The beautifully _white_ sails of the Mediterranean, so carefully, when in port, put up into clean bags; and the interesting circumstance of the Spéronara's sailing without a compass--by an obscure sense of time.
So far from deeming it, in a religious point of view, criminal to spread doubts of God, immortality and virtue (that 3 = 1) in the minds of individuals, I seem to see in it a duty--lest men by taking the _words_ for granted never attain the feeling or the true _faith_. They only forbear, that is, even to suspect that the idea is erroneous or the communicators deceivers, but do not _believe_ the idea itself. Whereas to _doubt_ has more of faith, nay even to disbelieve, than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting-trotters.
The Holy Ghost, say the harmonists, left all the solecisms, Hebraisms, and low Judaic prejudices as evidences of the credibility of the Apostles. So, too, the Theophneusty left Cottle his Bristolisms, not to take away the credit from him and give it to the Muses.
His fine mind met vice and vicious thoughts by accident only, as a poet running through terminations in the heat of composing a rhyme-poem on the purest and best subjects, startles and half-vexedly turns away from a foul or impure word.
The gracious promises and sweetnesses and aids of religion are alarming and distressful to a trifling, light, fluttering gay child of fashion and vanity, as its threats and reproaches and warnings--as a little bird which fears as much when you come to give it food as when you come with a desire to kill or imprison it.
That is a striking legend of Caracciolo and his floating corse, that came to ask the King of Naples' pardon.
Final causes answer to why? not to how? and who ever supposed that they did?
O those crinkled, ever-varying circles which the moonlight makes in the not calm, yet not wavy sea! Quarantine, Malta, Saturday, Nov. 10, 1804.
[Sidenote: THE CREATIVE POWER OF WORDS AND IMAGES]
Hard to express that sense of the analogy or likeness of a thing which enables a symbol to represent it so that we think of the thing itself, yet knowing that the thing is not present to us. Surely on this universal fact of words and images depends, by more or less mediations, the imitation, instead of the _copy_ which is illustrated, in very nature Shaksperianised--that Proteus essence that could assume the very form, but yet known and felt not to be the thing by that difference of the substance which made every atom of the form another thing, that likeness not identity--an exact web, every line of direction miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk.