Though I have said that duty is a consolation, I have not affirmed that the scar of the wound of disappointed love and insulted, betrayed fidelity would be removed in _this_ life. No! it will not--nay, the very duty must for ever keep alive feelings the appropriate objects of which are indeed in another world; but yet our human nature cannot avoid at times the connection of those feelings with their original or their first forms and objects; and so far, therefore, from removing the scar, will often and often make the wound open and bleed afresh. But, still, we know that the feeling is not objectless, that the counterfeit has a correspondent genuine, and this is the comfort.
_Canzone XVIII. fra le Rime di Dante_ is a poem of wild and interesting images, intended as an enigma, and to me an enigma it remains, spite of all my efforts. Yet it deserves transcription and translation. A.D. 1806 [? 1807].
"Tre donne intorno al cuor mi son venute," &c.
[After the four first lines the handwriting is that of my old, dear, and honoured friend, Mr. Wade, of Bristol.--S. T. C.]
_Ramsgate, Sept. 2nd, 1819._--I _begin_ to understand the above poem, after an interval from 1805, during which no year passed in which I did not reperuse, I might say construe, parse, and spell it, twelve times at least--such a fascination had it, spite of its obscurity! It affords a good instance, by the bye, of that soul of _universal_ significance in a true poet's composition, in addition to the specific meaning.
Great minds can and do create the taste of the age, and one of the contingent causes which warp the taste of nations and ages is, that men of genius in part yield to it, and in part are acted on by the taste of the age.
Common minds may be compared to the component drops of the stream of life--men of genius to the large and small bubbles. What if they break? they are still as good as the rest--drops of water.
In youth our happiness is hope; in age the recollection of the hopes of youth. What else can there be?--for the substantial mind, for the _I_, what else can there be? Pleasure? Fruition? Filter hope and memory from pleasure, and the more entire the fruition the more is it the death of the _I_. A neutral product results that may exist for others, but no longer for itself--a coke or a slag. To make the object one with us, we must become one with the object--_ergo, an_ object. _Ergo_, the object must be itself a subject--partially a favourite dog, principally a friend, wholly God, _the_ Friend. God is Love--that is, an object that is absolutely subject (God is a spirit), but a subject that for ever condescends to become the object for those that meet Him subjectively. [As in the] Eucharist, [He is] verily and truly present to the Faithful, neither [by a] _trans_ nor _con_, but [by] _substantiation_.