■^ X ■>il'-^ * t' ■^^^Is-lv! DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY T^reasure %oom THE COLERIDGE COLLECTION ■^m as '^m^W:^"^^ Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in-^OIS witii funding from Duke University Libraries Iittp://arcliive.org/details/guessesattrutli01liare GUESSES AT TRUTH. LONDON PRINTED BY S. AND R. BENTLEY. DORSET STREET -^^^a:^^L^ GUESSES AT TRUTH TWO BROTHERS. THE SECOND VOLUME. LONDON : PUBLISHED FOR JOHN TAYLOR, WATERLOO PLACE, BY JAMES DUNCAN, PATER140STER ROW ; AND SOLD BY J, A. HESSEY, FLEET STREET, AND HATCHARD AND SON, PICCADILLY. 1827. Hardly do we guess aright at things that are upon earth, and with labour do we find the things that are before us : but the things that are in heaven who hath searched out? Wisdom of Solomon, ix. 16. "ilva^ ov TO fiavrho'v 4o7s oilre \4yei oiire /cpuTTTei dWa (rrifialueu Heraclitus ap. Plutarch, de Pyth, orac. p. 404. Vasta ut plurimum solent esse quae inania : solida con- trahuntur maxime, et in parvo sita sunt. Bacon. Inst. Magn. Preef. GUESSES AT TRUTH. It may seem inconsistent with some foregoing observations, to quarrel with a jest; nor would I, so long as it pretends not to be something else. But wit will not keep ; jokes to be good ought to be fresh; [the airy particles which give them flavour, evaporate as they pass from mouth to mouth, and they grow so stale and vapid and mawkish that every man of taste nauseates them. Hence> to continue current, they must have a nominal as well as a real value : they must appear at least to be more than mere jests ; they must represent some VOL. II. B O O (■'r r: s\ r\ «J C. :/ '•;. "^ y 2 GUESSES AT TRUTH. truth, or mimic it. In this manner what was originally perhaps thrown off in harmless gaiety, being repeated as a proverb and retailed as a maxim, may become mischievous ; inasmuch as Wit, which delights in heightening and deepen- ing all contrasts, is nearly allied to that sophistry which thrives by perplexing and confounding all relations ; and after a saying has thus been abused^ one is loth to sully one's lips with it. Of such a kind is that vulgarest of street-walking vulgarisms, that smart, pert, tawdry, trickish cheat : Why should I do anything for Posterity ? Posterity has done nothing for me. The sophistry here is so shallow, one should be unwilling to expose it, did not continual ex- perience teach us that the shallows cause many more wrecks than the depths. People may grumble about dark and deep mysteries ; it is not among them that men make shipwreck of their souls ; it is on some jagged rock or flat sandbank near the shore. The saying I have GUESSES AT TRUTH. D cited, begins with utterly perverting the ideas of duty and moral obligation. Several words expressive of these ideas have been derived from words expressive of debt : duty itself for instance is that which is due ; and I ought, as every one knows, is only the preterite of 1 owe ; although according to the usual practice, where a word has at once two forms and a double signification, of dividing the property between them, ought is now used exclusively in the moral sense ; and that even as a present, since the affinity of sound connected the old present owe more closely with the other preterite owed: so important did the distinction of meaning appear, that grammar was violated to preserve it. All this is convenient enough, so long as the original notion is allowed to lie in the back-ground, not thrust obtrusively forward and unseasonably substituted for the derivative. But it cannot supplant, without overthrowing it. To assert that a duty nowise differs from a debt in the commercial sense of 4 GUESSES AT TRUTH. the word, that what I ought I owe, just like a guinea which I have borrowed, and that unless I have incurred such a debt, unless I have actu- ally borrowed the guinea, I am under no moral obligation ; an assertion of this kind is no less irrational than to insist that the water when it springs out of the earth, filtered, and purified and impregnated by the substances through which it has passed, is still nothing but snow and rain, because once perchance it may have been so. In one way of regarding it indeed, the primitive meaning is a very just one : whatever I ought to do, I owe : I owe it to the God who made me and gave me the power of doing it. I owe it, as a tree owes or ought to bring forth fruit after its kind, in obedience to the law of my nature, and in discharge of my debt for whatever gifts I may have received. Here too our language has most philosophically hit the truth : whatever I owe or own or possess, I owe ; whatever is my own, is owed : onm also is only GUESSES AT TRUTH. 5 another form of the participle owed, from which, as from ought, a new present has arisen. There- fore to say I owe no duty to such a man, because I have received nothing from him, is rank non- sense and perverse confusion. I owe him, what- ever I can do for him ; and I owe it^ because I can do it : that is of course, when it interferes not with other obUgations ; but the secondary question need not be considered here. Now this may be called an idle piece of work about what all the world knows. Would that it were ! But that proverb is too often quoted, alas ! not irrelevantly ; and when one casts one's eyes around, it would almost seem as if everybody were acting upon it. At least one very remark- able characteristic of our age, is the absolute want of any care for posterity. We have well nigh forfeited all claim to that noble description of man, as looking before and after. Short- sighted people, it has been observed, increase daily : short- thoughted people have multiplied 6 GUESSES AT TRUTH. far more rapidly. Providence has been con- tracted into prudence : so, having squeezed up the name, we think ourselves bound at least proportionably to contract the span and scope of the faculty. Indeed if there be any Gospel precept to the accomplishment of which we have recently made any considerable ap- proach, it must be that of taking no thought for tomorrow : only I am afraid one should have to read after tomorrow ; the truth being that we think so much about the morrow, we can find no thought to spare for the day beyond it, or even for the day behind it. Look at the buildings of the men in ancient times, their temples and their amphitheatres, their minsters and their castles : were they not also, like their writings, TiTY^fxara ig a el ; while our houses are already many of them biennials ; and if we mind well v/hat we are about, we may at last contrive to make them ephemeral. We are become the purveyors and jackals of Destruction, bargain- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 7 ing however that we shall have our share in the booty : whereas our ancestors wrought in a magnanimous spirit of rivalry with Nature; or in kindly fellowship with her at other times, as when they planted, choosing out her trees of longest life, the oak, the chesnut, the yew, the elm, trees which it does us good to behold, while we muse on the many generations of our fore- fathers whose eyes have reposed within the same leafy bays. Amongst them are trees by gazing on which Milton or Shakspeare may have enriched his imagination with visions of beauty, trees under the shade of which Philip Sidney or the Black Prince may have slumbered, trees which may have witnessed the wars between the Norman, the Saxon, and the Dane. Now oaks, thank God, cannot be made to grow faster : it would take from the countryman his most capacious measure of Time, who creeps over them so softly that his progress is scarcely discernible, except by some new beaiity ever 8 GUESSES AT TRUTH. springing up beneath his gentle beneficent tread. What we can do however to be beforehand with Death, we do : we plant the trees of quick- est growth, and such as promise the speediest return, trees which we may ourselves hope to cut down and to put the money into our own pockets ; thus degrading that most liberal and farsighted and least selfish employment, in which we most intimately consult and commune with Nature, and subordinate our wayward wilfulness to her unerring will, into a vulgar and mercenary trade. The commonest trees in our modem plantations are the horse-chesnut, the Scotch elm, the sycamore, firs of various kinds, above all the larch, that apt type of the age, brittle, thin, perking, premature, outgrowing, upstart, monotonous, with no massiness of limb, no variety of outline, no prominences and recesses for the lights and shadows to play in. It has little beauty save of the lowest kind, mere sym- metry, the beauty which most captivates all GUESSES AT TRUTH. 9 such imaginations as have not strength enough to combine and harmonize a greater diversity of elements : if any other trees come near it, even this vanishes, and it becomes dry and rugged, and careless about all other things, if it can but lift its head above its neighbours : when you have seen one larch, you have seen all ; for every de- viation is a deformity ; nay, when you have seen a single side of one : for however you may change your point of view, it still presents the same insubstantial self-satisfied appearance, as if Na- ture for once had meant to shew that she could have kept pace with man even in poverty of invention. Then we have our companies and associations, in which brocage is only the first step toward breakage, and which fall to pieces, so to say, long before they are put together. Who can tell how many of them existed yester- day ? or how many will exist tomorrow ? you might as easily count the swallows on their passage, or the worms that crawl out after a 10 GUESSES AT TRUTH. shower. There is no petty corporation, which will not outlive them all : it was established in an age when men knew rather better how to fix the holdfasts of society. Our ancestors legisla- ted : we write treatises on legislation. Without knowing how, they made laws which have lived for centuries, and promise to live for centuries to come ; we know how, at least we do not doubt it ; and yet one seldom expects that any law enacted during the last session will escape with- out either revision or repeal the next ; beyond which, it would be invidious to ask how many members of our legislature have projected their minds. If the law of the Medes and Persians was justly characterized as that which altereth not, the law of England in our times may no less justly be characterized as that which altereth. Consider too the governments now in being throughout Europe : are not the oldest the most likely to endure ? and of the new ones, those where., as in Wirtemberg, innovation has had the GUESSES AT TRUTH. 11 wisdom to content itself with being renovation ? As for our literature, a large portion of it has taken the name of journal, and nine-tenths of the rest might without the slightest impropriety. Few authors expect to outlive the season, any more than partridges ; many meet their end on the first day ; hardly two or three in a large covey see a second winter, hardly one a third. It matters not to them : the reputation of the day is so clamorous and deafening, they cannot listen amidst it to catch the distant voice of Fame. In short we seem to have made up our minds that we will leave no souvenir to Posterity, except our debts. Posterity will be even with us, and will reward us as we deserve ; by forget- ting that such a selfish, voracious, trivial, inch- eyed, minute-minded generation ever trod the earth. Nor will the earth remind them of us : those monuments which she displays with the fondest pride as memorials of what her children have done, are the monuments of those 12 GUESSES AT TRUTH. whom she has long since taken into her bosom ; and she does not seem likely to find any new favorites soon. This indictment may be deemed overdrawn by those who make their boast of their age, as of their cravat ; I only ask whether the several counts are not true. But to turn to the sophis- tical proverb, let me take it by the horns. You, whoever you are that make use of it, assert that you owe nothing to Posterity, because, as you assert. Posterity has done nothing for you. You are ignorant then of your greatest earthly benefactor. Posterity has cast her shadow be- fore, and you are at this moment reposing un- derneath it. Whatever good, whatever pleasure, whatever comfort you possess, you owe mainly to Posterity. The heroic deeds that were done by the men of former times, the great works that were wrought, the great fabrics that were raised by them, their mounds and em- bankments against the powers of evil, their GUESSES AT TRUTH. 13 drains to carry off mischief, the wide plains they redeemed from the overflowings of barbarism, the countless fields they inclosed and husband- ed for good to grow and thrive in : for whom was all this achieved, but for Posterity? Except for Posterity, it never would have been achieved : except for Posterity, except for the vital magnetic consciousness that while men perish man survives, the only principle of pru- dent conduct must have been, let us eat and drink for tomorrow ice die. We toil, because we die not, because we live to reap the har- vest of our toil, if not in ourselves, yet in Posterity. All this, I say, was done for Posterity : not for you, or for me, or for your next neighbour, or for any single generation, but for Posterity, that dim, majestic, multi- tudinous idea, with the broad earth for its throne, and illimitable time for the period of its dominion, with the sweet light of Glory ever radiating from its face, and the sweet 14 GUESSES AT TKUTH. voice of Fame ever gushing from its choral lips. To this idea they brought their most precious offerings, and laid them at its feet : this invisible light cheered them, when they would otherwise have desponded amid the gloom ; this inaudible voice often comforted and heartened them, when they were on the eve of abandoning their task- That same light will cheer you too, if you but look curiously for it ; that same voice will com- fort you, if you hearken for it diligently ; and you will then incur a far goodlier and prouder obligation to Posterity, an obligation you will rejoice to acknowledge. But even as you are now, inhabiting a civilized land, eating the bread and drinking the wine of social life, your obligations to Posterity are inestimable ; you are warmed by its reflected light ; and unless you go forth into the woods, and strip yourself, body and heart and mind, of all you have and feel and know, and turn a homeless, heartless, reck- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 15 less, thoughtless, godless savage, Posterity will still have done far more for you than the service of your whole life can repay. I know not how to close these observations more fitly, than by reminding the reader of the last words written by Lady Jane Grey on the table-book which she gave to the constable of the Tower, when about to lead her to the scaf- fold. They may serve to put him in mind of the greatest among all the great blessings which he owes to Posterity, the most precious of all his heir-looms, the virtues of his ancestors. That meek and heroic lady thus expressed what had upheld her, and what has in like manner upheld many others: If mi/ fault deserves pit- nishmentf my youth at least and my imprudence are "worthy of excuse ; and God and Posterity will shew me favour. u. Sic vos non rohis, said the old poet somewhat querulously ; and many since have echoed his 16 GUESSES AT TRUTH. complaint. For it is not the privilege of bees and birds and sheep and oxen only : it is the common lot of mankind ; and the greatest men have the greatest share in it. But is it indeed so grievous ? Ask a mother. u. One saves oneself much pain, by taking pains much trouble, by taking trouble. u. The indolent are seldom the strong, either bodily or mentally. It is the man with only one talent, who wraps it up in a napkin and buries it ; while they who have more, make increase in proportion to what they have re- ceived. Indeed few men have ever hoarded money, who have not some time or other felt the want of it. u. Let not your field or your mind lie fallow too long : they will produce a large crop of weeds ; and weeds are much readier to take GUESSES AT TRUTH. 17 root than to leave it. The most profitable hus- bandry, that which best works the land with- out exhausting it, is by a change of crops. Longhi, the great engraver of Raphael's lovely Marriage of the Virgin, told me that he made it a rule always to have two prints in hand, and that turning from one to the other was the only relaxation he needed. For relaxation means loosening, not untying; and when you have loosened your faculties, you may soon tighten them again : but if you let them lie on the ground, they get entangled and knotted, until it is often no easy task to bring them into order. u. When you pluck up a weed, take it up by the root : when you pluck out a vice, shew no mercy ; extirpate it. If you only tear off the head of the weed, for the sake of making your garden look neat, ere long it will come up again, with VOL. II. c 18 GUESSES AT TEUTH. a new head sprouting from every fragment of jtKe root. Can there be a more complete il- lustration of the parable in which the unclean spirit after going out of the man, takes with him seven other spirits worse than himself, and returns into his house from whence he came out? The weed even finds the place empty, swept, and garnished : but worse than vain is all labour of which the sole aim is a decorous outward seemliness ; and the last state of that garden is worse than the first. A relapse is still more dangerous in a spiritual disease than in a bodily. u. What is the great blessing of a very forward state of civilization ? That there are no high- waymen ; and . . . and . . . and plenty of pick- pockets. Perhaps this may hold in other senses besides the literal. u. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 19^; In former times people were put into the stocks ; and, as we learn from Shakspeare, there was at least one honest man amongst them. Now-a- days people put into the stocks ; and . . . but Mercury in more than one of his capacities for- bids my divulging the secrets of his wards. ir. Men who feed on nothing but meat, contract a gross habit of body. Men who think of no- thing but money, contract a gross habit of mind : or usurers have been scandalously belied. The wealthy Jews scarcely intermarry but among themselves. Would that this were true morally and spiritually, as well as physically ! u. The division of labour is the application of Divide et Impera to matter ; and in this sense alone ought that maxim ever to have been ut- c 2 W GUESSES AT TRUTH. tered. In its common acceptation it is grossly and mischievously false. The first principle of politic wisdom is the exact reverse : tmite and rule :. let that which was scattered be gathered together, and let order be the cement of union. Assimilation is the great mean of organic growth, not only in particular bodies, but in states : and except as facilitating or preparatory to combi- nation, division is altogether inefficient and good for nothing. You cut up your ox into joints, in order that you may the more easily dress them : you cut up your sirloin into morsels, in order that you may swallow and digest them : in both instances the latter is the important process, and without it the former is of no use. Yet politicians have seldom learnt this : they usu- ally stop short in the slaughter-house : they hack and hew and chop, and then they carve and mince ; and then, when the pieces are at their smallest, they look out for another body to serve after the same fashion ; marvelling all the while GUESSES AT TRUTH. 21 why their strength does not increase prodi- giously. And even with reference to matter, one must beware of carrying the principle too far : even here it ought to be secondary rather than primary. As secondary, it will procure for us everything that appertains to man's legitimate sway over the world he is placed in : if this leaves us discontented, and we aim at estab- lishing a despotism, we may set it up as pri- mary ; and we shall then fall under that curse from which, through the blessing of God, no despot has ever been exempt, of becoming our slave's slave. Unless the mist which the thought calls up into my eyes deceive me, there are symptoms of such a destiny to be detected in England at this day : I refer not to the events of the last twelvemonth : that were to confound the disease with the pain which warns us of it, and v/hich, if we heed it, may lead us to seek for a remedy before it is too late. u. Sjss guesses at truth. Everybody has laughed at the old woman killing her goose that lay the golden eggs. All our master -manufacturers have laughed at it : all our political economists have laughed at it : England herself, had she a mouth to laugh with, would distend that mouth into a grin at it. For they tell you, laughter makes people forget themselves. u. It is rather droll that the unquenchable laugh of the Homeric Gods should be at their brother who has turned himself into a mechanic. The gods of this generation would deem him the only sensible person amongst them all : in him alone can they find nothing to laugh, or, as their way rather is, to sneer at. No matter that he fell from Heaven : Heaven must be a very idle useless place, if no manufactories are to be found there. No matter that he limps : what is the use of walking straight, or having two legs of the same length? Man's busi- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 23 ness is to sit and work, not to walk about like an automaton that has nothing better to do. Homer however has made him some amends, by giving him a Grace for his wife ; thus intima- ting that even the mechanical arts, of which beauty is not the animating principle, as it is in the cycle that Apollo presides over, ought still to be wedded to beauty. Oh ! there "s not much sense in that. Beauty is of no use. But you know. Homer was a poor blind heathen. u. There has been much controversy about the true reading of the Good Friday cry. The sticklers for accuracy and meaning in little things, insist at their peril that it ought to be : One a periny, two for twopence, hot cross-buns ! On the other hand the pure lovers of antiquity, who love a thing all the better for its being somewhat unreasonable, turn with disdain from anything so punily arithmetical, and uphold the 24 GUESSES AT TEUTH. authority of all the oldest women in favour of One a penny , two a penny, hot cross-buns ! Mr. Bentham has decided the dispute : for he, I am credibly informed, is in the practice of walking about crying-, One a penny, two a penny, con- stitutions ! r. Whatsoever you do, do thoroughly : never divide your forces, as poor silly Argus did, and lock one half of them up in sleep, while the other half are to watch at their post : let the whole man be seen in every action of your life : do it with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And tell me not that I am profaning sacred words. If you were duly conscious of God's omnipresence, you would not make so frivolous an objection. But are we then to do evil with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind 1 It is impossible. Were there no half-doers, there would be no evil-doers. It is the want of GUESSES AT TUUTH. 25 unity in our nature, that causes the want of in- tegrity in our conduct. The father of evil has outwitted us : he was crafty enough to antici- pate the arch maxim of our statecraft : he di- vided us, and thereby made us his slaves. u. Scarcely anybody has a whole heart. A few may have some three-quarters of one ; a good many, half; still more, about a quarter ; the chief part of the world, a little bit of one. No human being, I trust, has ever yet lived without any heart ; for his senses without feelings leave man the nethermost of animals ; although in some it may have been like the figs one sees on a tree late in autumn, a starveling, with a kind of promise that it will come to something ; but the winter intervenes and nips it. By heart, I mean the complex of all such feel- ings as look outward, whatever may be their ob- ject, whether spiritual or sensuous, whether inani- mate or animate ; and I believe 1 only go along 26 GUESSES AT TRUTH. with common usage, in excluding self-love from the heart. For self-love is not a part of it, but its disease, preying upon it, and ossifying it as far as it reaches over it ; and nothing but self-love is the cause why our hearts are only fragments and little more than splinters and shivers of what they ought to be : it is that, instead of loving ourselves in others, in God and his world and our brother men, we love ourselves in distinction and separation from them, and therefore in opposition to them ; that, instead of finding our chief happiness in the utmost expansion of our feelings, we shut them up within our own breasts, where they waste and crumble and moulder and rot. u. There is only one thing which people cannot endure to hear. Falsehood ? — O no ! there is not much harm in that. GUESSES AT TRUTH. ^7 Flattery ? — The sweetest thing in the world ; only pray don't over-sugar it. Nonsense ? — How could one get through one's time without it ? Reason ?