Chapter D: G. Rossetti

* * * * *

Count that day lost, whose low descending sun
Views from thy hand no worthy action done.

ANON.

* * * * *

BIRTHDAYS.

“Time is the stuff of life”—then spend not thy days while they last
In dreams of an idle future, regrets for a vanished past;
The tombstones lie thickly behind thee, but the stream still hurries
thee on,
New worlds of thought to be traversed, new fields to be fought and won.
Let work be thy measure of life—then only the end is well—
The birthdays we hail so blithely are strokes of the passing bell.

W. E. H. LECKY.

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that
is the stuff life is made of.” (Franklin, _Poor Richard’s
Almanack_, 1757.)

* * * * *

Nothing is of greater value than a single day.

GOETHE (_Spruche im Prosa_).

* * * * *

Tears for the passionate hearts I might have won,
Tears for the age with which I might have striven,
Tears for a hundred years of work undone,
Crying like blood to Heaven.

WM. ALEXANDER.

* * * * *

My life, my beautiful life, all wasted;
The gold days, the blue days, to darkness sunk;
The bread was here, and I have not tasted:
The wine was here, and I have not drunk.

RICHARD MIDDLETON.

I do not find these lines in Middleton’s collected works, but I
think they are his.

* * * * *

And the nightingale thought, “I have sung many songs,
But never a one so gay,
For he sings of what the world will be
When the years have died away.”

TENNYSON (_The Poet’s Song_).

This often-quoted verse does not give the highest view of
poetry, as Tennyson’s own poems show. The poet sings of a
Universe,

Which moves with light and life informed,
Actual, divine and true.

He sings of Nature, Man, God, Immortality. (This note is from
an early letter of Hodgson’s. His quotation is from _The
Prelude_, Bk. XIV.)

* * * * *

Why are Time’s feet so swift and ours so slow!

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

Who is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing his office? It is the Devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all other, he is never out of his diocese, ye shall never find him unoccupied, ye shall never find him out of the way, call for him when you will; he is ever at home, the diligentest preacher in all the Realm; ye shall never find him idle, I warrant you.... He is no lordly loiterer, but a busy ploughman, so that among all the pack of them the Devil shall go for my money! Therefore, ye prelates, learn of the Devil to be diligent in doing of your office. If you will not learn of God nor good men: for shame learn of the Devil.

BISHOP LATIMER (_Sermon on the Ploughers_, 1549).

* * * * *

APPRECIATION.

To the sea-shell’s spiral round
’Tis your heart that brings the sound:
The soft sea-murmurs, that you hear
Within, are captured from your ear.

You do poets and their song
A grievous wrong,
If your own soul does not bring
To their high imagining
As much beauty as they sing.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.

In the present day it is not easy to find a well-meaning man among our more earnest thinkers, who will not take upon himself to dispute the whole system of redemption, because he cannot unravel the mystery of the punishment of sin. But can he unravel the mystery of the punishment of NO sin? Can he entirely account for all that happens to a cab-horse? Has he ever looked fairly at the fate of one of those beasts as it is dying—measured the work it has done, and the reward it has got—put his hand upon the bloody wounds through which its bones are piercing, and so looked up to Heaven with an entire understanding of Heaven’s ways about the horse? Yet the horse is a fact—no dream—no revelation among the myrtle trees by night; and the dust it dies upon, and the dogs that eat it, are facts; and yonder happy person, whose the horse was, till its knees were broken over the hurdles; who had an immortal soul to begin with, and wealth and peace to help forward his immortality; who has also devoted the powers of his soul, and body, and wealth, and peace, to the spoiling of houses, the corruption of the innocent, and the oppression of the poor; and has, at this actual moment of his prosperous life, as many curses waiting round about him in calm shadow, with their death-eyes fixed upon him, biding their time, as ever the poor cab-horse had launched at him in meaningless blasphemies, when his failing feet stumbled at the stones,—this happy person shall have no stripes,—shall have only the horse’s fate of annihilation! Or, if other things are indeed reserved for him, Heaven’s kindness or omnipotence is to be doubted therefore!

We cannot reason of these things. But this I know—and this may by all men be known—that no good or lovely thing exists in this world without its correspondent darkness; and that the universe presents itself continually to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, or of choice, the good and the evil set on the right hand and the left.

