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THOUGHTS AND IMAGES.

BY ARCHAEUS.

1.

There are countenances far more indecent than the naked form of the Medicean Venus.

2.

How overpowering are the mingled murmur, clang, tramp, and rattle of a body of troops, with all their footsteps, horses, arms, artillery, and varied voices! How insignificant compared with this uproar the speech of a single mouth! Yet the whisper of one mouth sets in motion and drives on to death and devastation twenty such bodies, comprising, perhaps, a hundred thousand human lives.

3.

It is trivial to say that geometrical truth means only consistency with hypothesis, unless we add, that the hypothesis is necessary and immutable.

4.

Conceive an arch wanting only the keystone, and still supported by the centreing, without which it would fall into a planless heap. It is now held up merely by the supports beneath it. Add the keystone, and it will stand a thousand years, although every prop should be shattered or fall in dust. Now, it is idle to say that this change in the principle of the structure was accomplished by the mere addition of one more stone. The difference is not only that of increase, but also that of almost magical transmutation. No stone before helped to hold up its neighbour, and each having its own prop, any one might have been removed without shaking the support of the others. Now, each is essential to the whole, which is sustained not from without but by an inward law. So is it with religion. It not only adds a new feeling and sanction to those previously existing in the mind, but unites them by a different kind of force, and one for the reception of which all the invisible frame was prepared and planned, though it may stand for years unfinished, upheld by outward and temporary appliances, and manifesting its want of the true bond and centre which it has not yet received.

5.

How many ought to feel, enjoy, and understand poetry who are quite insensible to it! How many ought not to attempt to create it who waste themselves in the fruitless enterprise ! It must be a sickly fly that has no palate for honey. It must be a conceited one that tries to make it.

6.

There can be poetry in the writings of few men; but it ought to be in the hearts and lives of all.

7.

Many have the talents which would make them poets if they had the genius. A few have the genius yet want the talent.

8.

No man is so born a poet but that he needs to be regenerated into a poetic artist.

9.

Luxurious and polished life, without a true sense for the beautiful, the good, and the great, is far more barren and sad to see than that of the ignorant and brutalized. Even as a mere wilderness would be less dreary to traverse than a succession of farms and gardens diligently and expensively cultivated to produce no crops but weeds.

10.

There are minds, or seem to be such, which we can only compare to a noble cathedral of vast size, beautiful proportions, and covered with graceful ornaments. Nothing that art can supply to devotion appears wanting till we approach the great door and try to enter, when we find the seeming building only a solid rock outwardly carved into that appearance.

11.

A botanist with a conscience will understand the saying, that no weeds grow on earth except in the heart of

man.

12.

A fierce polemic often pulls down the temple in order to build a fortified wall for the defence of its site against all profane invaders. What worse could they have done to it? But if he merely uses the sacred shields and

weapons, "armoury of the invincible knights of old," hung in the sanctuary, for the purpose of defending it against destroyers, he does the God service who, as the Genius Loci, will surely fight beside him.

13.

What is the one indispensable quality for a polemic controversialist? Not learning, nor talents, nor orthodoxy, nor zeal. But the Spirit of Love, which implies an anxiety to find good in all, and to believe it where we cannot find it. God admits into his courts no advocates hired to see but one side of a question.

14.

We look with wonder at the spectacle which astronomy presents to us, of thousands of worlds and systems of worlds weaving together their harmonious movements into one great whole. But the view of the hearts of men furnished by history, considered as a combination of biographies, is immeasurably more awful and pathetic. Every water-drop of the millions in that dusky stream is a living heart, a world of worlds! How vast and strange, and sad and living a thing he only knows at all who has gained knowledge by labour, experience, and suffering; and he knows it not perfectly.

15.