— I have nothing to say for it. u. An honoured friend is fond of asking, Dont you know the pleasure of Jinding one thing, when you are looking for another ? And verily few pleasures are sprightlier and more enlivening. It is satisfactory to meet with what you are seeking; but still sweeter is the surprise of lighting on something unsought, that appears as it were to answer a lurking yet indistinct unut- tered wish, and to gratify it ere it excites it. Is it not just the same, when you have beeiL awaiting somebody, and another friend comes up to you instead 'i you shake hands with him more heartily than you would otherwise ; and your spirits seem on tiptoe to welcome him. Nor are intellectual searches less privileged. 28 GUESSES AT TRUTH. When you let your faculties go a wool-gathering indeed, they bring back nothing besides wool. But if you set to work in right earnest, and dili- gently trace some dark question among the mazes of ancient learning, though you may still perhaps miss it, you will find abundant diversion and entertainment, and many things, it is likely, more profitable and instructive than what you had fixed your heart on. And still more cer- tainly, should we embark in a vessel of specu- lation, duly rigged and trimmed, and fitted out with all needful implements of knowledge, and thus voyage into the yet undiscovered hemi- sphere of thought, although we may not fall in with the gold mines or reach the Eldorado we dream of, we shall yet gain things of higher worth and of more diffusive utility, even as Ralegh did when he brought home the potato. For while in active life the result very seldom comes up to our expectations, in speculative life it almost always surpasses them. (J. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 29 It has often been asserted that to give is more delightful than to receive. 1 doubt it. Do you feel more pleasure in giving your dog a bone, or in his coming and licking your hand ? Is not her child's smile the mother's ample and most precious reward ? Much of the pleasure in the mere act of giving, consists in the anticipation of the return ; vrhile every gift we receive is a token of love, the one thing for which the heart hungers insatiably ; of man's love, if it be the gift of man ; of God's love, if it be the gift of God. Surely the poet feels a far loftier and purer rapture at those thoughts which his genius breathes into him, than at anything his con- scious understanding under order of his will can manufacture. No ! said a man of understanding : it is impossible for you to derive pleasure from anything except the consciousness of your own deserts, from being quite sure that what you have done is your own doing. 30 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Very well : then pray dismount and walk through that ditch, while my horse carries me over it. I shall not grudge you the satisfaction of having waded across the mire, even though you should enhance it and make the feat still mor^ your own, by taking off your shoes and stock-; ings, lest they should share in your merit.^ For my own part I always feel steadier and more comfortable when I am leaning on some- thing stronger and mightier than myself. u* I call that operation miraculous, wherein the moral predominates over the physical more perceptibly than we are wont to find it. That all the laws of nature are intellectual and spiritual, that the phenomena of the universe are only the outward forms of the workings, of these laws, and no more the laws them- selves than a block from Portsmouth is, I will not say the block-machine, but the steam-en- gine, or perhaps the steam which gives the GUESSES AT TRUTH. 31 machinery life and motion; all this is evident to a considerate mind. When a philosopher then calls a miracle a suspension or an altera- tion of the laws of nature, I cannot understand him; except indeed on the supposition that he is talking loosely, and cheating himself, or us, with words. Yet if the laws of nature are to be introduced at all into a statement of the difficulty, suspension and alteration, bad as they may be, are clearly better and less un- philosophical expressions than violation, Hume's term, which begs the question at starting. But if we mend the definition, and describe a miracle to be such a new and unaccountable appearance in an object of common note a^ cannot have been produced by ordinary human agency, the objector will find it hard to deduce from such strangeness the incredibility of the fact asserted ; until by comprehending the laws of nature in their full extent, he has ascertained D% GUESSES AT TRUTH. with exactness all their possible phases of operation. What you are startled by as con- trary to the laws of nature, may be only the phenomenon which under the particular cir- cumstances those laws are framed to present ; like the unforeseen changes in a great fire- work, which from a fountain becomes a ship first perhaps, and then a temple of glory. Could you demonstrate the reverse, you might on your own principles establish the impossibility of the miracle : till you can, you have no pretext for rejecting the evidence of the phenomenon, as contradicting laws of which in fact you know next to nothing. The aloe, they say, blows once in a quarter of a century : supposing the earth to be the aloe, why should not the miracle be its flower ? But for our immersion in sense which stupefies and blinds us, we should ra- ther wonder that it appears so seldom. To say nothing of the obstinate misgivings at GUESSES AT TRUTH. 33 the extent of evil, the triumphs of brute force, the desolation of innocence, the sufferings of goodness, which excited such deep ques- tionings among the best and wisest heathens ; almost every thing supernatural, providential, and extraordinary in works of fiction, and indeed the whole notion of poetical justice, points out that such is the appetite of our minds. If however a philosopher abides by the first definition of a miracle, as a suspension of the laws of nature, he ought to discern in it only a new object to be answered by so wonderful and spirit-stirring an event. That which we esteem desirable to authenticate Christianity, will be welcome to him, as it disproves Fate, and thus tends to keep men from deifying Nature, by shewing that the succession of operations desig- nated under that name, as it was first ordained by God's wisdom, so continues ever subject to VOL. II. D 34 GUESSES AT TRUTH. God's will, being the result neither of chance nor of necessity, but an order in a double sense, of regularity, and also of appointment. It has been argued that man cannot con- ceive any notion of God, because what compre- hends must be greater tnan that which is com- prehended. Yes ! just as that pane of glass is greater than the cluster of stars you see through it; just as the binding of that Shak- speare is greater than the spirit it incloses. u. The seventh day has been specially hal- lowed : is that a reason for un hallowing the other six? A large portion of literature in every Christian country must be exclusively religious : is that a reason for altogether excluding religion from the remainder? And yet the press brings forth volumes without number, which you can only infer to be writ- GUESSES AT TRUTH, S5 ten by a Christian, from its being' clear that they are not written by the believer in any other religion. Were Christianity diffused as it ought to be through the nation, circulating through all our actions and amalgamated with all our thoughts, this would not be. Whatever is current among a Christian people, ought to bear the distinct effigy of its king. Not how- ever that it belongs to religion to be imperti- nently obtrusive : this is no more a sign of its depth or sincerity, than it would be a sign of your wealth to keep chinking your few guineas in every body's ears : a practice which on the contrary would lead the shrewder to divine that he who makes so much of a little, can have but little to make much of. v. The lame stamp : the deaf scream. The art of saying nothing is often as difficult D 2 GUESSES AT TRUTH. for those who have something to say, as the art of saying something is to those who have nothing. If you pull up your window a little, it is far likelier to give you a cold or rheumatism or stiff neck, than if you throw it wide open ; and the chance of any bad consequence becomes still less, if you go out into the air and let it act on you equally from every side. Is it not just the same with knowledge ? Do not those who are exposed to a draught of it blowing on them through a crevice, usually grow stiff-necked? When you open the windows of the mind there- fore, open them as widely as you can : open them and let the soul send forth its messengers to explore the state of the earth. Although the unquiet raven may fly to and fro, and the home- loving dove may return once disheartened ; yet if the dove, that emblem of all kindly affections, GUESSES AT TRUTH. 37 goes forth a second time, she will bring- back the olive-leaf of peace : for charity, when it is indeed such, and has the patience and perse- verance of true charity, never fuileth. Nay, if you have the power, draw forth the spirit from its dark cell, and bathe it in knowledge as in an atmosphere : let it strip itself of all its habits and plunge in ; as soon as it comes out it will resume them. Let the butterfly, by which an- cient philosophy typified the soul, emancipate itself from its chrysalis and take wing : the readiest way to clear the head of maggots, which sleepy brains always breed, is by such a metem- psychosis. The best, indeed the only method of guarding against the mischiefs which may ensue from teaching men a little, is to teach them more. Knowledge is the true spear of Achilles : nothing but itself can heal the wounds it may have inflicted. u. 38 GUESSES AT TRUTH. The ideal aim and end in a perfect scheme of education, so far as concerns the intellectual part of man, is to produce a classical and ca- tholic mind ; classical from the refinement, the justness, and the orderliness of all its percep- tions ; catholic from the range of its comprehen- sion;^ as well as from the cordial affectionate welcome and acknowledgement with which it receives and entertains every form of existence. Such a spirit will venerate all things, yet no- thing will enslave it : thus is it the direct an- tipode to the liberal spirit now in vogue ; for of the latter it is not exaggeration to say that it venerates nothing, yet is the servilest of slaves to every shifting gust tossing about amid that heap of dead leaves which a misplaced courtesy terms public opinion. The foregoing definition is a sufficient answer to the advocates of professional education. u. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 39 The tirst object of education is to shape and discipline man, the second to teach him. You must build the house, before you furnish it. The communication and developement of power is of infinitely greater importance than the com- munication and infusion of knowledge ; even as it is more wholesome and beneficial to give a person a good appetite and a good digestion, than to cram him with food however choice or nutritive. This proposition is so evident that I should not have repeated it here, unless the line of argument pursued in most of the recent discussions on education, had seemed to imply that it is forgotten. The pro- blem considered in them has been, how to convey the greatest quantity of knowledge in the least time ; and not, as it ought to have been, in what way are good and able men, or, to speak more precisely, good and able English- men, to be trained, with the greatest likelihood 40 GUESSES AT TRUTH. of success. I say good and able Englishmen: because every useful system of education must accord with the spirit of the nation to be educated. True, it should promote and help on that spirit ; but the only method of doing so, is to go along with it : if you take another road, you will affect it very little ; if you pull it the contrary way, you will hardly help it on. Here however we find a new verification of the truth which Bacon after his custom has uttered in all its naked universality : for here too do knowledge and power coincide. It is by the judicious communication of know- ledge that the faculties of the mind are to be elicited and nourished : in the very act of tilling the ground the seed is also sown. u. Is it as a memento of the first offence, or as a punishment for it, or out of pure spite for having been unable to resist the tempter, that man ever GUESSES AT TRUTH. 41 since has set his heart on keeping woman in ignorance ? How successful his endeavours have been in some instances, the following conversation will shew. What are beef-steaks, mamma ? said a pretty miss in her teens to her mother, who had locked up her own and her daughter's understanding with their silk gowns, through fear lest some chance spot might soil them irremediably. Fy ? don^t talk about them, Imoinda ; things which people eat at inns. But do pray tell me how they make them, dear mamma ? / dont know anything about them, my sweet darling ; but I suppose they grow. This darkness on matters of housewifery may perhaps be unrivalled ; but it would be easy to find parallels on subjects of almost equal importance, 4S GUESSES AT TRUTH. Knowing men know little : teach them more, and they will know how little. u. The ignorant man is ignorant of his own ignorance : the wise man is aware of his. This perhaps is the main difference between them. u. To know the hight of a mountain, one must climb it. u. A. (Everybody knows A : he is as common an article as the indefinite article itself; and he seems to resemble it in being unattached to the soil : he is always to be found on stage-coaches, in steam-packets, in travellers' rooms at inns, and in every other place of resort for such as think that Cain was a gainer by becoming a va- gabond. He is a whimsical medley : disgusted with every thing strange, yet always running from place to place ; longing for companions GUESSES AT TRUTH. 43 if alone, and when he has got them as uneasy amongst them as a fish among his comrades in a net ; very fond of home, whenever he is away from it ; assuring you that his servants are the best in the universe, provided they are too far off for him to swear at them ; always out of his element, or, as the phrase is, always in the wrong box, or, like the weights in a balance, always in the empty scale ; and yet getting on well enough through the crowd from keeping his ; arms ever folded, and making up for his inca- pacity of pleasure by the redundance of his self- complacency.) What will become of the world, if it goes on for the next fifty years at the same rate it has gone on for the last fifty ? B. It must go on faster still ; its velocity must increase at every step : for I suppose you mean that it is going downward. A. Downward ! How can that be ? Is not every thing improving ? The world must be go- 44 GUESSES AT TllUTH. ing upward ; if ups and downs have any thin^ to do with the matter. B. People seldom go very fast up hill, especi- ally where the hill is a long: one : the horses would soon be blown. A. We shall have done with horses soon ; and when we are drawn by steam, the faster we drive it the livelier it will become. So that a four-horse power is worth a dozen horses. B, Without question ; particularly in point of beauty and safety. You are sure then that the world is improving ? A. Perfectly sure : are we not driving twelve miles an hour, where fifty years ago we should not have driven six ? B, This certainly proves that stage-coaches are better, or at least that they travel faster. A. Well, sir ! stage-coaches are the best part of the world. How should I have seen every GUESSES AT TRUTH. 45 thing in the world, if it was not for stage- coaches ? B, Have you then really seen every thing in the world ? You must have a well-stocked head. A. To be sure : I have got it all in there : if you like to try me, you will find me as good as a road-book. B. Still I cannot help doubting what you say. There are some tiny parts of the world, all Asia for instance, and all Africa, and almost all if not all America, and the bigger half of Europe, in which nothing like a stage-coach ever set wheel. A. Who cares about such outlandish holes ? By the world I mean England, the only bit of it worth a farthing. Once indeed I took a trip across the water ; but the moment I landed I put my handkerchief to my nose, and did not take it away till I was aboard again. How can any Christian live in a country where one's 46 GUESSES AT TEUTH. hands must be always keeping guard before one's nostrils ? I have heard say that the French language " is constructed upon stinks ;" and sure enough they have plenty of ground to build it on. B. Perhaps something might be said in their favour ; only I am much more anxious just now to see the bottom of our first question : hitherto we have only muddled it by our stirring. The world then which has improved so prodigiously, consists in the first place of stage-coaches, and next of England. A. Right, sir. What have you to say to that now? B. Did you ever hear of Penelope's web ? A. No : what is she ? a sort of spider ? B. She was the wife of Ulysses. A. And what had she to do with a web ? and what can her web have to do with the world ? B. You must let me take a run before I jump. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 47 She used to spin it every day, and to unravel it every night. A. The greater fool she. Had I been her husband, I would have taught her better house- wifery; she should have left spinning to the Jennies. But I suppose, sir, it must have been before Sir Richard ArkAvright's time. B. Her husband was far from home ; and this was her way of spending her time during the ten years of his absence. A. Why, it was not worse than reading and writing. But ten years ! there can have been no stage-coaches running in those days. B, He was on the sea. A. No matter : it is all one : he ought to have had a steam-boat. But how does all this concern the world's growing better or worse ?' B. It sometimes seems to me as if the world were, like Penelope, in a state of widowhood, divorced and separated from her lord ; and I 48 GUESSES AT TRUTH. fancy then that like her she is whiling away the sorrowful and unprofitable time in weaving and unravelling a web which can never be finished. Now and then comes a short interval of daylight, during which she sets all her faculties at work, and appears to be or conceives that she is ap- proaching to something like a completion of her task ; when darkness comes over her, or a new whim lays hold on her, and she undoes all she has been doing, to begin the next morning after a new fashion. A. But did not Penelope ever finish her web ? B. Yes ; when her enemies, pretending to be her lovers and suitors, forced her. I hope this is not to be the destiny of the world : when her web is spun out, God grant that it may not be at the instigation of the devil. A. There is no fear of that. The devil would never make people comfortable : on the contrary I am sure he would have everybody as uncom - GUESSES AT TRUTH. 49 fortable as himself. Now all the improvements in England are making people more and more comfortable every day. B. Be it so : I will allow it for argument's sake ; although for my part, if I wanted to ruin a person, body and soul, my bait should be what we call comforts. However let that pass. Are all orders of society equally or anywise propor- tionably sharers in this increase of comforts ? A. I can't go quite so far as to say that. B. Is the advance in morality equal or any- wise proportionable to the advance in luxury ? A. I am afraid the judges and gaolers and Jack Ketch to boot would cry No. B. Are we in fine become at all better morally, at all kinder, more charitable, honester, more orderly, more temperate, chaster, more obedient, more dutiful, more pious, during these last wonderful fifty years. A. Somehow I never thought of all this ; and VOL. II. E 50 GUESSES AT TRUTH. now you put the question to me, I am not the man to say yes to it. All the old people tell me men have grown worse ; and for myself, I cer- tainly do not find so much kindness in other places, as 1 used to find thirty years past in my father's house. Others are not quite so kind to me as my father and mother were. B. You see, much remains still to be done, in order to make even England quite perfect, and all Englishmen like one family. A. But when that is accomplished, what shall we have to do ? B. If that ever be accomplished, (and, though I discern no sign of its nearing, I would not pronounce it impossible) people will feel no want of work. They will go forth and make all the rest of the world as perfect as England. A. And when that is done, what will remain ? B. To go to heaven. A. It will be hardly worth while changing GUESSES AT TRUTH. 51 our quarters, after they have become so plea- sant. B. Perhaps not. Who knows what may hap- pen then ! But at all events we shall not soon be turned on our heavenly parish for lack of employment. God, when he laid on us the command to labour, supplied us with plenty of materials : he gave us a world to people, to cul- tivate, and to humanize : we had to imprint man's image on the whole earth, and to renew God's image within ourselves. When all this is achieved, and nothing is left, should such a time ever arrive, we may perhaps expect that he, who in his wisdom gave the command, in the same wisdom will revoke it. u. Man's labour is half spent in doing over a second time what was ill done at first. Pouvoir, c'est vouloir, 52 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Pollies like comets have their periodical returns. U. Surely men must have been Centaurs origin- ally. At least it is on horseback they seem to enjoy the full perfection of their nature : so that the argument by which Aristophanes in Plato's Banquet demonstrates the primeval existence of Androgynes, is equally cogent here. u. Barrow, in a letter to SJcinner about the trea- tise de Doctrina Christiana, warns him against having any concern with one Milton. This was several years after the publication of Paradise Lost. He who calls to mind how eminent a man Barrow himself was, may learn hence right- ly to estimate the worth of contemporary reputa- tion, u. GUESSES AT TRUTH, 55 No two pairs of eyes see the same thing in the same thing. ' v. What do people mean by being jealous of one another's fame ? Are they afraid of such a run upon Glory, as may bankrupt her before they- can get their due? Sooner will two rogues have to fight for the last halter in the world, than two great men for the last crown of glory. Sooner will the stars jostle against each other in the sky, than any shall be wronged for want of room in Glory's illimitable firmament. Glory is not a mistress or wife, that her affec- tions should be monopolized : her love is as a mother's love, which spreads equally over all her children, and seems almost to grow in capacity and intensity, as if her heart expanded, with the increase of her family. Do we wish to be re- ceived into that family? let us begin by treating all its members as our elder brethren. Man's 54 GUESSES AT TRUTH. powers of admiration, like all his spiritual faculties, in proportion as they are congenial to his nature, are enlarged and strengthened by- exercise. Let us then exercise them constantly, by helping him to discern whatever is admirable in others : so may we hope that, as he becomes familiar with the aspect of excellence, he will the more readily recognize it, if there be any- thing excellent in us. v. Many persons seem to keep their hearts in their eyes : you come into both together, and so you go out of them. Others are wonder- fully fond of you, when at a distance, but grow cold on your entering the house ; as if the meaning of representing Love blind, were, that he cannot see and love. With the former the imagination is a mere footman to walk behind the senses and hold up their train ; in the latter the imagination has quarrelled with the senses. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 55 never alert save when they are sleeping, sulky and speechless the instant they awake. The imagination I say ; because the activity of the imagination is indispensable to all affection. It is not the bare object, as it strikes our vision at the moment, that is the object of affection : it is that object arrayed in all the attributes wherewith the imagination invests it, in part from recollection, in part creatively by in- ference ; or rather it is the person to whom the imagination, the only personifying fa- culty, the faculty which combines qualities into character, assigns all those amiable at- tributes. Fortunate then and precious are those hearts in which the imagination and the senses move in harmonious unison with each other and with the affections, which care not about the accidents of time and space, the love of which can neither be undermined by absence, nor overturned or shaken by presence. u. 56 CUESSES AT TRUTH. : No book has ever been read and interpreted in so many different ways as the book of life : and no wonder, seeing that all other books are only transcripts from some part of it. It contains not a line, but one man will tell you it is straight, another crooked, a third forked, a fourth curved, a fifth zigzagged. It contains not a passage, but one man sees mischief crouch- ing at t^he end of it, while his neighbour per- ceives joy there echoing back his smiles. Every Tolume is like the Herculanian: if you touch it rashly and presumptuously, it crumbles : but unfold it with care and reverence, you find it inscribed with the characters of wisdom. What can be the origin of these differences ? Is life/, as God's gift, multiform, and the mind which receives and contemplates it, simple and single ? or is life one and the same, while it is the mind of man that " makes a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven ?" The question is akin to GUESSES AT TRUTH. 57 that which has been so vehemently agitated about the nature of light, whether the ray is complex, every coloured object imbibing only a portion of it, or whether the ray is simple, and the differences of colour arise from differences in the object illumined. On a matter so much disputed among far abler judges, I presume not to do more than guess that, whatever may be the true solution in the one case, the true so- lution in the other will be similar. The analogy between light and life almost convinces me that it must be so. u. It is curious to observe how some men's thoughts gravitate upward, some downward. Brutes can apprehend and have the affections of humanity : why should brutes be less than men ? Beasts can apprehend and have the affections of humanity : why should men be more than beasts ? 58 GUESSES AT TRUTH. The history of philosophy is the history of a game at cat's cradle. One theory is taken off; and then the taker off holds out a se- cond to you, of the same thread, and very like the first, although not quite the same^ According to the skill of the players, the gatae lasts through more or fewer changes : but most- ly the string at length gets entangled, and you must begin afresh, or give over ; or at best the cat's cradle comes back again, and you have never a cat to put into it. u. Truth, they say, lies at the bottom of a well ; and few, 1 suppose, have not once in their life sighed: If I could but get her out of it J Now the greater part of the world never make out which is the well : they think it must be some very marvellous fine one, a long long way off : their own, they are sure, contains nothing of the sort. Very many look down into it, and see nothing, GUESSES AT TRUTH. 59 and pass on. A good number begin to draw her up ; but after a turn or two find it hard work, and stop, A smaller number, more deter- jnined, pull rather longer ; till growing faint they wish to ascertain their progress, and beholding a dazzling light are frightened, think the earth must be on fire, and run away : it being a well, they had inferred that Truth must be a kind of water, and fancied she would be the very thing for their flower-pots, or for their plants. Some hold out till they get a sight of her features ; when finding little likeness to what their glass had assured them the face ought to be, they make no doubt of Truth being an impostor, and tumble her down again. A very few have brought her up near the ground : but having her there they begin to parley, and bargain that she shall say just what they bid her ; and on her laughing and exclaiming Oh no J t hut's impossi- ble ! they call her a pert ungrateful slut, who. 60 GUESSES AT TRUTH. for all they care, may roll back to the bottom and be drowned. In short, people seem to be nearly all of one mind, that where Truth has lain since the be- ginning of the world, she may continue to lie till the end of it. If she is at all nearer the top now than she was four thousand years ago, it is chiefly by reason of the rubbish which has fallen into the well and choked up the bottom. As for going down the well, I never heard of any except Aristotle who tried it; he did it, they tell you, to look at a star : perhaps he had other purposes also ; and who knows how many of his works he found there I u. A philosopher is Truth's minister : he usually fancies himself her favorite, forgetting that she has none, or thinking that she must make an exception in his behalf. v. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 61 One of the greatest benefits which a wise man in these days could bestow on mankind, would be by inventing a safety-lamp to work the mines of Truth with. But have we not already got one ? I dare say we have ; and it only needs to be discovered and applied. u. Does anybody really believe that the sun is as big as the little plot of ground he is standing on ? u. The worst person one can think about, is oneself. u. Men harm others by their deeds, themselves by their thoughts. u. How often one sees people looking far and wide for what they are holding in their hands ! Why ! I am doing it myself at this very moment. u. 62 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Truth is our intellectual Canaan. The chil- dren of this world are only to be enticed thither by the fruit of it, the grapes, pomegranates, and figs; yet even these baits cannot over- come their dread of the giants, the children of Anak, whom they suppose to dwell there. The wise man ascends the steep mountain, and views the promised land, and when he has fully seen it, his body can no longer hold his spirit, and he passes into it, as Moses did, through death, u. We scoff at the men of old as gross and sensual and carnal-minded, because they were for ever seeing the devil. Is it quite certain that we do not manifest a mind yet coarser, a spirit yet more beset and besotted by sense, in never seeing him ? One may grow so familiar with one's chains, as to forget that one wears them ; nor is insensibility to dirt an infallible criterion of cleanliness. At all events the devil GUESSES AT TRUTH. [ has enough of the fox in him to keep out of sight, unless we unearth him. u. Some people are content to be ignorant of what they do not know ; others are not. The former may be called negative ignorance, the latter positive. The first is commonest among the men who know the most, the other among those who know the least. It may be recognized at once like a horse's age by the mouth : for it is always big-mouthed and foul-mouthed. It im- mediately concludes that what it knows not, is not worth knowing; and hastens to tell the world so, and that this is the reason of its having neglected the study. Thus for instance, the abuse squirted upon the middle ages has mostly come from those who were strangers to them, or at least from those who could not comprehend them : for, as everybody is aware, the difference is important between the 64 GUESSES AT TRUTH. entrance of an object into the mind, and the entrance of the mind into the object. u. < When any one declaims against the schoolmen, I would hold up the Summa Theologiie of St. Thomas Aquinas, and desire him to read and to understand it, before he presumed to assert that there is nothing in the schoolmen. This argu- ment would knock him down as effectually, as Johnson's folio knocked down the poor book- seller., u. The Greeks and Romans were citizens ; the English, French, Germans, Spaniards, Italians, are subjects : and no enterprise in the history of the world, since that which was confounded on the plain of Shinar, has been so signally dis- comfited, as the attempt to introduce citizenship amongst us. The ancients perhaps, at least the Spartans and the Romans, drew too tight the GUESSES AT TRUTH. 65 bonds which attached the man to the state, and thereby at once thwarted his growth and cramp- ed the freedom of his action. Much to be sure was gained by this : but the damage was not less. Sparta was full of great Spartans ; Rome was full of great Romans ; and yet there was hardly ever a great man either at Sparta or at Rome, For a great man is a man of God's making, not of man's making ; if man meddles too much with it, he is sure to mar his maker's work : he should be content to bring out the original colours, by cleaning the picture and by varnishing it ; and even this ought to be done cautiously and charily. Whereas the Romans had too many marks of human workmanship about them. They stood like yews in a dipt hedge, forming indeed a solid impenetrable mass, admirable above all things for defence, deaden- ing whatever lay beneath them : but you could not disengage one tree or distinguish it from its VOL. II. F 66 GUESSES AT TRUTH. neighbours ; hardly could you tell where the first ended and the next began. The ploughshare of civil institutions had been driven once and again over the whole nation ; and its aspect was as monotonous and featureless as the surface of a furrowed field. You pass through their history as along their roads, in one straight uniform never- ending dreary despotical line : start where you will, advance far as you will, the same boundless length of trodden barren road still presses upon your eyes, and almost pierces them. In truth I know nothing more wearisome than a Roman road : Propria quce maribus is lively to it : if it saves you, as they say, a few minutes by the clock, it doubles the time by the dial within the breast. I have never landed at Dover, without recurrins: in thought during the first stage to those fine lines of Schiller : The road of Order, even though it bend, Is never devious. Straight on goes the lightning ; GUESSES AT TRUTH. 67 Straight is the cannon-ball's terrific path ; Rapidly, by the nearest way, it comes, And shattering rushes onward, still to shatter. My son, the road which human beings travel, Along which Blessing journeys, ever follows The river's turns, the valley's playful Avindings, Curves round the cornfield and the hill of vines, Honouring the holy bounds of property. My version of this passage from the Wallenstein (Act I. So, IV.) has been helped out by an im- perfect recollection of Coleridge's excellent trans- lation, which, like many of the best books pub- lished a quarter of a century ago, is become a great rarity. The last two lines belong entirely to him ; and I have retained his epithet holi/, as better suited to my purpose than Schiller's ex- pression, the measured bounds of property. Yet this change in its original place, where the words come from Octavio Piccolomiui, is clearly injurious. No man knows better than Mr, Cole- ridge that what may be ideally the best, may not be dramatically or characteristically the fittest ; F 2 68 GUESSES AT TRUTH. a distinction however which only few poets have duly perceived, and very few have not fre- quently lost sight of: for the observance of it requires an imagination that never slumbers. A meditative man, accustomed to contemplate God's workings in man's doings, may discern a holiness in the institutions of property : even the Romans in their religious age vene- rated Terminus as a deity. Or had the speech belonged to the younger Piccolomini, holy might have been appropriate : but a subtile intriguing statesman like his father would look only to the interests of this world, and behold the good of order and measure, rather than anything holy, in the strict observance of civil rights. Would that such men could always see even this ! To resume the former discussion I cannot re- mark the striking contrast between an English highway and a French, I cannot turn round the corner of some poor man's field, or see the road, as it does in some places, almost recoiling upon GUESSES AT TRUTH. 69 itself, without rejoicing, and blessing the coun- try in which " the holy bounds of property" have been thus " honoured." Our modern im- provements indeed are busily doing away with such idle useless incumbrances upon the public, that amorphous many-carcased idol to which the pleasure and happiness of every body are now so anxiously sacrificed : but, thank Hea- ven ! all traces of a better time cannot be easily obliterated. We must still be the children of our ancestors, not our own : fortunate will it be for our children if they are so likewise, if the blood of their forefathers prevails in their veins over that of their fathers. For the ten- dency in modern Europe has on the whole been to " honour the holy bounds" of individuality, the landmarks of property in character. At least it has been so, as I noticed some time since, among the nations of the Teutonic race : and even among those whose language indicates 70 GUESSES AT TRUTH. that in the confluence of the two mighty streams the Celto-Iiatin was predominant, in earlier times, before the conquerors had been fused and dissipated among the conquered, and before they had learnt that they ought to be ashamed of their own features, and to paint them over, and to mimic the nature of another people instead of perfecting their own, we find abun- dant evidence of individuality and originality, that is, of genius, which makes us proud of belonging to the same family. When reading Montaigne or Rabelais or Cervantes or Dante, we feel more akin to them, more i as if we were reading English authors, than when we look into their later countrymen : and the reason is, that in the former the human spirit is more powerful than the national, the genial than the formal : for our heart makes answer to every voice of nature, while our intellect, unwea- ried in devising artifices of its own, fences itself GUESSES AT TRUTH. 71 in against the intrusion of any artifices from without. The contrast between the two characters is illus- trated in its various bearings by the contrast be- tween the armies of the two periods ; between the legionary service of the Roman miles, whose name told him that he was only one of a thou- sand, and the feudal services of the knights and their retainers, every one of whom was a man-at- arms, surrounded by his friends and neighbours, and never passing out of his domestic circle or losing the thought and presence of his home, not even when fighting on foreign ground. " There cannot easily be any so degraded, (says the chivalrous Fouque), that his heart does not swell within him, when in the moment of glorious danger he hears the name of his dear home. The Brandenburgers to the charge ! cries a general galloping up; Brandenburgers on! cry the officers : and the town of Brandenburg 72 GUESSES AT TRUTH. and the whole beloved country rise up together in the souls of the brave soldiers, and the forms too of wife and child and mother, or of her who in hope is as a wife, of all the dearly loved gen- tle helpless ones, they too rise up and look at us affectionately and intreatingly and with an eye that minds us to do our duty : of a truth one fights well then :" {Gefuhle, Bildtr mid Ansickttn, V. 1. p. 213.) There was nothing like this in the Roman armies, that is, in the later times of the republic : the expedition of the Fabii belongs to its chivalrous age, and seems to imply that much then was otherwise. But the Roman peo- ple, such as we best know it, might have answer- ed with the demoniac, that its name was Legion. It was possessed by one spirit, a spirit made up of the spirits of all the Romans : and no man could bind it, no, not with chains ; neither could any man tame it. At last however, when it saw Jesus in the glory of his doctrine, the holders of GUESSES AT TRUTH. 73 the spirit were become as a herd of swine, and the herd ran violently down into the sea of de- struction, and were choked in the sea of de- struction. In modern times on the contrary the great dif- ficulty has been to infuse any thing like a na- tional consciousness into the people, to induce the individual to consider himself as a member of the body politic, as an integral part of the one great integral whole. Many persons, I am afraid, have never found out that there were any bonds connecting them with the state, until they made the discovery in a prison. Now although the architecture of a state should, I think, be of that kind which is called Cyclopian, in which the large blocks are craftily and mightily made fast, without being squared and shaven of all their knobs and ruggednesses, as the Romans squared and shaved them for their wall, where every stone was a mere facsimily of its neigh- 74 GUESSES AT 'IKUTH. hour ; still they ought to be combined in some way ; they ought to strengthen and comfort each other : whereas too often in modern history all the great stones are seen to lie scattered about the ground, the walls, such as they are, being made up of pebbles and rubbish. If we wish to know the prime reason of all this, we must trace it up, as we must trace up whatever is most extensively and permanently influential over human nature, to religion ; in its action, or in its inertness. The only thing which can uphold man against the world, which can preserve his principles from growing tortuous and his genius from being benumbed, is religion. But the religion of the Romans was too weak to contend with the power of the state. Rome was a greater deity than any that inhabited the heavens. So long as they wrought together, all went well, at least in outward seeming. But when the earthly god deposed the heavenly, it GUESSES AT TRUTH. 75 signed the forfeiture of its own franchise ; it be- came a mere nothing and fell to the ground. There was no vital indestructible essence in hea- thenism, to enable it, as Christianity has so of- ten, to revive m the very season of its greatest oppression, and to shoot out most healthily and vigorously, just after the world fancied it had cut it down. Thus the religious consci- ousness of the Romans was weak, when at vari- ance with their political consciousness. Christi- anity has reversed this : it has set up the spirit- Hal law of God in all its simplicity and purity high above the complicated machinery of human legislation : we are not merely to do what man i^ommands ; we are to look into our own hearts ; w^e are to commune with them ; we are to bring them into accordance with the Bible and into communion with God. In this way men have naturally been led to a stronger discernment of their own individuality, and a more scrupulous 76 GUESSES AT TRUTH. developement of the gifts which God has given them, without reference to their poHtical value. But that such contemplations, unless they be followed with the utmost meekness and humility, may easily mislead those who pursue them, to form very irregular notions of their civil duties, is apparent ; even without the evidence to be derived from the conduct of the Anabaptists, of our own fifth -monarchy men, and of other re- ligious fanatics. Still, as in the days of Christ, one of the hardest things for men to persuade themselves of, is, that the Kingdom of Heaven is not the Kingdom of Earth. u. I knew a man who went to church once a year, on the Martyrdom of Charles. u. Heliogabalus is said to have calculated the size of Rome from ten thousand pounds weight of cobwebs amassed within it. Mr. Colquhoun GUESSES AT TRUTH. 77 and the Reports of the PoUce and Mendicity Committees have furnished us with similar mate- rials for estimating the grandeur of our own me- tropolis. Only the dirt is moral. u. Good criticism is nice. u. Positive Law is the shield behind which we F* are to wage battle in the cause of Duty. If our souls were of adamant and invulnerable by the powers of Evil, we should not need it. And our instructions are like the charge of the Spartan mother, >; Tav, 77 eirl rdv. The fate of Sandt at once illustrates and confirms this. u. Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit. L' Homme a le droit de raisonner, et la liberte de deraisonuer. Mais il tient a ses libertes, plus 78 GUESSES AT TRUTH. qu'a ses droits. L'une est privilege, I'autre est devoir. v . C'est bien vrai : Platon est visionnaire, car il voit, u. Veritatis zonam nulla solvit manus nisi Amo- ris. u. What is possible ? What you will. *'A man's errors are what renders him amiable," says Goethe in the last number of his Journal on Art, that is, in his seventy- seventh year. I said one day to a girl of fourteen : If you tvere but as good as your brother ! Well ! she replied, with something of a bash- ful sullenness. I dont care. You would not be so fond of me, if I was. This coincidence between the aged poet and the child just emerging from childhood — laugh GUESSES AT TRUTH. 79 not, reader ! Goethe himself would be de- lighted to be told of it — might suggest many reflexions on the waywardness of the heart and the perverse nature of affection. But I will not pursue them, having only brought these sayings together, that they may explain and support a remark in the other volume, (p. 211 — 214.) u. L'amour est un bien, ou un bonbon. u. People can seldom brook contradiction, except within themselves. u. Some thoughts are acorns. Would that any in this book were ! u. A child must be borne long, before he is born. u. Suspect the wisdom which is always blaming. R. 80 GUESSES AT TRUTH. The crown of martyrdom is the only honour which men are fonder of bestowing than re- ceiving, R. When a gainful wrong is to be done, a man's charity forbids his leaving it as a qualm for the conscience of his neighbour. r. Is it truth or satire^ that nothing is condign but punishment ? u. On veut toujours 6tre quelque chose : c'est dommage qu'on n*y reussit point. On ne veut pas etre soi-m^me ; on y reussit. La personna- lite ne s'acheve que par nous-memes ; mais nous ne pouvons nous en debarrasser. u. The sorriest proof of your being in the Faith, is, asserting that your brother is out of it. Many Roman-catholics call Protestants heretics ; many GUESSES AT TRUTH. 81 Protestants call Roman-catholics heathens. God grant both may be wrong ! u. After wading through a treatise to prove that man is only an animal in whom selfishness has put on a mask, how heartening it is to read the second commandment, and to find that the mo- tive, by which, as being the most powerful, we are deterred from idolatry, is the love of our children. - u. I love to gaze on a breaking wave. It is the only thing in nature which is most beautiful in the moment of its dissolution. u. Coleridge ought to have written a poem on the falls of Schaffhausen, as a companion for his hymn on Mont Blanc. To me that fall was certainly the most majestic sight I had yet seen ; and so awakening were the images and emotions VOL. II. G 82 GUESSES AT TRUTH. it called up, that I could not refrain from attempt- ing to embody them in words, at the very moment when I was possest with the fullest conscious- ness that no words could represent to myself, much less convey to others, the rushings and whirls and flashes and roar, the mountains of foam and columns of spray, which had just been surrounding and amazing me. We are too lavish of strong expressions in speaking of little things, to have a sufficient store of them in reserve for great. What is louder than thun- der? what more momentary in brightness, more awful in rapidity, than lightning? And yet these two superlatives of nature are called in day after day, to give consequence to cracks and sparkles, until we reach this mighty water- fall without an image or allusion left to impart a notion of what the eye and ear are feeling. The Rhine at SchafFhausen is already a con- siderable stream, some hundred feet in breadth- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 83 Between the town and the fall, which is about half a league from it, the river, after making two right angles in its course, turns abruptly and makes yet another, to plunge headlong down a precipice of seventy or eighty feet. We crossed it at SchafFhausen, and followed the left bank through vineyards, until the walls of Lau- fen Castle, which overhangs the fall, prevented our proceeding further. We then mounted the rock on which the castle stands, and while Wait- ing for the key of the door that was to admit us to a sight of the cataract, I looked out of a win- dow in the court, and saw the Rhine already emerged from the fall, but still one stream of foam, flowing on and gradually changing colour, until it disappeared betwixt two quiet banks of green, itself also by that time as green and quiet as if it had never been disturbed. The door was now unlocked, and we descended a steep wind- ino; path, until we found ourselves in a little jut- 84 GUESSES AT TRUTH. ting gallery, opposite to the cascade, and within its spray. Then opened on my eyes and ears (which hitherto I had deafened purposely, to avoid getting accustomed to the roar of the fall, before I saw it) a scene wherein sensation for a while absorbed me. When at last I became collected enough to distinguish the sounds and sights which had astounded me, I perceived that on my left hand, very near as it then seemed to the right bank, two rocks broke the stream. Of these, one stood perhaps thirty yards before the other, and the torrent rushed furiously through the opening between them. On the left bank, just above the fall, the waters had scooped out a large basin, the issue from which into a narrow channel produced on that side of me the same violent cross-current, as the passage betwixt the two rocks produced on the other. Between these two cross-currents the main body of water fell, or rather, to speak as it looked. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 85 turned on its axis. For as the bottom of the descending stream was lost in its own vapour, this part of the river, from incessantly rolling down an unbroken mass of foam, seemed an ever-revolving avalanche crested with snowy spray. But how give an idea of the depth of sound, when the two cross streams, which had been prancing along sideways, arching their necks like warhorses that hear the trumpet, broke upon the main stream and forced their way into it ! From the valley of thunder where they encountered, rose a towering misty column, behind which the river unites unseen, as though unwilling that any should witness the aw- fully tender reconcilement of its waters. In returning up the path, contrasting in my mind the confusion I had just left,, with the compara- tive tranquillity of the stream above, and its subsequent beautifully gentle stillness as it winds between its green banks, I found it re- 86 GUESSES AT TRUTH. mind me of the one day of terror which is to separate time from eternity. The idea was strengthened, when looking back on the scene of turbulence from a summer-house immediately over it, I saw the glorious sun, that visible eye of God, not only smiling on the river in both its states of quietness, but beautifying the very fall itself with the colours of a perfect rainbow, thus brightening the depth of the extremest up- roar with a gleam of light and peace, and a sign of hope. After fully examining this side of the water- fall, we got into a boat to cross over. In our passage I discovered that what I had taken for nearly the whole stream, was little more than a third of it, and that between thfe' right bank and the two rocks before spoken of, was a third, which divided the remainder of the river into two unequal parts, so as to make three cascades in all. One has been already described. The GUESSES AT TRUTH. 87 middle fall is perhaps the broadest, and, though not so interesting as either of its brethren, brings its waters down with great dignity in one straight unbroken flood. The fall adjoining the right bank is the smallest. To this we approached very near by means of a mill which is built close to it. Here I perceived to my great de- light that what previously and at a distance seemed a savage contest between the cur- rents, is only a fiercer joyousness and the fury of mimic war. The waters, after rushing to the onset, leap back from it with a laughing exultation and boyish alacrity incompatible with hostility or hatred. The third fall is very beautiful indeed, the whole stream on that side running aslant over a bed of rocks till it tumbles forward in vast masses like enormous blocks of crystal, with edges so v/hite and bril- liant, so sudden in appearance, and following 88 GUESSES AT TRUTH. one another with a speed so glancing, that they gave me the idea of frost lightnings. On my return home, overflowing with admi- ration of the Rhinefall, I was told that I must be mistaken, for that most English travellers are disappointed by it. Perhaps this is owing to people's fondness for reading detailed accounts of the spots they are to visit, thus learning to look through other eyes instead of with their own ; especially as most descriptions mean to em- bellish or magnify^ and if a man sees a serpent a hundred feet long, the odds are he will tell you it was a hundred and fifty. Else tourists form in their own minds notional conceptions of what this and that object must be ; and then, be- €ause Nature's Rhinefall is not a copy of their's, they blame her for diifering from their pattern, forgetting that her's was made first : " For when we are there, although 'tis fair, It is another Yarrow." GUESSES AT TRUTH. 89 All these things, and the flutter incident ta expectation, render the mind unapt for receiving that new, vigorous, and exact impression, which alone is beautiful or lasting. Surely, the best way of taking the bent of a thing, is, to yield to its sway and there fix. But should not the ima- gination in studying poetry — and a tour in Swit- zerland is nothing else— be active ? Yes; when it has first been passive. To do anything worth doing, we must have suffered. The quality most fatal to a general, says Napoleon somewhere in his Memoirs, is a propensity ^^ de se faire des tableaux." It is to this propensity, equally destructive of knowledge and of taste, that I would attribute the disappointment of my coun- trymen at Schaffhausen. Widely diflerent from this picture-making are the modest anticipations of the true poet. He too perhaps dreams of rock and wood and yawning depths, and the restless might of an 90 GUESSES AT TRUTH. imprisoned river, or, it may be, of noble waters struggling for precedency down the rush of danger ; but all this while he knows himself to be dreaming, and knows moreover that he can only dream a dream. Truth, the presence of the desired object arouse him : he opens his senses and mind wide to the spectacles which nature has prepared, and submits his visions dutifully to her realities. His perceptions of beauty are too quick not to discover in a thousand points the justness and harmony of her work- ings ; and his imagination, flexible as well from practice as from inherent powers of mo- dulation, readily takes its tone from hers. Not even in those extreme cases where the anticipa- tion had been so long fostered in the fancy as to have taken root, is the reality excluded by it from the poet's mind : his spirit is large enough for both; and they flourish together in it like two brotherly trees that unite to make one great GUESSES AT TRUTH. 91 tree between them. But why say in prose, what has been already said much better in verse ? Wordsworth, who in 1803, sang of Yarrow Unvisited, eleven years afterward sang thus of Yarrow visited : " But thou, that didst appear so fair To fond imagination, Dost rival in the light of day Her delicate creation. * » * « I see; but not by sight alone. Fair region, have 1 won thee ; A ray of fancy still survives, Her sunshine plays upon thee. « * * * And yet I know, where'er I go, Thy genuine image Yarrow, Will dwell with me, to highten joy. And cheer my mind in sorrow. To translate La Fontaine's fables is as idle, as to decant a bottle of Champagne : the spirit evaporates ; and there is not much else, u. 9^ GUESSES AT TllUTH. Hardly any odour is so noisome as that of a perfumer's shop ; if some friend would but hint this to the author of Lalla Rookh. I have known that poem give a head-ache, just like the Pas- sage Fey dean. u. One often hears of characters being whiter washed. Yellow-washed would be an apter expres- sion : for in such cases gold has about twenty times the potency of silver. Indeed the Stock- Exchange would lead one to suspect that the yellow fever must be the healthiest state of man. All are so eager to catch it. u. Few are very ready to give, except to those who want nothing. They conceive, I fancy, that they are fulfilling the promise : unto every one that hath shall he given. That the second part of the same promise should never fail, has GUESSES AT TRUTH. 93 been the prime care of all the governments which have ever existed, u. Never tell a person, you mean no offence. If you really mean to give none, it is an insult to suppose he will take it. Much oftener however your very defence implies the consciousness of having offended. People seldom wrap a rag round a finger which has nothing the matter with it. But hollow things sound readily. I believe the correct definition of a busybody to be : a person who has nothing to do, and who therefore does nothings. It is natural that such characters should be so common among old maids ; where they find not a kindlier vent for their activity and for the great female instinct of busying themselves for others, in educating the children of their relations or friends, or in the 94 GUESSES AT TRUTH. superintendence and management of charitable works. u. Some minds cannot boil, without boiling over. Let Coleridge devise any vessel for his thoughts, however eccentric its shape, however manifold its convolutions, still it will not hold them. He seldom says enough on any subject, because he always says more than enough. His works are like a forest : you are for ever losing the main road, from the number of stately allies beneath which you must pause and contemplate, the number of pleasant by-paths which lure you along them, the number of wild dingles which you cannot choose but explore. u. Second thoughts are best, says every second person you meet ; fitly enough ; for second thoughts are always second-rate ones. A second GUESSES AT TRUTH. 95 thought is only a half-thought ; or, according to Hamlet's more correct analysis, The craven scruple Of thinking too precisely on the event, A thought which quartered hath hut one part "wisdom. And ever three parts coward. No second thought ever led a man to do any- thing generous, anything kind, anything great, anything good. By its very nature it can sug- gest nothing ; except difficulties and hinderances. It objects, it demurs, it pares off, it cuts down. I must not do this: who knows what may be the consequence ? I must not engage in that : it is im- possible to see the end of it. I must not go this way : there may be a precipice across it : nor that way : there may be a puddle, and I may wet my feet ; and people have died of wet feet ; or there may be a pebble, and it may get into my shoe, and men have been lamed for life by pebbles in their shoes. What will A say ? what will B think ? how 96 GCJESfeES AT TRUTH. taiU C look ? will not D laugh at me ? But it is endless to enumerate the doubts, the cavils, and the quiddities, the ifs, the should' s, and the may^s, the marks of interrogation, and the marks of ad- miration, wherewith that father of all pettifog- gers, Nothingness, barricades himself against the assaults of Enterprise. Second thoughts, I have said, are only frag- ments of thoughts ; that is, they are thought by a mere fragment of the mind, by a single faculty, the prudential understanding ; which, though highly useful as a servant, is too fond of putting on its master's clothes, in spite of its mean car- riage when wearing them. Now man, as I have before remarked of his actions, that is, of his outward thoughts, so also in his thoughts, which are his inward actions, should studiously preserve the unity of his being : his every motion, whether spiritual or corporeal, whether simple or complex, should be single as the flight of an arrow : it GUESSES AT TRUTH. 97 should be like the motion of that cloud so majestically described by Wordsworth, Which heareth not the loud winds when they call, Or moveth altogether, if it move at all. For this is the only way to preserve its consis- tency and integrity : if any portion of it strays from the main body, the Cossack winds are ready to disperse it, even as the Cossacks with their windlike fleetness destroyed every straggler from the great army of Napoleon. Our first thoughts, as was observed before, though in a somewhat different point of view, (Vol. I. p. 143.) are much likelier to be just : for they are the ex- pression of our whole being ; or at least, if the feelings have a somewhat undue predominance, they still act in unison with the intellect ; and moreover they have been fashioned by the intellect, and trained by the experience of our whole lives, until they have acquired that VOL. 11. H 98 GUESSES AT TRUTH. kind of discrimination which is called tacty from its approach to the certainty imparted by the least fallible of the senses. But when the un- derstanding lifts up its head, grumbling because it has not been appealed to, and mutters, this must not, may not, cannot, should not be, the mind is no longer at one, but at six and seven ; it grows as it were drunk with prudence and sees double, and falters, totters, reels, tumbles, and falls asleep. Are we then always to halt at our first thoughts ? Yes : if we cannot go beyond our second thoughts. These are only good as a half-way house to bait at in the progress to our third thoughts ; which in consonance with a foregoing remark are mostly found to chime with the first, like the third line in the Divina Commedia, that magnificent spiritualization of all sensuous things, the very title of which declares the harmony between earth and heaven. For GUESSES AT TRUTH. 99 while great practical minds anticipate their second thoughts in their first, great speculative minds take up their first and second thoughts and reconcile them in their third. The horses of the former are harnessed as before a Grecian chariot, all four abreast, and they advance vehe- mently and impetuously, though not without some peril. Second- thoughted men take off their feelings, that is, their two outside horses, for fear of their kicking and plunging, and are content to plod along at a foot's pace with the heavy wheelers of the understanding. The third-thoughted man resumes his feelings, and places them as leaders in front, where they are more manageable and less likely to run foul. u. No earthly light is without smoke ; no earthly fire but leaves embers : so is it with human vir- tues. Only good men have fumivores, to keep their smoke from annoying their neighbours, 100 GUESSES AT TEUTH. nay sometimes even to fuel their flame with it : they gather up the cinders, and throw them into the fire, which never burns so clearly and stea- dily and quietly and durably, as after this has been done. Such is one of the many precious lessons we learn from that peerless book St. Au- gustin's Confessions. u. The crab is among the very few native English fruit-trees. I hope the qualities it has given name to, are not likewise natives of this island. And yet one may suspect it, one may even suspect we are vain of them, from the outcry English travellers set up against the French, for not being equally ill-favoured. We are fond of bragging that they have no comfort in their language or in their country : they, I believe, might reply that they have no ill-nature in either. If so, not having the latter is a greater bliss than having the former. Nay, the GUESSES AT TRUTH. 101 former in its modern sense has a tendency to produce the latter : at least the chief effect of what we call comforts, that I know of, is, teach- ing people how to be, and how to make all around them, uncomfortable. So strangely do words change their meaning : a nervous arm, as Coleridge has noticed, used to be vigorous ; it is grown feeble and imbecile. Comfort used to strengthen and uphold : it now relaxes and weakens and lays us prostrate on a sofa. u. The only place where one rarely sees anybody acting a part, is on the stage. The practice there is to play double or quits, and either to act an actor, or to act oneself. u. We are, the better sort of us, all Adams. We all have love begotten for us, not of the 102 GUESSES AT TllUTH. flesh but of the soul, sent to us we guess not whence, leading us we see not whither, garrison- ing our vacant hearts against the assaults of ap- proaching manhood, with admiration, self-for- getfulness, devotion, purity, in a word with all true nobleness, and whispering to us its own eternity if we are faithful to it and to ourselves. But the fruit is fair to look upon, and the ser- pent suggests that it will be pleasant to the taste, and from impatience and curiosity we eat thereof, and love becomes mortal. Faultiness or pravity and perishableness are correlatives. The last enemy therefore must needs be Death ; and he, when all others are destroyed, will fall without a struggle. All the elements minister to man, even in their simplest unorganized state. The Earth is his abiding-place ; Water supplies him with drink ; GUESSES AT TRIXTH. 103 he breathes Air ; and such is the beneficence of Fire, that the ancients represented it as the greatest of the goods bestowed on men by their greatest benefactor, by that intelligence which enables them to look before and after, that Pro- metheus who at once M-VVfiiip & dTrdvTtiiv fiovffOjLirirop' cpydrtv. So manifold indeed is its utility, that hardly anything material can vie with it, even if it were not the chariot in which the spirits of the mar- tyrs had mounted into heaven. u. The impression left on the mind by the con- templation of some heroic deed, is not unlike that image of light which abides for some time on the eye after looking at the sun. And, alas ! it too seldom does more than dazzle and vanish. u. 104 GUESSES AT TRUTH. We are most of its Absaloms, caught and inextricably entangled by the beautiful locks which are our pride : and when so entrapt we fall an unresisting prey to the enemy. u. The bitterness of heaven is sweet : how sweet then its sweetness ! The sweetness of hell is bit- ter : how bitter then its bitterness ! Whence arises the pleasure, the eagerness, wherewith men, and women too, unless their natural appetites have been checked and refined into a nicer delicacy, if not into a fastidious daintiness, flock to the aspect of danger? What collects such a concourse around a scaffold ? surely it is not a mob of vultures ga- thering about the carcase. What renders a ship in a storm one of the most interesting and sub- limest and most fascinating spectacles ? Surely it is not, as the Epicureans assert, " quibus ipse GUESSES AT THUTH, 105 malis careas, quia cernere suave est," or, as Hobbes expresses it, because " there is Novelty and Remembrance of our own security present," (Humane Nature, Chap. IX. 19. J The plea- sure comes rather from the arousal of the ima- gination, from the impetuous rush of the feel- ings, which ever swarm like bees at the sound of the alarm-bell, and of which the intensest and most fervid activity is always the most de- lightful. There is a solemn assemblage of emo- tions, breathless and leaning forward to listen like a devout congregation to the eloquent voice of the preacher ; there is an awfulness in the turmoil of the elements upheaving wave after wave as it were sword after sword, and firing blast upon blast, to destroy their victim ; it is at once fearful and joyous to behold man battling with powers to which his own, materially considered, are nowise comparable, and holding out against them, if not vanquishing and subduing them, by 106 GUESSES AT TRUTH. the courage and wisdom of his soul : we sympa- thize with the conflict which our brother is wag- ing ; the honour of our own spiritual natures is concerned in it ; and so long as the result is still uncertain, we hope and trust that man will be victorious. In the weak indeed, where their own personal safety is at stake, and where their fears for them- selves are strongly awakened, the pain of such a situation will often overbalance the pleasure ; and thus a seemingly plausible pretext is aflbrded for the assertion of Lucretius, that danger is only pleasant to those who are out of it. But the brave and truly human heart, be it the manly or the womanly, is distressed to witness a peril in which it cannot share ; it longs to be in it, either for the sake of fighting or of helping : it rises higher and higher with the emergency ; and, as I have seen eyes which have seemed to loe bright with excessive darkness, so may it be GUESSES AT TEUTH. 107 said of honorable danger, that the very excess of its darkness brightens it. In the case of an execution, it is true, most of the finer excitements are wanting ; and that therefore is relished only by coarser palates, by those who feel not duly the atrocity of Crime or the majesty of Law, and who are little interrupt- ed by such appalling thoughts while they are gazing upon the struggle between Life and Death. u. What is material is immaterial : what is im- material is material. u. M7 ttoUl d iroiEiv tjov, dW a irEiroirjKevai, u. A true knight wishes only for two allies, the prayer of Earth, and the blessing of Heaven. Let him be slain : he cares not : he is sure to live. Let him be conquered : it matters not : 108 GUESSES AT TRUTH. lie is sure to triumph. For the cause of good is the cause of God. u. Is not the burning bush seen by Moses an exact type of the devout heart ? It too burns as with fire ; and it is not consumed : for the fire is the presence of God. Hence also we learn that destruction and mor- tality are of the earth earthy. The heavenly fire consumes not. The rays of the sun do not burn, unless the glass they shine through is darkened. The idea of the introduction to Goethe's Faust is evidently taken from the introduction to the book of Job. Pope had noticed long ago, that Satan now is wiser than of yore, And tempts by making rich, not making poor. This is the natural progress of society. The first danger is from distress, which may some- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 109 times drive a man into crime : the second and greater is from prosperity, which helps him to shde down into sin. The former may numb the heart, until it ceases to clench its hold ; the latter too often relaxes it, so that it lets virtue drop. Even this however furnishes a very inadequate no- tion of the temptations by which Faust is beset. The last century had taken rapid strides toward Hell. The sons of God, man's intellectual and spiritual faculties, saw the daughters of men, their animal and sensual propensities, that they were fair ; and we are not yet delivered from all the foul progeny that spawned from the unna- tural concubinage. This state of being is what the great poet of our times undertook to re- present, in which '' every imagination of the thoughts of the heart was only evil continually." The snares which Faust falls into, are within him as well as without him ; his enemy is him- self; and the strength of that enemy makes 110 GUESSES AT TRUTH. him the more formidable : every feeling of his heart, every talent of his mind, every aspiration of his soul, is leagued in conspiracy against him. No wonder then he falls, and that his fall from such a hight is terrible. Many good people, I understand, are shocked by Fu'Mt, and cry out that it is very profane. How loudly the same good people would have cried out against many passages in the Bible, if only they had not been in the Bible ! Weak eyes may be disabled for seeing by the excess of light, no less than by the absence of it. To repeat a re- mark which is forced upon one daily, it would be well if these exclaimers were to bear in mind, that being easily shocked is no proof of standing fast. u. " Toleration (says Landor) is an odious word." (Jmag. Conv. Vol. I. p. 318.) Perhaps it is so; and yet the intolerance of men has made it the GUESSES AT TRUTH. Ill name of a virtue, nay even of a very rare one. Many may boast of it : few truly possess it, or practise it, except toward themselves. u. The most heinous kind of blasphemy is per- secution, u. Drunkenness is usually followed by sickness ; so is spiritual intoxication by spiritual depres- sion, u. Society every now and then wants a little bloodletting : this may be the use of wars. u. Pour s'elever, il faut se lever. u. Peutetre, c'est le mot de celui qui ne peut faire. Napoleon ne s'en servoit pas. u. Forte ne agas, at fortiter : fortibus nihil est fortuitum. u. lis GUESSES AT TRUTH. Rivalry among men usually begets aversion, if not hatred. We forget that we cannot press down our competitor, without sinking ourselves. We forget that every moment employed in at- tacking him, is so much lost from the pursuit of the prize. We might take a lesson from a race- course : if the horses run against each other, they are likely to bolt. The sound of feet, whe- ther behind or beside or before them, only re- doubles their efforts to reach the goal. Nay, the very word rkalry might teach us wisdom. One cannot frame a conception of a more loving neighbourhood, than that between the opposite banks of a river, as they fix their smiling faces continually upon each other, although they vie in striving which shall convert the fertility, they both suck from the same stream, into the greatest richness and beauty. u. What a fine vision of Honour had Aristotle GUESSES AT TRUTH. 