John Ruskin (_Modern Painters_, V, 19).

It is one of the arguments in Plato’s _Phaedo_ that the soul
must survive, since otherwise terribly wicked and cruel men
would escape retribution; annihilation would be a good thing
for them.

* * * * *

All creatures and all objects, in degree,
Are friends and patrons of humanity.
There are to whom the garden, grove and field
Perpetual lessons of forbearance yield;
Who would not lightly violate the grace
The lowliest flower possesses in its place,
Nor shorten the sweet life, too fugitive,
Which nothing less than Infinite Power could give.

WORDSWORTH (_Humanity_).

* * * * *

Every man is not a proper Champion for Truth, nor fit to take up the Gauntlet in the cause of Verity: many, from the ignorance of these Maximes, and an inconsiderate Zeal unto Truth, have too rashly charged the troops of Error, and remain as Trophies unto the enemies of Truth. A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City and yet be forced to surrender; ’tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace than to hazzard her on a battle.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE (_Religio Medici_).

* * * * *

“Very well,” cried I, “that’s a good girl; I find you are perfectly qualified for making converts, and so go help your mother to make a gooseberry pye.”

GOLDSMITH (_The Vicar of Wakefield_).

* * * * *

White-handed Hope,
Thou hovering Angel girt with golden wings.

MILTON (_Comus_).

* * * * *

Hope, folding her wings, looked backward and became Regret.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Silas Marner_, ch. 15).

* * * * *

By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Middlemarch_, ch. 39).

* * * * *

Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin!
Here is custom come your way;
Take my brute, and lead him in,
Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay....

I am old, but let me drink;
Bring me spices, bring me wine;
I remember, when I think,
That my youth was half divine....

Fill the cup, and fill the can:
Have a rouse before the morn:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born....

Chant me now some wicked stave,
Till thy drooping courage rise,
And the glow-worm of the grave
Glimmer in thy rheumy eyes....

Change, reverting to the years,
When thy nerves could understand
What there is in loving tears,
And the warmth of hand in hand....

Fill the can, and fill the cup:
All the windy days of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.

TENNYSON (_The Vision of Sin_).

_Change_—i.e., change the subject. Many verses are omitted for
the sake of brevity.

* * * * *

A world without a contingency or an agony could have no hero and no saint, and enable no Son of Man to discover that he was a Son of God. But for the suspended plot, that is folded in every life, history is a dead chronicle of what was known before as well as after; art sinks into the photograph of a moment, that hints at nothing else; and poetry breaks the cords and throws the lyre away. There is no Epic of the certainties; and no lyric without the surprise of sorrow and the sigh of fear. Whatever touches and ennobles us in the lives and in the voices of the past is a divine birth from human doubt and pain. Let then the shadows lie, and the perspective of the light still deepen beyond our view; else, while we walk together, our hearts will never burn within us as we go, and the darkness as it falls, will deliver us into no hand that is Divine.

JAS. MARTINEAU (_Hours of Thought_, 1, 328).

The subject of the sermon is the _uncertainties_ of life, the
perils and catastrophies that cannot be foreseen or provided
for, death, disease, and other ills which may fall upon us at
any moment, the crises that arise in the history of men and
nations. It is by reason of these that _character_ is formed.
If everything happened by known rule, and could be predicted
as surely as the movements of the stars, we should have no
affections or emotions and would be mere creatures of habit.

From a recent book of poems, _The Lily of Malud_, by J. C.
Squire, I take the following musical verse. (“The Stronghold”
is where pain, hate, and all unpleasant things are excluded and
peace only reigns.)

But O, if you find that castle,
Draw back your foot from the gateway,
Let not its peace invite you,
Let not its offerings tempt you,
For faded and decayed like a garment,
Love to a dust will have fallen,
And song and laughter will have gone with sorrow,
And hope will have gone with pain;
And of all the throbbing heart’s high courage
Nothing will remain.

