The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
History
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
There are two sides to every question. If thou hast genius and poverty
to thy lot, dwell on the foolish, perplexing, imprudent, dangerous, and
even immoral, conduct of promise-breach in small things, of want of
punctuality, of procrastination in all its shapes and disguises. Force
men to reverence the dignity of thy moral strength in and for
itself,--seeking no excuses or palliations from fortune, or sickness, or
a too full mind that, in opulence of conception, overrated its powers of
application. But if thy fate should be different, shouldest thou possess
competence, health and ease of mind, and then be thyself called upon to
judge such faults in another so gifted,--O! then, upon the other view of
the question, say, Am I in ease and comfort, and dare I wonder that he,
poor fellow, acted so and so? Dare I accuse him? Ought I not to shadow
forth to myself that, glad and luxuriating in a short escape from
anxiety, his mind over-promised for itself; that, want combating with
his eager desire to produce things worthy of fame, he dreamed of the
nobler, when he should have been producing the meaner, and so had the
meaner obtruded on his moral being, when the nobler was making full way
on his intellectual? Think of the manifoldness of his accumulated petty
calls! Think, in short, on all that should be like a voice from heaven
to warn thyself against this and this, and call it all up for pity and
for palliation; and then draw the balance. Take him in his whole,--his
head, his heart, his wishes, his innocence of all selfish crime, and a
hundred years hence, what will be the result? The good,--were it but a
single volume that made truth more visible, and goodness more lovely,
and pleasure at once more akin to virtue and, self-doubled, more
pleasurable! and the evil,--while he lived, it injured none but himself;
and where is it now? in his grave. Follow it not thither.
TO THEE CHERUBIM AND SERAPHIM CONTINUALLY DO CRY.
The mighty kingdoms angelical, like the thin clouds at dawn, receiving
and hailing the first radiance, and singing and sounding forth their
blessedness, increase the rising joy in the heart of God, spread wide
and utter forth the joy arisen, and in innumerable finite glories
interpret all they can of infinite bliss.
DEFINITION OF MIRACLE.
A phaenomenon in no connection with any other phaenomenon, as its
immediate cause, is a miracle; and what is believed to have been such,
is miraculous for the person so believing When it is strange and
surprising, that is, with out any analogy in our former experience--it
is called a miracle. The kind defines the thing:--the circumstances the
word.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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