Doth love to dally with fantastic thoughts, And smiling like a sickly Moralist, Finds some resemblance to her own concern In the straws of chance, and things inanimate.[197]
But I cannot truly say that I grieve--I am perplexed--I am sad--and a little thing--a very trifle--would make me weep--but for the death of the baby I have _not_ wept! Oh this strange, strange, strange scene-shifter Death!--that giddies one with insecurity and so unsubstantiates the living things that one has grasped and handled! Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted me a most sublime epitaph. Whether it had any reality I cannot say. Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his sister might die.
A slumber did my spirit seal, I had no human fears; She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force, She neither hears nor sees: Mov'd round in Earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees!
GÖTTINGEN, in der Wondestrasse, April 8, 1799.
It is one of the discomforts of my absence, my dearest Love! that we feel the same calamities at different times--I would fain write words of consolation to you; yet I know that I shall only fan into new activity the pang which was growing dead and dull in your heart. Dear little Being! he had existed to me for so many months only in dreams and reveries, but in them existed and still exists so livelily, so like a real thing, that although I know of his death, yet when I am alone and have been long silent, it seems to me as if I did not understand it. Methinks there is something awful in the thought, what an unknown being one's own infant is to one--a fit of sound--a flash of light--a summer gust that is as it were _created_ in the bosom of the calm air, that rises up we know not how, and goes we know not whither! But we say well; it goes! it is gone! and only in states of society in which the revealing voice of our most inward and abiding nature is no longer listened to (when we sport and juggle with abstract phrases, instead of representing our feelings and ideas), only then we say it _ceases_! I will not believe that it ceases--in this moving, stirring, and harmonious universe--I _cannot_ believe it! Can cold and darkness come from the sun? where the sun is not, there is cold and darkness! But the living God is everywhere, and works everywhere--and where is there room for death? To look back on the life of my baby, how short it seems! but consider it referently to nonexistence, and what a manifold and majestic _Thing_ does it not become? What a multitude of admirable actions, what a multitude of _habits_ of actions it learnt even before it saw the light! and who shall count or conceive the infinity of its thoughts and feelings, its hopes, and fears, and joys, and pains, and desires, and presentiments, from the moment of its birth to the moment when the glass, through which we saw him darkly, was broken--and he became suddenly invisible to us? Out of the Mount that might not be touched, and that burnt with fire, out of darkness, and blackness, and tempest, and with his own Voice, which they who heard entreated that they might not hear it again, the most high God forbade us to use his _name vainly_. And shall we who are Christians, shall we believe that he himself uses his own power vainly? That like a child he builds palaces of mud and clay in the common road, and then he destroys them, as weary of his _pastime_, or leaves them to be trod under by the hoof of Accident? That God works by _general_ laws are to me words without meaning or worse than meaningless--ignorance, and imbecility, and limitation must wish in generals. What and who are these horrible shadows necessity and general law, to which God himself must offer _sacrifices_--hecatombs of sacrifices? I feel a deep conviction that these shadows exist not--they are only the dreams of reasoning pride, that would fain find solutions for all difficulties without faith--that would make the discoveries which lie thick sown in the path of the eternal Future unnecessary; and so conceiting that there is sufficiency and completeness in the narrow present, weakens the presentiment of our wide and ever widening immortality. God works in each for all--most true--but more comprehensively true is it, that he works in all for each. I confess that the more I think, the more I am discontented with the doctrines of Priestley. He builds the whole and sole hope of future existence on the words and miracles of Jesus--yet doubts or denies the future existence of infants--only because according to his own system of materialism he has not discovered how they can be made _conscious_.