mechanic tool, the commonest and most indispensable implements of agriculture, might remind one of the school-boy's second stage in metrical composition, in which his exercise is to contain sense, but he is allowed to eke out the scanning by the interposition, here and there, of an equal quantity of nonsense. And even in the existing height of national civilization, how many individuals may there not be found, for whose senses the non-essential so preponderates, that though they may have lived the greater part of their lives in the country, yet, with some exceptions for the products of their own flower and kitchen garden, all the names in the Index to Withering's Botany, are superseded for them by the one name, a weed! "It is only a weed!" And if this indifference stopt here, and this particular ignorance were regarded as the disease, it would be sickly to complain of it. But it is as a symptom that it excites regret-it is that, except only the potherbs of lucre, and the barren double-flowers of vanity, their own noblest faculties both of thought and action, are but weeds—in which, should sickness or misfortune wreck them on the desert island of their own mind, they would either not think of seeking, or be ignorant how to find, nourishment or medicine. As it is good to be provided with work for rainy days, Winter industry is the best cheerer of winter gloom, and fire-side contrivances for summer use, bring summer sunshine and a genial inner-warmth, which the friendly hearth-blaze may conspire with, but can not bestow or compensate.

A splenetic friend of mine, who was fond of outraging a truth by some whimsical hyperbole, in his way of expressing it, gravely gave it out as his opinion, that beauty and genius were but diseases of the consumptive and scrofulous order. He would not carry it further; but yet, he must say, that he had observed that very good people, persons of unusual virtue and benevolence, were in general afflicted with weak and restless nerves! After yielding him the expected laugh for the oddity of the remark, I reminded him, that if his position meant any thing, the converse must be true, and we ought to have Helens, Medicean Venuses, Shakspeares, Raphaels, Howards, Clarksons, and Wilberforces by thousands; and the assemblies and pump-rooms at Bath, Harrowgate, and Cheltenham, rival the conversazioni in the Elysian Fields. Since then, however, I have often recurred to the portion of truth, that lay at the bottom of my friend's conceit. It can T

VOL. IV.

not be denied, that ill health, in a degree below direct pain, yet distressfully affecting the sensations, and depressing the animal spirits, and thus leaving the nervous system too sensitive to pass into the ordinary state of feeling, and forcing us to live in alternating positives,* is a hot-bed for whatever germs, and tenden cies, whether in head or heart, have been planted there independ ently.

Surely, there is nothing fanciful in considering this as a providential provision, and as one of the countless proofs, that we are most benignly, as well as wonderfully, constructed! The cutting and irritating grain of sand, which by accident or incaution has got within the shell, incites the living inmate to secrete from its own resources the means of coating the intrusive substance. And is it not, or may it not be, even so, with the irregularities and unevennesses of health and fortune in our own case? We, too, may turn diseases into pearls. The means and materials are within ourselves; and the process is easily understood. By a law common to all animal life, we are incapable of attending for any continuance to an object, the parts of which are indistinguishable from each other, or to a series, where the successive links are only numerically different. Nay, the more broken and irritating (as, for instance, the fractious noise of the dashing of a lake on its border, comparing with the swell of the sea on a calm evening), the more quickly does it exhaust our power of noticing it. The tooth-ache, where the suffering is not extreme, often finds its speediest cure in the silent pillow; and gradually destroys our attention to itself by preventing us from attending to any thing else.

* Perhaps it confirms while it limits this theory, that it is chiefly verified in men whose genius and pursuits are eminently subjective, where the mind is intensely watchful of its own acts and shapings, thinks, while it feels, in order to understand, and then to generalize that feeling; above all, where all the powers of the mind are called into action, simultaneously, and yet severally, while in men of equal, and perhaps deservedly equal celebrity, whose pursuits are objective and universal, demanding the energies of attention and abstraction, as in mechanics, mathematics, and all departments of physics and physiology, the very contrary would seem to be exemplified. Shakspeare died at 52, and probably of a decline; and in one of his sonnets he speaks of himself as gray and prematurely old: and Milton, who suffered from infancy those intense headaches which ended in blindness, insinuates that he was free from pain, or the anticipation of pain. On the other hand, the Newtons and Leibnitzes have, in general, been not only long-lived, but men of robust health.

From the same cause, many a lonely patient listens to his moans, till he forgets the pain that occasioned them. The attention attenuates, as its sphere contracts. But this it does even to a point, where the person's own state of feeling, or any particular set of bodily sensations, are the direct object. The slender thread winding in narrower and narrower circles round its source and centre, ends at length in a chrysalis, a dormitory within which the spinner undresses himself in his sleep, soon to come forth quite a new

creature.

