exclaim) Here's a meditation on a broom-stick with a vengeance! Now, in the first place, I am, and I do not care who knows it, no enemy to meditations on broom-sticks; and though Boyle had been the real author of the article so waggishly passed off for his on poor Lady Berkley; and though that good man had written it in grave good earnest, I am not certain that he would not have been employing his time as creditably to himself, and as profitably for a large class of readers, as the witty dean was while composing the Draper's Letters, though the muses forbid that I should say the same of Mary Cooke's Petition, Hamilton's Bawn, or even the rhyming correspondence with Dr Sheridan. In hazarding this confession, however, I beg leave to put in a provided always, that the said Meditation on Broom-stick, or aliud quidlibet ejusdem farinæ, shall be as truly a meditation as the broomstick is verily a broom-stick-and that the name be not a misnomer of vanity, or fraudulently labelled on a mere compound of brain-dribble and printer's ink. For meditation, I presume, is that act of the mind, by which it seeks within either the law of the phenomena, which it had contemplated without, (meditatio scientifica,) or semblances, symbols, and analogies, corresponsive to the same, (meditatio ethica.) At all events, therefore, it implies thinking, and tends to make the reader think; and whatever does this, does what in the present over-excited state of society is most wanted, though perhaps least desired. Between the think ing of a Harvey or Quarles, and the thinking of a Bacon or a Fenelon, many are the degrees of difference, and many the differences in degree of depth and originality; but not such as to fill up the chasm in genere between thinking and no-thinking, or to render the discrimination difficult for a man of

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ordinary understanding, not under the same contagion of vanity as the writer. Besides, there are shallows for the full-grown, that are the maximum of safe depth for the younglings. There are truths, quite common-place to you and me, that for the unconstructed many would be new and full of wonder, as the common day-light to the Lapland child at the re-ascension of its second summer. Thanks and honour in the highest to those stars of the first magnitude that shoot their beams downward, and while in their proper form they stir and invirtuate the sphere next below them, and natures pre-assimilated to their influence, yet call forth likewise, each after its own norm or model, whatever is best in whatever is susceptible to each, even in the lowest. But, excepting these, I confess that I seldom look at Harvey's Meditations or Quarle's Emblems, † without feeling that I would rather be the author of those booksof the innocent pleasure, the purifying emotions, and genial awakenings of the humanity through the whole man, which those books have given to thousands and tens of thousands-than shine the brightest in the constellation of fame among the heroes and Dii minores of literature. But I have a better excuse, and if not a better, yet a less general motive, for this solemn trifling, as it will seem, and one that will, I trust, rescue my ideal of an ink-stand from being doomed to the same slut's corner with the de tribus Capellis, or de umbra asini, by virtue of the process which it exemplifies; though I should not quarrel with the allotment, if its risible merits allowed it to keep company with the ideal immortalized by Rabelais in his disquisition inquisitory De Rebus optime abstergentibus.

Dared I mention the name of my Idealizer, a name dear to science, and

consecrated by discoveries of far-extending utility, it would at least give a biographical interest to this trifling anecdote, and perhaps entitle me to claim for it a yet higher, as a trait in minimis, characteristic of a class of powerful and most beneficent intellects. For to the same process of thought we owe whatever instruments of power have been bestowed on mankind by science and genius; and only such deserve the name of inventions or discoveries. But even in those, which chance may seem to claim, "que homini obvenisse videantur potius quam homo venire in ea❞—which come to us rather than we to them-this process will most often be found as the indispensable antecedent of the discovery-as the condition, without which the suggesting accident would have whispered to deaf ears, unnoticed; or, like the faces in the fire, or the landscapes made by damp on a white-washed wall, noticed for their oddity alone. To the birth of the tree a prepared soil is as necessary as the falling seed. A Daniel was present; or the fatal characters in the banquet-hall of Belshazzar might have struck more terror, but would have been of no more import than the trail of a luminous worm. In the far greater number, indeed, of these asserted boons of chance, it is the accident that should be called the condition-and often not so much, but merely the occasion—while the proper cause of the invention is to be sought for in the coexisting state and previous habit of the observer's mind. I cannot bring myself to account for respiration from the stimulus of the air, without ascribing to the specific stimulability of the lungs a yet more important part in the joint product. To how many myriads of individuals had not the rise and fall of the lid in a boiling kettle been familiar, an appearance daily and hourly in sight? But it was reserved for a mind that understood what was to be wished and knew what was wanted in order to its fulfilment for an armed eye, which meditation had made contemplative, an eye armed from within, with an instrument of higher powers than glasses can give, with the

