P. 269. Trinity-Sunday. The Trinity In Unity, And Unity In Trinity, All reason doth transcend. Most true, but not contradict. Reason is to faith, as the eye to the telescope. EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF 8. T. COLERIDGE TO W. COLLINS, R. A. PRINTED IN THE LIFE OF COLLINS BY HIS SON. VOL. I. December, 1818. To feel the full force of the Christian religion it is perhaps necessary, for many tempers, that they should first be made to feel, experimentally, the hollowness of human friendship, the presumptuous emptiness of human hopes. I find more substantial comfort now in pious George Herbert's Temple, which I used to read to amuse myself with his quaintness, in short, only to laugh at, than in all the poetry since the poems of Milton. If you have not read Herbert I can recommend the book to you confidently. The poem entitled "The Flower" is especially affecting, and to me such a phrase as "and relish versing" expresses a sincerity and reality, which I would unwillingly exchange for the more dignified" and once more love the Muse," &c. and so with many other of Herbert's homely phrases. WE want, methinks, a little treatise from some man of flexible good sense, and well versed in the Greek poets, especially Homer, the choral, and other lyrics, containing first a history of compound epithets, and then the laws and licenses. I am not so much disposed as I used to be to quarrel with such an epithet as "silver-winding;" ungrammatical as the hyphen is, it is not wholly illogical, for the phrase conveys more than silvery and winding. It gives, namely, the unity of the impression, the coinherence of the brightness, the motion, and the line of motion. P. 10. Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen To chase the rolling circle's speed, Or urge the flying ball?-GRAY. This is the only stanza that appears to me very objectionable in point of diction. This, I must confess, is not only falsetto throughout, but is at once harsh and feeble, and very far the worst ten lines in all the works of Mr. Gray, English or Latin, prose or verse. P. 12. And envy wan, and faded care,' 'Bad in the first, in the second, in the last degree. The proud are taught to taste of pain.—GRAY. There is a want of dignity-a sort of irony in this phrase to my feeling that would be more proper in dramatic than in lyric composition. On Gray's Platonica, vol. i. p. 299-547. Whatever might be expected from a scholar, a gentleman, a man of exquisite taste, as the quintessence of sane and sound good sense, Mr. Gray appears to me to have performed. The poet Plato, the orator Plato, Plato the exquisite dramatist of conversation, the seer and the painter of character, Plato the highbred, highly-educated, aristocratic republican, the man and the gentleman of quality stands full before us from behind the curtain as Gray has drawn it back. Even so does Socrates, the social wise old man, the practical moralist. But Plato the philosopher, but the divine Plato, was not to be comprehended within the field of vision, or be commanded by the fixed immovable telescope of Mr. Locke's human understanding. The whole sweep of the best philosophic reflections of French or English fabric in the age of our scholarly bard, was not commensurate with the mighty orb. The little, according to my convictions at least, the very little of proper Platonism contained in the written books of Plato, who himself, in an epistle, the authenticity of which there is no tenable ground for doubting, as I was rejoiced to find Mr. Gray acknowledge, has declared all he had written to be substantially Socratic, and not a fair exponent of his own tenets, even this little, Mr. Gray has either misconceived or honestly confessed that, as he was not one of the initiated, it was utterly beyond his comprehension. Finally, to repeat the explanation with which I closed the last page of these notes and extracts, We learn from this dialogue in how poor a condition the art of reasoning on moral and abstracted subjects was before the time of Socrates: for it is impossible that Plato should introduce a sophist of the first reputation for eloquence and knowledge in several kinds, talking in a manner below the absurdity and weakness of a child; unless he had really drawn after the life. No less than twenty-four pages are here spent in vain, only to force it into the head of Hippias that there is such a thing as a general idea; and that, before we can dispute on any subject, we should give a definition of it. Is not this, its improbability out of the question, contradicted by the Protagoras of Plato's own drawing? Are there no authors, no physicians in London at the present moment, of "the first reputation," i. e. whom a certain class cry up: for in no other sense is the phrase historically applicable to Hippias, whom