167
The Round Table. On the Character of Rousseau.
168
“Aujourd’hui, jour de Pâques fleuries, il y a précisément cinquante ans de ma première connaissance avec Madame de Warens.”
169
Even on his death-bed the hero of Browning’s Confessions gives himself up to impassionated recollection:
How sad and bad and mad it was —
But then, how it was sweet.
In his Stances à Madame Lullin Voltaire is at least as poetical and nearer to normal experience:
Quel mortel s’est jamais flatté
D’un rendez-vous à l’agonie?
170
See especially Lyceum fragment, no. 108.
171
A well-known example of the extreme to which the romanticists pushed their Fichtean solipsism is the following from the William Lovell of the youthful Tieck: “Having gladly escaped from anxious fetters, I now advance boldly through life, absolved from those irksome duties which were the inventions of cowardly fools. Virtue is, only because I am; it is but a reflection of my inner self. What care I for forms whose dim lustre I have myself brought forth? Let vice and virtue wed. They are only shadows in the mist,” etc.
172
Beyond Good and Evil, ch. IV.
173
On Contemporary Literature, 206. The whole passage is excellent.
174
M. Legouis makes a similar remark in the Cambridge History of English Literature XI, 108.
175
I scarcely need say that Wordsworth is at times genuinely ethical, but he is even more frequently only didactic. The Excursion, as M. Legouis says, is a “long sermon against pessimism.”
176
“Quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.”
177
Eth. Nic., 1177 b.
178
Cf. the chapter on William Law and the Mystics in Cambridge History of English Literature, IX, 341-67; also the bibliography of Boehme, ibid., 560-74.
179
See Excursion, I, VV. 943 ff.
180
In his attitude towards sin Novalis continues Rousseau and anticipates the main positions of the Christian Scientist.
181
Prune thou thy words,
The thoughts control
That o’er thee swell and throng.
They will condense within the soul
And change to purpose strong.
But he who lets his feelings run
In soft, luxurious flow,
Shrinks when hard service must be done
And faints at every foe.
182
Wesley had no liking for Boehme and cut out from Brooke’s book the theosophy that had this origin.
183
Writing was often associated with magic formulæ. Hence γράμμα also gave Fr. “grimoire.”
184
Thus Spake Zarathustra, LXIX (The Shadow to Zarathustra).
185
Katha-Upanishad. The passage is paraphrased as follows by P. E. More in his Century of Indian Epigrams:
Seated within this body’s car
The silent Self is driven afar,
And the five senses at the pole
Like steeds are tugging restive of control.
And if the driver lose his way,
Or the reins sunder, who can say