Martineau not only did important work in philosophy, but he
was also eminent as a moral teacher. Taking together his
originality, sublimity of soul, and beauty of expression,
the sermons in _Hours of Thought_ and other similar writings
are the finest product of modern religious thought. They
indeed stand among the best productions of our _literature_,
and should be read even by those (if there are any such
persons) who love literature and thought but are indifferent
to religion. To illustrate this, I choose—almost at random—a
passage where the thought itself has no interest outside
religion (_Hours of Thought_, II. 334):—

Worship is the free offering of ourselves to God; ever renewed,
because ever imperfect. It expresses the consciousness that
we are His by right, yet have not duly passed into His hand;
that the soul has no true rest but in Him, yet has wandered in
strange flights until her wing is tired. It is her effort to
return home, the surrender again of her narrow self-will, her
prayer to be merged in a life diviner than her own. It is at
once the lowliest and loftiest attitude of her nature: we never
hide ourselves in ravine so deep; yet overhead we never see the
stars so clear and high. The sense of saddest estrangement, yet
the sense also of eternal affinity between us and God meet and
mingle in the act; breaking into the strains, now penitential
and now jubilant, that, to the critic’s reason, may sound at
variance but melt into harmony in the ear of a higher love.
This twofold aspect devotion must ever have, pale with weeping,
flushed with joy; deploring the past, trusting for the future;
ashamed of what is, kindled by what is meant to be; shadow
behind, and light before. Were we haunted by no presence of sin
and want, we should only browse on the pasture of nature; were
we stirred by no instinct of a holier kindred, we should not be
drawn towards the life of God.

* * * * *

GROWN UP.

My son is straight and strong,
Ready of lip and limb;
’Twas the dream of my whole life long
To bear a son like him.

He has griefs I cannot guess,
He has joys I cannot know:
I love him none the less—
With a man it should be so.

But where, where, where
Is the child so dear to me,
With the silken-golden hair
Who sobbed upon my knee?

ELIZABETH WATERHOUSE.

* * * * *

For her alone the sea-breeze seemed to blow,
For her in music did the white surf fall,
For her alone the wheeling birds did call
Over the shallows, and the sky for her
Was set with white clouds far away and clear,
E’en as her love, this strong and lovely one,
Who held her hand, was but for her alone.

AUTHOR NOT TRACED (_Perseus and Andromeda_).

* * * * *

He cometh not a king to reign;
The world’s long hope is dim;
The weary centuries watch in vain
The clouds of heaven for Him.

And not for sign in heaven above
Or earth below they look,
Who know with John His smile of love,
With Peter His rebuke.

In joy of inward peace, or sense
Of sorrow over sin,
He is His own best evidence
His witness is within.

The healing of His seamless dress,
Is by our beds of pain;
We touch Him in life’s throng and press,
And we are whole again.

O Lord and Master of us all!
Whate’er our name or sign,
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,
We test our lives by Thine....

Our Friend, our Brother, and our Lord,
What may Thy service be?—
Nor name, nor form, nor ritual word,
But simply following Thee.

We faintly hear, we dimly see,
In differing phrase we pray;
But, dim or clear, we own in Thee,
The Light, the Truth, the Way!

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (_Our Master_).

Many verses are omitted from this poem for want of space, and
the last two are transposed in order.

* * * * *

’Tis weary watching wave by wave,
And yet the Tide heaves onward,
We climb, like Corals, grave by grave,
That pave a pathway sunward;

We are driven back, for our next fray
A newer strength to borrow,
And, where the Vanguard camps To-day,
The Rear shall rest To-morrow.

GERALD MASSEY (_To-day and To-morrow_).

* * * * *

Where gods are not, spectres rule.

* * * * *

Where children are is a golden age.

* * * * *

A people, like a child, is a separate educational problem.

NOVALIS.

* * * * *

Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, _not_ a false imagining, an unreal character—but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature—loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be. Such friends seem inspired by a divine gift of prophecy—like the mother of St. Augustine, who, in the midst of the wayward, reckless youth of her son, beheld him in a vision, standing, clothed in white, a ministering priest at the right hand of God—as he has stood for long ages since. Could a mysterious foresight unveil to us this resurrection form of the friends with whom we daily walk, compassed about with mortal infirmity, we should follow them with faith and reverence through all the disguises of human faults and weaknesses, “waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.”

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (_The Minister’s Wooing_).

