Mem.--to collect facts for a comparison between a _wood_ and a _coal_ fire, as to sights and sounds and bodily feeling.
I have read somewhere of a sailor who dreamt that an encounter with the enemy was about to take place, and that he should discover cowardice during action. Accordingly he awakes his brother the Captain, and bids him prepare for an engagement. At daybreak a ship is discovered on the horizon and the sailor, mindful of his dream, procures himself to be tied to a post. At the close of the day he is released unwounded but dead from fright. Apply this incident to Miss Edgeworth's Tales, and all similar attempts to cure faults by detailed forewarnings, which leave on the similarly faulty an impression of fatality that extinguishes hope.
What precedes to the voice follows to the eye, as 000.1 and 100. A, B, C--were they men, you would say that "C" went first, but being letters, things of voice and ear in their original, we say that "A" goes first.
There are many men who, following, made 1 = 1000, being placed at head, become useless cyphers, mere finery for form's sake.
Of the millions that use the pen, how many (query) understand the story of this machine, the action of the slit, eh? I confess, ridiculous as it must appear to those who do understand it, that I have not been able to answer the question off-hand to myself, having only this moment thought of it.
The gentlest form of Death, a Sylphid Death, passed by, beheld a sleeping baby--became, Narcissus-like, enamoured of its own self in the sweet counterfeit, seized it and carried it off as a mirror close by the green Paradise--but the reviving air awakened the babe, and 'twas death that died at the sudden loss.
[Sidenote: THE FRENCH LANGUAGE AND POETRY Feb. 4, 1805]
I cannot admit that any language can be unfit for poetry, or that there is any language in which a divinely inspired architect may not sustain the lofty edifice of verse on its two pillars of sublimity and pathos. Yet I have heard Frenchmen, nay, even Englishmen, assert that of the German, which contains perhaps an hundred passages equal to the--
Und ein Gott ist, ein heiliger Wille lebt, Wie auch der menschliche wanke;--
and I have heard both German and Englishmen (and these, too, men of true feeling and genius, and so many of them that such company of my betters makes me not ashamed to the having myself been guilty of this injustice) assert that the French language is insusceptible of poetry in its higher and purer sense, of poetry which excites emotion not merely creates amusement, which demands continuous admiration, not regular recurrence of conscious surprise, and the effect of which is love and joy. Unfortunately the manners, religion and government of France, and the circumstances of its emergence from the polyarchy of feudal barony, have given a bad taste to the Parisians--so bad a one as doubtless to have mildewed many an opening blossom. I cannot say that I know and can name any one French writer that can be placed among the greater poets, but when I read the inscription over the Chartreuse--