logic of method, the only true Orga num Flevristicum which possesses the former and better half of knowledge in itself as the science of wise questioning, and the other half in reversion, -it was reserved for the Marquis of Worcester to see and have given into his hands, from the alternation of expansion and vacuity, a power mightier than that of Vulcan and all his Cyclops; a power that found its practical limit only where nature could supply no limit strong enough to confine it. For the genial spirit, that saw what it had been seeking, and saw because it sought, was it reserved in the dancing lid of a kettle or coffee-urn, to behold the future steam-engine, the Talus, with whom the Britomart of science is now gone forth to subdue and humanize the planet! When the bodily organ, steadying itself on some chance thing, imitates, as it were, the fixture of "the inward eye" on its ideal shapings, then it is that Nature not seldom reveals her close affinity with mind, with that more than man which is one and the same in all men, and from which

"the soul receives Reason and reason is her being !" Par. Lost.

Then it is, that Nature, like an individual spirit or fellow soul, seems to think and hold commune with us. If, in the present contempt of all mental analysis not contained in Locke, Hartley, or Condillac, it were safe to borrow from "scholastic lore" a technical term or two, for which I have not yet found any substitute equally convenient and serviceable, I should say, that at such moments Nature, as another subject veiled behind the visible object without us, solicits the intelligible object hid, and yet struggling beneath the subject within us, and like a helping Lucina, brings it forth for us into distinct consciousness and common light. Who has not tried to get hold of some half-remembered name, mislaid as it were in the memory, and yet felt to be there? And who has not experienced, how at length it seems given to us, as if some other unperceived had been employed

in the same search? And what are the objects last spoken of, which are in the subject, (i. e. the individual mind) yet not subjective, but of universal validity, no accidents of a particular mind resulting from its individual structure, no, nor even of the human mind, as a particular class or rank of intelligences, but of imperishable subsistence; and though not things, (i. e. shapes in outward space,) yet equally independent of the beholder, and more than equally real-what, I say, are those but the names of nature? the nomina quasi vousva, opposed by the wisest of the Greek schools to phenomena, as the intelligible correspondents or correlatives in the mind to the invisible supporter of the appearances in the world of the senses, the upholding powers that cannot be seen, but the presence and actual being of which must be supposed-nay, will be supposed, in defiance of every attempt to the contrary by a crude materialism, so alien from humanity, that there does not exist a language on earth, in which it could be conveyed without a contradiction between the sense, and the words employed to express it!

Is this a mere random flight in etymology, hunting a bubble, and bringing back the film? I cannot think so contemptuously of the attempt to fix and restore the true import of any word; but, in this instance, I should regard it as neither unprofitable, nor devoid of rational interest, were it only that the knowledge and reception of the import here given, as the etymon, or genuine sense of the word, would save Christianity from the reproach of

containing a doctrine so repugnant to the best feelings of humanity, as is inculcated in the following passage, among a hundred others to the same purpose, in earlier and in more recent works, sent forth by professed Christians. "Most of the men, who are now alive, or that have been living for many ages, are Jews, Heathens, or Mahometans, strangers and enemies to Christ, in whose name alone we can be saved. This consideration is extremely sad, when we remember how great an evil it is, that so many millions of sons and daughters are born to enter into the possession of devils to eternal ages."-Taylor's Holy Dying,p. 28. Even Sir T. Brown, while his heart is evidently wrestling with the dogma grounded on the trivial interpretation of the word, nevertheless receives it in this sense, and expresses most gloomy apprehensions" of the ends of those honest worthies and philosophers," who died before the birth of our Saviour: "It is hard," says he, "to place those souls in hell, whose worthy lives did teach us virtue on earth. How strange to them will sound the history of Adam, when they shall suffer for him they never heard of!" Yet he concludes by condemning the insolence of reason in daring to doubt or controvert the verity of the doctrine, or "to question the justice of the proceeding," which verity, he fears, the woeful lot of "these great examples of virtue must confirm. But here I must break off. Your's most affectionately, S. T. COLERIDge.