* * * * *

Because thou hast the power and own’st the grace
To look through and behind this mask of me,
(Against which years have beat thus blanchingly
With their rains) and behold my soul’s true face,
The dim and weary witness of life’s race,—
Because thou hast the faith and love to see,
Through that same soul’s distracting lethargy,
The patient angel waiting for a place
In the new Heavens,—because nor sin nor woe,
Nor God’s infliction, nor death’s neighbourhood,
Nor all which others viewing, turn to go,
Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed,—
Nothing repels thee, ... Dearest, teach me so
To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!

E. B. BROWNING (_Sonnets from the Portuguese_).

Here two fine thoughts of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Browning are
inspired by the vision of Monica, the saintly mother of the
great St. Augustine (354-430).

This is a good illustration of the need of notes. Without a
reference to St. Monica’s vision, I think that readers would be
repelled, rather than attracted, by Mrs. Browning’s sonnet. It
does not accord with one’s sense of modesty that a lady should
say to her lover, “My unattractive person and incurable illness
turned other men away, but you saw that, behind all this, I was
‘a patient _angel_ waiting for a place in the new Heavens.’” I
myself could not understand how Mrs. Browning could write and
her husband could publish this poem, until Hodgson, in one of
his letters to me, referred to “the use made by Mrs. Browning
of St. Monica’s vision in one of her sonnets.”

The sonnet is not quoted as one of the finest of the series.

I have placed Mrs. Stowe’s quotation first for an obvious
reason; but _The Minister’s Wooing_ was published in 1859,
while the sonnet appeared in 1847.

* * * * *

Death is the ocean of immortal rest; ...
Where shines ’mid laughing waves a far-off isle for me

Why fear? The light wind whitens all the brine,
And throws fresh foam upon the marble shores;
Or it may be that strong and strenuous oars
Must force the shallop o’er the hyaline;
But, welcome utter calm or bitter blast,—
The voyage will be done, the island reached at last.

...

Will it be thus when the strange sleep of Death
Lifts from the brow, and lost eyes live again?
Will morning dawn on the bewildered brain,
To cool and heal? And shall I feel the breath
Of freshening winds that travel from the sea,
And meet thy loving, laughing eyes, Earine?

...

O virgin world! O marvellous far days!
No more with dreams of grief doth love grow bitter
Nor trouble dim the lustre wont to glitter
In happy eyes. Decay alone decays;
A moment—death’s dull sleep is o’er and we
Drink the immortal morning air, Earine.

MORTIMER COLLINS.

* * * * *

We live in a world, where one fool makes many fools, but one wise man only a few wise men.

LICHTENBERG.

* * * * *

O Lady! We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah, from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth—
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

S. T. COLERIDGE (_Dejection_).

See note to next quotation.

* * * * *

TELLING STORIES.

A little child He took for sign
To them that sought the way Divine.

And once a flower sufficed to show
The whole of that we need to know.

Now here we lie, the child and I,
And watch the clouds go floating by,

Just telling stories turn by turn....
Lord, which is teacher, which doth learn?

H. D. LOWRY.

As Coleridge says in the last quotation, “We receive but what
we give.” We bring with us the mind that sees, and the feelings
and emotions with which we contemplate the universe; and, so
far as use, habit, and other causes still the activity and
lessen the receptivity of the mind and spirit, the world around
us becomes less instinct with life and beauty.

Putting aside the question whether, as Wordsworth says in his
great Ode,

Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home,

it will be familiar to anyone who has a sympathetic,
appreciative sense that the _child’s_ outlook on the world
around him is very different from our own. It has in him a more
intense emotional reaction. He sees it with a freshness and
wonder unfelt by us, because our sensibility is blunted and
less vivid. And for the same reason that we trust our faculties
in their prime rather than in their degeneration, so the fresh
and clear emotional response of a child’s nature represents
more _truthful_ appreciation than our own. Our sensibility is
blunted, not only by use and habit, but also by the hardening
and coarsening experiences of our lives; and also again by the
development of intellect, which grows largely at the expense
of the emotions. We lose the transparent soul of the child,
his simple faith and trusting nature. To anyone who cannot
_feel_ the difference between the child’s outlook and his own,
this will convey no meaning—and words cannot assist him. It
is as if one tried to describe love to a person who has never
loved, or a religious experience to one who has never had such
an experience, indeed, in both love and religious experience,
there is the same child-like attitude of pure emotion; and
hence Christ’s comparison of His true followers to “little
children.” Poetry, music, love of nature, and the highest art
produce in us at times the same indefinable feeling and give
us back for evanescent periods the fresh, clear, emotional
sensibility of a child.

