From De Quincey’s translation.
COMPLAINT OF THE BIRD IN A DARKENED CAGE
“AH!” said the imprisoned bird, “how unhappy were I in my eternal night, but for those melodious tones which sometimes make their way to me like beams of light from afar, and cheer my gloomy day. But I will myself repeat these heavenly melodies like an echo, until I have stamped them in my heart; and then I shall be able to bring comfort to myself in my darkness!” Thus spoke the little warbler, and soon had learned the sweet airs that were sung to it with voice and instrument. That done, the curtain was raised; for the darkness had been purposely contrived to assist in its instruction. O man! how often dost thou complain of overshadowing grief and of darkness resting upon thy days! And yet what cause for complaint, unless indeed thou hast failed to learn wisdom from suffering? For is not the whole sum of human life a veiling and an obscuring of the immortal spirit of man? Then first, when the fleshly curtain falls away, may it soar upwards into a region of happier melodies!
ON THE DEATH OF YOUNG CHILDREN
EPHEMERA die all at sunset, and no insect of this class has ever sported in the beams of the morning sun. Happy are ye, little human ephemera! Ye played only in the ascending beams, and in the early dawn, and in the eastern light; ye drank only of the prelibations of life, hovered for a little space over a world of freshness and of blossoms, and fell asleep in innocence before yet the morning dew was exhaled!
EPHEMERA die all at sunset, and no insect of this class has ever sported in the beams of the morning sun. Happy are ye, little human ephemera! Ye played only in the ascending beams, and in the early dawn, and in the eastern light; ye drank only of the prelibations of life, hovered for a little space over a world of freshness and of blossoms, and fell asleep in innocence before yet the morning dew was exhaled!
THE PROPHETIC DEWDROPS
A DELICATE child, pale and prematurely wise, was complaining on a hot morning that the poor dewdrops had been too hastily snatched away, and not allowed to glitter on the flowers like other happier dewdrops that live the whole night through, and sparkle in the moonlight and through the morning onwards to noonday. “The sun,” said the child, “has chased them away with his heat, or swallowed them in his wrath.” Soon after came rain and a rainbow; whereupon his father pointed upwards: “See,” said he, “there stand thy dewdrops gloriously reset—a glittering jewelry—in the heavens; and the clownish foot tramples on them no more. By this, my child, thou art taught that what withers upon earth blooms again in heaven.” Thus the father spoke, and knew not that he spoke prefiguring words: for soon after the delicate child, with the morning brightness of his early wisdom, was exhaled, like a dewdrop, into heaven.
A DELICATE child, pale and prematurely wise, was complaining on a hot morning that the poor dewdrops had been too hastily snatched away, and not allowed to glitter on the flowers like other happier dewdrops that live the whole night through, and sparkle in the moonlight and through the morning onwards to noonday. “The sun,” said the child, “has chased them away with his heat, or swallowed them in his wrath.” Soon after came rain and a rainbow; whereupon his father pointed upwards: “See,” said he, “there stand thy dewdrops gloriously reset—a glittering jewelry—in the heavens; and the clownish foot tramples on them no more. By this, my child, thou art taught that what withers upon earth blooms again in heaven.” Thus the father spoke, and knew not that he spoke prefiguring words: for soon after the delicate child, with the morning brightness of his early wisdom, was exhaled, like a dewdrop, into heaven.
ON DEATH
WE should all think of death as a less hideous object, if it simply untenanted our bodies of a spirit, without corrupting them; secondly, if the grief which we experience at the spectacle of our friends’ graves were not by some confusion of the mind blended with the image of our own; thirdly, if we had not in this life seated ourselves in a warm domestic nest, which we are unwilling to quit for the cold blue regions of the unfathomable heavens; finally, if death were denied to us. Once in dreams I saw a human being of heavenly intellectual faculties, and his aspirations were heavenly; but he was chained (methought) eternally in the earth. The immortal old man had five great wounds in his happiness—five worms that gnawed forever at his heart: he was unhappy in springtime, because that is a season of hope, and rich with phantoms of far happier days than any which this aceldama of earth can realize. He was unhappy at the sound of music, which dilates the heart of man into its whole capacity for the infinite, and he cried aloud—“Away! away! Thou speakest of things which throughout my endless life I have found not, and shall not find!” He was unhappy at the remembrance of earthly affections and dissevered hearts; for love is a plant which may bud in this life, but it must flourish in another. He was unhappy under the glorious spectacle of the starry host, and ejaculated forever in his heart—“So then I am parted from you to all eternity by an impassable abyss: the great universe of suns is above, below, and round about me; but I am chained to a little ball of dust and ashes.” He was unhappy before the great ideas of Virtue, of Truth, and of God; because he knew how feeble are the approximations to them which a son of earth can make. But this was a dream: God be thanked, that in reality there is no such craving and asking eye directed upwards to heaven, to which death will not one day bring an answer!
