O ye hopes! that stir within me! Health comes with you from above! God is _with_ me! God is _in_ me! I _cannot_ die: for life is love!
And now, that I am alone and utterly hopeless for myself, yet still I love--and more strongly than ever feel that conscience or the duty of love is the proof of continuing, as it is the cause and condition of existing consciousness. How beautiful the harmony! Whence could the proof come, so appropriately, so conformly with all nature, in which the cause and condition of each thing is its revealing and infallible prophecy!
And for what reason, say, rather, for what cause, do you believe immortality? Because I _ought_, therefore I _must_!
[The lines "On revisiting the sea-shore," of which the last stanza is quoted, were written in August, 1801. [_P.W._, 1893, p. 159.] If the note was written exactly seven years after the date of that poem, it must belong to the summer of 1808, when Coleridge was living over the _Courier_ office in the Strand.]
Truly, I hope not irreverently, may we apply to the French nation the Scripture text, "From him that hath nothing shall be taken that which he hath"--that is, their pretences to being free, which are the same as nothing. They, the illuminators, the discoverers and sole possessors of the true philosopher's stone! Alas! it proved both for them and Europe the _Lapis Infernalis_.
Lord of light and fire? What is the universal of man in all, but especially in savage states? Fantastic ornament and, in general, the most frightful deformities--slits in the ears and nose, for instance. What is the solution? Man will not be a mere thing of nature: he will be and shew himself a power of himself. Hence these violent disruptions of himself from all other creatures! What they are made, that they remain--they are Nature's, and wholly Nature's.
Try to contemplate mankind as children. These we love tenderly, because they are beautiful and happy; we know that a sweet-meat or a top will transfer their little love for a moment, and that we shall be repelled with a grimace. Yet we are not offended.
I am persuaded that the chymical technology, as far as it was borrowed from life and intelligence, half-metaphorically, half-mystically, may be brought back again (as when a man borrows of another a sum which the latter had previously borrowed of him, because he is too polite to remind him of a debt) to the use of psychology in many instances, and, above all, [may be re-adapted to] the philosophy of language, which ought to be experimentative and analytic of the elements of meaning--their double, triple, and quadruple combinations, of simple aggregation or of composition by balance of opposition.