my own House/I saw the spot where it was.—The clouds came on


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fast—& yet I long to ascend Bowfell—I pass along Scafell Precipices; & came to one place where I thought could descend, & get upon the low Ridge that runs between Sca Fell & Bowfell, & look down into the wild savage, savage Head of Eskdale/Good heavens! what a climb! dropping from Precipices and at last should have been crag fast but for the chasm— At last got on the ridge, but the Clouds came on lower & thicker, & I thought it best to defer Bowfell, so came down walking over hollow ground, with the fountain Streams of the Esk rumbling & gurgling under my feet—when these come out, it is a tolerable sized Beck, & divides into two. I creep down beside that nearest Scafell—it runs at a huge chasm, its sides perpendicular of solid rock, in many places 50 high/the breadth never more than 15/in a storm this would be a famous Scene indeed/but O Scafell, thy enormous Precipices/—Just by the hollow Stones are two enormous Columns/I am no measurer—they were vaster than any that I have ever seen, & were each a stone Mountain/they could not be less than 250 yards high/for they reached half way, or more down into the vale/The whole Head of Scafell, & its Bowfell & Eskdale Head & Side bare Stone, in many places more than perpendicular/Helvellin is not to be compared with it/Came to a waterfall, down a slope of Rock just 80 yards steep/not far from perpendicular/below this is a succession of Falls, some more sloping than other, to the number of 8—nearly at the bottom of the Hill, you may stand so as to command 5 of them . . . of which the first of 80 yards fall, & the fourth, about 50, but more perpendicular, are the most noticeable/but in a storm and thro’ & out of Clouds the whole must be the grandest thing in the country/ (BL Add. MS 47, 497 fl5v–18)

From a letter to Sara Hutchinson, 6 August 1802 I passed down from Broadcrag, skirted the Precipices, and found myself cut off from a most sublime Crag-summit, that seemed to rival Sca’ Fell Man in height, & to outdo it in fierceness. A Ridge of Hill lay low down, & divided this Crag (called Doe-crag) & Broad-crag . . . I determined to go thither; the first place I came to, that was not direct Rock, I slipped down, & went on for a while with tolerable ease—but

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now I came . . . to a smooth perpendicular Rock about 7 feet high— this was nothing—I put my hands on the Ledge, & dropped down / in a few yards came just such another / I dropped that too / and yet another, seemed not higher—I would not stand for a trifle / so I dropped that too / but the stretching of the muscle[s] of my hands & arms, & the jolt of the Fall on my Feet, put my whole Limbs in a Tremble, and I paused, & looking down, saw that I had little else to encounter but a succession of these little Precipices—it was in truth a Path that in a very hard Rain is, no doubt, the channel of a most splendid Waterfall.—So I began to suspect that I ought not to go on / but then unfortunately tho’ I could with ease drop down a smooth Rock 7 feet high, I could not climb it / so go on I must / and on I went / the next 8 drops were not half a Foot, at least not a foot more than my own height / but every Drop increased the Palsy of my Limbs—I shook all over, Heaven knows without the least influence of Fear / and now I had only two more to drop down / to return was impossible—but of these two the first was tremendous / it was twice my own height, & the Ledge at the bottom was [so] exceedingly narrow, that if I dropt down upon it I must of necessity have fallen backwards & of course killed myself. My Limbs were all in a tremble—I lay upon my Back to rest myself, & was beginning according to my Custom to laugh at myself for a Madman, when the sight of the Crags above me on each side, & the impetuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly & so rapidly northward, overawed me / I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance & Delight—& blessed God aloud, for the powers of Reason & the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us! O God, I exclaimed aloud—how calm, how blessed am I now / I know not how to proceed, how to return / but I am calm & fearless & confident / if this Reality were a Dream, if I were asleep, what agonies had I suffered! what screams!—When the Reason & the Will are away, what remain to us but Darkness & Dimness & a bewildering Shame, and Pain that is utterly Lord over us, or fantastic Pleasure, that draws the Soul along swimming through the air in many shapes, even as a Flight of Starlings in a Wind.—I arose, & looking down saw at the bottom a heap of Stones—which had fallen abroad—and rendered the narrow Ledge on which they had been piled, doubly dangerous . . . As I was looking at these I glanced my eye to my left, & observed that the Rock was rent from top to bottom—I measured the breadth of the Rent, and found that there was no danger of my being wedged in / so I put my Knap-sack round


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to my side, & slipped down as between two walls, without any danger or difficulty—the next Drop brought me down on the Ridge called the How / I hunted out my Besom Stick, which I had flung before me when I first came to the Rocks—and wisely gave over all thoughts of ascending Doe-Crag—for now the Clouds were again coming in most tumultuously. . . . I descended this low Hill which was all hollow beneath me—and was like the rough green Quilt of a Bed of waters—at length two streams burst out & took their way down, one on [one] side a high Ground upon this Ridge, the other on the other—I took that to my right . . . & soon the channel sank all at once, at least 40 yards, & formed a magnificent Waterfall—and close under this a succession of Waterfalls 7 in number, the third of which is nearly as high as the first. When I had almost reached the bottom of the Hill, I stood so as to command the whole 8 Waterfalls, with the great triangle-Crag looking in above them, & on the one side of them the enormous & more than perpendicular Precipices & Bull’s-Brows, of Sca’ Fell! And now the Thunder-Storm was coming on, again & again! . . . I now was obliged to ascend again, as the River ran greatly to the Left, & the Vale was nothing more than the Channel of the River, all the rest of the interspace between the mountains was a tossing up & down of Hills of all sizes . . . I ascended close under Sca’ Fell & came to a little Village of Sheep-folds . . . Here I found an imperfect Shelter from a Thunder-shower—accompanied with such Echoes! O God! what thoughts were mine! O how I wished for Health & Strength that I might wander about for a Month together, in the stormiest month of the year, among these Places, so lonely & savage & full of sounds! . . . After the Storm I passed on & came to a great Peat-road, that wound down a hill, called Maddock How, & now came out upon the first cultivated Land which begins with a Bridge that goes over a Stream, a Waterfall of considerable height & beautifully wooded above you, & a great water-slope under you / the Gill down which it falls, is called Scale Gill—& the Fall Scale Gill Force. . . . Well, I passed thro’ some sweet pretty Fields, & came to a large Farm-house where I am now writing / The place is called Toes or Te as—the master’s name John Vicars Towers . . . .This morning after breakfast I went out with him, & passed up the Vale again due East, along a higher Road, over a heathy up-land, crossed the upper part of Scale Gill, came out upon Maddock How, & then ascending turned directly Northward, into the Heart of the mountains; on my left the wild Crags under which

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flows the Scale Gill Beck, the most remarkable of them called Cat Crag (a wild Cat being killed there) & on my right hand six great Crags, which appeared in the mist all in a file—and they were all, tho’ of different sizes, yet the same shape all triangles—. Other Crags far above them, higher up the Vale, appeared & disappeared as the mists passed & came / one with a waterfall, called Spout Crag—and another most tremendous one, called Earn [Heron] Crag— (CL, 2: 841–5)

From a letter to Robert Southey, 9 August 1802 24 On Sunday, August 1st, after morning church, I left Greta Hall, crossed the fields to Portinscale, went through Newlands, where “Great Robinson looks down upon Marden’s Bower,” and drank tea at Buttermere, crossed the mountains to Ennerdale, and slept at a farm-house a little below the foot of the lake, spent the greater part of the next day mountaineering, and went in the evening through Egremont to St. Bees, and slept there; returned next day to Egremont, and slept there; went by the sea-coast as far as Gosforth, then turned off and went up Wasdale, and slept at T. Tyson’s at the head of the vale. Thursday morning crossed the mountains and ascended Scafell, which is more than a hundred yards higher than either Helvellyn or Skiddaw; spent the whole day among clouds, and one of them a frightening thunder-cloud; slipped down into Eskdale, and there slept, and spent a good part of the next day; proceeded that evening to Devock Lake, and slept at Ulpha Kirk; on Saturday passed through the Dunnerdale Mountains to Broughton Vale, Tarver Vale, and in upon Coniston. On Sunday I surveyed the lake, etc., of Coniston, and proceeded to Bratha, and slept at Lloyd’s house; this morning walked from Bratha to Grasmere, and from Grasmere to Greta Hall, where I now am, quite sweet and ablute, and have not even now read through your letter, which I will answer by the night’s post, and therefore must defer all account of my very interesting tour, saying only that of all earthly things which I have beheld, the view of Scafell and from Scafell (both views from its own summit) is the most heart-exciting. (CLE, 1: 393–4)


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From a letter to Sara Hutchinson, 10 August 180225 More Rain coming! I broke off writing to look at the Sky / it was exactly 35 minutes after 7, which [was] 4 minutes after the real Sunset, and long long after the apparent sun-set behind our Vales— & I saw such a sight as I never before saw. Beyond Bassenthwaite at the end of the view was a Sky of bright yellow-green; but over that & extending all over Bassenthwaite, & almost up to Keswick church a Cloud-Sky of the deepest most fiery Orange—Bassenthwaite Lake look’d like a Lake of ‘blood-red Wine’—and the River Greta, in all it’s winding, before our house, & the upper part of the Keswick Lake, were fiery red—even as I once saw the Thames when the huge Albion Mills were burning, amid the Shouts of an exulting Mob—but with one foot upon Walla Crag, and the other foot exactly upon Calvert’s House at Windy Brow was one great Rainbow, red and all red, entirely formed by the Clouds—I have now seen all the Rain-bows, that, I suppose, are possible—the Solar Rainbow, with it’s many colors, the grey lunar Rainbow, & a fiery red Rainbow, wholly from the Clouds after sunset!— (CL, 2: 848–9)

From a letter to Sara Hutchinson, 25 August 180226 All night it rained incessantly and in a hard storm of Rain this morning . . . I set off, and drove away toward Newlands. There is a Waterfall that divides Great Robinson from Buttermere Halse Fell, which when Mary, and Tom, and I passed, we stopped and said— what a wonderful Creature it would be in a hard Rain. Dear Mary was especially struck with it’s latent greatness and since that time I have never passed it without a haunting wish to see it in it’s fury. . . . I soon arrived at the Halse and climbed up by the waterfall as near as I could, to the very top of the Fell but it was so craggy, the Crags covered with spongy soaky Moss, and when bare so jagged as to wound one’s hands fearfully, and the Gusts came so very sudden and strong, that the going up was slow, and difficult and earnest and the coming down, not only all that, but likewise extremely dangerous. However, I have always found this stretched and anxious state of mind

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favorable to depth of pleasurable Impressions in the resting Places and lownding Coves. The Thing repaid me amply. It is a great Torrent from the Top of the Mountain to the Bottom; the lower part of it is not the least Interesting, where it is beginning to slope to a level. The mad water rushes thro’ its sinuous bed, or rather prison of Rock, with such rapid Curves as if it turned the Corners not from the mechanic force but with foreknowledge, like a fierce and skilful Driver: great Masses of Water, one after the other, that in twilight one might have feelingly compared them to a vast crowd of huge white Bears, rushing, one over the other, against the wind—their long white hair scattering abroad in the wind. The remainder of the Torrent is marked out by three great Waterfalls, the lowermost Apron-shaped, and though the Rock down which it rushes is an inclined Plane, it shoots off in such an independence of the Rock as shews that its direction was given it by the force of the Water from above. The middle which in peaceable times would be two tinkling Falls formed in this furious Rain one great Water-wheel endlessly revolving and double the size and height of the lowest. The third and highest is a mighty one indeed. It is twice the height of both the others added together, nearly as high as Scale Force, but it rushes down an inclined Plane, and does not fall, like Scale Force; however, if the Plane has been smooth, it is so near a Perpendicular that it would have appeared to fall, but it is indeed so fearfully savage, and black, and jagged, that it tears the flood to pieces. And one great black Outjutment divides the water, and overbrows and keeps uncovered a long slip of jagged black Rock beneath, which gives a marked Character to the whole force. What a sight it is to look down on such a Cataract! The wheels, that circumvolve in it, the leaping up and plunging forward of that infinity of Pearls and Glass Bulbs, the continual change of the Matter, the perpetual Sameness of the Form—it is an awful Image and Shadow of God and the World. . . . I went to Lodore on Sunday. It was finer than I had ever seen it before. Never were there three Waterfalls so different from each other, as Lodore, Buttermere Halse Fall, and Scale Force. Scale Force is a proper Fall between two very high and narrow Walls of Rock, well tree’d—yet so that the Trees rather add to, than lessen the precipice Walls. Buttermere Halse Fall is a narrow, open, naked Torrent with three great Water-slopes individualized in it one above another, large, larger, largest. Lodore has it’s Walls, but they are scarcely Walls,


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they are wide apart, and not upright, and their beauty and exceeding Majesty take away the Terror—and the Torrent is broad and wide, and from top to bottom it is small Waterfalls, abreast and abreast. Buttermere Halse Fall is the War-song of a Scandinavian Bard. Lodore is the Precipitation of the fallen angels from Heaven, Flight and Confusion, and Distraction, but all harmonized into one majestic Thing by the genius of Milton, who describes it. Lodore is beyond all rivalry the first and best Thing of the whole Lake Country. Indeed (but we cannot judge at all from Prints) I have seen nothing equal to it in the Prints and Sketches of the Scotch and Swiss Cataracts. (CIS, 240–2)

From a letter to William Sotheby, 26 August 180227 Wordsworth wrote a very animated account of his difficulties and his joyous meeting with you, which he calls the happy rencontre or fortunate rainstorm. Oh! that you had been with me during a thunderstorm on Thursday, August the 3d! I was sheltered (in the phrase of the country, lownded) in a sort of natural porch on the summit of Sca Fell, the central mountain of our Giants, said to be higher than Skiddaw or Helvellyn, and in chasm, naked crag, bursting springs, and waterfall the most interesting, without a rival. When the cloud passed away, to my right and left, and behind me, stood a great national convention of mountains which our ancestors most descriptively called Copland, that is, the Land of Heads. Before me the mountains died away down to the sea in eleven parallel ridges; close under my feet, as it were, were three vales: Wastdale, with its lake; Miterdale and Eskdale, with the rivers Irt, Mite, and Esk seen from their very fountains to their fall into the sea at Ravenglass Bay, which, with these rivers, form to the eye a perfect trident. (CLE, 1: 400–1)

Introduction to ‘Chamouni: The Hour before Sun-rise: A Hymn’, from the Morning Post 11 September 180228 Chamouny is one of the highest mountain valleys of the Barony of Faucigny in the Savoy Alps; and exhibits a kind of fairy world, in

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which the wildest appearances (I had almost said, horrors) of nature alternate with the softest, and most beautiful. The chain of Mont Blanc is its boundary; and, besides the Arve, it is filled with sounds from the Arveiron, which rushes from the melted glaciers, like a giant, mad with joy, from a dungeon, and forms other torrents of snow water, having their rise in the glaciers, which slope down into the valley. The beautiful gentiana major, or greater gentian, with blossoms of the brightest blue, grows in large companies, a few steps from the never-melted ice of the glaciers. I thought it an affecting emblem of the boldness of human hope, venturing near, and, as it were, leaning over the brink of the grave. Indeed, the whole vale, its every light, its every sound, must needs impress every mind, not utterly callous, with the thought—Who would be, who could be, an Atheist, in this valley of wonders! If any of the readers of The Morning Post have visited this vale in their journeys among the Alps, I am confident that they will not find the sentiments and feelings expressed, or attempted to be expressed, in the following poem, extravagant. (EOT, 3: 294)

‘Hymn Before Sun-Rise in the Vale of Chamouni’ (1802)29 Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star In his steep course? So long he seems to pause On thy bald awful head, O sovran BLANC, The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form! Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines, How silently! Around thee and above Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black, An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it, As with a wedge! But when I look again, It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, Thy habitation from eternity! O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone.


Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my Thought, Yea, with my Life and Life’s own secret joy: Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused, Into the mighty vision passing—there As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven! Awake, my soul! not only passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks and secret ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my Hymn. Thou first and chief, sole sovereign of the Vale! O Struggling with the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars, Or when they climb the sky or when they sink: Companion of the morning-star at dawn, Thyself Earth’s rosy star, and of the dawn Co-herald: wake, O wake, and utter praise! Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in Earth? Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee parent of perpetual streams? And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad! Who called you forth from night and utter death, From dark and icy caverns called you forth, Down those precipitous, black, jaggéd rocks, For ever shattered and the same for ever? Who gave you your invulnerable life, Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy, Unceasing thunder and eternal foam? And who commanded (and the silence came), Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest? Ye Ice-falls! ye that from the mountain’s brow Adown enormous ravines slope amain— Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice, And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge! Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

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Who made you glorious as the Gates of Heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?— GOD! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, ANSWER! and let the ice-plains echo, G OD! GOD! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, you piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, GOD! Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost! Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle’s nest! Ye eagles, play-mates of the mountain-storm! Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds! Ye signs and wonders of the element! Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise! Thou too, hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks, Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard, Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene Into the depth of clouds, that veil thy breast— Thou too, again, stupendous Mountain! thou That as I raise my head, awhile bowed low In adoration, upward from thy base Slow travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears, Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud, To rise before me—Rise, O ever rise, Rise like a cloud of incense from the Earth! Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills, Thou dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven, Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky, And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun Earth, with her thousand voices, praises GOD. (CPW, 1: 376–80)

From his notebook, September—October 180230 The stedfast rainbow in the fast-moving, hurrying, hail-mist! What a congregation of Images & Feelings, of fantastic Permanence


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amidst the rapid Change of Tempest—quietness the Daughter of Storm.— (BL Add. MS 47, 518 f49v) * * * Oct. 20th—1802. My 30th Birthday—a windy, showery Day—with great columns of misty Sunshine travelling along the lake toward Borrodale, the . . . Heavens, a confusion of white Clouds in masses, & bright blue Sky—Sunshine on the Bassenthwaite Window, while Rain & Hail was scourging the Newlands window—the whole vale shadow & sunshine, in broad masses. No clouds on the tops of the mountains—I meditating on Switzerland, & writing the Letters to Mr Fox—Eleven in the morning—〈The crescent moon waning in the Sky—the Sun not far below it.—〉 1/2 past one—the whole of Newlands full of a shower-mist drunk & dazzling with Sunshine in one part transparent, & Great Robinson, & the Green Ridge & hollow below or seen thro’ it. It passed off—& floated across the Lake toward Lodore in flossy silk. The Birches, auburn & gold, shew themselves among the Oak grove—the white flossy Sun-mist floats along, & now Borrodale looks thro’ it. The upper segment of the arch of the Sky is all blue, bright blue—and the descent on all sides white massy clouds, thrusting their heads into the blue, in mountain shapes. (BL Add. MS 47, 518 f42–42v)

From a letter to Thomas Wedgwood, 14 January 180331 On Wednesday I was well, and after dinner wrapped myself up warm, and walked with Sarah Hutchinson to Lodore. I never beheld anything more impressive than the wild outline of the black masses of mountain over Lodore [here he gives a rough sketch of the mountain outline] to the Gorge of Borrowdale, seen through the bare Twigs of a grove of Birch Trees, through which the road passes; and on emerging from the grove a red planet (so very red that I never saw a star so red, being clear and bright at the same time) stood on the edge of the point where I have put an asterisk; it seemed to have sky

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behind it; it started, as it were, from the Heaven, like an eye-ball of Fire. (TW, 133–4)

From his notebook August—September 180332 Tuesday Morn. Aug. 30—Walked to the Shore opposite to the Ferry, & having waited & shouted & made signals for near an hour in vain, I wandered on—/& seeing a Boat on the Shore, went to the Cottage— . . . . Passed on—the Mountain close by my side, high & green with ferns, Grasses, & young Trees—Trees scattered here & there, and often a handsome full grown Birch on the Edge of the Top of a naked Precipice/ /Crossed little Bridges, where streams came down over black Rocks—with many Views of that species of Scenery which is always 〈so〉 interesting—where Naked Rocks stand above each other some perpendicular & smooth & grey from a yard high to 20 fathom with green Ledges interspersed, some so narrow that a single sheep goes cautiously, some so broad that a small flock might graze there, or an industrious Chinese raise a crop of Corn/—Holly Trees wedging the solid Rock/Large Birch Tree filling up the hollow of the Arch of the Bridge—/ passed by Bays & Promontories, some wooded, some craggy & heath-rich, some cultivated, often a Boat heaving in the secure Bay, 〈& now the road〉 ascending a Hill led me to the last Reach of Loch Lomond, which resembles a majestic River, distinguished from it by the Ledger-like Lines of Foams, & its own lakish Sound of Water,—the head is crowned by 3 ridges of Mountains, the highest not very high, but bare & black & of very various outline; and such as in rainy or misty weather would be sublime—in this reach too is one of those Terraces before described—& there is another between this & the Ferry—the road up & down another Hill, on my descent I see to the Left a large single Rock, far away from the foot of the Mountain, in a green plot by itself—a little stream winds almost around it, overhung with Alder Bushes—it is cowl’d with Heath—all its sides Bare/the amplest side, viz, that facing the road, is 25 Strides in length, & I suppose at least 40 feet high/it is 60 Strides round/in shape it resembles the Gavel End of a House . . .


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. . . left Garbel Wednesday Morning, 1/4 past 9, August 31, 1801—& pursued my way up Glenfalloch toward Tyndrum, the Glen narrowing, the river becoming more & more wild & rocky, running & roaming among Alders & coppice Woods, the Hills landlocking the Glen with less than half a mile interspace, the Hills not very high, but much broken, & their wildness a ragged wildness.—I now passed over a Bridge with a stream dashing down over rocks, & under table Rock on which the foam of Monday’s Storm was lying yet—this I learnt was Fiona glen or the Glen of Fingal/ met with three good Highlanders, two understood & talked Gaelic, the third, an intelligent man, spoke low Scottish only—I went with him into a field to my right, & visited a noble waterfall—during rain it must be a most noble one/ the Trees are old, & army, one on each side/it is one great Apron with an oval Pool at the Bottom, but above it you look up thro’ a rocky Stream with trees & bushes, & the Fall itself is marked by two great Cauldrons delved out in the black rock, down which it falls—into which cauldrons it boils & rebounds/this is on the River of Glenfalloch, which word signifies the Hidden Glen—I talked much with the Scotchman—the oppressions of the Landlord—& he used these beautiful words—‘It kills one’s affections for one’s Country, the Hardships of Life, coming by change, & wi’ injustice.’—The Hills on each side of me are low, for I myself am on very high Ground—they are almost cragless, an intermixture of beds of purple Heath, slumbring in its Beauty, & beds of green fern, always alive & fluttering— but to my right the Hill breaks, & lets in upon the view a triangular Mountain of fine outline. . . . And in the break a little Stream with glimmering Waterbreaks & cowering Alders/wild Sheep-folds in the Hills but before me Ben More or the Huge Mountain/One of the highest in the highlands, shaped like a haystack, which dallies with the Clouds, that now touch, now hide, now leave it/ * * * I come to a Double Road, one to Shirley—the other to Tyndrum/And for about a mile the moors & hills are less interesting but soon regain their former size—dined at Tyndrum/walked a brisk pace under the inspiration of a Bottle of Burton Ale, from Tyndrum to Inverooran/a fine Road tho’ a perfectly houseless Moorland, the mountains on each side, behind, before, most noble—tho’ green/& I seemed to think that these high green mountains, so furrowed, delved, & wrinkled

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with Torrents are still wilder than craggy Mountains/the Mountains were all detached, a great Beauty!—One I shall never forget/in shape resembling a Schoolboy’s Top, or rather presenting to the eye two sides of a spherical Triangle/as I looked back, on my left, at the extremity of this side of the Triangle, a curving wall of green Highland, & over it from the distance a . . . mountain. At the extremity of the other side another mountain from the distance, but of wild & fantastic outline/but the Mountain itself, the spheric Triangle, so very vast, so high, so worn & marked/—The same road to Inverooran, the same to Kingshouse, 18 miles of beautiful Road, such as you may see in Noblemen’s pleasure Grounds, thro’ a wide wide Moor, with rocky rivers—mountains of all shapes, scarr’d & lay’d open, but none Craggy—the rain all the way, except now & then a Blow off that discovered all the forms of the mountains & that I had lost nothing else/add to these large moorland Pools with bushy Islets—and one goat—& you have the whole, I saw from Tyndrum & Inverooran/ 〈to Kingshouse〉—The whole Road from E. Tarbet to Ballachulish!— * * * The first six miles of Glencoe a winding glen, on my right a bulgy rifted continuous mountain, but the mists lay heavy & thick on its Top, but the rifts & Caverns were dark as Darkness—to my left the lower & grassy Half of the Mountains was continuous, save only that they were rifted, often to the foundation, but the rifts in general were narrow—tho’ a few wide enough to contain furious Waterfalls— the higher & craggy Half rose up into separate Mountains, Turrets, Steeples, Sugarloaves, & often Bulls’ Brows, Brows savager than those of Urus or Byson/one cone, of great Height, was connected with a rude triangle-shaped Mountain, of equal Height, by a semicircular Bason, or wall of rock in behind . . . —after two hours walk I came in sight of a Cottage, two or three green enclosures, so green within stone walls, & a lake/& about a furlong before I reached it, an enormous Facing of Mountain . . . —the highest—almost 1/3rd of the whole height of the mountain—a perfectly perpendicular smooth precipice with a huge Cavity in a cylinder. . . . —This whole Mountain more like Grasmere or Crummock than any thing I have hitherto seen, tis the noblest too that I have seen/it is ledge & precipice as I have elsewhere described—only no bushes or Trees—and only


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that the precipices are separate from each other seemingly not by their own protrusion but by channels of delving Storms—some traversing the Mountain, but by far the greater number running straight down/—At its feet are two lines sets of Housage with their inclosures, & a small 〈dead〉 Tairn out of which rushes a madcap of a River/the next Mountain to it, with a Torrent between, is green & ragged with Trees—but at the summit of the interspace, somewhat retiring, is a most remarkable naked rock . . . —resembling a house with two gavel ends fronting you, the one nearest Grasmere, the other next the green mountain, round and resembling a Porch— & now straight before me within a slingthrow, the Vale is closed by a green mountain—& I am to commence a new reach of the Glen.— This new reach brought in view another Lake at its termination/it pleased me much—the surface of the Mountain close by my right hand is playful, & its craggy half is bulgy & brown with moss & pinky with Screes/close by my left hand the arch of the vale is crowded with 9 sugar-loaf green Hills, . . . 2 only quite . . . Hills by . . . themselves/say 3 Hills, one with 7 heads—over these 〈a noble pyramidal〉 Mountain, 〈and another pyramidal mountain, but this was green, & presented its whole side to us/the other was craggier & pinkier, & stood edgeways—〉 an ocean of mist 〈there retiring〉 behind the Grasmere & its greener neighbor with her 10 rain channels floating down it (tho’ now no water—I speak only of the imaginary motion of its curvatures) like 10 pink Ribbons As now I stand, something more than half way of the green Pyramid’s side past, the road ascending, I stood, turned round, & the view that had been upon my Back, as it were—so finely do the mountains on my left—as I now stand—& Grasmere close up the reach, so tight, so narrow/for Grasmere seems now to run across the vale/it & its pink-ribbon’d neighbour of equal height—a descent & retirement of various outline, with an enormous Notch, then the Pyramid Edgways—& two houses at its feet/—the 3 Hills, I with 8 Tops, now cuddle in close at the feet of Grasmere’s Sister— The green Pyramid . . . whose broadside I am almost bisecting, sinks softly then rises again into another pyramidal, but far far lower where it deeps, there starts up a bare mountain—I might touch it with my stick if I were on that green ridge/of a rich red brown—quite bare/in shape resembling the Doric Portal of S t Paul’s in Covent Garden . . . an obtuse triangle!—In this reach Oats, Potatoes (O that

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one tiny strange Hovel of Boughs of Trees, & its tiny Plantation of Potatoes) and Alder Bushes innumerable! it is a sweet Reach, no doubt. . . . After having crossed the Ferry walked on, on a delightful road, high Hills on my right most richly wooded, all wood save where huge Rocks with Heath flowers, burst out of the Hill,—Trees too on my Left, with the Sea dashing its Spray among their Leaves— so for a mile & a half, or more, when I turned, looked back, & saw O what a sight!—the 2 Mountains running in . . . and they, & the mountains in between & behind them covered with illumined Clouds, & so very yellowly & richly lighted up by the Sunbeams stealing down from under the Clouds.—O this does indeed surpass Porlock—O that the Hovels looked comfortable. Sea truly, the roar & the waves & Feeling are of the Sea, but far as my eye can reach, it is all embosomed—& all the mountains separate, how various in their forms. * * * The Day continues glorious—enter Glen Nevish, a broadish Valley with a broad Shallow River, single Trees, Alders, & Sycamores, planted thick without interspace along its Banks—Ben Nevish to my Left, its height entirely lost to me, but its sides are nobly torrentrifted—a belt of ragged Wood athwart it, half way, the 〈apparent〉 ascent—above the woods grey craggs stained with yellow green— 8 great rifts, each no doubt forming tremendous Precipices to look down into—the mountain at the head of this Reach of the Glen shoots out 〈in〉 ridges from a lower wall of mountain turning into gavel ends, & roof-shaped ridges/two narrow Coombes with steep Sides, 〈a very fine gavel end wooded〉 & a steep wall not so high as the sides/at the end of the Coomb a low curve from Ben Nevish slides softly down into the Glen, and incloses the river, and its stony Bed now too big for it & trees or rather tall Bushes/this curve runs slant across the second Gavel where the second reach of the Vale begins—In twilight or mist and Storm I could fancy it a huge Elephant, the four larger Rifts its legs, & its proboscis curving round/ . . . from a lower ridge of mountain, of wild & concave outline . . . there shoots a roof-shaped mountain with a noble gavel end, say rather the front of a Tent—two thirds from the Top downward finely wooded—on each side of it a twisting Gully of water, over . . . each


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gully a rude mass of mountain, that in the first reach of the Glen lower, that on the second far higher than the Tent/this resembling more than aught else two sides of an unequal Triangle, but rounded at the Top—the surface rough & shelvy, tho’ green—ragged too with Trees. The river of Nevish is a poor Likeness of our Greta. I had scarcely written the words when the River improved most surprisingly huge masses of pinky Rock forming its side & narrowing its Channel & lo! as I turn with its Turn an enormous single Rock, higher than the high Banks, in the very middle of the River, filling up one half of the whole channel, leaving 1/4th on each side/(the River is on my left hand)—on the 1/4 th under the opposite further Bank it flows deep & as calm as the pool of a waterfall can do, for two or 3 yards beyond the Rock on that side, seen under Boughs of 〈Birch〉 Trees, arching from the Bank to the Birch Bushes & Heath on the Rock a fine fall/on the other side close under me as I shall pass it the River flows rough & shallow over stones, the Bank naked, but fine young Birch Trees on the Rock; on its side, 2 yards from the Top, all along its whole side.—So it appeared/but as I moved on ten or 20 yards, I found that there were but 3 Trees, 〈2〉 growing out of the cleft & as it seemed one root/& here too I found a break in the Bank, where another stream flows into the Nevish/a large Stream, and the Break so exactly corresponds in size to the rock, that one cannot help thinking, that some dread Torrent at the first bursting forth of this Stream must have shouldered away the opposing Bank, & pushed it in its madness just up the Stream/ I cross this Stream by a Bridge half of rock, half of an Alder Tree, whose one bough curves over. . . . I come to the great Rock/Now I could easily get on it, by the Trees that grow on this Bank & bend over to it, so that the end of their Boughs hang over it—There are 3 Trees on the rock all Birches, & then just where these leave off, three on the Bank, two Birches & one Ash/this occasioned the Delusion/but the Ash is farther from the Stone, a Thing for itself, hangs over a pool of water, in a bason of its own, from rain or flood/Divided by a great Stone from the grand fall of Water, its root and and bason in the same Line with the Head of the Fall/for there are 2 falls, one on each side the Rock/the further broad, this narrow & higher/the huge Stones above this fall, one adhering to the Bank, a middle Stone, & the prolongation of the rock, & the Water of this fall runs in two gutters one each side this middle ridge of Stone/I 〈must〉 get from one to the

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other, & so on the Rock to see the other waterfall, & the black jagged precipitous Wall of its Pool; but lo! behind me a part of a naked serrated Cone of Rock behind that green wooded Gavel or Tent/ smaller far & lower . . . shewing all one side, its apex, & no more, the rest intercepted by the Gavel. The broader fall among the sublimest I have ever seen/it divides itself, I might say, it distinguishes itself into 3 falls, the one nearest the Great rock shoots out & leaves a large Cavern underneath where a man might stand & but for the dashing in under of the other part of the Fall shelter himself from a Storm under the ceiling of Foam—the 2 other parts 〈are divided〉 only at the very head by a tall pink rock, . . . the one nearest the Shoot drives aslant the third which falls down in an opposite direction, and tho’ they touch, preserve their Individuality/ (BL Add. MS 47, 504 ff32–55) * * * September—October 180333 Thursday Morning, 10 o clock, Sept. 29, 1803—with Southey left Greta Hall, thro’ the Turnpike over Calvert’s Bridge thro’ the Wood, by the sweet Housage of Wesco with its Ivy & outhouse, thro’ Threlkeld, up Saddleback, over Blenkarthur having the Horse road a great deal to our Right, to Saddleback Tarn/I had quite forgotten the fearfully sublime Precipice & striding Edge on its farther or Northern . . . Side, and the colours of this little Tarn, . . . blood-crimson, and then Sea Green &c &c—& so go on in Sections, & calm now Calms, now Ruffled Spaces, & no where where more beautiful can you see the breezerace, blowing a rich blue like the Peacocks neck over the Tairn, till where it comes near the blood-crimson, & then it turns into the most beautiful purple/— * * * Friday, Sept. 30, 1803/10. on a ledge on the Side of the rock on the right of this Second pool, as you look up the Stream, & directly above the pool—in high water it would scarcely leave your Soles unwetted, the best view of the whole under part of this Scenery/ /On the left-most


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of the ivy—Swinging a mass of rock, the water gushing out from under, like a furious Gush of blood from a plethoric Artery fighting with the mossy middle buttress of this Sub-bridge, another Stream rushing in the same manner thro’ the lefter arch & one quiet fillet falling adown, without contact, the mossy rock/often intercepted by the Shooting of this & of that Waterfall/—in the center a round Tower of Rock, 50 feet high from the bed of the river, with an Indian Chief’s lofty dancing Coronet of Limes, & Hazels—/to the right of this/a beautiful opening, with the round faery Cauldron below it, whose wall forms the connection between this Turret, & the second Turret, equal in height, & much larger in diameter, & so wreathed as the other/& under this on the right-most the parlours—/& above my head where I stand the Cathedral Seats/The water was so low that I saw the whole Anatomy of the Place, especially those gushing waterfalls, which in full water are hidden by the fall of water over their bridge or cavern roof—/ . . . the Deluge of Stones from Carrock, on the road from Mossdale to Hesket/ /no stones immediately under the mountain, & but few on the left of the Road/but on the right several acres wholly covered with stones of hugest size/ (BL Add. MS 47, 513 ff12–14) * * * October 1803 Mist steaming up from the deep chasms or intervals of the mountains, as from a huge Caldron.—Waterfall, I gazing long & stedfastly, rolled like the segment of a wheel, the black rock gleaming thro’ it—amid the roar a noise as of innumerable Grashoppers, or manufactory of spinning wheels. Distance abstracting motion painted the Waterfall. (BL Add. MS 47, 518 f50v) * * * Oct. 21st. 1803. Friday Morning.—A drisling Rain. Heavy masses of shapeless Vapour upon the mountains (O the perpetual Forms of Borrodale!) yet it is no unbroken Tale of dull Sadness—slanting Pillars travel across the Lake, at long Intervals—the vaporous mass whitens,