In Edward Fitzgerald’s _Euphranor_, at the point where
Wordsworth’s ode is being discussed, the following passage is
interesting:—

“I have heard tell of another poet’s saying that he knew of
no human outlook so solemn as that from an infant’s eyes;
and how it was from those of his own he learned that those
of the Divine Child in Raffaelle’s Sistine Madonna were not
overcharged with expression, as he had previously thought they
might be.”

“Yes,” said I, “that was on the occasion, I think, of his
having watched his child one morning _worshipping the sunbeam
on the bedpost_—I suppose the worship of wonder.... If but
the philosopher or poet could live in the child’s brain for a
while!”

(The poet referred to was Tennyson, see Memoir by his son, the
baby in question, Vol. I., 357).

* * * * *

THE REVELATION

An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him; but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling’s jest.

Love wakes men, once a life-time each;
They lift their heavy heads and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach
They read with joy, then shut the book.

And some give thanks, and some blaspheme,
And most forget: but, either way,
That, and the Child’s unheeded dream,
Is all the light of all their day.

COVENTRY PATMORE (1823-1896).

* * * * *

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself![21] To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily, through long years of the foretime, hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to-day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along, and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.

WILLIAM JAMES (_The Varieties of Religious Experience_).

* * * * *

Et in Arcadia ego.

(I too have been in Arcady.)

ANON.

Arcadia was a mountainous district in Greece which was taken
to be the deal of pastoral simplicity and rural happiness—as
in Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ and other literature. It was
famous for its musicians and a favourite haunt of Pan.

The saying is best known from the fine landscape in the Louvre
by N. Poussin (1594-1665). In part of the landscape is a tomb
on which these words are written, and some young people are
seen reading them. I learn, however, from _King’s Classical and
Foreign Quotations_ that the words had been previously written
on a picture by Bart. Schidone (1570-1615), where two young
shepherds are looking at a skull.

The meaning intended was that _death_ came even to the joyous
shepherds of Arcady. But the quotation is now used in a more
general sense. “I too had my golden days of youth and love and
happiness.”

* * * * *

It often happens that those are the best people, whose characters have been most injured by slanderers; as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

ALEXANDER POPE.

* * * * *

There are many flowers of heavenly origin in this world; they do not flourish in this climate but are properly heralds, clear-voiced messengers of a better existence: Religion is one; Love is another.

NOVALIS.

* * * * *

ON DYING

I always made an awkward bow.

KEATS.

* * * * *

On n’a pas d’antécédent pour cela. Il faut improviser—c’est donc si difficile. (Death admits of no rehearsal.)

AMIEL.

* * * * *

C’est le maître jour; c’est le jour juge de tous les autres. (It is the master-day; the day that judges all the others.)

MONTAIGNE.

* * * * *

Will she return, my lady? Nay:
Love’s feet, that once have learned to stray,
Turn never to the olden way.

Ah, heart of mine, where lingers she?
By what live stream or saddened sea?
What wild-flowered swath of sungilt lea

Do her feet press, and are her days
Sweet with new stress of love and praise,
Or sad with echoes of old lays?

JOHN PAYNE (_Light o’ Love_).

* * * * *

I search but cannot see
What purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it tries
Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories
Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own
For ever, by some mode whereby shall be made known
The gain of every life.
...
I say, I cannot think that gains—which will not be
Except a special soul had gained them—that such gain
Can ever be estranged, do aught but appertain
Immortally, by right firm, indefeasible,
To who performed the feat, through God’s grace and man’s will.

R. BROWNING (_Fifine at the Fair_).

* * * * *

Nature, they say, doth dote
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan
Repeating us by rote.

J. R. LOWELL (_Ode at Harvard Commemoration_).

* * * * *

Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower, where I thought a flower would grow.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

* * * * *

Why describe our life-history as a state of waking rather than of sleep? Why assume that sleep is the acquired, vigilance the normal condition? It would not be hard to defend the opposite thesis. The newborn infant might urge with cogency that his habitual state of slumber was primary, as regards the individual, ancestral as regards the race; resembling at least, far more closely than does our adult life, a primitive or protozoic habit. “Mine,” he might say, “is a centrally stable state. It would need only some change in external conditions (as the permanent immersion in a nutritive fluid) to be safely and indefinitely maintained. Your waking state, on the other hand, is centrally unstable. While you talk and bustle around me you are living on your physiological capital, and the mere prolongation of vigilance is torture and death.”