WE should all think of death as a less hideous object, if it simply untenanted our bodies of a spirit, without corrupting them; secondly, if the grief which we experience at the spectacle of our friends’ graves were not by some confusion of the mind blended with the image of our own; thirdly, if we had not in this life seated ourselves in a warm domestic nest, which we are unwilling to quit for the cold blue regions of the unfathomable heavens; finally, if death were denied to us. Once in dreams I saw a human being of heavenly intellectual faculties, and his aspirations were heavenly; but he was chained (methought) eternally in the earth. The immortal old man had five great wounds in his happiness—five worms that gnawed forever at his heart: he was unhappy in springtime, because that is a season of hope, and rich with phantoms of far happier days than any which this aceldama of earth can realize. He was unhappy at the sound of music, which dilates the heart of man into its whole capacity for the infinite, and he cried aloud—“Away! away! Thou speakest of things which throughout my endless life I have found not, and shall not find!” He was unhappy at the remembrance of earthly affections and dissevered hearts; for love is a plant which may bud in this life, but it must flourish in another. He was unhappy under the glorious spectacle of the starry host, and ejaculated forever in his heart—“So then I am parted from you to all eternity by an impassable abyss: the great universe of suns is above, below, and round about me; but I am chained to a little ball of dust and ashes.” He was unhappy before the great ideas of Virtue, of Truth, and of God; because he knew how feeble are the approximations to them which a son of earth can make. But this was a dream: God be thanked, that in reality there is no such craving and asking eye directed upwards to heaven, to which death will not one day bring an answer!
IMAGINATION UNTAMED BY REALITIES
HAPPY is every actor in the guilty drama of life, to whom the higher illusion within supplies or conceals the external illusion; to whom, in the tumult of his part and its intellectual interest, the bungling landscapes of the stage have the bloom and reality of nature, and whom the loud parting and shocking of the scenes disturb not in his dream!
HAPPY is every actor in the guilty drama of life, to whom the higher illusion within supplies or conceals the external illusion; to whom, in the tumult of his part and its intellectual interest, the bungling landscapes of the stage have the bloom and reality of nature, and whom the loud parting and shocking of the scenes disturb not in his dream!
ON REVIEWERS
IN Suabia, in Saxony, in Pomerania, are towns in which are stationed a strange sort of officers—valuers of author’s flesh, something like our old market-lookers in this town. They are commonly called tasters (or Prægustatores) because they eat a mouthful of every book beforehand, and tell the people whether its flavor be good. We authors, in spite, call them reviewers; but I believe an action of defamation would lie against us for such bad words. The tasters write no books themselves; consequently they have the more time to look over and tax those of other people. Or, if they do sometimes write books, they are bad ones; which again is very advantageous to them, for who can understand the theory of badness in other people’s books so well as those who have learned it by practice in their own? They are reputed the guardians of literature and the literati for the same reason that St. Nepomuk is the patron saint of bridges and of all who pass over them, viz., because he himself once lost his life from a bridge.
IN Suabia, in Saxony, in Pomerania, are towns in which are stationed a strange sort of officers—valuers of author’s flesh, something like our old market-lookers in this town. They are commonly called tasters (or Prægustatores) because they eat a mouthful of every book beforehand, and tell the people whether its flavor be good. We authors, in spite, call them reviewers; but I believe an action of defamation would lie against us for such bad words. The tasters write no books themselves; consequently they have the more time to look over and tax those of other people. Or, if they do sometimes write books, they are bad ones; which again is very advantageous to them, for who can understand the theory of badness in other people’s books so well as those who have learned it by practice in their own? They are reputed the guardians of literature and the literati for the same reason that St. Nepomuk is the patron saint of bridges and of all who pass over them, viz., because he himself once lost his life from a bridge.