All the ordinary intercourse of life is big and warm with poetry. The history of a few weeks' residence in a circle of human beings is a domestic epic. Few friendships but yield in their developement and decay the stuff of a long tragedy. A summer day in the country is an actual idyll. And many a moment of common life sparkles and sings itself away in a light song; wounds as the poisoned barb of an epigram; or falls as a heavy mournful epitaph. But in all he who has an ear to catch the sound may find a continuous underflow of quiet melody, bursting sometimes into chorusses of triumph, sometimes into funereal chants. The reason why these archetypal poems of real life are so often unfit for the use of the poetic artist, is not their want of the true meaning of poetry, but their unsuitableness to the apprehension of any except the few, perhaps the one, immediately concerned. The poet must choose such a sequence of images as shall make the harmonious evolution

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But

Sylburgius is a narrow fierce man; a kind of dark lanthern; a mass of iron blast, but still burning hot. With little vision or sense for the outward, and with but weak and scanty sympathies, he wants the awakening and suggesting influences of external beings, which might have given him a consciousness of Truths not immediately arising from his own character. As there is no predominance of Reflection in his mind, he has not been led to expand and deduce to their full extent the principles he acknowledges. with some power of insight he sees that there is a Truth to be believed, and with strong zeal he clings to and hugs it as all that he can trust in. Propose to him any thing as additional and supplementary to this, and he thinks it something which you would substitute for his own peculiar possession, and so would rob under pretence of enriching him. And herein is the essence of the man's individuality,namely, in his view of Truth as something which can be his property, and under his dominion, and therefore as limited, for so all property must be, and cut off from a larger field left open to be divided and possessed by others. He does not discern Truth as rather a Law, or Sovereign Constitution, to which we look up, than as areas of clay and sand which we may mete out and occupy; as the Law of the Land rather than the Land itself. Hence, in his maintenance of his Faith, there is all the tenacity, the self-assertion, the at

titude of resistance, which men display in vindication of their material possessions. Noble art thou, O man! who canst possess Truth as thine own! How far nobler if thou wouldst be by Truth possessed, and so ennobled by the Sovereign to whom thou owest allegiance.

21.

Every man's follies are the caricature resemblances of his wisdom.

22.

If men were not essentially believing beings, falsehoods could have no effect on them; for a falsehood operates not as known to be false, but only as believed to be true. A falsehood, in its own name and character, is an impudent nothing. The fictions of the artist are only falsehoods, in so far as they depart from literal and partial truth in order to attain to the ideal and universal.

23.

A great truth sometimes sets the world in flames; and men afterwards commemorate the stoppage of the conflagration by some such dead monument as that which looks down on London, crowned with a dead brazen resemblance of the active living fire. But in another age the symbol may burst out again with the old life, and the brazen flames become real ones and kindle the land anew. Even the sepulchral images and signs of truth have a power to suggest and awaken the reality, so framed are men for truth, born into it as their element, vitally akin to it, and sensitive to the least rumour or stir of it. For the consciousness of truth is nothing else but the finding of one's self in one's world, and of one's world in one's self, and of God in all.

24.

God, where the word expresses a mere tradition, custom, premise of a theory, or unknown power, is less than the least of realities; not so much as the African's lock of hair, or bunch of rags, which he calls his fetish; but rather the sound, shadow, or dream of this. When known, believed, loved, reverenced-vaster than the universe, nay, than man; more than the Infinite and Eternal, even the Author and Fount of these, and of the reasonable mind that knows them.

25.

They who deride the name of God are the most unhappy of men, except

those who make a trade of honouring Him. And how many of the selfstyled, world-applauded holy are mere traffickers in the temple, setting so much present self-denial against so much future enjoyment!

26.

God is the only voluntary Being to whom we cannot, without absurdity and self-contradiction, attribute aught arbitrary and self-willed. And, to doubt that we can know and comprehend the principles by which he acts, is to deny both that our reason is a gleam of his light, and that he has ever revealed himself to us at all. 27.

As a sublime statue manifests its maker's thought, so God's creation displays his mind. But conceive, that while the rude mass is shaped into the lineaments of a man, it grows more and more conscious of the advancing work, so that each new outward line and trait is accompanied by a new and livelier inward sense of the artist's design, and, consequently, of his character, and we have a faint image of the scheme which the history of the world unfolds.

28.