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in large Stains of Light—on the 〈Lakeward〉 ridge of that huge arm chair, of Lowdore, fell a gleam of softest Light, that brought out the rich hues of the late Autumn.—The woody Castle Crag between me & Lowdore is a rich Flower-Garden of Colours, the brightest yellows with the deepest Crimsons, and the infinite Shades of Brown & Green, the infinite diversity of which blends the whole—so that the brighter colours seem as colors upon a ground, not colored Things. Little wool-packs of white bright vapour rest on different summits & declivities—the vale is narrowed by the mist & cloud—yet thro’ the wall of mist you can see into a bason of sunny Light in Borrodale—the Birds are singing in the tender Rain, as if it were the Rain of April, & the decaying Foliage were Flowers & Blossoms. The pillar of Smoke from the Chimney rises up in the Mist, & is just distinguishable from it; & the Mountain Forms in the Gorge of Borrodale consubstantiate with the mist & cloud even as the pillared Smoke/a shade deeper, & a determinate Form.—〈Cleared up. the last thin Fleeces on the bathed Fells.〉 * * * Sunday, Oct. 23rd. 1803.—To Grasmere yesterday, I returned today. O Thirlmere!—let me some how or other celebrate the world in thy mirror.—Conceive all possible varieties of Form, Fields, & Trees, and naked or ferny Crags—ravines, behaired with Birches—Cottages, smoking chimneys, dazzling wet places of small rock-precipices— dazzling castle windows in the reflection—all these, within a divine outline in a mirror of 3 miles distinct vision!—and . . . the distance closed in by the Reflection of Raven Crag, which at every bemisting of the mirror by gentle motion became a perfect vast Castle Tower, the corners rounded & pillar’d or fluted—/each corner ending in 〈received into〉 a round pillar, round save that slice off by which it lies flat on 〈& connects〉 the two sides. All this in bright lightest yellow, yellow-green, green, crimson, and orange!—The single Birch Trees hung like Tresses of Sea Weed—the Cliffs like organ pipes!— and when a little Breath of Air spread a delicious Network over the Lake, all these colours seemed then to float on, like the reflections of the rising or setting Sun.— * * *


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Monday, Oct. 24. 1803. I walked with Southey & Hazlitt thro’ Borrodale into Watendlath, & so home to a late dinner. Of course it was to me a mere walk; for I must be alone, if either my Imagination or Heart are to be excited or enriched. Yet even so I worshipped with deep feeling the grand outline & perpetual Forms, that are the guardians of Borrodale, & the presiding Majesty, yea, the very Soul of Keswick—The Birches were in all their Pride of gold & orange—the Lake was very full of Foam, the late great Flood having not yet wholly retired/I thought still more than before that if the Lake had pushed up into Borrodale, as far as the Bowder Stone, & if Borrodale were still better wooded, it would be distinguished from the Trossachs chiefly by its continuity of massiveness—tho’ there is one vast Crag to the left, as you go up Borrodale, complete Trossachs, all the dislocation & multitude of outjuttings & precipices—but this had only the Tale of Wood, no more!—On the whole, & as a whole, it is superior to the Trossachs, the view of the vale of Keswick being so greatly superior to the Banks of Loch Ketterin, & the lovely round Vale of Borrodale with its exquisite combination of nigh & distant Mountains so incomparably finer than the vale & Lake Achry.—I ascended in a wrong place, but it led me to some glorious fantastic rocks—the mitre, the huge pyramid, & Peak Fantastic, with a lower Rock to the Right of it, between which two in a narrow defile I went, having in this Toilsome Climb two most singular & noble views of the Lake & Vale of Keswick.—A whole Flight of small Birds flung themselves down in a gale of wind into Borrodale like a shoot of Stones—each Bird seemed to dart onward by projection, & to descend by its own lifelessness & weight.—What was the name of that most vivid of all vivid green mosses by the side of the falling water, as we clomb down into Watendlath!—that red moss, too and that blood-red Fungus?—The Lake of Watendlath has hitherto always appeared of inferior impressiveness to me/it is so bare, & pondish, & swampy—the mountains at its head would be better in a picture than they look in Nature—for the Forms & Combinations are fine, but they want something or other in colour, & distance to make them Satisfiers—neither do the Crags on each side of us as we go by the River Side till we have passed the Bridge, impress me so deeply as they seem to have done many—but from the Bridge, & all the rest of the way down to Baragh House—O what is there on Earth that can better deserve the name of Divine?—There should be some mark,

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some Cross or Heap of Stones to direct the Traveller to turn off on his Left, 15 or 20 yards thro’ the Coppice, about a 100 yards or so before he comes to the road-view of the Lake of Keswick/20 yards thro’ this open Coppice brings him suddenly to the Edge of a finely wooded Precipice, with Lodore beneath him at a small Distance on his Left, & on his Right the Promontory of Birches on the Lake/the House at the Foot of Lodore, the Bridge, the Road seen in 3 different distances, so very beautiful—the Lake of Keswick—& Bassenthwaite/—the Height from the extreme steepness & direct plumb-down Look in the Lake seems vast—the breezes rush in pencil brushes over it—/you look down on every thing, & every thing spreads in consequence, broad & long & vast!—This is/I have no hesitation in saying it—/the best, every way the best & most impressive View in all the Lake Country— why not in all the Island?—Bowder Stone, the Stone under Dumbarton Rock, & the Bull Stone in the foot of Glenfalloch, the 3 great Stones of the Island/of these Bowder is the least, by far. How could Wordsworth think otherwise?—Go & build up a pile of three, by that Coppice— measure the Strides from the Bridge where the water rushes down a rock in no mean cataract if the Rains should have swoln the River—& the Bridge itself hides a small cataract—from this Bridge measure the Strides to the Place, build the Stone heap, & write a Poem, thus beginning—From the Bridge &c repeat such a Song, of Milton, or Homer—so many Lines I Will must find out, may be distinctly recited during a moderate healthy man’s walk from the Bridge thither—or better perhaps from the other Bridge—so to this Heap of Stones—there turn in—& then describe the Scene.—O surely I might make a noble Poem of all my Youth nay of all my Life—One section on plants & flowers, my passion for them, always deadened by their learned names.—Yet ever to note those that have & may hereafter affect me— (BL Add. MS 47, 518 ff68–72) * * * November 180334 —What justice is there in Garve’s Idea, that a mountain delights us from its position/as a painting lying flat, what is it?—The painter


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comes, & puts it on the Easel/now what is a mountain else but a great flat picture—, Trees, Houses, Crags, Beasts &c placed by Nature on an Easel—It is certainly very just/you see 〈distinctly〉 what on a flat would be seen/& you see Trees, &c that on a flat would hide each other, but now stand, like Spectators in a Theatre/It fills the mind with distinct Images without any painful Effort to acquire them & joins therefore all the requisites of pleasure, Ease, Sufficiency, & Vividness— 2. Mountains cast larger Shadows, & must needs therefore produce grander effects of Light & Shade/& the absolute change of visual Objects produced thereby—I do not see the same things in the Noon that I did in the Morning—/〈Add to this〉 the ever-varying Distances of the distant Objects to you, & to each other. 3. The View of an extensive Plain, all cultivated, from a high mountain, would be merely an amusing object—a curiosity—a map—a picture—〈a model—〉 were it not for the imposingness of the situation from which we view it—the feelings, possibly worked on by the air &c. Hence, the advantage of Sea, & Lake in these Views— they take off the littleness & picturishness—the Camera obscura effect— 4. The effect ought not to be forgotten, that from the distance in mountain Countries being so distinct, you have a continual Inducement to look forward to the distance—whereas in flat Countries you look just before you, or on each side of you, at the turn in the Road, or the Flowers in the Hedge. Now there certainly is an intellectual movement connected with looking forward/a feeling of Hope, a stirring & inquietude of Fancy—. To look down upon, to comprehend, to be above, to look forward to, are all metaphors that shew in the original feeling a resemblance to the moral meaning christened thereafter. 5. Greater liveliness of the perceptions of motion, and Sound— partly from Contrast, partly from the echoingness of the Rocks, partly from the silence. (BL Add. MS 47, 499 ff60–61v) * * *

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November–December 180335 Slow shifting of Raven Crag from behind the green o’er wooded Hill, over which it arose with its naked Precipice & crowned Head/How majestically it glided away! Nov. 29. (BL Add. MS 47, 513 f28v) * * * Tuesday 1/2 past 3. beautiful Sun set—the Sun setting behind Newlands across the foot of the Lake. The Sky cloudless, save that there is a cloud on Skiddaw, one on the highest Mountain in Borrodale, some on Helvellin, and the Sun sets in a glorious Cloud/these Clouds are of various shapes, various Colours—& belong to their mountains, & have nothing to do with the Sky.—N.B. Something metallic, silver playfully & imperfectly gilt, & highly polished; or rather something mother of pearlish, in the Sun gleams upon Ice, thin Ice. (BL Add. MS 47, 518 f90) * * * Sameness in a Waterfall, in the foam Islands of a fiercely boiling Pool at the bottom of the Waterfall, from infinite Change. (BL Add. MS 47, 513 f120) * * * High up the Gill, sublime Lines of simple sublime by Helm Crag centrally fronting/indescribable in idea/the Tune, the Music only can be given—2 Nesses, then a gap, then three mountain steps horizontal — * * * Waterfall heavy & loud within, curtained or windowed by a thin broad Sheet of Glass or flowing Isinglass—so clear & smooth, you might so shut your eyes as not to see it move— * * *


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The two Nesses —the Helm Crag central/Easedale Tarn Rocks ( . . . Steel Fell the expanse to our Right) to the left of Helm Crag Sour Milk Force, Langdale Pikes, Elterwater Quarries & Coniston Fells—/—the foot path so even on the steep breast, of the Mountain, with such a precipice beneath & the tumultuous Brook at the bottom/but as you turn round & come out upon the vale, O my God! the whole white vale, from Steel Fell this way, from the Force on Easedale the River with the Mountain Islanding the half almost of the vale, including Butterlip How, the Church/& o! just in sight close down beneath me that House with dark slates & dingy white walls!—O remember it— The eye—let it be a spectrum in my feverous brain! The connection by Intakes of the smooth bowling Green Vale with the steep Mountain, & of the sides of the mountain with its craggy castle-ruin-like Top/—Road between Walls—the Lake with three walls rising each above the other—the Bridge with 2 arches—/—the smoke a perfect pillar/—the whole River from the Force to the quiet Lake/—On this blessed calming Day—sitting on the very Sheepfold dear William read to me his divine Poem, Michael.—The last day of the year. (BL Add. MS 47, 513 ff50v–52) * * * January–February 180436 Views from Etna & such Heights are sublime/for they are a true Language/crinkle crankle withered dried up lines—are these beautiful/ They are the description of a moonlight scenery by Homer— (BL Add. MS 47, 506 f17v)

From a letter to Robert Southey, 28 March 1804 37 While I was writing, Mottley, a dashing bookseller, a booted, buckskin-breeched Jockey, to whom Stuart gave me a letter of most urgent recommendation (he is their Portsmouth correspondent) called—he is a man of wealth, and influence here, and a knowing Fellow. He took me thro’ the Dock-yards, and I was lucky enough to be present at a

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Heat, i.e. at the welding a huge Faggot of small latten of red hot Iron into the Shafts of the Anchor of a man of war. It was truly sublime— the enormous Blaze, the regular yet complex intertwisted strokes of between 20 and 30 men, with their huge Flail-hammers, the astonishment how they could throw them about, with such seeming wildness without dashing out each other’s brains, and how they saved their eyes amidst the shower of sparks—the Iron dripping like a millwheel from the intense white heat—verily it was an unforgettable scene. The poor men are pitiable slaves—from 4 in the morning they work till 9 at night, and yet are payed less than any other in the yard. They all become old men in the prime of manhood. So do the ropemakers who yet only work from 7 till noon. The rope-room is a very low broad room, of a length far too great for the eye to see from one end to the other—it gave me a grand idea of an Hindustan Cavern. A fire machine has been lately introduced, after a rebellion among the men, and but for the same deplorable delusion two thirds of that labour might be done by machines, which now eats up the rope-men like a Giant in a fairy tale. (CLU, 1: 318) From his notebook April 1804 38 Saturday late Evening, about 8 clock—I was gazing to the Starboard on the Clouds/& was musing that in this Bay of Biscay I had observed that the great masses on the Horizon split themselves into more Heads, & those more deeply cleft, chimneys, obelisks, Turrets, & chiefly those larger loftier forms that have the Peak of the Mountain with the breadth & Proportions of the Tower. Yesterday I saw a strong resemblance of the most striking five Segments of Glencoe/the right hand side as you go to Ballachulish/& this Evening exactly over the Convoy, with it beginning & with it ending, I saw a delightful mockery of a Fleet, masts & Sails & Pennants/While I was thus musing, I turned to the Larboard side of the Vessel, & my Heart did indeed leap up/—Was it the Placefell Bank of Ulswater?—Or the Benlomond side of Loch Lomond!?—Or Lochness?—or rather that which I saw in late eve at Letter Findlay? Or was it not a new Mountain with a new


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Lake/only so completely did the Sea between our Ship & it become a Lake, and that black substantial Squall Cloud the Mountain that formed & rose up from its banks, that it would be a positively falsehood to say, it was like. It was utterly indistinguishable/I gazed & gazed again, & peered & scrutinized, & could find no distinction/a long level or nearly level ridge of low Mountain, then gradually rising up into a broad Lambda with the top somewhat more rounded, & sinking down into a similar but not so far stretching a mountain ridge/—exactly both in outline & in general surface the same as to distinctness, as the opposite Shore of a Lake a mile & a half or two miles broad has, in late evening, when the air is now drizzly, & now cleared up by the uncertain winds—as distinct if not more so/& the distinctness varying in the same way/especially in the outline, which was now sharp, & defined, & O! for a star to rest upon it, a bright large Star/& now light flying mantles of Clouds waving upon it, or snatched off from it/—Hoist out the boat/I looked, till I half saw a Light on the Hill—In the mean time the Captain paced up & down uneasy, & took in the Sails/he feared that it had a Tempest within it/ but the Squallcloud 〈has〉 dropt our wind, & . . . falls in large rain/it is not past/but our Stern is bethumpt with a rude Swell every 2 or 3 minutes/& the Mate is whistling aloft for a wind.—What a sweet Image to precede a Ship-wreck!— (BL Add. MS 47,506 ff43v–46v) * * * Saturday, Ap.21st went again on Shore; walked up to the furthermost Signal House, the Summit of that 3rd & last Segment of the Mountain Ridge, which looks over the blue Sea-lake to Africa—The Mountains around me did not any where arrange themselves strikingly, and few of their shapes were striking—one great pyramidal Summit far above the rest on the Coast of Spain, & an uncouth form, an 〈old〉 Giant’s Head & Shoulders, looking in upon us from Africa far inland were the most impressive; but the sea was so blue, calm, & sunny, so majestic a Lake where it is enshored by Mountains, & where it is not, having its indefiniteness the more felt from those huge Mountain Boundaries, which yet by their greatness prepared the mind for the sublimity of unbounded Ocean/altogether it reposed in the brightness &

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quietness of the noon, majestic, for it was great with an inseparable character of Unity; . . . on my right & immediately with and around me—white Stone above stone, an irregular heap of Marble Rocks, with flowers growing out of their Holes & Fissures, & palmetoes every where, uncouth thick Stem & leaves of 20 rushes growing together in one fan, joining all a 4 th from the bottom, & each having a minor segment, a hand with long tapering fingers you cannot but think of—& a 100 of these hands on each plant/—beyond these an old Moorish Tower, & then Galleries & Halls cut out by human Labor out of this dense hard, with enormous Cannon the apertures for which no eye could distinguish from the Sea or the Sands below them from the nesting Holes of sea Fowl/—On the North side aside these one absolutely perpendicular precipice the absolute height of the Rock at its highest, a perp. Precipice of 1450 feet/the whole Eastern side an unmanageable Mass, of stones & weeds—save in one place a perpend. Precipice of Stone slants suddenly off in a swelling Slope of Sand, like the Screes of Wastwater— on the other side of this rock 5000 men in arms, & not less than 10000 other inhabitants—on this sixty or 70 Apes!—What a multitude & 〈almost〉 discordant complexity of associations—the Pillars of Hercules, Calpe, Abbila, the Realms of Massinissa, Jugurtha, Syphax—Spain, Gibraltar, the Dey of Algiers, dusky Moor & black African/ and O! how quiet it is to the Eye, & to the Heart when it will entrance itself in the present vision, & know nothing, feel nothing, but the Abiding Things of Nature, great, calm, majestic, and one. (BL Add. MS 47, 512 ff12v–15) * * * Stars—their natural Sublimity/whether indeed one or only a Lanthorn on the mast.—And so of all the other objects of nature/ their sublimity to the man of nature, utterly ignorant of scientific Ontology.—Seen by all at once: and drawing all at once to see— &c— (BL Add. MS 47, 512 f29v) * * *


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January 180539 This Evening (Tuesday, Jan. 15th, 1805) was the most perfect & the brightest Halo . . . circling the roundest and brightest Halo I ever beheld—so bright was the Halo, so compact, so entire a circle, that it gave the whole of its area, the moon itself included, the appearance of a solid opake body—an enormous Planet/& as if 〈this Planet had〉 . . . a 〈circular belt-like〉 Trough . . . of some light-reflecting Fluid for its rim, 〈(that is the Halo)〉 and its centre, i.e. the Moon a small circular bason of some fluid that still more copiously reflected, or that ever emitted light 〈and as if〉 the interspatial area . . . were somewhat equally substantial, but sullen/ . . . —thence I have found occasion to meditate on the nature of the sense of magnitude; . . . its absolute dependence on the idea of Substance; the consequent difference between magnitude and Spaciousness; the dependence of the idea of substance on double-touch/& thence to evolve all our feelings & ideas of magnitude, magnitudinal sublimity, &c from a scale of our own bodies—so why if form constituted the sense, i.e. if it were pure vision, as a perceptive sense abstracted from feeling in the organ of vision, why do I seek for mountains when in the flattest countries the Clouds present so many so much more romantic & spacious forms, & the coal-fire so many so much more varied & lovely forms?—And whence arises the pleasure from musing on the latter/do I not more or less consciously fancy myself a Lilliputian, to whom these would be mountains—& so by this factitious scale make them mountains, my pleasure being consequently playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics or picture-writing—“phantoms of Sublimity” which I continue to know to be phantoms? —And form itself, is . . . not its main agency exerted in individualizing the Thing, making it this, & that, & thereby facilitating this shadowy measurement of it by the scale of my own body? Yon long not unvaried ridge of Hills that runs out of sight each way, it is spacious, & the pleasure derivable from it is from its running, its motion, its assimilation to action/& here the scale is taken from my Life, & Soul—not from my body. Space 〈is one of〉 the Hebrew names for God/& it is the most perfect image of Soul, pure Soul—being indeed to us nothing but unresisted action. —Wherever action is resisted, limitation begins— & limitation is the first constituent of body—the more omnipresent it is in a given space, the more . . . that is body or matter//but thus all