FEMALE TONGUES
HIPPEL, the author of the book “Upon Marriage,” says, “A woman that does not talk must be a stupid woman.” But Hippel is an author whose opinions it is more safe to admire than to adopt. The most intelligent women are often silent among women; and again the most stupid and the most silent are often neither one nor the other except among men. In general the current remark upon men is valid also with respect to women—that those for the most part are the greatest thinkers who are the least talkers; as frogs cease to croak when light is brought to the water edge. However, in fact, the disproportionate talking of women arises out of the sedentariness of their labors: sedentary artisans, as tailors, shoemakers, weavers, have this habit as well as hypochondriacal tendencies in common with women. Apes do not talk, as savages say, that they may not be set to work; but women often talk double their share—even because they work.
HIPPEL, the author of the book “Upon Marriage,” says, “A woman that does not talk must be a stupid woman.” But Hippel is an author whose opinions it is more safe to admire than to adopt. The most intelligent women are often silent among women; and again the most stupid and the most silent are often neither one nor the other except among men. In general the current remark upon men is valid also with respect to women—that those for the most part are the greatest thinkers who are the least talkers; as frogs cease to croak when light is brought to the water edge. However, in fact, the disproportionate talking of women arises out of the sedentariness of their labors: sedentary artisans, as tailors, shoemakers, weavers, have this habit as well as hypochondriacal tendencies in common with women. Apes do not talk, as savages say, that they may not be set to work; but women often talk double their share—even because they work.
FORGIVENESS
NOTHING is more moving to man than the spectacle of reconciliation: our weaknesses are thus indemnified and are not too costly,—being the price we pay for the hour of forgiveness; and the archangel, who has never felt anger, has reason to envy the man who subdues it. When thou forgivest—the man who has pierced thy heart stands to thee in the relation of the sea worm that perforates the shell of the mussel, which straightway closes the wound with a pearl.
NOTHING is more moving to man than the spectacle of reconciliation: our weaknesses are thus indemnified and are not too costly,—being the price we pay for the hour of forgiveness; and the archangel, who has never felt anger, has reason to envy the man who subdues it. When thou forgivest—the man who has pierced thy heart stands to thee in the relation of the sea worm that perforates the shell of the mussel, which straightway closes the wound with a pearl.
NAMELESS HEROES
THE GRAVES of the best of men, of the noblest martyrs, are, like the graves of the Herrnhuters (the Moravian brethren), level and undistinguishable from the universal earth; and if the earth could give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey laid flat. Ah! what a multitude of tears, what myriads of bloody drops have been shed in secrecy about the three corner trees of earth—the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the tree of freedom—shed, but never reckoned! It is only great periods of calamity that reveal to us our great men, as comets are revealed by total eclipses of the sun. Not merely upon the field of battle, but also upon the consecrated soil of virtue, and upon the classic ground of truth, thousands of nameless heroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool from which history surveys the one hero, whose name is embalmed, bleeding—conquering—and resplendent. The grandest of heroic deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy. And, because History records only the self-sacrifices of the male sex, and because she dips her pen only in blood, therefore is it that in the eyes of the unseen spirit of the world our annals appear doubtless far more beautiful and noble than in our own.
THE GRAVES of the best of men, of the noblest martyrs, are, like the graves of the Herrnhuters (the Moravian brethren), level and undistinguishable from the universal earth; and if the earth could give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey laid flat. Ah! what a multitude of tears, what myriads of bloody drops have been shed in secrecy about the three corner trees of earth—the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the tree of freedom—shed, but never reckoned! It is only great periods of calamity that reveal to us our great men, as comets are revealed by total eclipses of the sun. Not merely upon the field of battle, but also upon the consecrated soil of virtue, and upon the classic ground of truth, thousands of nameless heroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool from which history surveys the one hero, whose name is embalmed, bleeding—conquering—and resplendent. The grandest of heroic deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy. And, because History records only the self-sacrifices of the male sex, and because she dips her pen only in blood, therefore is it that in the eyes of the unseen spirit of the world our annals appear doubtless far more beautiful and noble than in our own.