So it is in the slighter cases of suffering, where suspension is extinction, or followed by long intervals of ease. But where the unsubdued causes are ever on the watch to renew the pain, that thus forces our attention in upon ourselves, the same barrenness and monotony of the object that in minor grievances lulled the mind into oblivion, now goads it into action by the restlessness and natural impatience of vacancy. We can not perhaps divert the attention; our feelings will still form the main subject of our thoughts. But something is already gained, if, instead of attending to our sensations, we begin to think of them. But in order to this, we must reflect on these thoughts—or the same sameness will soon sink them down into mere feeling. And in order to sustain the act of reflection on our thoughts, we are obliged more and more to compare and generalize them, a process that to a certain extent implies, and in a still greater degree excites and introduces the act and power of abstracting the thoughts and images from their original cause, and of reflecting on them with less and less reference to the individual suffering that had been their first subject. The vis medicatrix of Nature is at work for us in all our faculties and habits, the associate, reproductive, comparative, and combinatory.

That this source of consolation and support may be equally in your power as in mine, but that you may never have occasion to feel equally grateful for it, as I have, and do in body and estate, is the fervent wish of

Your affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

FROM BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, JAN. 1822.

Sundry
Select Chapters

From the Book of the

Two Worlds,
Translated from the Ori-
ginal ESOTERIC into the
Language of the
Border Land:

LOCLAST

Comprising the Historie and Gests
of MAXILIAN, agnominated
COSMENCEPHALUS and a Consin-
German of SATYRANE, the IDO-
a very true Novel
founded on Acts, aptly divided
and diversely digested into Fyttes,
Flights, Stations (or Landing-places)
Floors and Stories complete
Numeris, more or less.

in

NOTA BENE.-By default of the decipherer, we are forced to leave the blank space before “Numeris" unfilled; a part of the work, we fear, still remaining in the Oncephalic character, a sort of SANS-SCRIPT, much used, we understand, by adepts in the occult sciences, as likewise for promissory notes. We should also apologize for the indiscretion of our author in his epistolary preface (seduced by the wish of killing two birds with one stone), in shutting up vis à vis, as it were, so respectable and comprehensive (not to say synodical,) a personage as THE READER with Dick Proof, corrector-of what press, we know not, unless, as we grievously suspect, he is in the employ of Messrs. Dash, Asterisk, Anon, and Company. Nor is this all; this impropriety being aggravated by sundry passages, exclusively relating and addressed to this Mr. Proof, which have an effect on the series of thoughts common to both the parties, not much unlike that, which a parenthesis or two of links, made of dandelion stems, might be supposed to produce in my Lord Mayor or Mr. Sheriff's gold chain. In one flagrant instance, with which the first paragraph in the

MSS. concluded, we have, by virtue of our editorial prerogative, degraded the passage to the place and condition of a Note.—ED

ITOR.

MOTTO.*

"How wishedly will some pity the case of ARGALUS and PARTHENIA, the patience of GRYSELD in Chaucer, the misery and troublesome adventures of the phanatic (phrenetic ?) lovers in Cleopatra, Cassandra, Amadis de Gaul, Sidney, and such like! Yet all these are as mere romantic as Rabelais his Garagantua. And yet with an unmoved apprehension, can peruse the very dolorous and lamentable murder of MILCOLUMв the First, the cutting off the head of good KING ALPINUS, the poisoning of FERGUSIUS the Third by his own queen, and the throat-cutting of KING FETHELMACHUS by a fiddler ! nay, and moreover, even the martyrdom of old QUEEN KETABAN in Persia, the stabbing of Henry Fourth in France, the sacrilegious poisoning of Emperor Henry Seventh in Italy, the miserable death of MAURICIUS the Emperor, with a wife and five children, by wicked PHOCAS,-can read, I say, these and the like fatal passages, recorded by holy fathers and grave chroniclers, with less pity and compassion than the shallow loves of Romeo for his Juliet in Shakspeare-his deplorable tragedies, or shun the pitiful wanderings of Lady Una in search of her stray Red-cross, in Master Spenser his quaint rhymes. Yea, the famous doings, and grievous sufferings of our own anointed kings, may be far outrivalled in some men's minds by the hardships of some enchanted innamorato in Ariosto, Parismus, or the two Palmerins." FOULIS'S History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies, &c.

MOTTO II.

'Pray, why is it that people say that men are not such fools now-a-days as they were in the days of yore? I would fain know, whether you would have us understand by this same saying, as indeed you logically may, that formerly men were fools, and in this generation are grown wise. How many and what dispositions made them fools? How many, and what dispositions were wanting to make 'em wise? Why were those fools? How should these be wise? Pray, how came you to know that men were formerly fools? How did you find that they are now wise? Who made them fools? Who in Heaven's name made them wise? Who d'ye think are most. those that loved mankind foolish, or those that love it wise? How long has it been wise? How long otherwise? Whence proceeded the foregoing folly Whence the following wisdom? Why did the old folly end now and no later? Why did the modern wisdom begin now and no sooner? What were we the worse for the former folly? What the better for the succeeding wisdom? How should the ancient folly have come to nothing? How should this same new wisdom be started up and established? Now answer me, an't please you." FRANCIS RABELAIS' Preface to his Fifth Book.

* Which Posterity is requested to reprint at the back of the title-page, for the present, Quo' North, quo' Blackwood quo' concessére Columnæ.