113 seen! when he declared, AoKst ij rifirj ev rotg Ttfitovi fidXKov Iivat, ij h tJ Tifxaixhw. {Ethic* 1.3.) Nothing can be truer : as the same thought is nobly expressed by Landor, " Glory is a light that shines from us on others, and not from others on us." {Imag. Conv. Vol. II. p. 585.) And surely the happiness of possessing some- thing upon which we can look admiringly, some- thing wherewith we can always refresh ourselves as in an Oasis, after wandering wearily through the wilderness of fallen man, something to up- hold and stay our best resolves when they be- gin to faint and droop and hang down their heads in despondency, something whereon to pour forth all that love for our brethren which is ever rising and seeking an outlet in the generous heart, threatening, if we keep it shut up, to turn sour, — this happiness surely is far loftier and more deeply rooted than any pleasure which grows in the rotting swamps of vanity. VOL. II. 1 114 GUESSES AT TRUTH. There is satisfaction indeed in receiving the ac- knowledgement that we are worthy of honour : our conscience is often fearful of even whispering its approval, until prompted by some voice from without; wherefore men, as Aristotle pursues, coiKaort Ttjy rijLLtjv ^icSksiv, 'iva TrtffrEvatrtv iavTOvq dyaBovg livai. Moreover it is gladdening to see homage paid to Virtue, to see her majesty re- cognized, and to feel that the only reason which forbids our joining the chorus of her admirers, is, that she has vouchsafed to take up her abode in us, and to make our spirit her shrine. But, woe is me ! what mortal can feel this ! Admira- tion is human : self-complacency belongs only to Deity. Admiration ennobles and blesses those who feel it. The lover is made happier by his love, than his mistress can be. Like the song of a bird, it cheers his own heart ; and any pleasure it com- municates to another, is only incidental and GUESSES AT TRUTH. 115 secondary. Why are we so imperatively com- manded to give glory unto God ? unless that we may ourselves be made godly by our worship. Nor, if in divine things one may speak of mo- tives, is it easy to conceive any worthier motive why God should have revealed his glory, than that man might be glorified by contemplating it. Therefore is it our bounden duty to give thanks to him for his great glory. u. Philosophy is the love of wisdom : Christianity is the wisdom of love. u. Vita hominis magna sit instauratio. u. It was a strange fancy for the man who de- clared that admiring nothing is the only way of being happy, to take it into his head that he was born to be a poet, and of all poets a lyrical. For while other poetry is the portraiture of 116 GUESSES AT TRUTH. feelVng lyrical poetry is the utterance of it: and our feelings cannot rise into the etherial regions of poetry, until they are refined and purified and borne upward by admiration, u. I It is not the subsequent seriousness that is hypocritical, but the previous air of care- lessness and levity; an air not only more likely to be assumed from being less con- genial to our nature, but also more capable of being put on for an occasion, as blas- phemy is more easily feigned than prayer. Many pretend to be better than they are. One can understand this: it may serve their turn in this world, although in the next it can only deepen their damnation. But society in course of time growing high, breeds a strange race of vermin, a set of people who pretend to be worse than they are, a if they were pay- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 117 ing court to the Devil, and making interest with him against their being received into his house- hold. Fearful is the peril of such men ; incal- culable is the mischief of their example : and yet there is more hope of them than of the others. u. Fine ladies paint. . .just like savages. One sees a number of people sunning them- selves in the moonshine. u. A person given to barefaced flattery, will usually balance the account with interest in your absence. A. He who amuses his guests by satirizing their friends, pays a poor compliment to the under- standings which selected them. a. 118 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Unbelief is the offspring of refinement. The fool might have said in his heart there is no God; but even the fool would have kept it to himself, unless he had hoped to make a noise in the world by divulging it. r. Timid persons are afraid of learning and science and knowledge, as leading to atheism, or at least to infidelity. And yet the Psalmist has pronounced that it is the fool, who says in his heart there is no God. This should be the text for a sermon on the divine and god- ly tendencies of knowledge. In these days, when many are doubting whether Truth be Truth» people need to be especially and fre- quently reminded of the distinction so ac- curately laid down by Bacon, that " a little Philosophy inclineth man's mind to Atheism, but depth in Philosophy bringeth men's minds about to Religion. For while the mind of f GUESSES AT TRUTH. 119 man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them and go no further : but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity." No finer proof of this can be given, than Bacon's own Confession of Faith, that magnificent outpouring of the " understanding which is the knowledge of the holy." u. When philosophers tell us there will be no time in Heaven, I conclude they mean there will be no measure of time, that is, of suc- cession; for time essentially is nothing more. That after a happy resurrection of the body there will be no succession of sensations, that in a happy life of any kind there will be no succession of emotions, is certainly unimagina- ble, and, I fancy, is nowhere revealed. True, the succession of emotions may be imperceptible ; 120 GUESSES AT TRUTH. but to render it so, we must strip our eternity of reflexion. The eternal nov) of Hell is much more con- ceivable ; and it strikes me as being the most terrible form under which the idea of Hell can be presented to us. To be for ever buried, or rather suspended alive, in the same dark atmosphere of pain, able to see, hear, and touch, but neither seeing nor hearing nor even touching, deprived of all capacities of action, that the whole man may be more entirely given up to suffering, — who would bear the burthen of this bodiless tomb, that could fly from it to the flames and ice of which Milton has composed his Pandemonium? A Christian preacher ought to keep in mind that he is not a heathen philosopher, that he is not a political orator, that he is not a GUESSES AT TRUTH. 121 stage-player ; the last especially, if he is called to preach in a fashionable chapel. u. Affectation is offensive in all places : in the pulpit it is noisome. The twang of the con- venticle is not the twang of Apollo*s silver bow. u. Coxcombical indolence makes many infidels stupid indolence keeps many Christians. Few are aware that they want any thing, except pounds shillings and pence. u. Seeking is not always the way to find ; or Altamira would have found a husband long ago. A. It is natural that affluence should be fol- lowed by influence. u. 122 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Henry's chief fault is having too humble an opinion of himself. Do pray let him keep it then ; if it be only as a rarity. u. The human soul, if holiness is to abide in it, ought to grow up, like the temple of Je- rusalem, in silence. The stones of which it is constructed, the materials employed to edify it, should be " made ready before they are brought thither." u. How well it were if we knew nothing of evil, except that it is the opposite and the adversary of good ! This perhaps is the defi- nition of innocence. u. The ultimate tendency of civilization is toward barbarism. The spirit of colonies has in all ages had a GUESSES AT TRUTH. 12S clemocratical bias. Nations seldom think of sending out colonies, until they have reached a certain pitch of civilization, and of that practical knowledge which springs from a familiarity with the forms and circumstances of civilized or congregated life. Now Despotism finds it difficult to establish its throne, except on the flats of Ignorance, even as the Pyramids arose not among the mountains of Upper, but among the sands of Lower Egypt : at least the only other soil which does not shake it off as with an earthquake, is the putrid pestilent marsh of a people in its decrepitude. Again, in a co- lony all institutions are modern and as it were of . yesterday, so that their utility must be palpable and immediate : they cannot possess the suita- bleness and expediency consequent on long usage, which make the abandoning old habits and customs, even mischievous or evil ones, an affair not only of difficulty but of danger alike 124 GUESSES AT TRUTH. to nations and individuals ; neither can they ex- cite that reverential affection which twines its evergreen foliage around all things ancient, blending with and hightening their beauties, veiling their weaknesses, and concealing the foot- steps of decay, which it too often hastens even by its own action, as well as by preventing timely repairs. A recently founded state has no such feelings : it is not enough there for a practice to exist : every citizen wants to know some good reason for its continuance. Besides, colonists are mostly men of ambition, always of enterprise : among them are to be found many of those whom their own restlessness or the pressure of circumstances has irritated into discontent with the government of their native land. In their new home intellect and industry must be the means of eminence ; and intellect will hardly raise a man to any considerable hight above his fellows, except where an army or a GUESSES AT TRUTH. 125 mob heave him up on their shields or on their shoulders. Now a mob is the settlement to be found in none except an old state of society. Colonies too from their situation, from the pur- poses which dictated the choice of it, and from other causes, are generally commercial : but Commerce holds no commerce save with the free. These remarks, it is clear, apply not to the military colonies of the Romans. They were things of a different kind, mighty engines of stifling oppression, cities of police-officers keep- ing watch and ward against the struggles of independence, the craftiest device of the craftiest politicians whom the world ever saw. It is not easy to estimate their importance : the laws and languages of half Europe bear witness to it : but in themselves they were little or nothing, and rather machines than beings. u. Use begets use. u. 126 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Professional education might entail on our posterity all the evils of Indian castes. r. None ever appropriated like the Romans. They incorporated into their empire not only provinces, but gods. r. Men have in all ages been readily brought to mortify their bodies much ; as the penances, wearisome pilgrimages, and tortures, which fill every superstitious code, attest. But scarcely can they be induced by any means to mortify their minds a little. So much fonder is man of his soul than of his body ; in other words, so much nearer is the soul to him, so much more essentially himself. Can we then be really fond of that about which we are so negligent ? How do we shew ourselves to be so ? as the fondest of all fond things, a foolish mother, does, by spoiling it. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 1S7 Augustus made Tiberius adopt Germanicus, " quo pluribus munimentis insisteret." {Tacit. Ann. I. 3.) He was too strong to be afraid of his strongest support, and too wise to distrust where security was safety. But few sovereigns have been equally politic. In Asia they seem to think that relations are only suckers which weaken the royal stem and must be cut off, and that the only use of a king's brothers is to garnish a coronation with heads. Even Tibe- rius, although he had among men a pre-eminence like the serpent's, that was " more subtile than any beast of the field," made haste to forget this lesson, the best thing his stepfather ever gave him. u. Other animals war against the animals of other kinds. It is the prerogative of man to war against his own kind. Among animals too, 128 GUESSES AT TRUTH. J believe, fratricide prevails in proportion as they become domesticated. u. It is a most mischievous notion that allow- ances are to be made for lofty and powerful minds : such indulgence encourages evil, and flatters it and foments it. Let allowances be made for the weak, in proportion to their weak- ness : but to whom much is given, from them let much be required. u. We are tardy in finding out the beauty of Order : our upstart will cannot be readily brought to acknowledge the sublimity of Law. On the contrary, we prate about the uncontrolable ve- hemence of Greatness, the excursive vagaries of Genius : as if forsooth the uniformity of the sun's march detracted from its glory, as if the orderliness of the universe, by which the Greeks were so charmed that they called the world f GUESSES AT TRUTH. 129 Kofffxoc or Order, and made the endeavour to conform thereto the regulative principle of their minds, could in any wise lessen its majesty or loveliness. None but a madman would wish to turn the former into a comet, or to melt and stir up the latter in the yawning caldron of chaos. u. If Genius overflow, it is, like the Nile, to fertilize. u. Experience is the best of teachers. Doubt- less : if anybody would go to her school. But hardly one person in a hundred can learn any- thing from the experience of others ; and hardly will one in ten learn much from his own. Let a father have ruined his fortune, his health, his character, by indulgence in any bad pro- pensity; let him have repented and reformed his life, and been diligent in warning his VOL. II. K IBQ GUESSES AT TRUTH. son against the sins of which he retains a painful consciousness : the chance is that the son will still try to pick his way through the same mire in which his parent foundered. Though we scorn the moth for returning to the flame it has just singed its wings in, the moth might with more justice scorn and jeer at the gigantic folly of the creature gifted with reason, who in defiance of ex- hortation, in spite of suffering, keeps flutter- ing about the flames of hell, until he falls into them. u. The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood : but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it. u. Few take advice, or physic, without wry faces at it. u. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 131 Who is fit to govern others ? He who governs himself. You might as well have said : nobody. u. Christianity requires not only acts but dis- positions, not only virtuous deeds but virtues. This is decisive of its practical disinterestedness. Selfish alms-giving is possible ; but the Gospel enjoins love, and selfish love is a -contradiction. Why then does it hold out punishments and rewards as motives ? Among other reasons, to keep men from being over-weighted by the world, and in the first instance to induce the acts, a perseverance in which, if sanctified by prayer, at length superinduces the disposition. The motives which in childhood made us learn to read, are not the reasons why we now love read- ing ; but it is plain that, to love reading, we must first have learnt to read. As Coleridge say« philosophically: "the mind and con- .i k2 132 GUESSES AT TRUTH. science may be reconciled to such motives, in the foreknowledge of the higher principle, and with a yearning toward it that implies a fore- taste of future freedom. The enfeebled con- valescent is reconciled to his crutches, and thankfully makes use of them, not only be- cause they are necessary for his immediate sup- port, but likewise because they are the means and conditions of exercise, and by exercise of establishing gradatim pauUatim that strength, flexibility, and almost spontaneous obedience of the muscles, which the idea and cheering presentiment of health hold out to him. He finds their value in their present necessity, and their worth as they are the instruments of finally superseding it." Aids to Refiexiorij p. 23. And after all the being directly influenced by what the Bible has promised and de- nounced, is in itself wise and good. It is not only a higher and wiser, a more patient and liberal and far-minded interestedness, than GUESSES AT TRUTH. 133 any other the world can shew, (though even as such it appertains to the perfection of our prudential nature) ; but it must also have been preceded by a pure act of Christian virtue : for it is a preference of faith to sight, a practical acknowledgement of God in his characters of lawgiver and judge, and a manly humble seek- ing him as such in spite of contumely and temp- tation. Like Txion, we often embrace a cloud, and can only be awakened from our trance by a thun- derbolt exploding in our arms. - u. In the moment of our creation we receive the stamp of our individuality ; and much of life is spent in rubbing off or defacing the im- pression. V. There is only one tempter whom we are very studious to withstand . . God. u. 134) GUESSES AT TRUTH. On doit bien aimer de perdre : on passe la vie a la perdre, et a se perdre soi-m^me ; et il y a peu de jours ou on ne fait mille choses a pure perte. u. Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies ? is not life one ? u. I have been told that Lord Byron is quite as great a poet as Shakspeare, bating his univer- sality. So Buonaparte in St. Helena was quite as powerful as Buonaparte at Paris, bating the empire of the world. u. Jeremy Taylor's gleaming fancy plays over his deep reasoning, like the sunbeams on the sea, converting it into a flood of light. u. The tree of knowledge is the tree of the know- ledge of evil, no less than of the knowledge of GUESSES AT TRUTH. 135 good. Now if we were always certain which we got hold of, if we always knew good to be good, and evil to be evil, things might go on better. But their outward appearance is often such as to beguile those who are so ready to be beguiled ; and there never is wanting a troop of conjurors and jugglers who play tricks with them, and offering us the one put the other into our hands, sophists, as the prophet denounces them, " wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight, calling evil good, and good evil, putting light for darkness, and darkness for light, putting bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter." As society thickens and knowledge spreads, these blind guides multiply a hundred -fold : for while great men come forth almost like lions, singly from the womb of Time, the meanest and most noxious creatures will often have plentiful broods. Hence, while at an earlier stage great authors 136 GUESSES AT TRUTH. ' have to deal chiefly with men as men, with their passions and feelings, at a later they must deal with them in great measure as readers and writers, or at least with their opinions and prin- ciples. Those familiar with Goethe, and able to compare his works with Shakspeare's, will easily perceive this distinction ; and when a person complains that Goethe's views of life and manners, his way of treating and representing things, are not the same with Shakspeare's, he only shews that he understands not what he is talking about. It is indeed a common practice in matters of taste, among those who have not apprehended the principles of right judgement, to judge of a thing, not by itself, but by another thing, and to condemn it be- cause it is not something else: but this is like shooting a horse, because he has not got the horns of an ox. Goethe m 1800 does not write just as ShakspearQ wrote in 1600: but GUESSES AT TRUTH. 137 neither would Shakspeare in 1800 have written just as he wrote in 1600. For the frame and aspect of society are different; the world which would act on him, and on which he would have to act, is another world. True poetical genius lives in communion with the world, in a perpetual reciprocation of influ- ences, imbibing feeling and knowledge, and pouring out what it has imbibed in words of power and gladness and wisdom. It is not, at least when highest it is not, as Wordsworth describes Milton to have been, " like a star dwelling apart." Solitude may comfort weak- ness : it will not be the home of strength. The piety which mingles with the world and passes through it, as a great river passes through a lake, preserving the integrity of its waters, is of a far purer and mightier, as it is of a more beneficent kind, than that which shuns observation like the Riger, and goes and buries itself in a desert. Now W^ GUESSES AT TKUTH. if Religion be rather social than eremitical, surely the same holds of Genius : surely he is a greater poet who can plunge into the world, and stem its flood, and ride upon its waves, than he who loiters about the little pool of his own fancies, throwing crumbs to the gold and silver fish he has put into it. In short. Genius is not an independent and insulated, but a so- cial and continental, or at all events a penin- sular power, with a Corinthian acropolis at once connecting it with and protecting it against the main land: it must suck in its nourishment drawn from the bowels of the earth, before the strings are cut and it is launched on its voyage through time and space. Now, without entering into a comparison of Shakspeare's age with our own, one thing at least is evident, that, considered generally and as a nation, we are more bookish than our an- cestors. The mere scholar may not be so mere GUESSES AT TRUTH. 139 a scholar; but literature is more extensively diffused, and more operative on society. Our feelings come not to us directly from their ob- jects, but through a number of mediums which have been interposed. Their wildness has been tamed ; their free play has been checked ; they have been taught their paces, and move in some degree according to rule : all contrasts have been softened ; and we seem as it were to have passed from an uncultivated country, with its high mountains and wide dreary moors, and here and there a lovely dell lying like a smiling infant in the arms of its mailed father, into an inclosed plain, gay and pros- perous and laughing, with all its fields look- ing one much like another. While the conflict and tug of passions supplied in Shakspeare's days the chief materials for poetry, in our days it is rather the conflict of principles : the war now is underground; the mine is dug, and we 110 GUESSES AT TRUTH. must countermine it. This appears not only from the works of Goethe and others of his countrymen, but from the course taken by our own greatest poets, by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Landor. They have been rebuked indeed for not writing otherwise : but they have done rightly ; for they have obeyed the impulse of their nature, and the voice of their age is heard speaking through their lips. In a like way our poetry has become sentimental. This too has been found fault with : but it was in- evitable. A sentiment is different from a thought and from a feeling ; it is a mixture of both. In its old sense it is not a mere opinion, but an opinion influencing and influenced by the character : in its modern sense, as denoting what is implied in the much abused adjective sentimental, a sentiment is a reflective self-conscious feeling, a feeling aware of its own existence, nursing itself, feeding itself, and too often pampering and spoiling itself. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 141 Various considerations miglit arise out of the foregoing remarks : we are already in the chamber where they are sleeping; one has only to raise the coverlet, and they will jump up and beg to be dressed. Let me take the first I come to. Since knowledge, like all other earthly things, is " of a mingled yarn, good and ill together," since too at any parti- cular time the ill is likely to be more plenteous than the good, they who enlist under the ban- ner of literature, have a twofold duty, to extend the dominions of Truth, and to fight against and subdue the retainers of Error. Whatever may be man's chosen line of action, it lies under the operation of the original curse, and there is no doing without also undoing : not only as mem- bers of the church, but in every other capacity, while here on earth, we are militant. There are always idols which must be overthrown, and superstitions which must be rooted out ; and although it may be a wholesomer and more genial 14!^ GUESSES AT TRUTH. employment to set up than to pull down, to pro- duce than to destroy, still intellectual like other warfare is necessary, is unavoidable. Falsehood will lift up its impudent head, and must there- fore be cast down and crushed : weeds and thorns will sprout up, and, unless they are cleared away, will choke any good seed that may be sown. But warfare, of whatever kind, is a perilous trade : even though it be undertaken in the cause of humanity, it can hardly be carried on without some inhumanity : nor is literary war less slippery than any other ; nay, rather it is inwardly more dangerous, in proportion as it is less dangerous outwardly. For the immediate bodily presence of danger strengthens and ele- vates and therefore humanizes : but it is a fear- ful thing, to have the power of wounding a fel- low-Creature without looking him in the face, and of poisoning him with the nightshade which trickles from the pen. Nowhere is it more need- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 143 ful thtit every thing should be done calmly and temperately and deliberately, without anger or personal animosity, and with an unceasing watch- fulness lest the blow fall on the offender in- stead of the offence. When thus waged in the spirit of love, war is not alien from poetry : for what is poetry but the language of Love ? of that harmonious harmonizing spirit which looks on all things with an eye, dispassionate indeed, yet kind and complacent, not as they stand alone and may often seem to be purely mischievous, but as they spring from the abysmal sources of nature, and even when worst have still ** a soul of goodness." For this reason the wis- dom of the Imagination is far wiser, as it is far gentler, than the wisdom of the reflective under- standing : the speculation of the latter is narrow and fragmentary and minute : but in the visions of the former all things are bathed in Love, as the stars are in the crystalline bath of the sky ; 144 GUESSES AT TRUTH. all are members of the one indissoluble universe whereof inexhaustible Love is the radiant centre. What then is the proper fashion of literary warfare ? The end being not personal, but the exposure and destruction of falsehood, the de- sirable thing must be, to apply some solvent, at the touch of which it shall crumble. Now there are two intellectual solvents : logic, which acts externally and step by step, eating away one morsel after another ; and ridicule, which pene- trates within, and spreads itself through every part, until by a sudden explosion it shivers the whole. In each kind the most admirable spe- cimens are to be found among the writings of the Athenians. The demoralizing sophistry which infested and worried their republic, was assailed by the analysis of Plato and by the laugh of Aristophanes : and although they could not get rid of the disease, fo- mented as it was by the strongest and most GUESSES AT TRUTH. 