THE GRANDEUR OF MAN IN HIS LITTLENESS
MAN upon this earth would be vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes, vapor and a bubble, were it not that he felt himself to be so. That it is possible for him to harbor such a feeling—this, by implying a comparison of himself with something higher in himself, this is it which makes him the immortal creature that he is.
MAN upon this earth would be vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes, vapor and a bubble, were it not that he felt himself to be so. That it is possible for him to harbor such a feeling—this, by implying a comparison of himself with something higher in himself, this is it which makes him the immortal creature that he is.
NIGHT
THE EARTH is every day overspread with the veil of night, for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened—viz., that we may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and quiet of darkness. Thoughts, which day turns into smoke and mist, stand about us in the night as lights and flames: even as the column which fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the daytime appears a pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire.
THE EARTH is every day overspread with the veil of night, for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened—viz., that we may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and quiet of darkness. Thoughts, which day turns into smoke and mist, stand about us in the night as lights and flames: even as the column which fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the daytime appears a pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire.
THE STARS
LOOK up, and behold the eternal fields of light that lie round about the throne of God. Had no star ever appeared in the heavens, to man there would have been no heavens; and he would have laid himself down to his last sleep, in a spirit of anguish, as upon a gloomy earth vaulted over by a material arch—solid and impervious.
LOOK up, and behold the eternal fields of light that lie round about the throne of God. Had no star ever appeared in the heavens, to man there would have been no heavens; and he would have laid himself down to his last sleep, in a spirit of anguish, as upon a gloomy earth vaulted over by a material arch—solid and impervious.
MARTYRDOM
TO die for truth—is not to die for one’s country, but to die for the world. Truth, like the Venus de Medici, will pass down in thirty fragments to posterity; but posterity will collect and recompose them into a goddess. Then also thy temple, O eternal truth! that now stands half below the earth, made hollow by the sepulchres of its witnesses, will raise itself in the total majesty of its proportions; and will stand in monumental granite; and every pillar on which it rests will be fixed in the grave of a martyr.
TO die for truth—is not to die for one’s country, but to die for the world. Truth, like the Venus de Medici, will pass down in thirty fragments to posterity; but posterity will collect and recompose them into a goddess. Then also thy temple, O eternal truth! that now stands half below the earth, made hollow by the sepulchres of its witnesses, will raise itself in the total majesty of its proportions; and will stand in monumental granite; and every pillar on which it rests will be fixed in the grave of a martyr.
THE QUARRELS OF FRIENDS
WHY is it that the most fervent love becomes more fervent by brief interruption and reconciliation? and why must a storm agitate our affections before they can raise the highest rainbow of peace? Ah! for this reason it is—because all passions feel their object to be as eternal as themselves, and no love can admit the feeling that the beloved object should die. And under this feeling of imperishableness it is that we hard fields of ice shock together so harshly, whilst all the while under the sunbeams of a little space of seventy years we are rapidly dissolving.
WHY is it that the most fervent love becomes more fervent by brief interruption and reconciliation? and why must a storm agitate our affections before they can raise the highest rainbow of peace? Ah! for this reason it is—because all passions feel their object to be as eternal as themselves, and no love can admit the feeling that the beloved object should die. And under this feeling of imperishableness it is that we hard fields of ice shock together so harshly, whilst all the while under the sunbeams of a little space of seventy years we are rapidly dissolving.
DREAMING
BUT for dreams, that lay mosaic worlds tesselated with flowers and jewels before the blind sleeper, and surround the recumbent living with the figures of the dead in the upright attitude of life, the time would be too long before we are allowed to rejoin our brothers, parents, friends: every year we should become more and more painfully sensible of the desolation made around us by death, if sleep—the antechamber of the grave—were not hung by dreams with the busts of those who live in the other world.