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body necessarily presupposes soul, inasmuch as all resistance presupposes action/Magnitude therefore is the intimate union blending, the most perfect union, thro’ its whole sphere, in every minutest part of it, of action and resistance to action/it is spaciousness in which Space is filled up; & feelingly stopped 〈as we well say—i.e. transmitted by incorporate accession, not destroyed〉 . . . In all limited things, that is, in all forms, it is at least fantastically stopped/and thus from the positive grasp to the mountain, from the mountain to the Cloud, from the Cloud to the blue depth of Sky, that which, as on the top of Etna in a serene atmosphere, seems to go behind the Sun, all is gradation, that precludes division indeed, but not distinction/& he who endeavors to overturn a distinction by shewing that there is no chasm, by the old sophism of the Cumulus, or the horse’s tail, is still diseased with the . . . Formication, the (what is the nosological name of it?—the hairs or dancing infinites of black specks seeming always to be before the eye) the Araneosis of corpuscular materialism. S.T.C. (BL Add. MS 47,518 ff128–129v) * * * October 180540 The view . . . on the Path from Taormina to the Theatre, & from the Theatre itself, surpasses perhaps all I have ever seen/the sea with its lovely Twin Bays, the well-wooded cultivated Shore, the sudden fantastic savage Rise & Upland/ — The high rock-hill that so fronted us with its proud Cone as we were entering Giardini/ . . . Taormina, gray roofs & white fronts on its breast/Savage scenery, of various, leaping Outline, & cut-glass Surface/and the Clouds, & the Crater of Etna rising above/ On the Theatre you see on one side all Etna, & the Twin Bays, Sicily Taormina, &c/and on your right the full Sea yet so be-mountained as to form/a huge Harbour, in appearance—so compleatly is it landlocked except . . . along the sea side, where all is so Montserratish!— Then passing immediately under Taormina a perpend. Precip. by the Church & Houses appearing to rim its edge/rim/ An immensely steep steep road with a precipice on my right Hand, as I ascended (out of the Lettiga) & took my Adieu of Giardini &


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Taormina on its Top. On the beginning of the Descent a new Scene tho’ of the same character/to the Left a precip. finely bushed 〈with Cactus Opuntium〉 . . . & handsome Buildings peeping above/likewise to the Right the Sea with two Bays, but with one ruinous up-piled Island Rock-Hill created with a square Building, not above a stone-throw from the Shore—& about a stone-throw further a high savage Promontory of various outline with Buildings on it, running far into the Sea/The Island Rock has another naked Islet Rocklet at its Summit—a few yards— * * * December 1805 Sunday, 15 Dec. 1805—Naples/view of Vesuvius in the Hail mist/ Torre Greca bright amid darkness, & the Mountains above it flashing here & there from their snows; but Vesuvius—it had not thinned as I have seen at Keswick (ah me!) but the air had so consolidated with the massy Cloud Curtain, that it appeared like a Mountain in basso relievo or an interminable wall of some Pantheon/ (BL Add. MS 47, 513 ff87v–104v)


3 ‘A grand feeling of the unimaginable’:1 Transcendence in Literature and the Visual Arts

The central focus of Coleridge’s writings on sublimity in literature and the visual arts is the production or expression of a feeling of the inexpressible which he associates with a liberating sense of elevation, excitement, and transcendence of the everyday, as well as with an intuitive insight into the unity of being which he sees as underlying the diversity of appearances—an insight which can never be given concrete or literal expression, but which the greatest works of art produce by evoking or highlighting the very inadequacy of words or concrete images. Literature and art, that is, ought in Coleridge’s view to stimulate a ‘strong working of the mind’ in their reader or observer—an activity of intellect and imagination which, like the mind of the ideal philosopher, cannot remain satisfied with simple images or conclusions, but always reaches through or beyond each successive interpretation, both sustained by and itself producing a sense of the sublimity of ultimate truths, or of the ideas to which the work of art directs us.2 Imagination (which, in Coleridge’s as in Schelling’s opinion, can go further than mere intellect in unifying the spiritual with the material, the conscious with the unconscious, the self with the other, and more generally in recreating or envisaging the original unity underlying the conflicts and divisions of experience)3 is thus fundamental to creating that sense of an inexpressible unity or ungraspable essence of reality which both underlies and itself arises from the achievement of sublimity in literature and the visual arts. This substitution of ‘a grand feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image’,4 indeed, is often specifically connected by Coleridge with the Schellingian ideal of a unification of conscious 81

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and unconscious, or of the idea with the image, or in other words with Schiller’s concept of attaching a feeling of necessity to expressions of ideas or of subjective feelings.5 The individual object or character depicted by the work of art, Coleridge argues, should—as Biographia famously puts it—thus become ‘representative’ of more general truths, while the subjective feeling of the author should be given a seemingly external life through the projective and objectizing power of his imagination.6 What makes such achievements sublime, in Coleridge’s view, is however always their expression of a truth which transcends the merely particular, or in other words of a universality which goes beyond the mere evocation of typical qualities of experience, character, or landscape. The achievement of this sense of universality—or the stimulation of an activity in the reader’s or observer’s mind which reaches beyond the mere surface appearances of the work of art and of the world which it depicts—however, is often connected by Coleridge with a certain sublimity in the author himself which enables him to transcend his merely individual circumstances or existence and give expression to the universal, the permanent, and the infinite. Shakespeare is for Coleridge the pre-eminent example of such sublime genius; and his ability to achieve the imaginative ‘fusion . . . [of] many into one’ (CN, 2: 3290) is combined (Coleridge argues) with a unique ability himself to become ‘all things, . . . [while] for ever remaining himself’ (CN, 3:4117), so that the pattern of unifying self and other or universal and particular in the work of art is paralleled by the author’s own capacity to be at once himself and the diverse characters which his imagination evokes or inhabits. This transference of the sublimity which Coleridge describes from the work of art itself to the ‘Protean’ or ‘myriad-minded’ bard he sees as the leading exemplar of creative genius is paralleled by his description of Milton, whose ‘sublimest’ works are ‘the revelations of [his] own mind, producing itself and evoking its own greatness’, yet doing so through (for example) the objectification of human passions in the personae of Paradise Lost.7 Hence a certain transcendence of the personal in the author or artist, by which the unification of image and idea, or objective and subjective is achieved in his works, is again Coleridge’s central focus. Some of the passages collected below (for example, his celebrations, written in 1794, of Schiller’s Die Räuber)8 focus on different forms of the sublime, detached both from his later ideals of transcendent

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unity and from any Kantian emphasis on a sense of one’s unity with incomprehensibly vast or powerful forces, being more closely related to Burke’s theory of the dependence of sublime feeling on the perception of a danger or a sense of terror from which one is secure. 9 The continuity with his later Kantian and Schellingian theories of sublimity in works of art (and in the artist or creative imagination itself) may perhaps lie in the fact that security from threatening forces is also described by Kant as generating a sense of one’s own superiority to any external force or danger, and hence also of one’s unity with a power which transcends the merely physical world.10 This unity with higher, spiritual forms of being is indeed the idea to which Coleridge’s descriptions of sublimity in literature and the visual arts most often gesture, and is (for example) no less prominent in his description of how Raphael’s Galatea perfectly reconciles the ‘two conflicting principles of the FREE LIFE, and . . . the confining FORM’, and almost ‘volatilize[s]’ the physical images through the ‘interpenetration and electrical flashes’ of the spiritual or ideal forces (SWF, 1: 374). Hence, as noted earlier, we cannot separate such sublimity from the unifying imagination, which never allows us to rest in the concrete or the superficial, but always directs us towards the transcendent ideas which it incorporates.

i.

General

From the 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton11 Coleridge begged first to be permitted to say that in his view poetry was no proper antithesis to prose. In truth, the correct opposite of poetry was science, and the correct antithesis of prose was metre. The immediate object of science was the communication and acquirement of truth; the immediate object of poetry is the communication of pleasure. Yet it would be acknowledged by all that when they read Newton’s Principia or Locke’s works the immediate object was not pleasure, but to obtain truth which might hereafter enlighten the pursuit of pleasure, or something nobler, for which we have not a name, but distinct altogether from what in the ordinary language of common sense can be brought under the

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name of pleasure, but which was expressed in the sacred writings as a peace that passeth all understanding, the delight of which could never be known but by experience, which, consisting of no difference of parts, but being in itself entire, must be altogether unknown, or fully known. (SC, 2: 75–6) * * * The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected; the result being what the poet wishes to impress, namely, the substitution of a sublime feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image. I have sometimes thought that the passage just read might be quoted as exhibiting the narrow limit of painting, as compared with the boundless power of poetry: painting cannot go beyond a certain point; poetry rejects all control, all confinement. Yet we know that sundry painters have attempted pictures of the meeting between Satan and Death at the gates of Hell; and how was Death represented? Not as Milton has described him, but by the most defined thing that can be imagined—a skeleton, the dryest and hardest image that it is possible to discover; which, instead of keeping the mind in a state of activity, reduces it to the merest passivity,—an image, compared with which a square, a triangle, or any other mathematical figure, is a luxuriant fancy. (C17thC, 594) * * * I have heard it said that an undevout astronomer is mad. In the strict sense of the word, every being capable of understanding must be mad, who remains, as it were, fixed in the ground on which he treads—who, gifted with the divine faculties of indefinite hope and fear, born with them, yet settles his faith upon that, in which neither hope nor fear has any proper field for display. Much more truly, however, might it be said that, an undevout poet is mad: in the strict sense of the word, an undevout poet is an impossibility.


I have heard of verse-makers (poets they are not, and never can be) who introduced into their works such questions as these:—Whether the world was made of atoms?—Whether there is a universe?— Whether there is a governing mind that supports it? As I have said, verse-makers are not poets: the poet is one who carries the simplicity of childhood into the powers of manhood; who, with a soul unsubdued by habit, unshackled by custom, contemplates all things with the freshness and the wonder of a child; and, connecting with it the inquisitive powers of riper years, adds, as far as he can find knowledge, admiration; and, where knowledge no longer permits admiration, gladly sinks back again into the childlike feeling of devout wonder. (Ashe, 104–5)

From The Friend (1812)12 But how shall I avert the scorn of those critics who laugh at the oldness of my topics, evil and good, necessity and arbitrament, immortality and the ultimate aim? By what shall I regain their favor? My themes must be new, a French constitution; a balloon; a change of ministry; a fresh batch of kings on the Continent, or of peers in our happier island; or who had the best of it two parliamentary gladiators, and whose speech, on the subject of Europe bleeding at a thousand wounds, or our own country struggling for herself and all human nature, was cheered by the greatest number of “laughs,” “loud laughs,” and “very loud laughs:”—(which, carefully marked by italics, form most conspicuous and strange parentheses in the newspaper reports.) Or if I must be philosophical, the last chemical discoveries,—provided I do not trouble my reader with the principle which gives them their highest interest, and the character of intellectual grandeur to the discoverer; or the last shower of stones, and that they were supposed, by certain philosophers, to have been projected from some volcano in the moon,—care being taken not to add any of the cramp reasons for this opinion! Something new, however, it must be, quite new and quite out of themselves! for whatever is within them, whatever is deep within them, must be as old as the first dawn of human reason. But to find no contradiction

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in the union of old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of days with feelings as fresh, as if they then sprang forth at his own fiat— this characterizes the minds that feel the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it! To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years has rendered familiar, With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman ———— this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. And so to represent familiar objects as to awaken the minds of others to a like freshness of sensation concerning them—that constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, health—to the same modest questioning of a selfdiscovered and intelligent ignorance, which, like the deep and massy foundations of a Roman bridge, forms half of the whole structure— (prudens interrogatio dimidium scientiæ, says Lord Bacon)—this is the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation. Who has not, a thousand times, seen it snow upon water? Who has not seen it with a new feeling, since he has read Burns’s comparison of sensual pleasure, To snow that falls upon a river, A moment white—then gone forever! In philosophy equally, as in poetry, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues the stalest and most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. Extremes meet;—a proverb, by the by, to collect and explain all the instances and exemplifications of which, would constitute and exhaust all philosophy. Truths, of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, are too often considered as so true that they lose all the powers of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors. (Shedd, 2: 103–5)


From the 1818 Lectures on European Literature 13 The Greek art is beautiful. When I enter a Greek church, my eye is charmed, and my mind elated; I feel exalted, and proud that I am a man. But the Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and with awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible impression left is, ‘that I am nothing!’ This religion, while it tended to soften the manners of the Northern tribes, was at the same time highly congenial to their nature. The Goths are free from the stain of hero worship. Gazing on their rugged mountains, surrounded by impassable forests, accustomed to gloomy seasons, they lived in the bosom of nature, and worshipped an invisible and unknown deity. Firm in his faith, domestic in his habits, the life of the Goth was simple and dignified, yet tender and affectionate. (MC, 11–12)

From the 1818–19 Lectures on the History of Philosophy14 . . . we feel therefore that our being is nobler than its senses and the man of genius devotes himself to produce by all other means whether a Statesman a poet a painter a Statuary or a man of Science this same sort of a something which the mind can know but which it cannot understand of which understanding can be no more than the symbol and is only excellent as being the symbol—it is this same spirit which still craving for something higher than what could be imagined in form this value of the images of form as far as they make us forget ourselves and become mere words unnoticed in that which they convey which works in all men . . . more or less and which assuredly in the higher classes of Society in Greece and Rome did that which their own humble feelings and their own solace and affections did for the lower class of mankind—prepare them to be more and more dissatisfied with religion which presented nothing but forms the symbols of which were to be found either in crude phylological speculations—our moral vices still led them to look first to a purer ideal with a desire of connecting with it which is equally taught by Plato—reality and which

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Plato himself or at least Socrates told us could only be done by the Realizer by him who was the fountain of all and who in the substance superceded the Shadow—I mean the Christian religion— (Lects 1818–19, 2: 692)

From the Table Talk July 25 1832 Could you ever discover any thing sublime, in our sense of the term, in the classic Greek literature? I never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth. (TT, 177–8) * * *

September 4 1833 I HAVE already told you that in my opinion the destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now left for an epic poem of the highest kind. Yet, with all its great capabilities, it has this one grand defect— that, whereas a poem, to be epic, must have a personal interest,— in the destruction of Jerusalem no genius or skill could possibly preserve the interest for the hero from being merged in the interest for the event. The fact is, the event itself is too sublime and overwhelming. (TT, 273)

ii.

Individual authors and texts

Aeschylus From the Table Talk, July 1 1833 When I was a boy, I was fondest of Æschylus; in youth and middle age I preferred Euripides; now in my declining years I admire Sophocles.


I can now at length see that Sophocles is the most perfect. Yet he never rises to the sublime simplicity of Æschylus—simplicity of design, I mean—nor diffuses himself in the passionate outpourings of Euripides. (TT, 244) The Bible From the 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton15 When I read the song of Deborah, I never think that she is a poet, although I think the song itself a sublime poem: it is as simple a dithyrambic production as exists in any language; but it is the proper and characteristic effusion of a woman highly elevated by triumph, by the natural hatred of oppressors, and resulting from a bitter sense of wrong: it is a song of exultation on deliverance from these evils, a deliverance accomplished by herself. When she exclaims, “The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel, until that I, Deborah, arose, that I arose a mother in Israel,” it is poetry in the highest sense: we have no reason, however, to suppose that if she had not been agitated by passion, and animated by victory, she would have been able so to express herself; or that if she had been placed in different circumstances, she would have used such language of truth and passion. (Ashe, 89–90)

From his marginalia on the Bible, Psalms 50 (c. 1826–29) 16 What can Greece or Rome present, worthy to be compared with the 50th Psalm, either in sublimity of the Imagery or in moral elevation? (CM, 1: 430)

From the Table Talk May 9 183017 Think of the sublimity, I should rather say the profundity, of that passage in Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.” I know nothing like it. (TT, 66)

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Chatterton From ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ (1790–1834)18 Thee, Chatterton! these unblest stones protect From want, and the bleak freezings of neglect. Too long before the vexing Storm-blast driven Here hast thou found repose! beneath this sod! Thou! O vain word! thou dwell’st not with the clod! Amid the shining Host of the Forgiven Thou at the throne of mercy and thy God The triumph of redeeming Love dost hymn (Believe it, O my Soul!) to harps of Seraphim. Yet oft, perforce (’tis suffering Nature’s call), I weep that heaven-born Genius so should fall; And oft, in Fancy’s saddest hour, my soul Averted shudders at the poison’d bowl. Now groans my sickening heart, as still I view Thy corse of livid hue; Now Indignation checks the feeble sigh, Or flashes through the tear that glistens in mine eye! Is this the land of song-ennobled line? Is this the land, where Genius ne’er in vain Pour’d forth his lofty strain? Ah me! yet Spenser, gentlest bard divine, Beneath chill Disappointment’s shade, His weary limbs in lonely anguish lay’d. And o’er her darling dead Pity hopeless hung her head, While ‘mid the pelting of that merciless storm,’ Sunk to the cold earth Otway’s famish’d form! Sublime of thought, and confident of fame, From vales where Avon winds the Minstrel came. Light-hearted youth! aye, as he hastes along, He meditates the future song, How dauntless Ælla fray’d the Dacyan foe; And while the numbers flowing strong In eddies whirl, in surges throng,