145 irritating diet, and confirmed by the constitu- tional tendency of the human soul to breed in its fairest part a cancer that shall consume it, yet they must have done much good even in their own days, some nationally, more perhaps to individuals whom they startled and admonished ; and their works have sounded through all after ages like warning voices of inspiration, pro- claiming the dangers that encompass the un- checked aberrations of the intellect, and calling back the prodigal son to the home of his father, from feeding swine, where '' he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat, and no man gave unto him," any more than the philosophical swineholders give nourishment tp the poor people who feed their swine. * These two polemical powers may be com- bined in various proportions: the philosophical disputant may have more or less wit; the po- etical may at times introduce more or less of VOL. II. L 146 GUESSES AT TRUTH. argument; whereof the Clouds furnish a clas- sical example. Yet, if judicious, he will try to keep as much as may be within the region of the ridiculous, and not to manifest his skill by delineating what is loathsome. Prodigious cleverness may be displayed in such a delinea- tion : it may make one turn half sick with dis- gust: but the poet's aim is not to disgust, but to delight, to exhibit what he alone duly sees and thoroughly feels, the everlasting indisso- luble alliance between beauty and truth, be- tween goodness and gladness. We have been told over and over again, that the business of poetry is to please : it is so, and this is the cause i the wisdom of the Imagination is clothed in smiles; she leaves frowns to the weekday faculties of the soul. A purely hate- ful character, such as Shelley has represented in his Cencif a work surpassingly excellent for the chaste beauty of its diction, is an un- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 147 poetical character. The poet averts or rather diverts us from evil, not by stamping on it and treading out its venomous entrails, but in a quieter and pleasanter way, by widening that smile of rapture which it is his high privilege to excite, into a laugh ; by shewing the weak- nesses of human nature, but without unco- vering its nakedness or disgracing it : on the contrary he leaves us with an intenser love for what is good therein, and a more ardent devotion to its welfare. The historian may drain and strain the English tongue, and write till his style cracks and his orthography gets the cramp, in abuse of the Athenian com- monwealth : Aristophanes neither strains nor grows hoarse, but awakens the jocund spirits of laughter. No one so powerfully exposes all that is bad in Athens ; and yet who ever loved Athens more than Aristophanes ? what image is the presiding hearth-god of his works, what L 2 148 GUESSES AT TRUTH. idea is breathed into us by every line he has left, but that of the city which, with all its failings, none else can rival or approach ? So again the essayist, with a mind as plain al- though it may not be so spacious as Hounslow heath, and with thoughts as distinct and per- chance as numerous as his fingers, will de- claim against the silliness of chivalry, if he can think of no fresher topic on which to vent his bile and his self-satisfaction. He will talk about ignorance, and darkness, and absurdity, and folly, and the like, such being perhaps the qualities he is most familiar with ; and he will congratulate himself on being born in an age when knight-errantry has been supplanted by author- vagrancy, when magazines contain anything but armour, and when a youthful as-' pirant after renown, instead of breaking a lance in a tournament, wears a quill to the stump in a review. It was in a far different spirit that GUESSES AT TRUTFI. 149 the chivalrous Ceryantes, when the light of chivalry was expiring, put his extinguisher on it, and drove away the moths that alone still fluttered around it. He loved chivalry too well, to be patient when he saw it parodied and bur- lesqued ; and he perceived that the best way of preserving it from shame, was, to throw over it the sanctity of death. And yet, when he set up his scare-crow, how many chivalrous virtues he could not refrain from investing him with ! Here again we are won away from an error, and still retain our admiration of the principle which in its decrepitude so corrupted itself. u. Dwarfs strut : giants stoop. What is the use of ridicule? To point out the deformity of foolish things to the fancy ; as the use of reasoning is to demonstrate their 150 GUESSES AT TEUTH. foolishness to the understanding. That a mere intellectualist should object to such a wea- pon, does not surprise me. He who would pro- scribe a sense of beauty for attracting with- out formal proof, may consistently condemn ridicule, because there too the proof is informal. But for poets to cry out against it— and many do — only shews them to be nothing more than half poets. It was a matter of boast to the Romans, that they invented a new species of poetry, the satire. The fact, I believe, is so ; and the reason is plain. The Greeks were incapable of invent- ing anything so unpoetical. Their Satyrs haunt- ed the woods, and were beings among whom the Imagination could be content to abide, even as Una abode amongst them, without disparagement to her heavenly purity, taming their wildness and softening their ferocity, and breathing some- thing of a human soul into these anti-genii, or GUESSES AT TRUTH. 151 concentrations of the animal nature. Whereas the Roman satires have no scent of the woods ; their haunts are the purlieus of sin : in Juvenal they reached their full impurity, and in him they are the toadstools that spring up in the hotbed of corruption. u. A good razor never hurts or scratches. Neither would good wit, were men as tractable as their chins. But instead of parting with our intellectual bristles quietly, we set them up and wriggle. Who can wonder then if we are cut to the bone ? and however ridiculous lather alone may make us look, lather shot with blood makes us look much more so. After all, wit is an edged tool. It is well to have it : but take care how you use it. Else it may wound your neighbour ; it may cut your own finger, or even your throat. u. 15£ GUESSES AT TRUTH. Nobody can be such an enemy to another, as almost every body is to himself. u. Far the greater number of mankind spend their lives in making themselves miserable. A great many are chiefly employed in making others miserable. Not a few, thank God ! busy themselves a good deal about making others happy. The only rarities are the persons who make themselves happy. This is very odd : for everybody says, nobody thinks of or cares about anybody half so much as himself. What if that should be the very reason ? You love good : shew your love, by your ac- tivity and unweariedness in wooing and try- ing to win it, by watching all its motions and slightest gestures, by laying wait for its going out and its coming in, by sitting all night GUESSES AT TRUTH. 153 long under its window, if perchance you may hear its voice or catch the light of its face^ by diligently seeking for it in every thing that be- falls you, by aiming at it and keeping its image before you in every thing you do, by tracing its footsteps and its spirit in every thing your neighbour does. There is hardly anything which you may not turn to good, even as there is nothing which the sun cannot illuminate. It is the simplest of all metamorphoses, and, when you are used to it, almost the easiest : only set about it heartily. L^appetit vient en mangeant, as the French say. This in short is the true philosopher's stone ; it changes all things into what is far more pre- cious than gold, into that of which gold is only one of the utensils ; and it may be found, u. Certain mathematical theorems hold equally, as moral truths : only few people acknowledge. 154 GUESSES AT TJRUTH. and still fewer discern, their evidence and unquestionableness, when they are applied to spiritual things. Men are very slow to believe that the right road is the right road, or that the straight path to any point is the shortest : every- body whispers in your ear that he has found out a short cut of his own, and is ready to shew it you, if you will but follow him and keep his secret : for else all the inns will be full, and there Avill be no getting horses. In spite of this, everybody is angry with all the rest of the world, for not treading in the same track with himself, for not doing exactly as he does. In this most reasonable anger all agree ; but in few things besides. Yet I cannot feel sure that this world would be a much better place, although men were like pins or nine-pins, multiplicates of each other. True, we are or ought all to be moving toward the same point ; but that point is a centre toward which we are converging: GUESSES AT TRUTH. 155 for the present we stand at different points in the circumference, it matters not whether of the same, or of divers concentric circles ; and al- though your business is to make for the goal along your radius, your neighbour's nearest way lies along his. Therefore quarrel not with your neighbour because his temper is not your temper, nor his understanding your understand- ing, nor his pursuits your pursuits : rather admire the inexhaustible opulence of nature, bringing forth such a crowd and throng of creatures all differing in kind, but all precious and wholesome, if so be they fulfil the duties of their kind. But you wish to give your brother your arm, and to help him on? Perhaps during a long journey men walk better with their arms free. I say men : because I know not that it is true of women : their arms seem to seek a resting- place ; and the comfort thus given to the 156 GUESSES AT TRUTH. heart, may more than make amends for any- trifling hinderance to the body. But you want to have your brother near you, and to shake hands with him ? Make haste then and get to the centre, and be ready there to welcome him on his arrival. v. Finding fault must have something strange- ly agreeable, seeing that so many spend in it the largest part of their lives. Success to be sure encourages them : in hunting for faults, nobody is ever at a fault. The odd thing is, that, the employment being so delightful, no one ever thinks of carrying it on at home, where it would cost far less trouble. Perhaps people are used to see so much good within doors, that when they go abroad it sickens them, and they v/ant a little refreshing variety. They warm themselves before their own fire, but can only wind the smoke out of another's chim- ney. And yet a person may turn his own dung- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 157 hill to some profit, while his neighbour's can only annoy him, especially if he thrusts his nose into it. For my own part I would rather go into my neighbour's garden, and smell the choicest flowers or taste the choicest fruit there : they are likely to be pleasanter and sweeter. u. Learned men have objected to deriving lucus a non lucendo, from the want, they say, of any like etymology. That suggested by a celebrated divine, of pancake from Tav KaKovj is not quite certain. But surely scandal is an instance in point : for it means what nobody stumbles or takes offence at, what on the contrary every body picks up and pockets, unless indeed he rather hang it to his watch-ribband and jingle it against his seals. u. - It is the beam that is censorious : the pooir little mote is shame-faced and silent. I think 158 GUESSES AT TRUTH. of this, when I hear the men of the eighteenth or nineteenth century inveying against the fol- lies of the twelfth or the sixteenth. They did not treat us so. u. The intellectual soul has many senses or mem- bers, by which it communicates with the out- ward world, but which yet are no more the in- tellect itself, than the limbs of the body are the life. Such are memory and attention, which last however is rather a habit than a faculty; stich also are the powers of expression and per- ception ; fancy, with which, as with an eye, we see similitudes ; apprehension, with which, as with a hand, we lay hold on objects and notions ; and lastly sense, as it is familiarly called, by which we practically discover of two instruments which is the more suitable, of two actions which is the more expedient. Each of these faculties is susceptible of various excellencies, and these excellencies are all so many talents. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 159 Genius on the other hand is a perfection of the soul itself. But what perfection V For the soul not only thinks, it also feels and wills. Now these its parts should not live in un- neighbourly separation, but should endeavour to become one, as far as may be, by interpene- tration and interfusion. The condition of the soul is then most perfect, when the intellect is impassioned, the passions intellectualized, and both are elevated, refined, controuled, actuated, and directed by a master principle. And this interpenetration and interfusion, I conceive, form the essence of Genius. Its most remark- able property or organ is its digestion, whereby it assimilates all things ; and its chief instinct is to realize an idea. Let me follow out my brother's remark : for he seems to me to have caught sight of the truth, in a matter of no little obscurity and perplex- ity. Coleridge has often tried to lay down cer- 160 GUESSES AT TRUTH. tain distinctions between Talent and Genius, in the Friend, (Vol. i, p. 183. Vol. iii, pp, 7Sf 85.) and elsewhere; and has displayed his usual ingenuity for discovering the invisible and trac- ing the furthest and finest ramifications of an idea. Yet, so far as I can judge, he has not sa- tisfied others of the essential difference in their nature : and this want of success 1 would attri- bute to his having chiefly delineated what is remote and derivative, if it be not accidental, without digging into the ground and pulling up the root. It is true, the common eye best distin- guishes a tree by it& leaves ; but the scientific eye would see the root, would examine the seed, would search until it discerned the miniature of the oak in the acorn. If you want a person to possess an idea fully, put him fully in possession of it. What we have once known thoroughly, we never lose ; what we have not, was never ours. The light on the glow-worm passes away : the light in the diamond endures as long as the diamond* GUESSES AT TRUTH. 161 Nay more, I cannot help doubting whether Mr. Coleridge himself ever reached the origin of the difference : had he done so, he would hardly have talked about talent, or used the vulgar phrase a man of talent. Landor, al- though no professing metaphysician, yet guided by that tact for propriety in language, which characterizes him almost above every other writer I am acquainted with, has reproved this expression in his interesting and instructive dialogue between Johnson and Tooke (Imag. Conv. Vol. ii. p. 213.) which all desirous of writing English ought to know by heart. In this instance, as in others where a word has been fingered and thumbed until its meaning is effaced, a thing especially frequent in ab- stract terms and the names of spiritual things, since the commonalty, never having framed a precise notion of their value, let them rub against the larger and harder copper coins, and are often glad to pass them off, as the Iris^au VOL. II. M 162 GUESSES AT TRUTH. passed off his guinea, between two half-pence; in such cases, to restore the original impression, one must try to recover the original die. He who wishes to define an ambiguous word, ought to shew that the signification he assigns to it is not arbitrary, by shewing it to be consistent with etymology, or with analogy, or with pri- mitive usage. Now there is little question that the common use of the word talent to denote a faculty of the mind, is traceable to the parable of the talents in the New Testament : just as many other words, lazar for example, spring from the same source : just as parole and palabra (whence our palaver, in derision perhaps of what was deemed a Spa- nish peculiarity) are only forms of Trapa(3o\^, and must at first have meant the word of the Saviour. The true sense of the parable was evident : the talents were spiritual gifts or en- dowments : so wherever any spiritual or intel- lectual faculty existed in a high degree, it was GUESSES AT TRUTH. 163 called a talent. A good memory was a talent ; an eye for painting was a talent ; a musical ear was a talent ; readiness of speech was a talent ; a man might have a talent for raillery, a talent for logic : *' Horace (says Dryden,) is to be considered in his three different talents, as a critic, satirist, and writer of odes." All the other instances cited by Johnson prove that this is the old and right usage. The original meanmg of the word in France, whence we probably imported it, was the same. All these talents were so many gifts, so many dons, names often applied to them. They were, so to say, the particular features or members of the mind, when any-wise eminent or remark- able : so that the excellence of any faculty is a talent. But as a face may have fine eyes without a handsome nose or mouth, so the possession of one talent implies not the pos- session of another. Hence it is a blunder to club them together, and denominate the whole M 2 164 GUESSES AT TRUTH. flock by a singular noun. A man may have a talent of a particular kind ; he may have several talents of particular kinds ; amassing them we may say he has talents, or is a man of talents ; but he can no more have talent or be a man of talent, than he can have pound or be a man of poud, than he can have letter or be a man of letter. Genius on the other hand is one and whole and indivisible. We cannot say that a man has geniuses, as we ought not to say that he has talent. Shakspeare was a man of genius ; but even Shakspeare was not a man of geniuses. Genius is the excellence of the soul itself as an intelligence. It is that • central pervading essence which modifies and regulates and de- termines all the particular faculties ; it is above the soul and in the soul and one with it : as the talents are its executive ministry and may be many, so genius being its legislative principle can only be one. And as, when go- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 165 vernments are disordered, the harmony between the administration and the principle of law is at an end, so in the diseased and broken state of our nature the harmony between its genius and its talents ceases, and the voice of genius seems to speak to us from without, even as the voice of conscience seems to speak ; or rather the voice proceeds from a self within ourselves, from that holy place which we have forfeited the privilege of entering, and into which we can only obtain admission again through the reconciling blood of the atonement. Hence it is that men of genius have looked on their genius as something distinct from themselves : like con- science, it is seated behind the veil which our will by its wilfulness draws across the soul ; and the will cannot controul it, cannot add to it or take away from it, cannot command it to do this or that ; it is what it is, and such it continues to be : let it act freely, and its might is almost boundless, and its offspring are almost ever- 166 GUESSES AT TRUTH. lasting; chain or curb it, and it is nothing. Hence was it that Socrates spoke of his genius as of a Zai^oviov or supernatural power. Hence too the very name of genius. But alas ! while talents are things which can be handled and talked about, I feel that genius can only be fully understood or intelligibly de- scribed by him who possesses it ; and he perhaps must rather represent than describe it. Yet these scanty observations may help some to more accu- rate notions on this difficult subject. Nothing can be vaguer or more turbid than the common use of the two words. People feel that there is a difference between them : the most slovenly writer would hardly call Milton a man of talent, or Waller a man of genius : but this feeling gropes about blindly, without seeing its own reasonableness : so, after the usual practice of our helpless understanding, which, when at variance with the imagination, likes to bring all things under the simplest category, that of quantity. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 16? and knowing nothing of the essential dogmatizes about the formal, and incapable of recognizing any distinction of nature, will hear of nothing but a difference as to more or less ; here likewise the general opinion is, that talent is a lower degree of genius, and genius a higher degree of talent, even as monkeyhood is a lower humanity, and humanity a higher monkeyhood. u. There is no commoner stopgap in conversa- tion than such questions as Which do you think the best play of Shakspeare 9 or the best novel of Walter Scott ? Yet among all the questions which the schoolmen tried to solve in their logical cru- cible, and wherewith the modern scorners of logic have stilled the cravings of their vanity and tickled themselves nito a dull forced laugh, none, not even the famed one about the number of angels who can dance on the point of a needle, is not quite as rational and answerable. Indeed the paralogism in the two cases is the same : 168 GUESSES AT TRUTH. the modes of space and number are applied to things with which space and number have no- thing to do. The pinnacle of Strasburg Min- ster may be a certain number of feet higher than the cross of St. Peter's ; the cubic content of St. Peter's may exceed by a certain number of feet that of Strasburg Minster : these are points which may be ascertained by measurement. But where shall we learn that intellectual trigono- metry which will determine whether Lear or Macbeth be the sublimer tragedy ? whether a Gothic cathedral or a Grecian temple be the grander building? or, to make the absurdity more palpable, which is the most beautiful, the Iliad, the Parthenon, Cleopatra, Mont Blanc, the vale of Tempe, a palm-tree, or a rose-bud ? A different idea of beauty, or, if the idea be one, a different modification of it, has become mani- fest in every one of these objects ; and ideas or manifestations of ideas differ not quantitively, but specifically or generically : so that the office GUESSES AT TRUTH. 