BUT for dreams, that lay mosaic worlds tesselated with flowers and jewels before the blind sleeper, and surround the recumbent living with the figures of the dead in the upright attitude of life, the time would be too long before we are allowed to rejoin our brothers, parents, friends: every year we should become more and more painfully sensible of the desolation made around us by death, if sleep—the antechamber of the grave—were not hung by dreams with the busts of those who live in the other world.
TWO DIVISIONS OF PHILOSOPHIC MINDS
“THERE are two very different classes of philosophic heads, which, since Kant has introduced into philosophy the idea of positive and negative quantities, I shall willingly classify by means of that distinction. The positive intellect is, like the poet, in conjunction with the outer world, the father of an inner world; and, like the poet, also, holds up a transforming mirror in which the entangled and distorted members as they are seen in our actual experience enter into new combinations which compose a fair and luminous world: the hypothesis of Idealism (i.e., the Fichtéan system), the Monads and the Pre-established Harmony of Leibnitz—and Spinozism are all births of a genial moment, and not the wooden carving of logical toil. Such men, therefore, as Leibnitz, Plato, Herder, etc., I call positive intellects, because they seek and yield the positive; and because their inner world, having raised itself higher out of the water than in others, thereby overlooks a larger prospect of island and continents. A negative head, on the other hand, discovers by its acuteness—not any positive truths, but the negative (i.e., the errors) of other people. Such an intellect, as for example, Bayle, one of the greatest of that class—appraises the funds of others, rather than brings any fresh funds of his own. In lieu of the obscure ideas which he finds he gives us clear ones: but in this there is no positive accession to our knowledge; for all that the clear idea contains in development exists already by implication in the obscure idea. Negative intellects of every age are unanimous in their abhorrence of everything positive. Impulse, feeling, instinct—everything, in short, which is incomprehensible, they can endure just once—that is, at the summit of their chain of arguments, as a sort of hook on which they may hang them, but never afterwards.
“THERE are two very different classes of philosophic heads, which, since Kant has introduced into philosophy the idea of positive and negative quantities, I shall willingly classify by means of that distinction. The positive intellect is, like the poet, in conjunction with the outer world, the father of an inner world; and, like the poet, also, holds up a transforming mirror in which the entangled and distorted members as they are seen in our actual experience enter into new combinations which compose a fair and luminous world: the hypothesis of Idealism (i.e., the Fichtéan system), the Monads and the Pre-established Harmony of Leibnitz—and Spinozism are all births of a genial moment, and not the wooden carving of logical toil. Such men, therefore, as Leibnitz, Plato, Herder, etc., I call positive intellects, because they seek and yield the positive; and because their inner world, having raised itself higher out of the water than in others, thereby overlooks a larger prospect of island and continents. A negative head, on the other hand, discovers by its acuteness—not any positive truths, but the negative (i.e., the errors) of other people. Such an intellect, as for example, Bayle, one of the greatest of that class—appraises the funds of others, rather than brings any fresh funds of his own. In lieu of the obscure ideas which he finds he gives us clear ones: but in this there is no positive accession to our knowledge; for all that the clear idea contains in development exists already by implication in the obscure idea. Negative intellects of every age are unanimous in their abhorrence of everything positive. Impulse, feeling, instinct—everything, in short, which is incomprehensible, they can endure just once—that is, at the summit of their chain of arguments, as a sort of hook on which they may hang them, but never afterwards.
THE DIGNITY OF MAN IN SELF-SACRIFICE
THAT for which man offers up his blood or his property must be more valuable than they. A good man does not fight with half the courage for his own life that he shows in the protection of another’s. The mother, who will hazard nothing for herself, will hazard all in defense of her child; in short, only for the nobility within us, only for virtue, will man open his veins and offer up his spirit: but this nobility, this virtue, presents different phases: with the Christian martyr it is faith; with the savage it is honor; with the republican it is liberty.
THAT for which man offers up his blood or his property must be more valuable than they. A good man does not fight with half the courage for his own life that he shows in the protection of another’s. The mother, who will hazard nothing for herself, will hazard all in defense of her child; in short, only for the nobility within us, only for virtue, will man open his veins and offer up his spirit: but this nobility, this virtue, presents different phases: with the Christian martyr it is faith; with the savage it is honor; with the republican it is liberty.