Exulting in the spirits’ genial throe In tides of power his life-blood seems to flow . . . O spirit blest! Whether the Eternal’s throne around, Amidst the blaze of Seraphim, Thou pourest forth the grateful hymn, Or soaring thro’ the blest domain Enrapturest Angels with thy strain,— Grant me, like thee, the lyre to sound, Like thee with fire divine to glow;— But ah! when rage the waves of woe, Grant me with firmer breast to meet their hate, And soar beyond the storm with upright eye elate! Ye woods! that wave o’er Avon’s rocky steep, To Fancy’s ear sweet is your murmuring deep! For here she loves the cypress wreath to weave; Watching with wistful eye, the saddening tints of eve. Here, far from men, amid this pathless grove, In solemn thought the Minstrel wont to rove, Like star-beam on the slow sequester’d tide Lone-glittering, through the high tree branching wide. And here, in Inspiration’s eager hour, When most the big soul feels the mastering power, These wilds, these caverns roaming o’er, Round which the screaming sea-gulls soar, With wild unequal steps he pass’d along, Oft pouring on the winds a broken song: Anon, upon some rough rock’s fearful brow Would pause abrupt—and gaze upon the waves below. Poor Chatterton! he sorrows for thy fate Who would have prais’d and lov’d thee, ere too late. Poor Chatterton! farewell! of darkest hues This chaplet cast I on thy unshaped tomb; But dare no longer on the sad theme muse, Lest kindred woes persuade a kindred doom: For oh! big gall-drops, shook from Folly’s wing, Have blacken’d the fair promise of my spring;

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And the stern Fate transpierc’d with viewless dart The last pale Hope that shiver’d at my heart! Hence, gloomy thoughts! no more my soul shall dwell On joys that were! no more endure to weigh The shame and anguish of the evil day, Wisely forgetful! O’er the ocean swell Sublime of Hope I seek the cottag’d dell Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray; And, dancing to the moon-light roundelay, The wizard Passions weave an holy spell! O Chatterton! that thou wert yet alive! Sure thou would’st spread the canvass to the gale, And love with us the tinkling team to drive O’er peaceful Freedom’s undivided dale; And we, at sober eve, would round thee throng, Would hang, enraptur’d, on thy stately song, And greet with smiles the young-eyed Poesy All deftly mask’d as hoar Antiquity. Alas, vain Phantasies! the fleeting brood Of Woe self-solac’d in her dreamy mood! Yet will I love to follow the sweet dream, Where Susquehannah pours his untamed stream; And on some hill, whose forest-frowning side Waves o’er the murmurs of his calmer tide, Will raise a solemn Cenotaph to thee, Sweet Harper of time-shrouded Minstrelsy! And there, sooth’d sadly by the dirgeful wind, Muse on the sore ills I had left behind. (CPW, 1: 125–31)

On his own poetry From a letter to an unknown correspondent, November 181919 In a copy of verses entitled “A Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouny” I described myself under the influence of strong devotional feelings gazing on the Mountain till as if it had been a


Shape emanating from and sensibly representing her own essence my soul had become diffused thro’ “the mighty Vision,” and there As in her natural Form, swelled vast to Heaven. Mr. Wordsworth, I remember, censured the passage as strained and unnatural, and condemned the Hymn in toto (which nevertheless I ventured to publish in the “Sibylline Leaves”) as a specimen of the Mock Sublime. It may be so for others; but it is impossible that I should find it myself unnatural, being conscious that it was the image and utterance of Thoughts and Emotions in which there was no Mockery. Yet on the other hand I could readily believe that the mood and Habit of mind out of which the Hymn rose, that differs from Milton’s and Thomson’s and from the Psalms, the source of all three, in the Author’s addressing himself to individual objects actually present to his Senses, while his great Predecessors apostrophize classes of things, presented by the memory and generalized by the Understanding—I can readily believe, I say, that in this there may be too much of what the learned Med’ciners call the Idiosyncratic for true Poetry. For from my very childhood I have been accustomed to abstract and as it were unrealize whatever of more than common interest my eyes dwelt on; and then by a sort of transference and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the Object—and I have often thought, within the last five or six years, that if ever I should feel once again the genial warmth and stir of the poetic impulse, and referred to my own experiences, I should venture on a yet stranger and wilder Allegory than of yore—that I should allegorize myself, as a rock with it’s summit just raised above the surface of some Bay or Strait in the Arctic Sea “while yet the stern and solitary Night Brook’d no alternate Sway”—all around me fixed and firm me-thought as my own Substance, and near me lofty Masses, that might have seemed to “hold the moon and stars in fee,” and often in such wild play with meteoric lights, or with the Shine from above which they made rebound in sparkles or disband in off-shoots and splinters and iridescent needleshafts of keenest Glitter, that it was a pride and a place of Healing to lie, as in an Apostle’s Shadow, within the Eclipse and deep substance-seeming Gloom of “these dread Ambassadors from Earth to Heaven, Great Hierarchs” and tho’ obscured yet to think myself obscured by consubstantial Forms, based in the same Foundation as my own. I grieved not to serve

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them—yea, lovingly and with gladsomeness I abased myself in their presence: for they are, my Brothers, I said, and the Mastery is their’s by right of elder birth and by right of the mightier strivings of the hidden Fire that uplifted them above me— (CLE, 1: 261–2) Milton From a School Exercise, 179020 To the Greek Poets Milton owed his boundless harmony, and from them he learnt to equal or excell his great instructors: nor did his sublime genius boast less originality, because he had been early taught “to read and to admire the Chian Bard”. And equal excellencies might have been attained in different walks of Genius from the variety of literature lost—from those ample sources, which Virgil and Horace so largely and so happily used, Boileau and Pope might have soared yet more high, and this age have boasted its illustrious imitators of Authors now unknown. (SWF, 1: 8–9)

From the 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton21 MR. COLERIDGE This gentleman, on Monday last, drew the attention of his little intellectual audience to M ILTON, whom he called the first poet of Christianity. . . . He described the SUBLIME in Milton, and read some beautiful passages, accompanied by strictures on what was indispensable to the true sublime; and these qualities he illustrated by placing in contrast some striking instances of the false sublime. . . . He selected an instance of what was called the sublime, in DARWIN, who imagined the creation of the universe to have taken place in a moment, by the explosion of a mass of matter in the womb, or centre of space. In one and the same instant of time, suns and planets shot into systems in every direction, and filled and spangled the illimitable void! He asserted this to be an intolerable degradation—referring, as it were, all the beauty and harmony of nature to something like the


bursting of a barrel of gunpowder! that spit its combustible materials into a pock-freckled creation! He described the sublime as contradistinguished from the beautiful. Beauty consisted in the relation of parts to the whole. The sublime was an image of which you neither see the wholeness, nor the parts. Here the lecturer read Milton’s description of the form of Satan, floating in the sea, as an instance of the true sublime; and described the image impressed on the mind, in language and figure so fugitive and evanescent, that he became the poet he described—hurrying his thoughts over our minds so as only just to enable us to see that they were, ere they were not. We had glimpses of them, but could not, and would not grasp them. (Lects 1808–19, 1: 401–2)

From his notes on Paradise Lost (c. 1818)22 Sublimity is the pre-eminent characteristic of the Paradise Lost. It is not an arithmetical sublime like Klopstock’s, whose rule always is to treat what we might think large as contemptibly small. Klopstock mistakes bigness for greatness. There is a greatness arising from images of effort and daring, and also from those of moral endurance; in Milton both are united. The fallen angels are human passions, invested with a dramatic reality. The apostrophe to light at the commencement of the third book is particularly beautiful as an intermediate link between Hell and Heaven; and observe, how the second and third book support the subjective character of the poem. In all modern poetry in Christendom there is an under consciousness of a sinful nature, a fleeting away of external things, the mind or subject greater than the object, the reflective character predominant. In the Paradise Lost the sublimest parts are the revelations of Milton’s own mind, producing itself and evolving its own greatness; and this is so truly so, that when that which is merely entertaining for its objective beauty is introduced, it at first seems a discord. . . . Milton is not a picturesque, but a musical, poet; although he has this merit, that the object chosen by him for any particular foreground always remains prominent to the end, enriched, but not encumbered, by the opulence of descriptive details furnished by an

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exhaustless imagination. I wish the Paradise Lost were more carefully read and studied than I can see any ground for believing it is, especially those parts which, from the habit of always looking for a story in poetry, are scarcely read at all,—as for example, Adam’s vision of future events in the 11th and 12th books. No one can rise from the perusal of this immortal poem without a deep sense of the grandeur and the purity of Milton’s soul, or without feeling how susceptible of domestic enjoyments he really was, notwithstanding the discomforts which actually resulted from an apparently unhappy choice in marriage. He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendent ideal. (C17thC, 577–9) Schiller From a letter to Robert Southey, November 179423 ’Tis past one o’clock in the morning. I sat down at twelve o’clock to read the “Robbers” of Schiller. I had read, chill and trembling, when I came to the part where the Moor fixes a pistol over the robbers who are asleep. I could read no more. My God, Southey, who is this Schiller, this convulser of the heart? Did he write his tragedy amid the yelling of fiends? I should not like to be able to describe such characters. I tremble like an aspen leaf. Upon my soul, I write to you because I am frightened. I had better go to bed. Why have we ever called Milton sublime? that Count de Moor horrible wielder of heartwithering virtues? Satan is scarcely qualified to attend his execution as gallows chaplain. (CLE, 1: 96–7)

‘To the Author of “The Robbers”’ (?1794)24 SCHILLER! that hour I would have wish’d to die. If thro’ the shuddering midnight I had sent From the dark dungeon of the Tower time-rent That fearful voice, a famish’d Father’s cry—


Lest in some after moment aught more mean Might stamp me mortal! A triumphant shout Black Horror scream’d, and all her goblin rout Diminish’d shrunk from the more withering scene! Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity! Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood Wandering at eve with finely-frenzied eye Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood! Awhile with mute awe gazing I would brood: Then weep aloud in a wild ecstasy! (CPW, 1: 72–3)

From the Table Talk, February 16, 1833 The young men in Germany and England who admire Lord Byron, prefer Goethe to Schiller; but you may depend upon it, Goethe does not, nor ever will, command the common mind of the people of Germany as Schiller does. Schiller had two legitimate phases in his intellectual character:—the first as author of the Robbers—a piece which must not be considered with reference to Shakspeare, but as a work of the mere material sublime, and in that line it is undoubtedly very powerful indeed. It is quite genuine, and deeply imbued with Schiller’s own soul. After this he outgrew the composition of such plays as the Robbers, and at once took his true and only rightful stand in the grand historical drama—the Wallenstein;—not the intense drama of passion,—he was not master of that—but the diffused drama of history, in which alone he had ample scope for his varied powers. The Wallenstein is the greatest of his works; it is not unlike Shakspeare’s historical plays—a species by itself. You may take up any scene, and it will please you by itself; just as you may in Don Quixote, which you read through once or twice only, but which you read in repeatedly. (TT, 197–8) Shakespeare From his notebook, 1808–11 25 There are men who can write most eloquently, and passages of deepest pathos & even Sublimity, on circumstances personal & deeply exciting

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their own passions; but not therefore poets—Mothers—Deborah’s Song—Nature is the Poet here—but to become by power of Imagination another Thing—Proteus, a river, a lion, yet still the God felt to be there/—Then his thinking faculty & thereby perfect abstraction from himself—he writes exactly as if of an other planet, or as describing the movement of two Butterflies— (BL Add. MS 47, 523 f5v–6) * * * Merciful Wonder-making Heaven! What a man was this Shakespear! I know no better epithet than that given by a Greek Monk of the lower Empire to some other Monk—µυριΟνΟυς, myriad-minded.— (BL Add. MS 47, 512 f123v) * * * In the preceding Lecture we have examined with what armour cloathed & with what titles authorized Shakespere came forward, as a poet, to demand the throne of Fame, as the dramatic poet of England; we have now to observe . . . and retrace the excellencies which compelled even his Contemporaries to seat him on that Throne, altho’ there were Giants in those days, contending for the same honor—hereafter we shall endeavor to make out the title of the English Drama, as created by & existing in Shakespere, & its right to the Supremacy of Dramatic Excellence, in general.— . . . I have endeavored to prove that he had shewn himself a poet, previously to his appearance, . . . a dramatic poet—& that had no Lear, No Othello, no Henry the Fourth, no Twelfth Night, appeared, we must have admitted that Shakespere possessed the chief if not all the requisites of a Poet—namely, deep Feeling & exquisite sense of Beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in combinations of form, & to the ear in sweet and appropriate melody (with the except: of Spenser, he is &c)—. That these feelings were under the command of his own Will—that in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own particular being, & felt and made others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself, except by force of Contemplation—& that sublime faculty, by which a great mind becomes that which it


meditates on.—To this we are to add the affectionate Love of Nature & Natural Objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily, or painted so truly & passionately the 〈very〉 minutiæest beauties of the external world— Next, we have shewn that he possessed Fancy, considered as the faculty of bringing together & c & c.—“Full gently now she” & c/Still mounting, we find undoubted proof in his mind of . . . Imagination or the power by whyich one image or feeling is made to modify many others, & by a sort of fusion to force many into one—that which after shewed itself in such might & energy in Lear, where the deep anguish of a Father spreads the feeling of Ingratitude & Cruelty over the very Elements of Heaven—. Various are the workings of this greatest faculty of the human mind—both passionate & tranquil—in its tranquil & purely pleasurable operation it acts chiefly by producing . . . out of many things, as it would have appeared in the description of an ordinary mind, described slowly & in . .. unimpassioned succession, a oneness/even as Nature, the greatest of Poets, acts upon us when we open our eyes upon an extended prospect— Thus the flight of the Adonis from the enamoured Goddess in the dusk of the Evening— Look! how a bright star shooteth from the Sky, So glides he in the night from Venus’ Eye—. How many Images & feelings are here brought together without effort & without discord—the beauty of Adonis—the rapidity of his flight—the yearning yet hopelessness of the enamoured gazer—and a shadowy ideal character thrown over the whole—/or it acts by . . . impressing the stamp of humanity, of human feeling, over inanimate Objects—The Pines shorn by the 〈Sea〉 wind & seen in twilight/ Then Lo! here the gentle Lark— and lastly, which belongs only to a great poet, the power of so carrying on the Eye of the Reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words—to make him see every thing—& this without exciting any painful or laborious attention, without any anatomy of description, (a fault not uncommon in descriptive poetry) but with the sweetness & easy movement of nature—

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Lastly, he—previously to his Drama—gave proof of a . . . most profound, energetic & philosophical mind, without which he might have been a very delightful Poet, but not the great dramatic Poet/but this he possessed in so eminent a degree that it is to be feared &c &c—if— But Chance & his powerful Instinct combined to lead him to his proper province—in the conquest of which we are to consider both the difficulties that opposed him, & the advantages— (BL Add. MS 47, 513 f13–16) * * * The Venus & Adonis, we have seen, did not allow the display of any of the deeper passions— . . . but the story of Lucretia seems to demand it—and yet pathos or any thing truly dramatic we do not find—The same minute & faithful Imagery in the same vivid Colors inspirited by the Same impetuous Vigor & activity of Thought & . . . true associative & assimilative faculties—with a larger display of profound reflection & a perfect Dominion, often Domination over, the whole World of Language—/What then shall we say?—Even this, that Shakespear, no mere child of Nature, no Automaton of Genius, possessed by the Muse not possessing, first studied, deeply meditated, understood minutely— the knowledge become habitual gradually wedded itself with his habitual feelings, & at length gave him that wonderful Power by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class, any where— . . . seated him one one of the two Golden Thrones of the English Parnassus, with Milton on the other/—the one darting himself forth, & passing into all the forms of human character & passion, the other attracting all forms & things to himself, into the unity of his own grand Ideal—/Sh. became all things, yet for ever remaining himself—/while all things & forms became Milton. (CN, 3: 4115)

From his marginalia on Beaumont and Fletcher, Dramatic Works (c. 1815–19)26 In respect of Style and Versification this Play and the Bonduca may be taken as the best, and yet as characteristic, specimens. Particularly,


the first Scene of Bonduca—. Take the Richard the Second of Shakespear, and having selected some one scene of about the same number of Lines, and consisting mostly of long Speeches, compare it with the first scene of Bonduca/ not for the idle purpose of finding out which is the better, but in order to see and understand the difference. The latter (B. and F.) you will find a well arranged bed of Flowers, each having its separate root, and its position determined aforehand by the Will of the Gardener—a fresh plant a fresh Volition. In the former an Indian Fig-tree, as described by Milton—all is growth, evolution, γενεσις—each Line, each word almost, begets the following—and the Will of the Writer is an interfusion, a continuous agency, no series of separate Acts.—Sh. is the height, breadth, and depth of Genius: B. and F. the excellent mechanism, in juxta-position and succession, of Talent.

From the 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton27 It is absolutely necessary to recollect, that the age in which Shakespeare lived was one of great abilities applied to individual and prudential purposes, and not an age of high moral feeling and lofty principle, which gives a man of genius the power of thinking of all things in reference to all. If, then, we should find that Shakespeare took these materials as they were presented to him, and yet to all effectual purposes produced the same grand result as others attempted to produce in an age so much more favourable, shall we not feel and acknowledge the purity and holiness of genius—a light, which, however it might shine on a dunghill, was as pure as the divine effluence which created all the beauty of nature? (SC, 2: 116) * * * The readers of Shakespeare may be divided into two classes:— 1. Those who read his works with feeling and understanding; 2. Those who, without affecting to criticise, merely feel, and may be said to be the recipients of the poet’s power.

