[Footnote C: I have the same anxiety for my friend now in England as for myself, that is to be, or may be, two months hence.]
[Footnote D: "A prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times without being seen by them."]
Alas! for some abiding-place of love, O'er which my spirit, like the mother dove, Might brood with warming wings!
I had a confused shadow rather than an image in my recollection, like that from a thin cloud, as if the idea were descending, though still in some measureless height.
As when the taper's white cone of flame is seen double, till the eye moving brings them into one space and then they become one--so did the idea in my imagination coadunate with your present form soon after I first gazed upon you.
And in life's noisiest hour There whispers still the ceaseless love of thee, The heart's self-solace and soliloquy.
You mould my hopes, you fashion me within, And to the leading love-throb in my heart Through all my being, all my pulses beat. You lie in all my many thoughts like light, Like the fair light of dawn, or summer light, On rippling stream, or cloud-reflecting lake-- And looking to the Heaven that beams above you, How do I bless the lot that made me love you!
In all processes of the understanding the shortest way will be discovered the last and this, perhaps, while it constitutes the great advantage of having a teacher to put us on the shortest road at the first, yet sometimes occasions a difficulty in the comprehension, inasmuch as the longest way is more near to the existing state of the mind, nearer to what if left to myself, on starting the thought, I should have thought next. The shortest way gives me the _knowledge_ best, but the longest makes me more _knowing_.
When a party man talks as if he hated his country, saddens at her prosperous events, exults in her disasters and yet, all the while, is merely hating the opposite party, and would himself feel and talk as a patriot were he in a foreign land [_he_ is a party man]. The true monster is he (and such alas! there are in these monstrous days, "vollendeter Sündhaftigkeit"), who abuses his country when out of his country.
Oh the profanation of the sacred word _the People_! Every brutal Burdett-led mob, assembled on some drunken St. Monday of faction, is the People forsooth, and each leprous ragamuffin, like a circle in geometry, is, at once, one and all, and calls its own brutal self, "_us_ the People." And who are the friends of the People? Not those who would wish to elevate each of them, or, at least, the child who is to take his place in the flux of life and death, into something worthy of esteem and capable of freedom, but those who flatter and infuriate them, as they _are_. A contradiction in the very thought! For if, really, they are good and wise, virtuous and well-informed, how weak must be the motives of discontent to a truly moral being--but if the contrary, and the motives for discontent proportionably strong, how without guilt and absurdity appeal to them as judges and arbiters? He alone is entitled to a share in the government of all, who has learnt to govern himself. There is but one possible ground of a right of freedom--viz., to understand and revere its duties.