We are, indeed, clay in the hands of the potter; but what a weight of new meaning, what a revolutionary transmutation, transorganization of the whole image arises, when we only add, in one word, that we are conscious clay. I may mould a plastic lump of earth or putty in my fingers for an hour, shaping it into a hundred forms, a cube, a ball, a crescent, a pyramid. At last the fancy seizes me to give it the semblance of a child: and, at the moment when I have rudely shaped the limbs, they begin to heave and glow with life; the lips breathe, the faint eyes open, and fix on me with a gaze of thought and emotion. I thrill with fearful joy and awe. Is the clay to me any longer a mass which I can mould and juggle at with pleasure? Alas! it is now a sacred, an immeasurable thing; itself a man ; almost a god. Its sensations quiver on into my heart. am no longer a potter-but a parent.

29.

I

There is one class of men in whom the higher powers of insight, love, and faith, appear to want a sufficient apparatus of the meaner faculties, the quick perception and sturdy boldness required for working in this world of

work. There are others of whom the reverse is true. They are Torsostrunks and arms, but no heads. They have quick apprehension and ready vigour; but in the higher movements of the spirit are confused, inert, crippled. The business of life for each is to supply what each wants; to strengthen the deep roots for the nourishment of the apparent and excessive branches; and to take care that the hidden and imperishable root shall struggle forth into the production of adequate stem and boughs, leaves, blossoms, and fruit. So each may murmur peacefully in the breeze, and calmly shade the soil; and each shall wave amid the storms with the roar of all its awakened being brows, and a mantled head, dark with mysterious umbrage, propped upon an unshaken and columnar stem.

30.

poses, with an air of the jauntiest kindliness, the relaxation of a farce, a masquerade, or a stroll in a green field. On this earth, where men so often wander amid graves and charnel houses, and hospitals, wrapped in funeral mantles— or stand upon the lonely stormy ridges, sentinels armed for fight-he skips along with a Jew's harp, and a smelling bottle, as if these were divine preservatives, Moly and Hæmony, against all sense of ill and danger. Say to him that, after all his quips and gentlenesses, a living foot of blood and bone must have something firmer than cobwebs pearled with dew to stand upon, and must spurn those who would deny it any better support, and he is not indignant-he is too soft and sweet a thing for that — but fretted and hurt with a sense of undeserved wrong, and is unhappy till he has accomplished a formal reconciliation, to be celebrated

Lies are the ghosts of truths—the with a hecatomb of sugar plums. masks of faces.

31.

Dulcidius is an extreme example of a kind of man not uncommon in an age like ours, of hectic, flatulent sympathies, and præter-human humanities. He shuts his eyes to all that annoy him, or would, if noticed, annoy him, in the existence of mankind; and you can work him no sorer injury than to say or do any thing which disturbs his waking dream. If men are not exempt from labours and sorrows, yet, in his eyes, they ought to be; and we must cheat ourselves and others with the pleasant delusion that it really is so; and must forget the miseries which we cannot altogether escape from. In face of the gravest calamities and toils he turns away his head with a wink and smirk, as if to let us know that he is in the secret, and that these horrors are but empty bugbears to frighten children. With a harlequin's leap, and a clown's grin, he whisks out of the throng, and press, and fierce contention; and chirps, or chatters that if people would only stand still, or lounge about and sip sugar and water, all evils under the sun would disappear. If men stare with blank consternation at the spot of a shipwreck or a massacre, he tries to draw off their attention, and raise their spirits with a puppet-show, or a penny trumpet. And, to one wrestling in the agonies of conscience, or nerved for severe and heroic effort, he pro

In support of his filagree and tinsel fancies, Dulcidius has no lack of arguments, which sound plausible and specious, and bubble over with ingenuity and prettiness. But his reasonings buzz and twinkle like summer flies, and after all, leave each of them only a puny speck of dirt behind. Would not one fancy that he is some wealthy fop, who has never known the pressure of difficulty? Yet he has had his pains and crosses ; has lost an arm and an eye; and with a face seamed with heavy wrinkles, and a head of snow-white hair, he goes prating, and quirking, and simmering, and flaunting away in all the good-humoured vacancy of a milliner's girl in the midst of her shreds and gauzes, or a doating country barber with his soapfroth and gossip. What stern hard fierceness, what fantastic bigotry would be as melancholy and repulsive as the sight of this dreary baseless levity, and tawdry benevolence!