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Between the two no medium can be endured. The ordinary reader, who does not pretend to bring his understanding to bear upon the subject, often feels that some real trait of his own has been caught, that some nerve has been touched; and he knows that it has been touched by the vibration he experiences—a thrill, which tells us that, by becoming better acquainted with the poet, we have become better acquainted with ourselves. In the plays of Shakespeare every man sees himself, without knowing that he does so: as in some of the phenomena of nature, in the mist of the mountain, the traveller beholds his own figure, but the glory round the head distinguishes it from a mere vulgar copy. In traversing the Brocken, in the north of Germany, at sunrise, the brilliant beams are shot askance, and you see before you a being of gigantic proportions, and of such elevated dignity, that you only know it to be yourself by similarity of action. In the same way, near Messina, natural forms, at determined distances, are represented on an invisible mist, not as they really exist, but dressed in all the prismatic colours of the imagination. So in Shakespeare: every form is true, everything has reality for its foundation; we can all recognise the truth, but we see it decorated with such hues of beauty, and magnified to such proportions of grandeur, that, while we know the figure, we know also how much it has been refined and exalted by the poet. (SC, 2: 163)

* * *

It is a mistake to say that any of Shakespeare’s characters strike us as portraits: they have the union of reason perceiving, of judgment recording, and of imagination diffusing over all a magic glory. While the poet registers what is past, he projects the future in a wonderful degree, and makes us feel, however slightly, and see, however dimly, that state of being in which there is neither past nor future, but all is permanent in the very energy of nature. (SC, 2: 168)


From Biographia Literaria (1817)28 No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotion, language. In Shakespeare’s poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. The V ENUS AND ADONIS did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favor and even demand their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakspeare’s management of the tale neither pathos, nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colors, inspirited by the same impetuous vigor of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with yet a larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language. What then shall we say? even this; that Shakspeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power, which seated him on one of the two glorysmitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet forever remaining himself.

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O what great men hast thou not produced, England, my country!— Truly indeed— We must be free or die, who speak the tongue, Which Shakspeare spake; the faith and morals hold, Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung Of earth’s first blood, have titles manifold. (Shedd, 3: 381–2)

From the 1818 Lectures on European Literature 29 S. shaped his characters out of the Nature within—but we cannot so safely say, out of his own Nature, as an individual person.—No! this latter is itself but a natura naturata—an effect, a product, not a power. It was S’s prerogative to have the universal which is potentially in each particular, opened out to him—the homme generale not as an abstraction of observation 〈from a variety of men;〉 but as the Substance capable of endless modifications of which his own personal Existence was but one—& to use this one as the eye that beheld the other, and as the Tongue that could convey the discovery—No greater or more common vice in Dramatic Writers than to draw out of themselves—how I alone & in the selfsufficiency of my study as all men are apt to be proud in their, Dreams, should like to be talking—King?—I am the King who would bully the Kings—Tut!—Shakespear in composing had no I but the I representative. (Lects 1808–19, 2: 148–9)

From the Table Talk December 29 1822 Schiller has the material Sublime; to produce an effect, he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower. But Shakspeare drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow.


Lear is the most tremendous effort of Shakspeare as a poet; Hamlet as a philosopher or meditater; and Othello is the union of the two. There is something gigantic and unformed in the former two; but in the latter, every thing assumes its due place and proportion, and the whole mature powers of his mind are displayed in admirable equilibrium. (TT, 1–2) * * *

May 12 1830 S HAKSPEARE is the Spinosistic deity—an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare’s poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare’s rhymed verses are excessively condensed,—epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. No one can understand Shakspeare’s superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakspeare’s own. (TT, 67)

Spenser From the Table Talk, June 24/1827 SPENSER’S Epithalamion is truly sublime; and pray mark the swan-like movement of his exquisite Prothalamion. His attention to metre and rhythm is sometimes so extremely minute as to be painful even to my ear, and you know how highly I prize good versification. (TT, 35–6)

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Wordsworth ‘To William Wordsworth’ (1807)30 FRIEND of the wise! and Teacher of the Good! Into my heart have I received that Lay More than historic, that prophetic Lay Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright) Of the foundations and the building up Of a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tell What may be told, to the understanding mind Revealable; and what within the mind By vital breathings secret as the soul Of vernal growth, oft quickens in the heart Thoughts all too deep for words!— Theme hard as high! Of smiles spontaneous, and mysterious fears (The first-born they of Reason and twin-birth), Of tides obedient to external force, And currents self-determined, as might seem, Or by some inner Power; of moments awful, Now in thy inner life, and now abroad, When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received The light reflected, as a light bestowed— Of fancies fair, and milder hours of youth, Hyblean murmurs of poetic thought Industrious in its joy, in vales and glens Native or outland, lakes and famous hills! Or on the lonely high-road, when the stars Were rising; or by secret mountain-streams, The guides and the companions of thy way! Of more than Fancy, of the Social Sense Distending wide, and man beloved as man, Where France in all her towns lay vibrating Like some becalméd bark beneath the burst Of Heaven’s immediate thunder, when no cloud Is visible, or shadow on the main. For thou wert there, thine own brows garlanded,


Amid the tremor of a realm aglow, Amid a mighty nation jubilant, When from the general heart of human kind Hope sprang forth like a full-born Deity! —Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down, So summoned homeward, thenceforth calm and sure From the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self, With light unwaning on her eyes, to look Far on—herself a glory to behold, The Angel of the vision! Then (last strain) Of Duty, chosen LAWS controlling choice, Action and joy!—An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chaunted! O great Bard! Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air, With stedfast eye I viewed thee in the choir Of ever-enduring men. The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence! They, both in power and act, Are permanent, and Time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it. Nor less a sacred Roll, than those of old, And to be placed, as they, with gradual fame Among the archives of mankind, thy work Makes audible a linkéd lay of Truth, Of Truth profound a sweet continuous lay, Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes! Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn, Where Wisdom’s voice has found a listening heart. Amid the howl of more than wintry storms, The Halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours Already on the wing. Eve following eve, Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home Is sweetest! moments for their own sake hailed And more desired, more precious, for thy song, In silence listening, like a devout child,

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My soul lay passive, by thy various strain Driven as in surges now beneath the stars, With momentary stars of my own birth, Fair constellated foam, still darting off Into the darkness; now a tranquil sea, Outspread and bright, yet swelling to the moon. And when—O Friend! my comforter and guide! Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength!— Thy long sustainéd Song finally closed, And thy deep voice had ceased—yet thou thyself Wert still before my eyes, and round us both That happy vision of belovéd faces— Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close I sate, my being blended in one thought (Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?) Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound— And when I rose, I found myself in prayer. (CPW, 1: 403–8)

From the Table Talk, July 21 1832 I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position, which is peculiarly— perhaps I might say exclusively—fitted for him. His proper title is Spectator ab extra. (TT, 175)

iii.

The visual arts

From the 1808 Lectures on the Principles of Poetry . . . truly—deeply, O far more than words can I express as I venerate the Last Judgment and the Prophets of Michael Angelo Buonoroti—yet the very pain, which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself in gazing upon


them, the pain〈ful〉 reflection, that their having been painted in Fresco was the sole cause that they had not been abandoned to all the accidents of a dangerous Transportation to a distant Capitol, and that the same Caprice which made the Neapolitan Soldiery destroy all the exquisite Masterpieces on the walls of the Church of the Trinità 〈di〉 Monte after the retreat of their antagonist Barbarians, might as easily have made vanish the Rooms & open Gallery of Rafael, and the yet more unapproachable wonder of the sublime Florentine, in the Sistine Chapel, revived forced upon my mind the reflection—How grateful the human race ought to be, that the Works of Euclid, Newton, Plato, Milton, Shakspere, are not subjected to similar Contingencies—that they, and their Compeers, & 〈the〉 great tho’ inferior Peerage of undying Intellect, are secure! 〈Secured〉 even from a second Irruption of Goths & Vandals, in addition to the many other safeguards, by the vast Empire of English Language, Laws, & Religion founded in America thro’ the overflow of the Power and Virtue of my Country—and that now the great & certain Works of genuine Fame can only cease to act for Mankind, till when they themselves cease to be men, or when the Planet, on which they exist, shall have altered its relations or have ceased to be. (Lects 1808–19, 1: 76–7)

From ‘On the Principles of Genial Criticism’ (1814) In Raphael’s admirable Galatea (the print of which is doubtless familiar to most of my readers) the circle is perceived at first sight; but with what multiplicity of rays and chords within the area of the circular group, with what elevations and depressions of the circumference, with what an endless variety and sportive wildness in the component figure, and in the junctions of the figures, is the balance, the perfect reconciliation, effected between these two conflicting principles of the FREE LIFE, and of the confining FORM! How entirely is the stiffness that would have resulted from the obvious regularity of the latter, fused and (if I may hazard so bold a metaphor) almost volatilized by the interpenetration and electrical flashes of the former. (BL, 2: 234–5)

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From the 1818 Lectures on European Literature 31 The worship of statues in Greece had, in a civil sense, its advantage, and disadvantage; advantage in promoting statuary and the arts; disadvantage, in bringing their gods too much on a level with human beings, and thence depriving them of their dignity, and gradually giving rise to scepticism and ridicule. But no statue, no artificial emblem, could satisfy the Northman’s mind; the dark wild imagery of nature, which surrounded him, and the freedom of his life, gave his mind a tendency to the infinite, so that he found rest in that which presented no end, and derived satisfaction from that which was indistinct. (MC, 12–13)

From the Table Talk, June 29 1833 The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect. I was more than ever impressed with the marvellous sublimity and transcendant beauty of King’s College Chapel. It is quite unparalleled. (TT, 240)

4 ‘That life-ebullient stream’:1 Coleridge and Romantic Psychology

Perhaps the most distinctive and consistent feature of Coleridge’s thought is his preoccupation with a process of ‘ascent’—whether in human beings or in the ‘chain’ of being more generally (an image he adopts from the early Neoplatonists and their successors)—from ‘matter’ to ‘spirit’, or from an automatic and unreflective participation in the world of sensations and appearances, towards a reflective understanding of the relation between consciousness and matter, and beyond that to a recognition of the ultimate inexplicableness of the origin or basis of consciousness itself—a recognition which is inherently sublime, and which in Coleridge’s view brings us closer to the state of the ‘sole self-comprehending being’—that is, the Deity.2 This pattern of ascent is, with various modifications, prominent in his writing from such early works as ‘Religious Musings’ (1796) to such major works of his last creative phase as Aids to Reflection (1825) and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1828). The fact that, until the early 1800s, Coleridge often expressed a basically empiricist view of consciousness derived from Locke and Hartley, while after that period idealist theories were predominant in his thinking, indeed, by no means makes this pattern of ‘sublime’ ascent to increasing degrees of spirituality any less consistent a feature of his thinking. His early expressions of this vision follow Hartley and Priestley in seeking empirical and ‘scientific’ explanations, from the nature of matter and the brain, for what he optimistically sees as the general tendency of human consciousness to become increasingly focused on the deity, and to perceive the ultimately beneficent nature of every aspect of His creation, however problematic or ambivalent it might at first appear.3 Later in his career, however, the thought 111

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Coleridge and Romantic Psychology

of Schelling and the Naturphilosophen provided Coleridge with more vivid and intellectually satisfying models of such a process of ascent, contrasting the ‘dogmatic’ outlook of materialist thinkers with the reflective and critical attitude of transcendental idealism,4 which Coleridge (like Schelling) sees as rising above everyday consciousness through the very process of interpreting and explaining it, yet as ultimately being unable wholly to reconcile the objective with the subjective pole of experience—a task which, in Biographia Literaria at least, Coleridge follows Schelling in according to the creative imagination.5 Both in the earlier and in the later periods of his thought, however, this pattern of sublime transcendence is conceived by Coleridge as bringing human beings closer to the deity, paralleling the Plotinian concept of a gradual ‘ascent’ of being towards union with the supra-mundane ‘One’ from which it emanates.6 At the same time, however—and especially under the influence of the Naturphilosophie of Steffens, Schelling, and others—he combines this vision of individual spiritual ascent with a pre-Darwinian concept of evolution which sees the principle of both nature and human consciousness as lying in an increasing individuation, or separation of the individual unit of life or consciousness from the inert or unconscious ‘mass’ of physical and animal being.7 Because Coleridge sees this individuation as fulfilling the destiny of nature or of ‘life’ in general, however, he also sees it—particularly in the Theory of Life (1816)—as bringing the individual into a more significant form of unity with the system to which he belongs—a unity which not only involves an ever-greater awareness or understanding of that system, but also brings us closer to the divine origin of life in general. 8 These evolutionary patterns in Coleridge’s thought, which always imply a basically Neoplatonic vision, however, are distinctively combined by him with a Christian and even puritanical emphasis on the importance of transcending the physical or material realm—both in the sense of overcoming and escaping from subservience to mere physical and instinctual impulses, and in the sense of eschewing a preoccupation with individual wealth and detaching oneself from the mundane tastes of the majority. 9 Hence his often-expressed conviction that human beings are naturally divided into several ‘classes’ or levels of consciousness, the lowest of which, he argues, is ‘below’ that of animals in the sense that while they naturally occupy this level, man only does so by abjectly neglecting his duty to rise above it.10 In case this emphasis on levels or ‘classes’ of humanity be seen as elitist in an


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absolute or exclusive sense, however, one should also emphasize Coleridge’s frequent expression of his wish to persuade as many as possible of his fellow human-beings to share his quest not only for higher forms of insight, but also—and most importantly—for an ultimately religious confrontation with the inexplicable basis and origin of being.11 This confrontation with the divine or the absolute—inevitably separated from its object by the limitations of human understanding— is the central context or focus of the sublime in Coleridge’s later writings, and will be explored further in the final chapter of this book. His famous distinction between the ‘understanding’ which strives and fails to comprehend that origin, and the ‘Reason’ which provides us with an intuitive knowledge of it, however, is central to the hierarchical conceptions of knowledge and being which I focus on in the selections below, and which form so important a context of the sublime, particularly in the middle and later periods of his writing. The recognition of this distinction, indeed, is seen by Coleridge not only as fundamental to avoiding the errors of materialists, but also as dividing humanity into those who have, and those who do not have, the philosophic and religious insight necessary to organize or govern societies.12 This, at least ostensibly, is the reason for the later Coleridge’s hierarchical vision of politics and society, which arrogates the role of governance to those who share his own sense of the importance of spiritual ascent and the purification of oneself from ‘lower’ or material preoccupations. More fundamentally, perhaps, it is Coleridge’s increasing sense of the isolation of the intellectual in modern commercial society, and the devaluation of his abilities and achievements by a democratic elevation of the popular as the sole criterion of value and of truth, that leads to a notable intensification of this politically elitist vision in his latest writings, and especially in On the Constitution of the Church and State.13 Yet the prominence, even here, of the concept of a hierarchy of being whose origin is clearly Neoplatonic highlights the common imaginative ground between these writings and his works of the 1790s. The passages below are divided into six sections: firstly those which illustrate the evolutionary conceptions of life or consciousness which are a central feature of his writing, but which are especially prominent in the middle period from around 1809 to 1818, which coincides with his greatest enthusiasm for Schelling and for Naturphilosophie; secondly, the passages illustrating his distinction between

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a materialist or scientific outlook and that vision which always questions the material and the comprehensible, reaching beyond it towards a sublime confrontation with the infinite; thirdly, his discussions of the relation between Reason and Understanding (excluding those whose significance is more exclusively theological, which are included in the final chapter); fourthly, the passages illustrating his later emphasis on the view of society as intrinsically hierarchical, and as naturally governed by those of greatest insight or genius; fifthly, his discussions of the sublimity of love—a topic also closely associated in his writing with a transcendence both of self, and of the physical or material;14 and finally, his reflections on the psychological causes of the experience of the sublime in general. As in earlier chapters, within these sections the passages are arranged chronologically, in order to give a more detailed impression of the development and transmutation of his ideas.

i.

Evolution

From his notebook 1795–180015 Brutal Life—in which we pursue mere corporeal pleasures & interests— Human Life—in which for the sake of our own Happiness we & Glory we pursue studies and objects adapted to our intellectual faculties. Divine Life—when we die to the creatures & to self and become deiform by following the eternal Laws of order from the pure Love of Order & God. (BL Add. MS 27, 901 f63v) * * *

May–July 1811 16 We are born in the mountains, in the Alps—and when we hire ourselves out to the Princes of the Lower Lands, sooner or later we feel an incurable Home-sickness—& every Tune that recalls our native


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Heights, brings on a relapse of the Sickness.—I seem to myself like a Butterfly who having foolishly torn or bedaubed his wings, is obliged to crawl like a Caterpillar with all the restless Instincts of the Butterfly. Our Eye rests in an horizon—still moving indeed as we move—yet still there is an Horizon & there the Eye rests—but our Hands can only pluck the Fruit a yard from us—there is no Horizon for the Hand— and the Hand is the symbol of earthly realities, the Eye of our Hope & Faith. And what is Faith?—it is to the Spirit of Man the same Instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to build its involucrum as long again as itself to make room for the Antennæ, which are to come, tho’ they never yet have been—O the Potential works in us even as the Present mood works on us!— Love with Virtue have almost an actual Present—tho’ for moments and tho’ for few—but in general, we have no present unless we are brutalized—the Present belongs to the two extremes, Beast & Angel— We in youth have Hope, the Rainbow of the Morning in the West— in age, we have recollections of Hope, the Evening Rainbow in the East!—In short, all the organs of Sense are framed for a corresponding World of Sense: and we have it. All the organs of Spirit are framed for a correspondent World of Spirit: & we cannot but believe it. The Infidel proves only that the latter organs are not yet developed in him—. The former are . . . their appointed Nurse; but the Nurse may overlay the Child.—How comes it that even Worldlings, who are not wholly Worldlings in their thoughts, as well as conduct, will contemplate the man of simple goodness & disinterestedness with the contradictory feeling of Pity and of Respect—“He is not made for this World”— O therein he utters a prophecy for himself. For he pities the Ideot; but does he respect him? does he feel awe & an inward Self-questioning in his Presence? No. (BL. Add. MS 47, 515 ff154v–156v)

From the Theory of Life (1816)17 In the lowest forms of the vegetable and animal world we perceive totality dawning into individuation, while in man, as the highest of the class, the individuality is not only perfected in its corporeal sense, but begins a new series beyond the appropriate limits of

