Spite of the decided approbation which my plan of delivering lectures has received from several judicious and highly respectable individuals, it is still too histrionic, too much like a retail dealer in instruction and pastime, not to be depressing. If the duty of living were not far more awful to my conscience than life itself is agreeable to my feelings, I should sink under it. But, getting nothing by my publications, which I have not the power of making estimable by the public without loss of self-estimation, what can I do? The few who have won the present age, while they have secured the praise of posterity, as Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Southey, Lord Byron, etc., have been in happier circumstances. And lecturing is the only means by which I can enable myself to go on at all with the great philosophical work to which the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years of my life have been devoted. Poetry is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum. Yet sometimes, spite of myself, I cannot help bursting out into the affecting exclamation of our Spenser (his "wine" and "ivy garland" interpreted as competence and joyous circumstances):--
"Thou kenn'st not, Percy, how the rhyme should cage! Oh, if my temples were bedewed with wine, And girt with garlands of wild ivy-twine, How I could rear the Muse on stately stage! And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine, With queen'd Bellona in her equipage! But ah, my courage cools ere it be warm!"[170]
But God's will be done. To feel the full force of the Christian religion it is, perhaps, necessary for many tempers that they should first be made to feel, experimentally, the hollowness of human friendship, the presumptuous emptiness of human hopes. I find more substantial comfort now in pious George Herbert's "Temple," which I used to read to amuse myself with his quaintness, in short, only to laugh at, than in all the poetry since the poems of Milton. If you have not read Herbert, I can recommend the book to you confidently. The poem entitled "The Flower" is especially affecting; and, to me, such a phrase as "and relish versing" expresses a sincerity, a reality, which I would unwillingly exchange for the more dignified "and once more love the Muse," etc. And so, with many other of Herbert's homely phrases.