[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE" Friday Morning, Dec. 21, 8 o'clock]
How beautiful a circumstance, the improvement of the flower, from the root up to that crown of its life and labours, that bridal-chamber of its beauty and its two-fold love, the nuptial and the parental--the womb, the cradle, and the nursery of the garden!
_Quisque sui faber_--a pretty simile this would make to a young lady producing beauty by moral feeling.
Nature may be personified as the [Greek: polymêchanos erganê], an ever industrious Penelope, for ever unravelling what she has woven, for ever weaving what she has unravelled.
Oh, said I, as I looked at the blue, yellow, green and purple-green sea, with all its hollows and swells, and cut-glass surfaces--oh, what an _ocean_ of lovely forms! And I was vexed, teased that the sentence sounded like a play of words! _That_ it was not--the mind within me was struggling to express the marvellous distinctness and unconfounded personality of each of the million millions of forms, and yet the individual unity in which they subsisted.
A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the _alive_ sea, most interestingly combined with the number of white sea-gulls, that, repeatedly, it seemed as if the foam-spit had taken life and wing and had flown up--the white precisely-same-colour birds rose up so close by the ever-perishing white-water wavehead, that the eye was unable to detect the illusion which the mind delighted to indulge in. O that sky, that soft, blue, mighty arch resting on the mountain or solid sea-like plain--what an awful omneity in unity! I know no other perfect union of the sublime with the beautiful, so that they should be felt, that is, at the same minute, though by different faculties, and yet, each faculty be predisposed, by itself, to receive the specific modifications from the other. To the eye it is an inverted goblet, the inside of a sapphire basin, perfect beauty in shape and colour. To the mind, it is immensity; but even the eye feels as if it were [able] to look through with [a] dim sense of the non-resistance--it is not exactly the feeling given to the organ by solid and limited things, [but] the eye feels that the limitation is in its own power, not in the object. But [hereafter] to pursue this in the manner of the old Hamburg poet [Klopstock].