169 of the Judgement or Critical Faculty is to exa- mine with what completeness any particular idea is embodied and revealed in its earthly form, not to weigh or measure different ideas against one another. In other words, every object is to be judged of by itself, not by others ; and the business of Judgement is with the positive, not with the comparative or superlative. Landor indeed, in his dialogue between Southey and Porson (p. 69), speaks of such intellectual trigonometry, only however as a thing desirable, not as having actual existence : nor is it likely to have any, seeing it is a no- tional nonentity. He also complains more than once that " no critic has ever been able to fix the exact degrees of excellence above a certain point :" the failure is owing to the impossibility of the thing attempted. But impossibilities are ot to be attempted with impunity : the teeth which gnaw at a piece of iron, wear themselves away. Criticism would not be in its present 170 GUESSES AT TUUTH. deplorable reptile state, unless critics had wasted their faculties in striving to do what is not to be done. Nor are books the only sufferers by those odious things, comparisons. We seem incapable of admiring anything, without at the same time disparaging something else : even Wordsworth in some fine lines already quoted says that " the beauty of promise sets the budding rose above the rose full-blown." The rose-bud would blush with shame at the preference : true, it has this peculiar beauty ; still it cannot be said that in every sense youth is more beautiful than age, promise than fulfilment, the bud than the flower, morning than day and evening and night, spring than summer and autumn. We are indeed for ever exalting some one of these above what we are pleased to deem its rival, although nothing like rivality severs them ; but our reasons for doing so are altogether arbitrary, and de- pend on the casual changing whim of the mo- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 171 ment. Hear Wordsworth again in an autumnal sonnet : This rustling dry Through the green leaves, and yon crystalline sky, Announce a season potent to renew Mid frost and snow the instinctive joys of song, And nobler cares than listless summer knew. It is really hard that winter cannot be praised, without abusing summer in the same breath ; that they cannot be allowed to exist side by side in our thoughts, as they exist in nature, in sisterly beauty and amity ; that we cannot smile on the favorite of the moment, without frowning askance on every other woman in the room. But so it is : we are the slaves of a domineering egotistical understanding, which will not let us wander freely, enjoying the flowers as they bloom beside our path, and alive to every joyous im- pression, but compels us to make a choice, to subscribe certain articles of faith, and then re- 172 GUESSES AT TRUTH. solves that everything, except that whereon it sheds the light of its countenance, must be worthless. From these considerations it appears, that precipitancy in pronouncing one book better or worse than another, indicates not superior discernment of their relative merits, but a feeble discernment of their positive merits. u. The reason why many people are so fond of using superlatives, is, they are so positive that the poor positive is not half positive enough for them. u. Poor Richard ! all his geese are swans. Doubly poor Robert ! all his swans are geese. u. How many merits one sees in those one likes! how many faults in those one dislikes ! Yet people fancy they see with their eyes. u. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 173 All our senses have their imported prejudices, and adopt and lay aside and alter their tastes at foreign example and suggestion : a proof that even in ordinary men the mind modifies the senses more directly, not to say (which I believe I might so far as appears) more, than the senses modify the mind. Hardly a writer does not use a magnifying glass. u. I once heard a woman say to her husband, after several little controversies playfully carried on and prettily declined : Je ne sais pas comment il arrive f mais tu as toujour s raison. This speech delighted and surprised me : others I hope will only be delighted by it. The opposite speech in the play is well known ; and that would never have surprised anybody. u. 174 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Doribert is the first person in the universe. Are you quite sure of it ? To be sure. . . .By the by, do you know, there is not a question on which we do not think exactly aUke. I heard him speak slightingly of your favo- rite Johnson the other day. Oh ! I was always certain that he did not know a good book from a bad. This barefacedness of our self-love thrusting its head through our esteem for others, may be rare : cover it up a little, and nothing is com- moner. ' u. Time delights in contradictions. When it passes slowly, it is gone very fast; and when shortest in its presence, it is longest in the re> trospect. u. Physical objects are lessened by distance ; moral objects are often magnified by it. Most GUESSES AT TRUTH. 175 pleasures are greater in forethought or after- thought than in enjoyment ; and a danger an- ticipated is far more dreadful than a danger encountered. u. . Puppies are blind: I suppose, because their eyes are looking inward. u. Vanity is vanity. You who prate so glibly and so thoughtlessly about giving a nation a constitution, believe me, you might as reasonably talk about giving a man a constitution. It were a lighter matter to transport London with its double cathedral into Africa, than to carry thither our constitution with its two houses of Parliament. A constitution is the child of Time, the mate of Life, the disciple of Necessity, the ward of Providence. If none but God can breathe a soul into a man, neither can any but God breathe a soul into a people, r. 176 GUESSES AT TRUTH. It was the original sentence on mankind, that whatever we bring forth should be brought forth with pain, that the human race should be fed by the labour of the man, and should increase and m,ultiply by the labour of the woman, that our bread should be moistened with the sweat of the brow, and that we should come into the world amid groans and tears. So is it likewise with the human race. The sweat must have run down the cheeks of a nation, before its condition can be bettered : the world must be in labour, before it can bring forth happiness : and unless our own sins render our pains abortive, every suc- ceeding revolution will be as it were a throe of childbirth. u. -Light, when suddenly let in, dazzles and hurts and almost blinds us : but this soon passes away, and it seems to become the only element we can exist in. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 17T Statesmen ought to define their objects fully and conclusively within their own minds, before they engage in active life. Else their actions may get to shape their principles, instead of their principles shaping their actions. The knowledge of one's strength doubles it : the io-norance of it halves it. u. On peut savoir tout sans savoir faire. u. At the wonder-match in the fairy tale, the prince produces a nut, out of which he draws I know not how many yards of muslin. Any Spaniard five years since would have beat him hollow : he would have pulled out of his waist- coat pocket the whole constitution of his country, perhaps still more finely spun, and almost as durable. u. The business of a statesman is to deal with VOL. II. X 178 GUESSES AT TRUTH- men. This has been lost sight of by most of our recent legislators and constitution-mongers : or they must have drawn their notion of men from the chess-board, and have fancied moreover that they were themselves playing both sets... a kind of game which commonly ends in a puzzle, and in both parties having the worst of it : so unbecoming is it to other things as well as the Thames, to have their two sides on one side. Would you see bowmen are not to be dealt with ? read any of the French Constitutions, or the Spanish. They are all based on the same funda- mental error, the fancy that a forest will spring up if you only mumble over a few pages of Lin- neus. Would you on the other hand behold how a true statesman deals with men such as they are, having flesh and blood and all the good and evil that flesh and blood are heirs to ? how he breaks them in and manages and controuls them, but without maiming their strength or quenching their spirit ? with how gentle a hand he disentangles the fruit -bearing plant from the GUESSES AT TRUTH. 179 noxious creeper that is stifling it? how he searches for every little islanded spot of good ground to sow his good seed in ? how kind he is, how condescending, how indulgent, and how he displays the consciousness of his own superiority chiefly by the silent acknowledgement that he has no right to expect from others what he has a duty to exact from himself? how in fine he prepares and accomplishes the blessed task of bringing the confused elements of society into order, and where hatred and rapine and Woodshedding and terror have been raging, there makes peace grow and joy and confidence and that love which arises when families dwell together in amity ? would you see and under- stand how all this is to be done, read Sir John Malcolm's Instructions to his Assistants and Offi- cers, and his account of his administration in Central India: read and see how much may be effected, even in four short years, when a man sets about it rightly and wisely. u. N % 180 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Tibi impera. Deo pare. Hominibus, sicuti Naturae, parendo impera. u. Dieu seul peut commencer par le commence- ment, u. Is not straitening the best way of straighten- ing ? Look into a foul clothes' bag and see : it will serve just as well as a crowded prison or an election mob. True, clean linen packs closely: but then it is clean. And though ironing and mangling are good for shirts, I am not sure that they are equally good for the wearers ; notwithstandiag the authority of sun- dry rulers, who seem to have served their apprenticeship in the laundry. u. People cannot go wrong, if you don't let them. They cannot go right, unless you let them. u. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 181 The great discovery of modern statecraft, is^ that policy means police. . u. I hate to see trees pollarded . . or nations. u. Lisping must be very common : so many people call royalty loyalty. u. The very idea of lawful Power involves the prior existence of Law, through its conformity with which alone can Power become lawful. It is quite right that there should be a heavy duty on cards : not only on moral grounds ; not only because they act on a social party like a torpedo, silencing the merry voice and numb- ing the play of the features ; not only to still the hunger of the public purse, which, reversing the qualities of Fortunatus's, is always empty. 182 GUESSES AT TRUTH. I however much you may put into it; but also" because every pack of cards is a malicious libel on courts, and on the world, seeing that the trumpery, with number one at the head, is the best part of them, and that it gives kings and queens no other companions than knaves. u. When the spirit of good is busy, the spirit of evil is not idle. This has been made manifest at every momentous epoch in history. So like- wise has the converse, expressed in the German proverb : When need is highest. Then aid is nighest. v. Even folly has its use. The cackling of geese has more than once saved the capitol. Tetzel awakened Luther. u. What would be the state of the world, if God did not bring good out of evil ? He may do GUESSES AT TRUTH. 183 this: man cannot. It is true, man tries, or would persuade others and even himself that he tries : but it is like a wasp's trying to fly through a pot of honey. u. Oxenstiern's son, on his arrival at the con- gress of Munster, dismayed by the gravity of the Spanish plenipotentiaries, and by the quickness and ready confidence of the French, wrote to beg that his father would send him some sage and experienced adviser. The great chancellor's answer is well known : Mi Fill, parvo mundiis regitur intellectu. He spake with reference to the policies and ordinances of man : and the histories of two thousand years are com- ments on his remark. But men, in their con- scious intelligent agency, have not much more to do with the government of the world, than they have to do with the motion of the earth ; whereat if all its inhabitants amassing their whole strength were to push for a century, they could not even shake it in its stedfast course. 184 GUESSES AT TRUTH. In the mighty watch of our world, which hath the moon for its month-hand, and the sun for its year-hand, man at the utmost is only the mainspring, needing to be perpetually wound up as the chain of life runs out, going right only so long as he meekly fulfils the purpose of his maker, but evermore liable to be disordered by the strain or shock of his passions or the in- trusive dirt of his sensuality. Oxenstiern spake truly, inasmuch as he spake of man; whose intellect, seldom very strong, save in his own conception, has usually grown giddy on mount- ing any lofty eminence of power. Had Oxen- stiern spoken with reference to the true Gover- nor of the world, he would have said : Magno mundus regitur intellectu. Wherever science has traced his footsteps, it has discovered that Infinite Power is the executive of Infinite Wisdom. It has perceived this in all those lower orders of things which it is better able to survey : and if the same is not equally evi- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 185 dent in contemplating mankind, it is be- cause the object is so gigantic that the eye cannot comprehend it, and thus cannot discern the relative proportion and reciprocal adaptation of its parts ; because man collectively, as indi- vidually, cannot see the whole of himself. All that we behold is a mere fragment, as it were a Torso of the colossal statue; and the beauty of such a fragment is hardly perceivable, except where the Imagination can supply what is wanting. Let me observe here that the contrast be- tween Oxenstiern aad the contemporaneous minister of France, Mazarin, aptly illustrates the difference remarked above between third -thought- ed and second-thoughted men. Mazarin was palsied by his prudence. Oxenstiern was no less prudent ; but his prudence combined with his generosity to constitute magnanimity : and as he reconciled his first and second thoughts in his third, so Gustavus Adolphus may perhaps 186 GUESSES AT TRUTH. serve as an example of one who anticipated his second thoughts in his first. Hardly any other hero has been so politic : hardly any other politician has been so heroic : nor can any rhyme in Terza Rima be more perfect than was the harmony between the great king and his great minister. u. When we skim along the surface of history, we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it, u. Did we duly consider how far the goodness of a single individual may be influential in his neighbourhood, how that influence may be pro- pagated in ever-widening circles, and may ulti- mately in no small degree promote the welfare of his country, it would surely be a great sup- port and strengthening to our weak faltering virtue. If ten righteous men had been found in the city, Sodom would have been spared ; indeed it could hardly have been Sodom : GUESSES AT TRUTH. 187 but among ten every unit is important. The kingdom of heaven, we know, is as a grain of mustard seed ; and whatever belongs "to that kingdom, is in like manner fruitful. u. Nothings bears interest to a wise man, ex- cept principle. To be sure ! says a broker : what else should ? u. Ou trouvera-t-on des gens comma il faut ? En Paradis. Mais il n'y a la que des parvenus. A la bonne heure : done a Paris. u. Heroism would not be heroism, did not half the world mistake it for superstition or infidelity or treason or madness or folly. The only way of undoing the Gordian knot of circumstances is that which Alexander tried, by decision. He knew it to be the rapidest kind of 188 GUESSES AT TRUTH. resolution. That single deed marked him out as the man born to cut through not only the twisted policies df Greece, but also that still more thickly ravelled complication in which the destinies of Greece and Asia had been involved for two cen- turies, and wherein the swords of Marathon and Salamis and Platea had only made a rent. As soon however as the disentangler was gone, the entangling began anew; only the thread was finer and still brittler. At length the iron foot of the Romans stamped on it and mashed it. By the only way, I mean the only way in action, not in speculation : for the actor finds, the thinker seeks : the former lays hold on one thing, the latter takes a survey of many. Alex- ander's teacher went otherwise to work : his Organon was not the sword : he tried to analyse, that is, to untie the knot, and his writings are the journal of his progress. The legend indeed tells that he at last bethought himself of copying GUESSES AT TRUTH. 189 his pupil, but that like most copyists he marred his model, by throwing himself into the inextric- able Euripus. If there be any thing like truth in the story, it must be interpreted differently. The ebb and flow which puzzled him, were not the ebb and flow of waters : his Euripus was upon the earth ; its current was fate ; the same current into which Demosthenes plunged in the selfsame year, and into which three centuries afterward the last of the Romans plunged at Utica for the selfsame reason. No less emblematic than what Alexander did, as well of his character as of his destiny, was Na- poleon's behaviour at Milan, when he took the iron crown from the archbishop and himself placed it on his own head. He took everything ; he would receive nothing, not even a blessing : so he had to fight foes against which nothing but blessings can prevail, curses ; and they were too much for him. u. 190 GUESSES AT TRUTH. What ought to have been done, and what shall be done, often stifle doing between them. I doubt whether the Duke of Wellington him- self could move a company of ordinary persons rapidly from the drawing-room into the dining- room : nobody will go first. Were it so in the world, society would be always at a standstill. A master-mind is wanted to shew the way. Que doit on faire dans ce bas monde ? On doit diner. Et puis ? Badiner. u. Hors d'oeuvres become made dishes in Ens:- land ; in the drawing-room and the library, as well as in the kitchen. u. It must be very unnatural to be natural ; few people being so, except naturals. u. GUESSES AT TRUTH- 191 How easy it is to pass sentence against a work ! All we understand in it, is common-place : all we understand not is nonsense. u. What are the books of philosophers ? Mostly windfalls from the tree of knowledge. u. Some vermin are begotten and born and beget and die in a day. Literature has similar vermin. One might indeed doubt about the third point : but like breeds like. u. There can be no shade without light. Igno- rance would never have been discovered to be among us, had it not been pointed out by know- ledge. So is it with negatives universally : they owe, many of them their existence, all of them our perception of it, to the qualities of which they are negations. But if positives lead us to observe negatives, they in return best teach us the nature and value of positives. This is one 192 GUESSES AT TRUTH. reason why the perfection of male virtue is likely to be stronger than the perfection of female. It has added to truth knowledge, and is not only founded on a conviction of the goodness of what is good, but is likewise guarded on every side by the discernment of the evil of what is evil. There can be no shade then without light. Now what is shade ? The exclusion of light from a given spot by the accidental intervention of a dark body ; the dimness, for example, of a room from which the sun has been partially shut out, or of a deep and narrow glen obscured by an overhanging mountain, or of a wall running east and west where one side is sacrificed to the other. But that which is accidental, is also temporary. After a time the windows will be thrown open, the glen will be lifted up, and a vertical sun will shower his rays on both sides of the wall equally. For though there can be no shade without light, there may and here- after will be light without shade. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 193 When you speak to a stranger, how are you to address him ? 1 suppose you must Sir him. And yet there is something so startling and repelling in that triliteral monosyllable, with its initial hiss and closing rumble, that, used be- tween equals, if it stand alone or prominently, and be not softened down into . a scarcely dis- tinguishable enclitic, it seems well-nigh to por- tend a challenge. I hate the ugly Johnsonian word, and can hardly use, or hear it without repugnance. I would almost as soon throw myself into the vacuum of abstract humanity, and call my neighbour Man. The French, with that delicacy of social tact which belongs to them, never separate their appellative from the pronoun, which seeks the individual out of the mass, bringing him into some kind of personal relation to the speaker : and the as- saults of jacobinism upon individuality were in this respect vain : Citoyen and Citoyennc were soon replaced by Monsieur and Madame. VOL. II. o 194 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Would it were as easy to restore all the other good things devoured by that polypus preying on the heart of the body politic ! In like manner among the Germans, the friendliest of nations, the vocative Herr is seldom uttered M^ithout the individualizing humanizing pronoun. And even we use the pronoun to persons of rank. Its absence in Italian might be deemed a type of the disunion which has in all ages distracted that unfortunate fratricidal and sui- cidal country, where every man is always fan- cying that he feels his neighbour's hand at his throat or in his pocket, and where the phan- tasies and schemes of the Unitarians, as they style themselves, even if all hinderances from without were removed, appear about as feasible as giving consistency to a heap of needles : only Spain oiFers the same phenomenon. In both countries it is connected with the want in the national character of those gregarious qualities, by the operation of which in England^ GUESSES AT TRUTH. 195 France, and Germany, has been gradually de-^ veloped what by way of eminence we call soci- ety, that is to say, a happy conformity and free circulation of manners, customs, and habits, throughout the people, every domestic circle intersecting with numberless others : which same cause explains why the novel of society and manners has no existence in the South of Eu- rope, whereas a.nong the central nations it now forms the chief staple article of fine literature. At all events however there is something in signor and sertor for the voice to dwell on, and by its intonation to indicate sentiment ; they have a fulness of sound and a capability of mo- dulated expression, very different from the af- fronting abruptness of our vowel-less unchange- able Sir. Indeed one can hardly help wishing at times to be a Southron, for the sake of being called by a southern name. Listen to the names which meet you at every turn and winding in a Spanish O 2 196 GUESSES AT TRUTH. chronicle : many of them come upon you with a sweeping sound, like a full peal of bells, while others have a depth and a solemnity as if they were brooding over the glory they had inherited from " Pelayo and the Campeador." Look at the names of the historians themselves, Juan Mariana, Geronymo Zurita, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Vicente Bacallar y Sana, An- tonio de Solis y Ribadeneyra. Such names are worth having; the breath that pronounces them is not wasted. But as for the mincing, minikin, make-believe sounds, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, one might as well be denominated by numerals or alge- braic symbols, and called 155 or xz^ What a name has Shakspeare given to his lover ! Romeo : and how Juliet loves it ! how she ** makes Echo's airy tongue grow hoarse with repetition of her Romeo's name !" The first sounds in which she breathes her passion into the ear of night, are, " O Romeo, Romeo, GUESSES AT TRUTH. 197 wherefore art thou Romeo !" It would be a mistake to suppose that nothing is meant in this and the following lines, except a wish that her lover had another name : the name that drives him from her, is not Romeo, but Montague. She would not have it changed for the world : while pretending to chide it, she is regaling herself with its luscious melody : it rests and lingers on her lips, " never ending, still begin- ning." But what can even the sweetest and fondest voice make of William, or Henry, or Charles, or John, or Smith, or Thompson, or Simpkins, or Bankes ? Many a time must the dearest Robert, the beloved Wiggins, the adorable Ash, have wished that he belonged to that numerous family of Anon who wrote half the Elegant Extracts. Change only a few letters in Romeo, and let Juliet exclaim, O Thomas, Thomas, wherefore art thou Thomas ! and I would stake a ducat to a denier that not one mouth in ten would preserve its rigidity. This 198 GUESSES AT TRUTH. is not owing merely to the latter being a com- mon, and therefore a vulgar name : Mary is One of the commonest in the world, as common as roses, ^nd still must always be one of the niost beautiful. The reason is rather, that in the change the vowels are lost ; and a pack of conisonants may indeed be arranged rhythmi- cally and harmoniously, but have still less me- lody than a pack of hounds. Hence also even our best names, such as Herbert, Percy, Pembroke, Talbot, Stanley, Gordon, Camp- bell, owe far more of their value to the as- sociations and recollections connected with them, than to their sound ; although the liquids or, as they are not unaptly termed, semivowels, which in all these names are the emphatic letters, admit in some degree of prolongation and into- nation. It is the same in our sweetest female names, Emily, Emmeline, Ellen, Fanny, Mar- garet, Dorothea, Genevieve, Rosalind, Imogen, Miranda, Ophelia, Perdita : the important conso- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 199 nants are all liquids ; as they are likewise in spwg, amor, and its modern derivatives, in minnCf Hebe, love, in order that the sound may have some- thing in accord with the feeling. It seems to have arisen from some kind of instinctive consciousness, that admiration and reverence and love, and all our higher and purer feelings, delight to dwell and repose on their objects, and to linger about them, thereby inti- mating their original and ultimate union with eternity and infinity and peace ; while hatred and arrogance and every base and malignant passion are abrupt and concise^ that is lite- rally, break themselves off and cut themselves short, and thus bear witness of the nothingness from which they are struggling to escape, and into which at the same time they appear impa- tient to return : it seems to be from some in- stinct of this sort, as well as for the sake of distinction, that in speaking to royalty we have adopted the longer form Sire. I might here 200 GUESSES AT TRUTH. observe that a like instinct has led the French to address persons of rank with the unabridged Monseigneur ; I might proceed to notice, that, in spite of the ridicule cast lavishly, because at little expense of thought or wit, on the long German accumulative tit'es, Hochgeborner, Hochrvohlgehorner, Edtisthochwohlgebnrner, and the rest of them, at least they were not the produce of an age and nation whose greatest trouble was how to put themselves to the least trouble ; I might further inquire whether any and what qualities in the English cha- racter correspond with or illustrate that most inhospitable word Sir ; and Simond's account of what he saw at the fall of SchaiFhausen might serve in lieu of a thousand similar anec- dotes : but I remember that, notwithstanding the example set by Berkeley, the inverted pyra- mid is not yet become an approved style of ar- chitecture, u. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 201 It is said by Milton, that " we Englishmen, being far northerly, do not open our mouths in the cold air, wide enough to grace a southern tongue ; but are observed by all other nations to speak exceeding close and mward." (0 Education, Works, Vol. 1. p. 278). To perceive the truth of this, you need only see an English and Italian singer side by side. The chief study of the for- mer seems, to waste as little breath and to dis- tort her face as little as may be ; while the latter unfolds the gates of her mouth and lets the full torrent of sound stream forth. But the opera- tion of the same cause is discernible throughout our language, which it has stript of vowel after vowel, yearly taking from it something of its melody. To be sure, we gain compression : and this would be something, were our thoughts so copious that we could not house them except by squeezing them up closely : but it is not everything: and even in speech it may be doubted whether ice do not take up more 202 GUESSES AT TRUTH. room than water, Seneca than Plato; not to mention that water finds readier admission. Sometimes the vowels are utterly got rid of: when one sees iXsrjiuoffijyri doubled up into alms^ one can hardly help thinking of the picture where the devil folds up and pockets Peter Schlemihl's shadow. But more commonly, al- though we retain the form of them, we throw away the substance, slurring them, and hurry- ing on to the next consonant. Me-mo-ri-a with its four vowels, becomes mem-o-ry or rather mem'-ry with only the final short one : so i-ma- gi-na-ri-us is converted mto im-aj-in-ar-y ; and poor knowledge goes slipshod as knulledge, that it may rhyme, I suppose, with its favorite abode. The like process of envowelling words goes on daily : one hears people beginning to call le-gend lej-end, and te-net ten-et. So that in time we shall perhaps adopt the practice of the Semitic nations, and take to expressing that indistinct ill-defined breathing which keeps our GUESSES AT TRUTH. consonants from falling into a heap, by points instead of by characters. Formerly it was de- noted in many words by an apostrophe ; in giving up which I know no* that we have done wisely : a character is an unapt symbol of that which has no character. The last word reminds me that such peculi- arities and idioms in language always corre- spond with and indicate something peculiar and idiomatic in national character. Every lan- guage must be the print of the national mind. No thought can be taken up permanently into that mind, but it will stamp its image in words. De Maistre says well, when maintaining that the languages of savages " sont et ne peuvent ^tre que des debris de langues antiques, ruinees, et degradees comme les hommes qui les par- lent : toute degradation individuelle ou na- tionale est sur-le-champ annoncee par une degradation rigoureusement proportion nelle dans le langage. Comment I'homme pourroit-il per- 204 GUESSES AT TRUTH, dre une id6e ou seulement la rectitude d'une idee sans perdre la parole ou la justesse d0 la parole qui I'exprime? et comment au contraire pourroit-il penser ou plus ou mieux, sans le manifester sur-le-champ par son Ian- gage." {Soirees de St. Petersbourg, Vol. 1. p. 82). Hardly any work would be more instructive and entertaining, than one to illustrate this proposition, if executed by a man of learn- ing duly under the discipline of judgement. All thoughtful minds are pleased to detect traces of the way in which habits aiyd manners and opinions imperceptibly frame for themselves exponents in words. Every indication of spi- ritual action is congenial, and therefore de- lightful, to the soul. Why is physical science so fascinating? because it breathes order and law and intelligent obedience into what at first sight looks like a confused unruly incomprehen- sible chaos. Thus in all departments of study there is a joy in catching a glimpse of a prin- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 205 ciple, in discovering a rule, in beholding things as they stand in the sequence of causation, so that what we have been wont to make use of without knowing how or wherefore, we can now deposit ticketed in the cabinets of the understanding. To take an instance of the con- nexion just referred to between alterations in practice and in language : how emblematic, as has been remarked, is the modern transfer of speculation from philosophy to commerce ! it has led me into discussions seemingly intermi- nable, and wherein we only receded from each other, when at last it came out that we had taken different courses, and that while Pytha- goras or Leibnitz was my pole-star, my com- panion was looking at M. Rothschild. So again at a time when the personality of God was an idea almost evanescent in our theology, his name too was going into disuse, except in swearing ; and many divines became delicately scrupulous about speaking of him by so familial 206 GUESSES AT TRUTH. a term, and chose rather to hide their shrunken faith within the folds of some misty abstrac- tion, talking about Heaven, or Providence, or the Deity, or the Divinity, and resorting to other such phrases to which neither they nor their hearers or readers could attach any de- finite meaning. But not only in the sense and spirit of words, are types to be detected ; their outward form and sound are significant. To revisit the point whence we started, even the proportion between the vowels and consonants in a language will shew the relative influence of the feelings and of the understanding over the people who speak it. German grammarians have called consonants the objective, vowels the subjective element of lan- guage. As the end of human speech is two- fold, to utter feelings and to communicate thoughts, we may reasonably look to find the organs of speech adapted to this double purpose. And we do so find them. The vowels express GUESSES AT TRUTH. 207 what is felt: they come more immediately from that part of the body which is less un- der the dominion of the will : they make the whole melody of speech : the interjections in which our bursting emotions find vent, consist chiefly of vowels, repeated sometimes over and over again, and occasionally kept from running and melting into each other by some recurring consonant. Thus they resemble the notes of beasts and birds, which are mainly vocalic, with the admixture of a consonant or two. Much like these are the languages of savage nations, especially where the climate fosters the luxuriant growth of the feelings. In Hawaii or Owhyhee, the very name of which is a mess of vowels, one, meets with such words as tavovovovo; and Mr. Ellis gives the follow- ing sentence, e i ai oe ia 'ia ne e ao 'ia, which he renders s^eak now to him hy the side that he learn. In consonants on the other hand, fashioned as they are by those organs about the 208 GUESSES AT TRUTH. mouth over which we have a fuller and readier controul, one beholds something like the opera- tion of the formative principle on the raw ma- terial of language, the shaping and modifying and combining or syllabling action of the in- tellect. Now if the natural excellence of man lie in the perfect balance or rather the perfect union of the heart and the head, then surely no nation has ever come so near it as the Greeks : and accordingly in no language is the distribution of the vowels and consonants so fair and equable as in theirs : infinitely various and plastic, it runs over every chord of melo- dious combination, stopping just where strength becomes too harsh and rugged, and sweetness too cloyingly luscious. The Latin, as was to be expected, has not 'only substituted a stately monotonousness for the ever flexible rhythm and changing accentuation of the Greek : the consonants also begin to predominate ; Xiyei becomes legit, Xeyfre legitis, Xtyovai legmtt. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 200 Quintilian himself says : Latina facundia est ipsis statim sonis durior, quando jucundissimas ex Graecis litteras non habemus, T et $, quibus nullee apud eos dulcius spirant ; et velut in lo- cum earum succedunt tristes et horridoe, quibiis Graecia caret. Quid? quod pleraque nos ilia quasi mugiente littera cludimus M : at illi N jucundam et in fine quasi tinnientem illius loco ponunt. (xii. 10). Latin is sonorous however and dignified and imperious, and worthy of the kingly senate : it is the language of all others to write laws in. Even the mugient M, the bull's letter, was not ill suited to a people whose chief business was to strike terror. By the modern Italians the speech of their forefathers has been diluted and effeminated, until it has become as feeble as themselves. One hears it called indeed the language of love ; but then it must be of sensual voluptuous unstable transient love, not of loyalty and chaste constancy, not of that love in which the imaginative reason consecrates VOL. II. p 210 GUESSES AT TRUTH. and gives permanence to the animal passion of the moment. These feelings receive their con- sistency from the intellect; and they are not to be uttered by a mere flux of vowels, but re- quire consonants to hold and bind them to- gether. Now as in English the consonants are too predominant, so are the vowels in Italian. Almost every final consonant has been removed, not always after the usual mode, by rubbing them off, but often by subjoining a vowel, or, what amounts to the same, by setting one of the ob- lique cases in the place of the theme : sedes be- comes sedia, parens parente. Termination too after termination is appended, until one gets to such words as piacevolissimafnente, with tails as long as the train of a lady's court-dress, and about as unfit for the household business of everyday life ; in which moreover the substance is so lost in the attributes, as greatly hinders clear straightforward independent thought. Where every word is in the superlative, it matters little GUESSES AT TRUTH. 211 which is chosen : one cannot mean a great deal more or a great deal less than another. In Dante's time this process of unmanning and degradation was still incomplete : he put forth his mighty hand to arrest it : he tried to lift up the prostrate body of his country, to nerve her flaccid limbs, and enable her to stand firmly and lastingly : but he tried in vain. The poison of pleasure spread through her whole frame, relaxing every fibre and sinew, now that it was not resisted by the healthful check of political activity, now that she was become, as he calls her, " Non donna di province, ma bordello." It is interesting to see how Dante likewise strives to brace and strengthen the language, to coun- teract its luscious softness, to give it something of manly dignity and wholesome asperity, and to form it into a car fit to bear brave and noble thoughts on the field in which Good and Evil are battling, instead of what it now is, a cush- ioned velvet-lined coach for women and men ■ p 2 212 GUESSES AT TRUTH. more womanish than women to loll in down the Corso. The French on the contrary have dipt and trimmed their tongue so that all fulness and majesty and variety of sound have passed away from it : they have broken up their words, as Macadam breaks stones, to make a road for conversation to glide along easily. And they have achieved what they wished : as at their restaurants, whatever you can want is ready in a moment : but all is so disguised, you are puzzled to tell what it may once have been; there are no solid substantial joints ; and if any- thing is served up in its natural shape, it is overdone. They never accentuate their words, or their feelings : all is in the same key : a cap is charmant, so is Raphael's Transfigu- ration. Admirably adapted for all the ends of society, so as sometimes even to put bon mots into the mouth of those, who in their own language had always kept good things at a distance, it is of little worth for any other purpose. But then society is all in all GUESSES AT TRUTH. 213 with the French. I was once pointing out the features of a beautiful prospect to a lady : she listened listlessly, and replied, Oui, mats il ny a point de maisons. She spoke as the representa- tive of her nation. In Spanish one finds a dig- nity not inferior to the Roman, and at the same time a sweetness ennobled by its alliance with that dignity; even its gutturals give it an in- wardness of tone, so that it seems fitted, as Charles the Fifth said, above other languages for the outpourings of the spirit to Heaven. The primary character of all the Teutonic dialects is different : in them the consonants always assert their preeminence ; and the wild- ness and complexity of their intellectual com- binations answer well to the constraint of the vocal organs when twisting the uncouthest knots of consonants. It is true, sundry dis- tinctive shades are found in particular nations : we for example have not only cast away from us the euphonous vowels of the Latin, but also in many instances, as in ni^ht and the like, the 214 GUESSES AT TRUTH. accumulated consonants of the German. That is, we endeavour to keep a sound judicious mean, shunning equally the vagrancy of sense and the vagaries of intellect. How far we have been successful, let others determine. u. A practical maxim results from what has been just said. Inasmuch as vowels, like feelings, may be indefinitely prolonged, while consonants are yet more fleeting and momentary than -thoughts ; English poets who- write for song, should study to introduce as many syllables as they can with full distinct sonorous vowels, especially in those places where the' voice is meant to dwell. The neglect of this sometimes thtows our singers off their balance, just as if they were trying to support themselves by the leaf of an acacia. u. A minute may be minute ; yet every moment is of moment. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 9lB Would it not be more appropriate to call articles particles, and particles articles ? u. Our will, when at twain with reason, lessens all things down to its own littleness. What- ever it insists on, it makes a point of. u. People are hardly so tenacious of any rights, as of those which are wrongs. u. It is an old remark that we talk less of our good than of our ill health. Perhaps generally we are less talkative in pleasure than in pain ; it being the essence of satisfaction to enjoy in peace and tranquillity, while dissatisfaction is ever querulous and garrulous : one cannot grum- ble without grumbling. When the motion of a carriage is noiseless, we know that all its springs are in order, and that its path is over soft turf : but when things go wrong, it rumbles and creaks, sometimes no less shrilly than an old shrew. A smile is voiceless, a shriek vociferous. After- 216 GUESSES AT TRUTH. wards Tiowever all this is reversed : we for- get our past pangs and tears, and the sorrows we have gone through, save that about them which was interesting or soothing, and our thoughts and our words linger and abide among the pleasures and smiles of former days. u. A great man commonly disappoints those who visit him. They are on the look out for his thundering and lightning, and he speaks about common things much like other people ; nay sometimes he may even be seen laughing. He proportions his exertions to his excitements : having been accustomed to converse with deep and lofty thoughts, it is not to be expected that he will flare or sparkle in ordinary chit-chat. One sees no pebbles glittering at the bottom of the Atlantic. u. When we call names, they unluckily are always bad ones. u. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 217 Hard words are much too easy. u. Les philosophes n'ont fait souvent que changer le vrai en I'equivoque. u. Les chateaux en Espagne ont perdu beaucoup de gens, meme Buonaparte. u. Every wise man lives in an observatory, u. The classical universe is a perfect sphere with the earth for its centre : the modern is a multitudinous flood of worlds, the centre of which is the unattainable object of endless research. u. Selfishness confounds and reverses all rela- tions. Postumous charity is injustice; a mis- tress is the meanest of slaves. Some obtain money under false pretences ; 218 GUESSES AT TRUTH. some only hearts. Of these two kinds of swind- ling, it is easy to see which is the most severely punished by law, and perhaps not much harder to find out which is the most offensive. If there is carrion to feed the crows, there are also crows to feed on carrion. Amours are fragments of loves ; and by heap- ing one upon another the dissolute expect ap- parently to make up love at last. But accu- mulation is not union : a thousand bits of glass are not a mirror : and though a man may have almost every thing else in a seraglio, he cannot have a wife. Why did not Goethe ever marry ? His mistresses would not let him. Mistresses ! out upon him ! How many had he? Only the nine Muses. And what business had they to interfere ? GUESSES AT TRUTH. ^19 Somebody once asked him how the human race would have been propagated, if Adam had not fallen. His answer was : There can he no doubt : by reasonable discourse. Perhaps the be- ginning of the fourth chapter of Genesis was in his mind ; and he remembered that carnal know- ledge is only the ca'piit mortuum of spiritual knowledge. u A coquette thinks she is worthy to be be- loved, and likes to see men become her lovers, not being aware that love is misery, from her own ignorance of the passion. Would you know how to deal with one, who is beginning to jilt you, and encouraging another in the notion that you are secured ? Profess an entire devo- tion : affirm that she is the most . . everything in the world : but do so with a sleepy indifference : if there be anything in the shape of a, woman at all pretty in the house, follow her, hunt her, look at her, talk to her ; yet tell her and all the world that you do not love her, but are in love GUESSES AT TRUTH. with the lady coquette. She and all the world will believe you; but the lady coquette will be alarmed : she will regild her chains, and look to the links. By proper management you will make her so far anxious about you, that it will be your own fault if she does not marry you : and after marriage no English woman is a coquette : no modest woman who exhibits the love of sway, which is the coquetry of modesty, before mar- riage, will after it affect a dominion over any but her husband. It is hardly possible to ex- cite a strong passion in a heart which admires admiration. But the moment the craving to be universally loved is overcome, (and I be- lieve a husband to be the only aquafortis that eats away the disease), at that moment true love may be begotten, nursed, and educated. i. Rien n'est plus petit que le grand monde. 17. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 2f21 He must have been a preposterous regrater, who first fancied that his brother by preventing hindered him. u. Falsehood is lying : it implies an utter prostra- tion and downtroddenness of the soul. u. A drunken man is fitly named : he has drunk, till he is drunken : the wine swallows his con- sciousness, and it sinks therein. u. The often noticed superiority of pleasures in anticipation to pleasures in enjoyment, is owing to our unquenchable appetite for spiritual acti- vity. So long as the mind is busy, the pleasure lasts ; but when the call for exertion ceases be- cause the object is attained, we begin to flag, and want something new to excite us. So im- measurably are the senses below the soul, even sensual delights hardly gratify except in thought. 222 GUESSES AT TRUTH. " The most voluptuous and loose person breathing, (says South, Vol. i. p. 20.) were he tied to follow his hawks and his hounds, his ^ dice and his courtships every day, would find it the greatest torment and calamity : he would fly to the mines and the gallies for recreation from the misery of unintermitted pleasure. But there is no action, the usefulness of which has made it the riiatter of duty and of a profession, but a man may bear the continual pursuit of it, with- out loathing or satiety. The same shop and trade that employ a man in his youth, employ him also in his age. Every morning he rises fresh to his hammer and his anvil ; he passes the day singing ; his shop is his element, and he cannot with any enjoyment of himself live out of it." This is to be accounted for from the ac- tivity of the mind in the latter case, a^d from its inactivity in the former. Nothing is less weariable than the soul; nothing more weariable than the body, unless where the soul upholds GUESSES AT TRUTH. it. In the would-be man of pleasure (for the title is a false one) all the higher faculties are suspended. Now it is a curse attendant on the blessing of reason, or, to speak more correctly, in- to which that blessing by abuse may be perverted, that we cannot cast it away from us : we cannot become as if we had never been gifted with it. South contrasts a little before " the stillness of a sow at her wash," with " the silence of an Archi- medes in the study of a problem." Man may rise into the latter ; he cannot sink into the former. We cannot bring ourselves to walk on all fours : so unless we keep ourselves upright, quadrupeds have the advantage of us and may trample over us as we lie flat on the ground. Conscience must either assist or resist us ; and her resistance will disable us for enjoying the stillness of the sow. But the mechanic on the other hand is happy, if so be he is at one with himself ; although there is a greater sameness in his occupation, although 224i GUESSES AT TRUTH. that occupation, from being less free and from other causes, may seem less amusing : and yet I should not have called it less free ; for no lash of slavery is so galling as that which drives the voluptuary to his task-work. The mechanic has a charm against weariness : he sings in his forge or his saw-pit ; his conscience tells him he is doing his duty ; he indulges perhaps in hopeful visions, visions which that cheering conscience justifies, of a brighter future and an easy old age, when he may sit contentedly before his own hearth ; he feels that he is earning the bread of his wife and children, and he looks to the loving welcome which awaits his return. u. People talk about wearisome sameness : va- riety is often more wearisome. We tire much sooner of turning over the leaves of a book, than of reading straight onward. Continuous labour often strengthens : dissipation always enervates. Nobody ever felt ennui, until some- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 225 body found out that he had nothing to do. u. Gaping and yawning are indications of empti- ness, at least in inanimate nature. u. Attention implies tension or stretch or exer- tion. You cannot follow, unless you step. Yet most hearers fancy that mere hearing will do ; or if they stretch themselves it is to yawn. u. The wise are like the daughters of Danaus, and the ears of mankind are their sieve. u. Patience is sufferance, and often hard enough. But nothing great or good can be done without it. u. Some minds are made of blotting-paper: you can write nothing on them distinctly. They VOL. II. Q GUESSES AT TRUTH. swallow the ink, and you find a large black spot. u. Indigestion, they say, is the source of more than half our bodily maladies ; and so it is of more than half our mental. Against either the only true medicine is temperance, or auxppoffvvt}, as the