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physiology. The tendency to individuation, more or less obscure, more or less obvious, constitutes the common character of all classes, as far as they maintain for themselves a distinction from the universal life of the planet; while the degrees, both of intensity and extension, to which this tendency is realized, form the species, and their ranks in the great scale of ascent and expansion. (TL, 48) * * * It has been before noticed that the progress of Nature is more truly represented by the ladder, than by the suspended chain, and that she expands as by concentric circles. This is, indeed, involved in the very conception of individuation, whether it be applied to the different species or to the individuals. In what manner the evident interspace is reconciled with the equally evident continuity of the life of Nature, is a problem that can be solved by those minds alone, which have intuitively learnt that the whole actual life of Nature originates in the existence, and consists in the perpetual reconciliation, and as perpetual resurgency of the primary contradiction, of which universal polarity is the result and the exponent. (TL, 70) * * * For lo! in the next step of ascent the power of sensibility has assumed her due place and rank: her minority is at an end, and the complete and universal presence of a nervous system unites absolutely, by instanteity of time what, with the due allowances for the transitional process, had before been either lost in sameness, or perplexed by multiplicity, or compacted by a finer mechanism. But with this, all the analogies with which Nature had delighted us in the preceding step seem lost, and, with the single exception of that more than valuable, that estimable philanthropist, the dog, and, perhaps, of the horse and elephant, the analogies to ourselves, which we can discover in the quadrupeds or quadrumani, are of our vices, our follies, and our imperfections. The facts in confirmation of both the propositions are so numerous and so obvious, the advance of


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Nature, under the predominance of the third synthetic power, both in the intensity of life and in the intenseness and extension of individuality, is so undeniable, that we may leap forward at once to the highest realization and reconciliation of both her tendencies, that of the most perfect detachment with the greatest possible union, to that last work, in which Nature did not assist as handmaid under the eye of her sovereign Master, who made Man in his own image, by superadding self-consciousness with self-government, and breathed into him a living soul. . . . Porphyrigeniti sumus! In Man the centripetal and individualizing tendency of all Nature is itself concentred and individualized—he is a revelation of Nature! Henceforward, he is referred to himself, delivered up to his own charge; and he who stands the most on himself, and stands the firmest, is the truest, because the most individual, Man. In social and political life this acme is inter-dependence; in moral life it is independence; in intellectual life it is genius. Nor does the form of polarity, which has accompanied the law of individuation up its whole ascent, desert it here. As the height, so the depth. The intensities must be at once opposite and equal. As the liberty, so must be the reverence for law. As the independence, so must be the service and the submission to the Supreme Will! As the ideal genius and the originality, in the same proportion must be the resignation to the real world, the sympathy and the inter-communion with Nature. In the conciliating mid-point, or equator, does the Man live, and only by its equal presence in both its poles can that life be manifested! (TL, 84–6)

From a letter to Hugh J. Rose, 25 September 181618 Hazlitt possesses considerable Talent; but it is diseased by a morbid hatred of the Beautiful, and killed by the absence of Imagination, & alas! by a wicked Heart of embruted Appetites. Poor wretch! he is a melancholy instance of the awful Truth—that man cannot be on a Level with the Beasts—he must be above them or below them. (CL, 4: 686)

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From Biographia Literaria (1817)19 But it is time to tell the truth; though it requires some courage to avow it in an age and country, in which disquisitions on all subjects, not privileged to adopt technical terms or scientific symbols, must be addressed to the Public. I say then, that it is neither possible nor necessary for all men, nor for many, to be philosophers. There is a philosophic (and inasmuch as it is actualized by an effort of freedom, an artificial) consciousness, which lies beneath or (as it were) behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings. As the elder Romans distinguished their northern provinces into Cis-Alpine and Trans-Alpine, so may we divide all the objects of human knowledge into those on this side, and those on the other side of the spontaneous consciousness; citra et trans conscientiam communem. The latter is exclusively the domain of pure philosophy, which is therefore properly entitled transcendental, in order to discriminate it at once, both from mere reflection and re-presentation on the one hand, and on the other from those flights of lawless speculation which, abandoned by all distinct consciousness, because transgressing the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties, are justly condemned, as transcendent. The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To the multitude below these vapors appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude with impunity; and now all a-glow, with colors not their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few, who measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls have learned, that the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few, who even in the level streams have detected elements, which neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or could supply. How and whence to these thoughts, these strong probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge may finally supervene, can be learnt only by


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the fact. I might oppose to the question the words with which Plotinus supposes Nature to answer a similar difficulty. “Should any one interrogate her, how she works, if graciously she vouchsafe to listen and speak, she will reply, it behooves thee not to disquiet me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as I am silent, and work without words.” Likewise in the fifth book of the fifth Ennead, speaking of the highest and intuitive knowledge as distinguished from the discursive, or in the language of Wordsworth, “The vision and the faculty divine;” he says: “It is not lawful to inquire from whence it sprang, as if it were a thing subject to place and motion, for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place; but it either appears to us or it does not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it with a view of detecting its secret source, but to watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us; preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle as the eye waits patiently for the rising sun.” They, and they only, can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennæ yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased, will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and respect? “Poor man! he is not made for this world.” Oh! herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfilment; for man must either rise or sink. (Shedd, 1: 325–8) * * *

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The necessary tendence therefore of all natural philosophy is from nature to intelligence; and this, and no other is the true ground and occasion of the instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural phænomena. The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect. The phænomena (the material) must wholly disappear, and the laws alone (the formal) must remain. Thence it comes, that in nature itself the more the principle of law breaks forth, the more does the husk drop off, the phænomena themselves become more spiritual and at length cease altogether in our consciousness. The optical phænomena are but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn by light, and the materiality of this light itself has already become matter of doubt. In the appearances of magnetism all trace of matter is lost, and of the phænomena of gravitation, which not a few among the most illustrious Newtonians have declared no otherwise comprehensible than as an immediate spiritual influence, there remains nothing but its law, the execution of which on a vast scale is the mechanism of the heavenly motions. The theory of natural philosophy would then be completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as intelligence and self-consciousness; when the heavens and the earth shall declare not only the power of their Maker, but the glory and the presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great Prophet during the vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity. (Shedd, 3: 336–8)

From his notebook, c. 1819–182520 The progress of human Intellect from Earth to Heaven not a Jacob’s Ladder but a Geometrical Stair-case with 5 or more Landing-Places— that on which we stand, enables us to see clearly & count all below us, while that or those above us are so transparent for our eyes, that they appear the Canopy of Heaven—we do not see them, & believe ourselves on the highest— (BL Add. MS 47, 514 f164)


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From his marginalia on Richard Baxter, Reliquae Baxterianae (c. 1820) 21 The great maxim of legislation, intellectual or political, is Subordinate, not exclude. Nature in her ascent leaves nothing behind, but at each step subordinates and glorifies:—mass, crystal, organ, sensation, sentience, reflection. (Shedd, 5: 326)

From the Table Talk, January 3 182322 Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts, it may be; but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree, and not in kind; just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of all the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts—and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of a soul within us that makes the difference. * * * Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice, and you will be convinced at once. After the narrative of the creation of the earth and brute animals, Moses seems to pause, and says:—“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And in the next chapter, he repeats the narrative:—“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;” and then he adds these words,—“and man became a living soul.” Materialism will never explain those last words. (TT, 7)

From Aids to Reflection (1825)23 The lowest class of animals or protozoa, the polypi for instance, have neither brain nor nerves. Their motive powers are all from without. The sun, light, the warmth, the air are their nerves and brain. As life ascends, nerves appear; but still only as the conductors of an

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external influence; next are seen the knots or ganglions, as so many foci of instinctive agency, which imperfectly imitate the yet wanting centre. And now the promise and token of a true individuality are disclosed; both the reservoir of sensibility and the imitative power that actuates the organs of motion, (the muscles) with the network of conductors, are all taken inward and appropriated; the spontaneous rises into the voluntary, and finally after various steps and long ascent, the material and animal means and conditions are prepared for the manifestations of a free will, having its law within itself, and its motive in the law—and thus bound to originate its own acts, not only without, but even against, alien stimulants. That in our present state we have only the dawning of thus inward sun (the perfect law of liberty) will sufficiently limit and qualify the preceding position, if only it have been allowed to produce its two-fold consequence—the excitement of hope and the repression of vanity. (Shedd, 1: 166–7)

* * *

Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixure, by which it is differenced in kind from the flower-shaped Psyche, that flutters with free wing above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth the irritability, the proper seat of instinct, while yet the nascent sensibility is subordinated thereto—most wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in the insect, and the musco-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically rehearse the adaptive understanding, yea, and the moral affections and charities, of man. Let us carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious week, the teeming work-days of the Creator; as they rose in vision before the eye of the inspired historian of the generations of the heavens and of the earth, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And who that hath watched their ways


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with an understanding heart, could, as the vision evolving still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal Bee; the home-building, wedded, and divorceless Swallow; and above all the manifoldly intelligent Ant tribes, with their commonwealths and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in their tiny flocks on the honeyed leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity—and not say to himself, Behold the shadow of approaching humanity, the sun rising from behind, in the kindling morn of creation! Thus all lower natures find their highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better. All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, in neighborhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance. No! it must be a higher good to make you happy. While you labor for any thing below your proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death. Well saith the moral poet— Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how mean a thing is man! (Shedd, 1: 180–1)

From his marginalia on Heinroth, Lehrbuch der Anthropologie (c. 1826) 24 That the Vis vitæ sublimes itself into mind is incomparably more difficult to conceive, thatn the reverse. viz. that Mind reflects itself & has, as it were, its confused echo, in Life. The going contrary to the old principle, A Iove principium is the characteristic of the Naturphilosophy, and the cause of its failure. But neither theory solves the problem of the chasm the difference in kind, between Man and the noblest mere animal.

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From the Table Talk May 2 1830 Plants exist in themselves. Insects by, or by means of, themselves. Men, for themselves. The perfection of irrational animals is that which is best for them; the perfection of man is that which is absolutely best. There is growth only in plants; but there is irritability, or, a better word, instinctivity, in insects. (T T, 59) * * * August 30 1833 If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse. (TT, 270)

ii.

‘Thought’ and ‘things’

From a letter to John Thelwall, 31 December 179625 The passage in your letter respecting your mother affected me greatly. Well, true or false, heaven is a less gloomy idea than annihilation. Dr. Beddoes and Dr. Darwin think that Life is utterly inexplicable, writing as materialists. You, I understand, have adopted the idea that it is the result of organised matter acted on by external stimuli. As likely as any other system, but you assume the thing to be proved. The “capability of being stimulated into sensation” . . . is my definition of animal life. Monro believes in a plastic, immaterial nature, all-pervading. And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, etc.


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(By the bye, that is the favourite of my poems; do you like it?) Hunter says that the blood is the life, which is saying nothing at all; for, if the blood were life, it could never be otherwise than life, and to say it is alive is saying nothing; and Ferriar believes in a soul, like an orthodox churchman. So much for physicians and surgeons! Now as to the metaphysicians. Plato says it is harmony. He might as well have said a fiddlestick’s end; but I love Plato, his dear, gorgeous nonsense; and I, though last not least, I do not know what to think about it. On the whole, I have rather made up my mind that I am a mere apparition, a naked spirit, and that life is, I myself I; which is a mighty clear account of it. (CLE, 1: 211–12)

From a letter to John Thelwall, 14 October 179726 I can at times feel strongly the beauties you describe, in themselves and for themselves; but more frequently all things appear little, all the knowledge that can be acquired child’s play; the universe itself! what but an immense heap of little things? I can contemplate nothing but parts, and parts are all little! My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great, something one and indivisible. And it is only in the faith of that that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns, give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity. (CLE, 1: 228)

From a letter to Thomas Poole, 16 October 1797 27 My father (who had so little of parental ambition in him, that he had destined his children to be blacksmiths, etc., and had accomplished his intention but for my mother’s pride and spirit of aggrandizing her family)—my father had, however, resolved that I should be a parson. I read every book that came in my way without distinction; and my father was fond of me, and used to take me on his knee and hold

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long conversations with me. I remember that at eight years old I walked with him one winter evening from a farmer’s house, a mile from Ottery, and he told me the names of the stars and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world, and that the other twinkling stars were suns that had worlds rolling round them; and when I came home he shewed me how they rolled round. I heard him with a profound delight and admiration: but without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of fairy tales and genii, etc., etc., my mind had been habituated to the Vast, and I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Should children be permitted to read romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole. Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess. They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little. And the universe to them is but a mass of little things. It is true, that the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former method; but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favour? I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness, but when they looked at great things, all became a blank and they saw nothing, and denied (very illogically) that anything could be seen, and uniformly put the negation of a power for the possession of a power, and called the want of imagination judgment and the never being moved to rapture philosophy! (CLE, 1: 16–17)

From a letter to Thomas Poole, 6 April 1799 28 I find it wise and human to believe, even on slight evidence, opinions, the contrary of which cannot be proved, and which promote


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our happiness without hampering our intellect. My baby has not lived in vain—this life has been to him what it is to all of us—education and development! Fling yourself forward into your immortality only a few thousand years, and how small will not the difference between one year old and sixty years appear! Consciousness!—it is no otherwise necessary to our conceptions of future continuance than as connecting the present link of our being with the one immediately preceding it; and that degree of consciousness, that small portion of memory, it would not only be arrogant, but in the highest degree absurd, to deny even to a much younger infant. ’T is a strange assertion that the essence of identity lies in recollective consciousness. ’Twere scarcely less ridiculous to affirm that the eight miles from Stowey to Bridgwater consist in the eight milestones. Death in a doting old age falls upon my feelings ever as a more hopeless phenomenon than death in infancy; but nothing is hopeless. What if the vital force which I sent from my arm into the stone as I flung it in the air and skimmed it upon the water—what if even that did not perish! It was life!—it was a particle of being!—it was power! and how could it perish? Life, Power, Being! Organization may and probably is their effect—their cause it cannot be! I have indulged very curious fancies concerning that force, that swarm of motive powers which I sent out of my body into that stone, and which, one by one, left the untractable or already possessed mass, and—but the German Ocean lies between us. It is all too far to send you such fancies as these! Grief, indeed,— Doth love to dally with fantastic thoughts, And smiling like a sickly Moralist, Finds some resemblance to her own concern In the straws of chance, and things inanimate. But I cannot truly say that I grieve—I am perplexed—I am sad—and a little thing—a very trifle—would make me weep—but for the death of the baby I have not wept! Oh this strange, strange, strange sceneshifter Death!—that giddies one with insecurity and so unsubstantiates the living things that one has grasped and handled! Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted me a most sublime epitaph. Whether it had any reality I cannot say. Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his sister might die.

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EPITAPH

A slumber did my spirit seal, I had no human fears; She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force, She neither hears nor sees: Mov’d round in Earth’s diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees! (CLE, 1: 283–4)

From his notebook February–March 180129 By deep feeling we make our Ideas dim—& this is what we mean by our Life—ourselves. I think of the Wall—it is before me, a distinct Image—here. I necessarily think of the Idea & the Thinking I as two distinct & opposite Things. Now 〈let me〉 think of myself—of the thinking Being—the Idea becomes dim whatever it be—so dim that I know not what it is—but the Feeling is deep & steady—and this I call I —the identifying the Percipient & the Perceived—.

* * *

March–December 1801 30 March 17, 1801. Tuesday—Hartley looking out of my study window fixed his eyes steadily & for some time on the opposite prospect, & then said—Will yon Mountains always be?—I shewed him the whole magnificent Prospect in a Looking Glass, and held it up, so that the whole was like a Canopy or Ceiling over his head, & he struggled to express himself concerning the Difference between the Thing & the Image almost with convulsive Effort.—I . . . never before saw such an


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Abstract of Thinking as a pure act & energy, of Thinking as distinguished from Thoughts. * * * T. Wedgwood’s objection to my “Things & Thoughts,” because [‘‘] Thought always implies an act or nisus of mind,” not well founded. A Thought and Thoughts are quite different words from Thought—as a Fancy from Fancy, a Work from Work, a Life from Life, a Force & Forces from Force, a Feeling, a Writing &c an Urgency &c &c. (BL Add. MS 47, 518 ff24v–39v)

From a letter to Thomas Wedgwood, 14 January 180331 In simple earnest, I never find myself alone with the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit courses, drives, and eddies, like a Leaf in Autumn; a wild activity, of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion, rises up from within me; a sort of bottom-wind, that blows to no point of the compass, comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole being is filled with waves that roll and stumble, one this way, and one that way, like things that have no common master. I think that my soul must have preexisted in the body of a Chamois-chaser; the simple image of the old object has been obliterated; but the feelings, and impulsive habits, and incipient actions are in me, and the old scenery awakens them. The further I ascend from animated Nature, from men, and cattle, and the common birds of the woods and fields, the greater becomes in me the Intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have, an opposite. “God is everywhere,” I have exclaimed, “and works everywhere, and where is there room for death?” In these moments it has been my creed, that Death exists only because Ideas exist; that life is limitless Sensation; that Death is a child of the organic senses, chiefly of the Sight; that Feelings die by flowing into the mould of the Intellect, and becoming ideas; and that Ideas passing forth into action reinstate themselves again in the

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world of Life. And I do believe that truth lies enveloped in these loose generalisations. (TW, 132–3)

From his notebook October 180332 Poem on Spirit—or on Spinoza—I would make a pilgrimage to the Deserts of Arabia to find the man who could make understand how the one can be many! Eternal universal mystery! It seems as if it were impossible; yet it is—& it is every where!—It is indeed a contradiction in Terms: and only in Terms!—It is the co presence of Feeling & Life, limitless by their very essence, with Form, by its very essence limited—determinate—definite.— (BL Add. MS 47, 518 f51) * * * Our mortal existence a stoppage in the blood of Life—a brief eddy in the everflowing Ocean of pure Activity, from wind or concourse of currents—who beholds Pyramids, yea, Alps and Andes, giant Pyramids the work of Fire, raising monuments like a generous Victor, o’er its own conquest, tombstones of a world destroyed—yet, these too float adown the Sea of Time, & melt away, Mountains of floating Ice/— (BL Add. MS 47, 509 f48) * * * April 1811 33 The image-forming or rather re-forming power, the imagination in its passive sense, which I would rather call Fancy = Phantasy, . . . this, the Fetisch & Talisman of all modern Philosophers (the Germans excepted) may not inaptly be compared to the Gorgon Head, which looked death into every thing—and this not by accident, but from the


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nature of the faculty itself, the province of which is to give consciousness to the Subject by presenting to it its conceptions objectively but the Soul differences itself from any other Soul for the purposes of symbolical knowlege by form or body only—but all form as body, i.e. as shape, & not as forma efformans, is dead—Life may be inferred, even as intelligence is from black marks on white paper—but the black marks themselves are truly “the dead letter”. Here then is the error—not in the faculty itself, without which there would be no fixation, consequently, no distinct perception or conception, but in the gross idolatry of those who abuse it, & make that the goal & end which should be only a means of arriving at it. Is it any excuse to him who treats a living being as inanimate Body, that he we cannot arrive at the knowlege of the living Being but thro’ the Body which is its Symbol & outward & visible Sign?— From the above deduce the worth & dignity of poetic Imagination, of the fusing power, that fixing unfixes & while it melts & bedims the Image, still leaves in the Soul its living meaning— (BL Add. MS 47, 514 f119–119v)

April 1817 34 It is the instinct of the Letter to bring into subjection to itself the Spirit.—The latter cannot dispute—nor can it be disputed for, but with a certainty of defeat. For words express generalities that can be made so clear—they have neither the play of colors, nor the untranslatable meanings of the eye, nor any one of the thousand indescribable things that form the whole reality of the living fuel— (BL Add. MS 47, 519 f21–21v)

iii.