A paradox such as this forms no part of my argument; but it may remind us that physiology at any rate hardly warrants us in speaking of our waking state as if that alone represented our true selves, and every deviation from it must be at best a mere interruption. Vigilance in reality is but one of two co-ordinate phases of our personality, which we have acquired or differentiated from each other during the stages of our long evolution.

F. W. H. MYERS (_Multiplex Personality_).

This is from an article in _The Nineteenth Century_ for
November, 1886, in which Myers urged the study of the
trance-personalities that exhibit themselves under hypnotism.
In his _Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death_
his views on sleep may be very briefly summarized as follows:
In the low forms of animal life there is an undifferentiated
state, neither sleep nor waking, and this is also seen in our
prenatal and earliest infantile life. In life generally the
waking time can exist only for brief periods continuously.
We cannot continue life without resort to the fuller
vitality which sleep brings to us. Again, from the original
undifferentiated state, our waking life has been developed
by practical needs; the faculties required for our earthly
life then become intensified, but by natural selection other
faculties and sensations (including those which connect us with
the spiritual world) are dropped out of our consciousness.
The state of sleep cannot be regarded as the mere _absence of
waking faculties_. In this state we have some faint glimmer of
the other faculties and sensations in various forms—dreams,
somnambulism, etc. Myers then develops the theory that the
relations of hysteria and _genius_ to ordinary life correspond
to those of somnambulism and hypnotic trance to sleep; and
he arrives at the question of self-suggestion and hypnotism
generally.

Thus in sleep there are, _first_, certain physiological changes
(including a greater control of the physical organism, as
seen in the muscular powers of somnambulists); no length of
time spent lying down awake in darkness and silence will give
the recuperative effect that even a few moments of sleep will
give. But also, _secondly_, we find existing in sleep the other
faculties withdrawn from use in ordinary waking life. Thus
during sleep we find memory revived, problems unexpectedly
solved, poems like “Kubla Khan” composed, and many intense
sensations and emotions experienced. Beyond these powers again
Myers finds in sleep still higher powers which seem to connect
us with the spiritual world. Hence the advisability of studying
the phenomena of sleep and investigating it _experimentally_ by
employing hypnotism.

William James adopted much the same view as Myers (see, for
example, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_). But much
has been written of late about sub-consciousness and about
dreams; and the tendency is rather to follow Martineau’s view
of mental development—that the lower nervous centres are
unconscious “habits” deposited from the old intelligence (see
p. 304). Thus, for instance, memories of the past would be
recorded in the sub-conscious, but there is nothing to be found
there _of a higher character_ than in the conscious self. In
sleep, the waking control being removed, our dreams reveal
impulses and desires that have been inhibited or kept under
in waking life, but do not reveal anything of the _higher_
indicated by Myers. However, although it is too large a subject
to discuss here, there is a vast deal yet to be explained,
as, for example, inspiration, and what we used to call
“unconscious cerebration,” and the amazing results of hypnotism
and suggestion. Also who or what is it that _composes_ the
dream-story, or who or what _makes us_ act or dream the story?

* * * * *

Without good nature man is but a better kind of vermin.

* * * * *

Extreme self-lovers will set a man’s house on fire, though it were but to roast their eggs.

BACON.

* * * * *

Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

On sunny noons upon the deck’s smooth face,
Linked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace,
Or, o’er the stern reclining, watch below
The foaming wake far widening as we go.

On stormy nights when wild north-westers rave,
How proud a thing to fight with wind and wave!
The dripping sailor on the reeling mast
Exults to hear, and scorns to wish it past.

Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

A. H. CLOUGH (_Songs in Absence_)

The Ship is the ship of life. The first line is taken from
Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Where lies the land to which yon Ship
must go.”

* * * * *

The brooding East with awe beheld
Her impious younger world.
The Roman tempest swell’d and swell’d,
And on her head was hurled.

The East bowed low before the blast
In patient, deep disdain;
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again.