MY DEAR D.-The philosophic poet, whom I quoted in my last, may here and there have stretched his prerogative in a war of offence on the general associations of his contemporaries. Here and there, though less than the least of what the Buffoons of parody, and the Zanies of anonymous criticism, would have us believe, he may be thought to betray a preference of mean or trivial instances for grand morals, a capricious predilection for incidents that contrast with the depth and novelty of the truths they are to exemplify. But still to the principle, VOL. X.

to the habit of tracing the presence of the high in the humble, the mysterious Dii Cabiri, in the form of the dwarf Miner, with hammer and spade, and week-day apron, we must attribute Wordsworth's peculiar power, his leavening influence on the opinions, feelings, and pursuits of his admirers,

most on the young of most promise and highest acquirements; and that, while others are read with delight, his works are a religion. A case still more in point occurs to me, and for the truth of which I dare pledge myself. The art of printing alone seems to have

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been privileged with a Minerval birth, to have risen in its zenith; but next to this, perhaps, the rapid and almost instantaneous advancement of pottery from the state in which Mr Wedgewood found the art, to its demonstrably highest practicable perfection, is the most striking fact in the history of modern improvements achieved by individual genius. In his early manhood, an obstinate and harassing complaint confined him to his room for more than two years; and to this apparent calamity Mr Wedgewood was wont to attribute his after unprecedented success. For a while, as was natural, the sense of thus losing the prime and vigour of his life and faculties, preyed on his mind incessantly-aggravated, no doubt, by the thought of what he should have been doing this hour and this, had he not been thus severely visited. Then, what he should like to take in hand; and lastly, what it was desirable to do, and how far it might be done, till generalizing more and more, the mind began to feed on the thoughts, which, at their first evolution, (in their larva state, may I say?) had preyed on the mind. We imagine the presence of what we desire in the very act of regretting its absence, nay, in order to regret it the more livelily; but while, with a strange wilfulness, we are thus engendering grief on grief, nature makes use of the product to cheat us into comfort and exertion. The positive shapings, though but of the fancy, will sooner or later displace the mere knowledge of the negative. All activity is in itself pleasure; and according to the nature, powers, and previous habits of the sufferer, the activity of the fancy will call the other faculties of the soul into action. The self-contemplative power becomes meditative, and the mind begins to play the geometrician with its own thoughts -abstracting from them the accidental and individual, till a new and unfailing source of employment, the best and surest nepentha of solitary pain, is opened out in the habit of seeking the principle and ultimate aim in the most imperfect productions of art, in the least attractive products of nature; of beholding the possible in the real; of detecting the essential form in the intentional; above all, in the collation and constructive imagining of the outward shapes and material forces that shall best express the essential

form, in its coincidence with the idea, or realize most adequately that power, which is one with its correspondent knowledge, as the revealing body with its indwelling soul.

Another motive will present itself, and one that comes nearer home, and is of more general application, if we reflect on the habit here recommended, as a source of support and consolation in circumstances under which we might otherwise sink back on ourselves, and for want of colloquy with our thoughts, with the objects and presentations of the inner sense, lie listening to the fretful ticking of our sensations. A resource of costless value has that man, who has brought himself to a habit of measuring the objects around him by their intended or possible ends, and the proportion in which this end is realized in each. It is the neglect of thus educating the senses, of thus disciplining, and, in the proper and primitive sense of the word, informing the fancy, that distinguishes at first sight the ruder states of society. Every mechanic tool, the commonest and most indispensible 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 pot-herbs 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 desart 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 in dustry 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 cannot bestow or compen

sate.

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 or 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, Medicæan Venuses, Shakespeares, Raphaels, How ards, 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 cannot 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 tendencies, whether in head or heart, have been planted there independently.

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, compared 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. 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,

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