Poem. Ghost of a mountain--the forms, seizing my body as I passed, became realities--I a ghost, till I had reconquered my substance.
The sopha of sods. Lack-wit and the clock find him at last in the Yorkshire cave, where the waterfall is.
[The reference is, no doubt, to Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy," which was composed at Nether Stowey, in 1798. In a letter addressed to John Wilson of June 5, 1802, Wordsworth discusses and discards the use of the word "lackwit" as an equivalent to "idiot." The "Sopha of Sods" was on Latrigg. In her journal for August, 1800, Dorothy Wordsworth records the making of a seat on Windybrow, a part of Latrigg. Possibly this was the "Sopha of Sods."--_Life of W. Wordsworth_, 1889, i. 268, 403.]
The old stump of the tree, with briar-roses and bramble leaves wreathed round and round--a bramble arch--a foxglove in the centre.
The palm, still faithful to forsaken deserts, an emblem of hope.
The stedfast rainbow in the fast-moving, fast-hurrying hail-mist! What a congregation of images and feelings, of fantastic permanence amidst the rapid change of tempest--quietness the daughter of storm.
[Sidenote: "POEM ON SPIRIT, OR ON SPINOZA"]
I would make a pilgrimage to the deserts of Arabia to find the man who could make me understand how the _one can be many_. Eternal, universal mystery! It seems as if it were impossible, yet it _is_, and it is everywhere! It is indeed a contradiction in _terms_, and only in terms. It is the co-presence of feeling and life, limitless by their very essence, with form by its very essence limited, determinable, definite.
Meditate on trans-substantiation! What a conception of a miracle! Were one a Catholic, what a sublime oration might one not make of it? Perpetual, [Greek: pan]topical, yet offering no violence to the sense, exercising no domination over the free-will--a miracle always existing, yet perceived only by an act of the free-will--the beautiful fuel of the fire of faith--the fire must be pre-existent or it is not fuel, yet it feeds and supports and is necessary to feed and support the fire that converts it into his own nature.
Errors beget opposite errors, for it is our imperfect nature to run into extremes. But this trite, because ever-recurring, truth is not the whole. Alas! those are endangered who have avoided the extremes, as if among the Tartars, in opposition to a faction that had unnaturally lengthened their noses into monstrosity, there should arise another who had cut off theirs flat to the face, Socinians in physiognomy. The few who retained their noses as nature made them and reason dictated would assuredly be persecuted by the noseless party as adherents of the rhinocerotists or monster-nosed men, which is the case of those [Greek: archaspistai] [braves] of the English Church, called Evangelicals. Excess of Calvinism produced Arminianism, and those not in excess must therefore be Calvinists!