So says the high and pure, but somewhat narrow and haughty moralist. But is there not another side to the question? In a world where there are grains of dust as well as mountains, and where the thistle-down hangs upon the oak, may there not be room for weak and trivial men beside the noblest and most earnest ? A fool with cap and bells may jingle away his life at the elbow of Rome-crowned Charlemagne. There are doubtless hours of desperate conflict for the

gravest interests of mankind, when the slight and empty spirits are necessarily trampled down like sparrows' eggshells, or swept away like sparrows' feathers, by the holy will of the hero and the prophet. The chaff must fly when the storm blows; and the frogs of the pool, when its waters redden with blood of men, are squelched unpitied under the hoofs of the warhorses. So be it, for it must be so. But in quiet times, and the long inter. spaces of history, there is leave and license for the growth of weeds, and weedlike creatures, which also have their use. For this weed is an old woman's remedy, and that a child's plaything. The idle creepers grow up round the grey stone effigy for a century; but when the hour comes, and the figure feels new life, and wakes and starts, and flashes out with eyes and sword, it snaps the fettering growth like worsted threads, and they perish rightfully. But while the poor and puffed-up worthlessness of our neighbour does no more harm than offend our more serious thoughts, or jar on our sensitive retiredness, it is justice to pardon him, and charity to endeavour to feel with him, and help him on.

Fireflies are not stars, but neither are they mere nothings. We cannot steer by them, we must not worship them; but we need not crush them. The smallest, paltriest human creature may have pains and conflicts to maintain himself, even in his small paltriness, equal for him to the inward strivings of a Luther or a Shakspeare.

32.

There are looks and gestures of quiet, unheard of women, a housekeeper, a governess, a sodden washerwoman, and of men as commonplace as any whom Holborn, or Manchester, or May Fair generates, in which a thoughtful eye will read tragedies to draw deeper, bitterer tears than Shakspeare's Othello, Goethe's Tasso, or all the woes of Euripides. I have stood in a group of peasants before a painted crucifixion, and there were looks of sympathy which mine perhaps reflected. But I heard a hard heavy breathing behind me, and turning, I saw a woman who had brought her sorrows thither, not found them there.

She stood with dull and heavy eyes beholding the painted grief of the Holy Virgin Mother. I never knew what was her calamity. She too,

doubtless, was mourning for a son, perhaps for his crimes. But I felt that to me sublime religion and perfect art were nothing while I saw so close to me a living genuine misery. 33.

The forests of utterance, with all their rustling raving seas of leaves, grow out of the deep and silent soil, the immeasurably deep boundlessly silent bosom of old earth. Yet the living utterances are better than the sublime silence; but for which also they could not be. 34.

If men's reason were laid to sleep, no doubt they would do by instinct many more than as at present of the things to which instinct is equal. The instinctive powers are lost sight of under the presence of the rational consciousness, as the stars disappear in sunshine. Hence we may explain some of the startling ingenuities of savages. But the delights and capacities of the conscious spirit, instinct never can supply. For instinct is intelligence incapable of self-conscious

ness.

35.

Whatever has been seen of Fair and Excellent was first conceived in the sacred darkness of the Unseen. But because vitally, irrepressibly, fair and excellent, therefore, must it needs go forth, and so be seen in its true beauty.

36.

It is not a part, small or great, but the very whole of a man's work, ha.. ving within himself (as all have) a world of dusky unembodied greatness, to bring this to utterance, first within his heart, clearly, honestly, and therefore, as must needs be, slowly; and next at ripe seasons, and with due precautions, by bold unconquerable flaming mouth and deed outwardly to utter it. His utterance must be this thing, and no other which he has truly intimately found within himself. this cannot to himself be altogether clear and evident till he has begun to impart it. And thus as the whole race of man is still but individual man, multiplied and completed, so all human history is but the striving towards full and mature utterance of that dark and seething reality which lies hidden and more or less turbulent in every breast. But as the true utterance of all the truth is the work and consummation of

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