a Sydenham redivivus or a new Stahl might not exhibit as pompous ignoramuses? no one Hippias amongst them? But we need not flee to conjectures. The ratiocination assigned by Aristotle and Plato himself to Gorgias and then to the Eleatic school, are posi * See Plato's second epistle φραστέον δή σοι δι' αἰνιγμῶν κ. τ. λ. and towards the end τὰ δε νῦν λεγόμενα Σωκράτους ἐστὶ, κ. τ. λ. See also the 7th Epistle, p. 341. + Petrarch's Trionfo della Fama, cap. terz. v. 4-6. tive proofs that Mr. Gray has mistaken the satire of an individual for a characteristic of an age or class. May I dare whisper to the reeds without proclaiming that I am in the state of Midas,—may I dare to hint that Mr. Gray himself had not, and through the spectacles of Mr. Locke and his followers, could not have seen the difficulties which Hippias found in a general idea, secundum Platonem ?-S. T. C. P. 386. Notes 289. Passages of Heraclitus. Πιθηκῶν ὁ κάλλιστος αἰσχρὸς ἄλλῳ γένει συμβαλεῖν.—Ανθρώπων ὁ σοφώ τατος πρὸς Θεὸν πιθηκὸς φανεῖται. This latter passage is undoubtedly the original of that famous thought in Pope's Essay on Man, b. ii. :— "And showed a Newton as we show an ape." I remember to have met nearly the same words in one of our elder Poets. Pp. 390-391. That a sophist was a kind of merchant, or rather a retailer of food for the soul, and, like other shopkeepers, would exert his eloquence to recommend his own goods. The misfortune was, we could not carry them off, like corporeal viands, set them by a while, and consider them at leisure, whether they were wholesome or not, before we tasted them: that in this case we have no vessel but the soul to receive them in, which will necessarily retain a tincture, and perhaps, much to its prejudice, of all which is instilled into it. Query, if Socrates, himself a scholar of the sophists, is accurate, did not the change of d σogós into ó Zopioris, in the single case of Solon, refer to the wisdom-causing influences of his legislation? Mem. :-to examine whether Poortons was, or was not, more generally used at first in malum sensum, or rather the proper force originally of the termination Ιστής, ἀστής—whether (as it is evidently verbal) it imply a reflex or a transitive act. Ρ. 399. Οτι 'Αμαθία. This is the true key and great moral of the dialogue, that knowledge alone is the source of virtue, and ignorance the source of vice; it was Plato's own principle, see Plat. Epist. vii. p. 336. 'Apabia, ¿5 s návra κακὰ πᾶσιν ἐῤῥίζεται καὶ βλαστάνει καὶ εἰς ὕστερον ἀποτελεῖ καρπὸν τοῖς yevvýσaσi mikρótarov. See also Sophist. pp. 228 and 229, and Euthydemus from pp. 278 to 281, and De Legib. L. iii. p. 688, and probably it was also the principle of Socrates: the consequence of it is, that virtue may be taught, and may be acquired: and that philosophy alone can point us out the way to it. More than our word, Ignorance, is contained in the 'Auaia of Plato. I, however, freely acknowledge, that this was the point of view, from which Socrates did for the most part contemplate moral good and evil. Now and then he seems to have taken a higher station, but soon quitted it for the lower, more generally intelligible. Hence the vacillation of Socrates himself; hence, too, the immediate opposition of his disciples, Antisthenes and Aristippus. But that this was Plato's own principle I exceedingly doubt. That it was not the principle of Platonism, as taught by the first Academy under Speusippus, I do not doubt at all. See the xivth Essay, pp. 96-102 of The Friend. In the sense in which ἀμαθίας πάντα κακὰ ἐῤῥίζωται, κ. τ. λ. is maintained in that Essay, so and no otherwise can it be truly asserted, and so and no otherwise did ὡς εμοί γε δοκεί, Plato teach it. BARRY CORNWALL* BARRY CORNWALL is a poet, me saltem judice: and in that sense of the term, in which I apply it to C. Lamb and W. Wordsworth. There are poems of great merit, the authors of which I should yet not feel impelled so to designate. The faults of these poems are no less things of hope, than the beauties; both are just what they ought to be,—that is, new. If B. C. be faithful to his genius, it in due time will warn him, that as poetry is the identity of all other knowledges, so a poet can not be a great poet, but as being likewise inclusively an historian and naturalist, in the light, as well as the life, of philosophy all other men's worlds are his chaos. Hints obiter are:-not to permit delicacy and exquisiteness to seduce into effeminacy. Not to permit beauties by repetition to become mannerisms. To be jealous of fragmentary composition, -as epicurism of genius, and apple-pie made all of quinces. Item, that dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion,-not thought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry. * Written in Mr. Lamb's copy of the Dramatic Scenes.'-Ed. |