[See _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, Letter cli., ii. 474, 475.]
[Sidenote: PLACES AND PERSONS, Thursday, April 19, 1804]
This is Spain! That is Africa! Now, then, I have seen Africa! &c., &c. O! the power of names to give interest. When I first sate down, with Europe on my left and Africa on my right, both distinctly visible, I felt a quickening of the movements in the blood, but still it felt as a pleasure of _amusement_ rather than of thought or elevation; and at the same time, and gradually winning on the other, the nameless silent forms of nature were working in me, like a tender thought in a man who is hailed merrily by some acquaintance in his work, and answers it in the same tone. This is Africa! That is Europe! There is _division_, sharp boundary, abrupt change! and what are they in nature? Two mountain banks that make a noble river of the interfluent sea, not existing and acting with distinctness and manifoldness indeed, but at once and as one--no division, no change, no antithesis! Of all men I ever knew, Wordsworth himself not excepted, I have the faintest pleasure in things contingent and transitory. I never, except as a forced courtesy of conversation, ask in a stage-coach, Whose house is that? nor receive the least additional pleasure when I receive the answer. Nay, it goes to a disease in me. As I was gazing at a wall in Caernarvon Castle, I wished the guide fifty miles off that was telling me, In this chamber the Black Prince was born (or whoever it was). I am not certain whether I should have seen with any emotion the mulberry-tree of Shakspere. If it were a tree of no notice in itself, I am sure that I should feel by an effort--with self-reproach at the dimness of the feeling; if a striking tree, I fear that the pleasure would be diminished rather than increased, that I should have no unity of feeling, and find in the constant association of Shakspere having planted it an intrusion that prevented me from wholly (as a whole man) losing myself in the flexures of its branches and intertwining of its roots. No doubt there are times and conceivable circumstances in which the contrary would be true, in which the thought that under this rock by the sea-shore I know that Giordano Bruno hid himself from the pursuit of the enraged priesthood, and overcome with the power and sublimity of the truths for which they sought his life, thought his life therefore given him that he might bear witness to the truths, and _morti ultra occurrens_, returned and surrendered himself! So, here, on this bank Milton used to lie, in late May, when a young man, and familiar with all its primroses, made them yet dearer than their dear selves, by that sweetest line in the Lycidas, "And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies:" or from this spot the immortal deer-stealer, on his escape from Warwickshire, had the first view of London, and asked himself, And what am I to do there? At certain times, uncalled and sudden, subject to no bidding of my own or others, these thoughts would come upon me like a storm, and fill the place with something more than nature. But these are not contingent or transitory, they are nature, even as the elements are nature--yea, more to the human mind, for the mind has the power of abstracting all agency from the former and considering [them] as mere effects and instruments. But a Shakspere, a Milton, a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure _action_, defecated of all that is material and passive. And the great moments that formed them--it is a kind of impiety against a voice within us, not to regard them as predestined, and therefore things of now, for ever, and which were always. But it degrades the sacred feeling, and is to it what stupid superstition is to enthusiastic religion, when a man makes a pilgrimage to see a great man's shin-bone found unmouldered in his coffin. Perhaps the matter stands thus. I could feel amused by these things, and should be, if there had not been connected with the great name upon which the amusement wholly depends a higher and deeper pleasure, that will [not] endure the co-presence of so mean a companion; while the mass of mankind, whether from nature or (as I fervently hope) from error of rearing and the worldliness of their after-pursuits, are rarely susceptible of any other pleasures than those of _amusement_, gratification of curiosity, novelty, surprise, wonderment, from the glaring, the harshly-contrasted, the odd, the accidental, and find the reading of the _Paradise Lost_ a task somewhat alleviated by a few entertaining incidents, such as the pandemonium and self-endwarfment of the devils, the fool's paradise and the transformation of the infernal court into serpents and of their intended applauses into hisses.