Reason and understanding

From his marginalia on Jeremy Taylor, ‘ΣYMBOΛON Θ EOΛ O Γ IKON; or, A Collection of Polemicall Discourses’ (c. 1811–26)35 In this most eloquent treatise we may detect sundry logical lapses, sometimes in the statement, sometimes in the instances, and once or

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twice in the conclusions. But the main and pervading error lies in the treatment of the subject in genere by the forms and rules of conceptual logic; which deriving all its material from the senses, and borrowing its forms from the sense (α/σθησ ις καθαρ ) or intuitive faculty, is necessarily inapplicable to spiritual mysteries, the very definition or contra-distinguishing character of which is that they transcend the sense, and therefore the understanding, the faculty, as Archbishop Leighton and Immanuel Kant excellently define it, which judges according to sense. In the Aids to Reflection, I have shown that the proper function of the understanding or mediate faculty is to collect individual or sensible concretes into kinds and sorts ( genera et species) by means of their common characters (notæ communes); and to fix and distinguish these conceptions (that is, generalized perceptions) by words. Words are the only immediate objects of the understanding. Spiritual verities, or truths of reason respective ad realia, and herein distinguished from the merely formal, or so-called universal truths, are differenced from the conceptions of the understanding by the immediatcy of the knowledge, and from the immediate truths of sense,—that is, from both pure and mixed intuitions,—by not being sensible, that is, not representable by figure, measurement or weight; nor connected with any affection of our sensibility, such as color, taste, odors, and the like. And such knowledges we, when we speak correctly, name ideas. Now, Original Sin, that is, sin that has its origin in itself, or in the will of the sinner, but yet in a state or condition of the will not peculiar to the individual agent, but common to the human race, is an idea: and one diagnostic or contra-distinguishing mark appertaining to all ideas, is, that they are not adequately expressible by words. An idea can only be expressed (more correctly suggested) by two contradictory positions; as, for example: the soul is all in every part;—nature is a sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere, and the like. (Shedd, 5: 206–7)

From The Statesman’s Manual (1816)36 Notions, the depthless abstractions of fleeting phænomena, the shadows of sailing vapors, the colorless repetitions of rainbows, have


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effected their utmost when they have added to the distinctness of our knowledge. For this very cause they are of themselves adverse to lofty emotion, and it requires the influence of a light and warmth, not their own, to make them crystallize into a semblance of growth. But every principle is actualized by an idea; and every idea is living, productive, partaketh of infinity, and (as Bacon has sublimely observed) containeth an endless power of semination. Hence it is, that science, which consists wholly in ideas and principles, is power. Scientia et potentia (saith the same philosopher) in idem coincidunt. Hence too it is, that notions, linked arguments, reference to particular facts and calculations of prudence, influence only the comparatively few, the men of leisurely minds who have been trained up to them: and even these few they influence but faintly. But for the reverse, I appeal to the general character of the doctrines which have collected the most numerous sects, and acted upon the moral being of the converts with a force that might well seem supernatural. The great principles of our religion, the sublime ideas spoken out everywhere in the Old and New Testament, resemble the fixed stars, which appear of the same size to the naked as to the armed eye; the magnitude of which the telescope may rather seem to diminish than to increase. At the annunciation of principles, of ideas, the soul of man awakes and starts up, as an exile in a far distant land at the unexpected sounds of his native language, when after long years of absence, and almost of oblivion, he is suddenly addressed in his own mother-tongue. He weeps for joy, and embraces the speaker as his brother. How else can we explain the fact so honorable to Great Britain, that the poorest amongst us will contend with as much enthusiasm as the richest for the rights of property? These rights are the spheres and necessary conditions of free agency. But free agency contains the idea of the free will; and in this he intuitively knows the sublimity, and the infinite hopes, fears and capabilities of his own nature. (Shedd, 1: 433–4) * * * Of the discursive understanding, which forms for itself general notions and terms of classification for the purpose of comparing and arranging phænomena, the characteristic is clearness without depth.

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It contemplates the unity of things in their limits only, and is consequently a knowledge of superficies without substance. So much so indeed that it entangles itself in contradictions in the very effort of comprehending the idea of substance. The completing power which unites clearness with depth, the plenitude of the sense with the comprehensibility of the understanding, is the imagination, impregnated with which the understanding itself becomes intuitive, and a living power. The reason (not the abstract reason, not the reason as the mere organ of science, or as the faculty of scientific principles and schemes à priori; but reason), as the integral spirit of the regenerated man, reason substantiated and vital, one only, yet manifold, overseeing all, and going through all understanding; the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence from the glory of the Almighty; which remaining in itself regenerateth all other powers, and in all ages entering into holy souls maketh them friends of God and prophets; (Wisdom of Solomon, c. vii.) this reason without being either the sense, the understanding, or the imagination, contains all three within itself, even as the mind contains its thoughts, and is present in and through them all; or as the expression pervades the different features of an intelligent countenance. Each individual must bear witness of it to his own mind, even as he describes life and light: and with the silence of light it describes itself, and dwells in us only as far as we dwell in it. It can not in strict language be called a faculty, much less a personal property, of any human mind. He, with whom it is present, can as little appropriate it, whether totally or by partition, as he can claim ownership in the breathing air or make an inclosure in the cope of heaven. (Shedd, 1: 460–1)

From The Friend (1818)37 Man may rather be defined a religious than a rational creature, in regard that in other creatures there may be something of reason, but there is nothing of religion. Harrington If the reader will substitute the word “understanding” for “reason”, and the word “reason” for “religion,” Harrington has here completely


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expressed the truth for which I am contending. Man may rather be defined a rational than an intelligent creature, in regard that in other creatures there may be something of understanding, but there is nothing of reason. But that this was Harrington’s meaning is evident. Otherwise, instead of comparing two faculties with each other, he would contrast a faculty with one of its own objects, which would involve the same absurdity as if he had said, that man might rather be defined an astronomical than a seeing animal, because other animals possessed the sense of sight, but were incapable of beholding the satellites of Saturn, or the nebulæ of fixed stars. If further confirmation be necessary, it may be supplied by the following reflections, the leading thought of which I remember to have read in the works of a continental philosopher. It should seem easy to give the definite distinction of the reason from the understanding, because we constantly imply it when we speak of the difference between ourselves and the brute creation. No one, except as a figure of speech, ever speaks of an animal reason; but that many animals possess a share of understanding, perfectly distinguishable from mere instinct, we all allow. . . . I should have no objection to define reason with Jacobi, and with his friend Hemsterhuis, as an organ bearing the same relation to spiritual objects, the universal, the eternal, and the necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phenomena. But then it must be added, that it is an organ identical with its appropriate objects. Thus, God, the soul, eternal truth, &c., are the objects of reason; but they are themselves reason. We name God the Supreme Reason; and Milton says,— —whence the soul Reason receives, and reason is her being. Whatever is conscious self-knowledge is reason: and in this sense it may be safely defined the organ of the supersensuous; even as the understanding wherever it does not possess or use the reason, as its inward eye, may be defined the conception of the sensuous, or the faculty by which we generalize and arrange the phenomena of perception; that faculty, the functions of which contain the rules and constitute the possibility of outward experience. In short, the understanding supposes something that is understood. This may be merely

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its own acts or forms, that is, formal logic; but real objects, the materials of substantial knowledge, must be furnished, I might safely say revealed, to it by organs of sense. The understanding of the higher brutes has only organs of outward sense, and consequently material objects only; but man’s understanding has likewise an organ of inward sense, and therefore the power of acquainting itself with invisible realities or spiritual objects. This organ is his reason. Again, the understanding and experience may exist without reason. But reason can not exist without understanding; nor does it or can it manifest itself but in and through the understanding, which in our elder writers is often called discourse, or the discursive faculty, as by Hooker, Lord Bacon, and Hobbes: and an understanding enlightened by reason Shakspeare gives as the contradistinguishing character of man, under the name ‘discourse of reason.’ In short, the human understanding possesses two distinct organs, the outward sense, and the mind’s eye, which is reason: wherever we use that phrase, the ‘mind’s eye,’ in its proper sense, and not as a mere synonyme of the memory or the fancy. In this way we reconcile the promise of revelation that the blessed will see God, with the declaration of St. John, No man hath seen God at any time. (Shedd, 2: 143–6) * * * Reason! best and holiest gift of God and bond of union with the giver;—the high title by which the majesty of man claims precedence above all other living creatures;—mysterious faculty, the mother of conscience, of language, of tears, and of smiles;—calm and incorruptible legislator of the soul, without whom all its other powers would ‘meet in mere oppugnancy;’—sole principle of permanence amid endless change,—in a world of discordant appetites and imagined self-interests the one only common measure, which taken away,— Force should be right; or, rather right and wrong,— Between whose endless jar justice resides,— Should lose their names, and so should justice too. Then every thing includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite;


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And appetite a universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce a universal prey! Thrice blessed faculty of reason! all other gifts, though goodly and of celestial origin, health, strength, talents, all the powers and all the means of enjoyment, seem dispensed by chance or sullen caprice;— thou alone, more than even the sunshine, more than the common air, art given to all men, and to every man alike. To thee, who being one art the same in all, we owe the privilege, that of all we can become one, a living whole,—that we have a country. Who then shall dare prescribe a law of moral action for any rational being, which does not flow immediately from that reason, which is the fountain of all morality? Or how without breach of conscience can we limit or coerce the powers of a free agent, except by coincidence with that law in his own mind, which is at once the cause, the condition, and the measure of his free agency? Man must be free; or to what purpose was he made a spirit of reason, and not a machine of instinct? Man must obey; or wherefore has he a conscience? The powers, which create this difficulty, contain its solution likewise: for their service is perfect freedom. And whatever law or system of law compels any other service, disennobles our nature, leagues itself with the animal against the god-like, kills in us the very principle of joyous well-doing and fights against humanity. (Shedd, 2: 176–7) * * * Most truly, and in strict consonance with his two great predecessors, does our immortal Verulam teach, that the human understanding, even independently of the causes that always, previously to its purification by philosophy, render it more or less turbid or uneven, . . . that our understanding not only reflects the objects subjectively, that is, substitutes for the inherent laws and properties of the objects the relations which the objects bear to its own particular constitution; but that in all its conscious presentations and reflexes, it is itself only a phænomenon of the inner sense, and requires the same corrections as the appearances transmitted by the outward senses. But that there

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is potentially, if not actually, in every rational being, a somewhat, call it what you will, the pure reason, the spirit, . . . intellectual intuition, or the like,—and that in this are to be found the indispensable conditions of all science, and scientific research, whether meditative, contemplative, or experimental,—is often expressed, and everywhere supposed, by Lord Bacon. And that this is not only the right but the possible nature of the human mind, to which it is capable of being restored, is implied in the various remedies prescribed by him for its diseases, and in the various means of neutralizing or converting into useful instrumentality the imperfections which can not be removed. There is a sublime truth contained in his favorite phrase, idola intellectus. He thus tells us, that the mind of man is an edifice not built with human hands, which needs only be purged of its idols and idolatrous services to become the temple of the true and living Light. Nay, he has shown and established the true criterion between the ideas and the idola of the mind; namely, that the former are manifested by their adequacy to those ideas in nature, which in and through them are contemplated. . . . Thus the difference, or rather distinction, between Plato and Lord Bacon is simply this: that philosophy being necessarily bipolar, Plato treats principally of the truth, as it manifests itself at the ideal pole, as the science of intellect (de mundo intelligibili); while Bacon confines himself, for the most part, to the same truth, as it is manifested at the other or material pole, as the science of nature (de mundo sensibili). . . . Hence too, it will not surprise us, that Plato so often calls ideas living laws, in which the mind has its whole true being and permanence; or that Bacon, vice versa, names the laws of nature ideas; and represents what I have in a former part of this disquisition called facts of science and central phænomena, as signatures, impressions, and symbols of ideas. A distinguishable power self-affirmed, and seen in its unity with the Eternal Essence, is, according to Plato, an idea: and the discipline, by which the human mind is purified from its idols (ε/δωλα), and raised to the contemplation of ideas, and thence to the secure and ever-progressive, though neverending, investigation of truth and reality by scientific method, comprehends what the same philosopher so highly extols under the title of dialectic. . . . We can now, as men furnished with fit and respectable credentials, proceed to the historic importance and practical application of method, under the deep and solemn conviction, that without this


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guiding light neither can the sciences attain to their full evolution, as the organs of one vital and harmonious body, nor that most weighty and concerning of all sciences, the science of education, be understood in its first elements, much less display its powers, as the nisus formativus of social man, as the appointed protoplast of true humanity. Never can society comprehend fully, and in its whole practical extent, the permanent distinction, and the occasional contrast, between cultivation and civilization; never can it attain to a due insight into the momentous fact, fearfully as it has been, and even now is, exemplified in a neighbor country, that a nation can never be a too cultivated, but may easily become an over-civilized race: never, I repeat, can this sanative and preventive knowledge take up its abode among us, while we oppose ourselves voluntarily to that grand prerogative of our nature, a hungering and thirsting after truth, as the appropriate end of our intelligential, and its point of union with our moral nature; but therefore after truth, that must be found within us before it can be intelligibly reflected back on the mind from without, and a religious regard to which is indispensable, both as guide and object to the just formation of the human being, poor and rich: while, in a word, we are blind to the master-light, which I have already presented in various points of view, and recommended by whatever is of highest authority with the venerators of the ancient, and the adherents of modern philosophy. (Shedd, 2: 444–8)

From the 1818–19 Lectures on the History of Philosophy38 I must speak of that which was really influential in Plato, and which none will deny to have originated in Platonism who does not deny the coinciding testimony of all antiquity. It is this: in common with others but more expressly and purely than any, he taught us to seek the principles, that charm and spell by which nature is to be invoked in reason itself, but with final awe [and, “as it were the great Mother’s knee”, to seek] the confirmation of those principles of nature by induction. But above all, this is what I mean: he taught the idea, namely the possibility, and the duty of all who would arrive at the greatest perfection of the human mind, of striving to contemplate

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things not in the phenomenon, not in their accidents or in their superficies, but in their essential powers, first as they exist in relation to other powers co-existing with them, but lastly and chiefly as they exist, in the Supreme Mind, independent of all material division, distinct and yet indivisible. This is expressly asserted by [Plato], and it is the very essential of Platonism when he says that that which exists in the perfection of distinctness and yet without separation, either from another or from the supreme cause, is an Idea. What can such an abstract notion as this produce, it may be said? What can such a shadow give of formless truth? If it be a truth, bring it forward. For that very reason, were there no others (as there are many and better) did it produce a great effect. The human passions and human energies do not clothe my natural humanity with any distinct palpable visible forms. The mind always feels itself greater than aught it has done. It begins in the act of perceiving that it must go beyond it in order to comprehend it; therefore it is only to that which contains distinct conception in itself, and, thereby satisfying the intellect, does at the same time contain in it a plenitude which refuses limitation or division, that the soul feels its full faculties called forth. (PLects, 165–6)

From a letter to C.A. Tulk, 12 February 182139 ‘They say, Coleridge! that you are a Swedenborgian!’ Would to God! (I replied fervently) that they were any thing. I was writing a brief essay on the prospects of a country, where it has become the mind of the Nation to appreciate the evil of public acts and measures by their next consequences or immediate occasions, while the principle violated, or that a Principle is thereby violated, is either wholly dropt out of the consideration, or is introduced but as a Garnish or ornamental Common-place in the peroration of a Speech! The deep interest was present to my thoughts—of that distinction between the Reason, as the source of Principles, the true celestial influx and porta Dei in hominem internum, and the Understanding, with the clearness of the proof, by which this distinction is evinced—viz. that vital or zoo-organic Power, Instinct, and Understanding fall all three under the same definition in genere, and the very additions by which the definition is


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applied from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, are themselves expressive of degrees only and in degree only deniable of the preceding—(Ex. gr. 1. Reflect on the selective power exercised by the stomach of the Caterpillar on the undigested miscellany of food—the same power exercised by the Caterpillar on the outward Plants—& you will see the order of the conceptions.) 1. Vital power = the power, by which means are adapted to proximate ends. 2. Instinct, the power, which adapts means to proximate ends. 3. Understanding = the power which adapts means to proximate ends according to varying circumstances. May I not safely challenge any man to peruse Huber’s Treatise on Ants, and yet deny their claim to be included in the last definition?—But try to apply the same definition, with any extension of degree, to the Reason—the absurdity will flash upon the conviction. First, in Reason there is and can be no degree. Deus introit aut non introit.—Secondly, in Reason there are no means nor ends: Reason itself being one with the ultimate end, of which it is the manifestation. Thirdly, Reason has no concern with things (i.e. the impermanent flux of particulars) but with the permanent Relations; & is to be defined, even in it’s lowest or theoretical attribute, as the Power which enables man to draw necessary and universal conclusions from particular facts or forms—ex. gr. from any 3 cornered thing that the 2 sides of a Triangle are & must be greater than the third.— From the Understanding to the Reason there is no continuous ascent possible, it is a metabasis ε;ς

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