Il Penseroso

“ Now it was that he, in his often-quoted words written to the young Deodati, doomed to an early death, was meditating ‘an immortality of fame,’ letting his wings grow and preparing to fly. But dreaming though he ever was of things to come, none the less, it was at Horton he composed Comus, Lycidas, L’Allegro, and Il Penseroso, poems which enable us half sadly to realize how much went and how much was sacrificed to make the author of Paradise Lost. ”

“ Double number. .40 Lays of Ancient Rome and other Poems (Atkinson) . .20 Speeches on Copyright, and Lincoln's Address at Cooper Union (Pittenger) . .20 Milton's L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas (Buck) . .20 Paradise Lost. Books I and II (Stephens) . .20 Old Testament Narratives (Baldwin) . .20 Poe's Selected Poems and Tales (Stott) . .20 Pope's Homer's Iliad. Books, I, VI, XXII, XXIV .20 Rape of the Lock, and Essay on Man (Van Dyke) . ”

“ Life admits of no lookers-on. Speak to me frankly, as you used to do. Your face retains its old melancholy expression. Are you not happy?"
KENELM.—"Happy, as mortals go, I ought to be. I do not think I am unhappy. If my temper be melancholic, melancholy has a happiness of its own. Milton shows that there are as many charms in life to be found on the /Penseroso/ side of it as there are on the /Allegro/."
LADY GLENALVON.—"Kenelm, you saved the life of my poor son, and when, later, he was taken from me, I felt as if he had commended you to my care. ”

“ Now, the Lord, in the beginning of our temporal existence on the earth, placed within us this spirit of life and light, and if we would be actuated by that spirit and walk in the path that leads to the Father's presence, we would get so near to him that we would learn of him personally. But all have gone astray, and when we take up the history of mankind and view it in the various ages and among the various races of men, we find that they have all been prone to do evil; that the great bulk of the human family, at any rate, have loved darkness rather than light ”

“ He has presented to us a great many things that are true and profitable for us to reflect upon. I always take pleasure in listening to my brethren when they say something. I take pleasure in reflecting upon the ideas which they present and in carrying them to their legitimate conclusion. When we hear a truth presented to us by the Spirit of the Lord, it is of this nature; that we are not only instructed in that particular truth for the time being ”

“ All day he was weary; all night he was wakeful. He was estranged from his body. He was distressed by a sense of detachment from the things about him, by a curious intimation of unreality in everything he experienced. And with that went this levity of conscience, a heaviness of soul and a levity of conscience, that could make him talk as though the Creeds did not matter—as though nothing mattered.... ”

“ What to the purely utilitarian conscience is the good of now and of to-day, the same conscience, awakened to a greater light, repudiates as evil. The imaginative vision of the poet, in which truth expresses itself, sensuous and finite, and yet pregnant of its infinity, dissolves like mist in the sun in the clearness of the logical concept, and is then restored in its right by the historical and critical consciousness to which that truth is poetry. ”

“ Mind, and conservative psyche, and the incalculable soul, these three are a trinity of powers in every human being. But there is something even beyond these. It is the individual in his pure singleness, in his totality of consciousness, in his oneness of being: the Holy Ghost which is with us after our Pentecost, and which we may not deny. ”

“ But my intellect is of no use to me when my heart is breaking. I must get down on my knees and own that I am less than nothing, seek God, not joy; consent to suffer, not cry for relief. And how transcendently good He is when He brings me down to that low place and there shows me that that self-renouncing, self-despairing spot is just the one where He will stoop to meet me! ”

“ Here, what I want is known to me by virtue of its contrast with what another wants, and this contrast, rendering relatively clear my consciousness of my own intent, tends, by its very existence, and by reason of the blindness of my passion, to inflame the opposition. In a more benign, but also, as I judge, in even a more primitive form, appears the simple contrast of ego and non-ego in all my imitative, or explicitly plastic and socially submissive, states of consciousness. ”

“ He was weeping over the last few weeks, over the wretched life he had been leading, and his subdued crying was filled with deep lamentation, filled with regret and repentance, yet his eyes did not turn from the great beauty and glory around him. It seemed to him that now, for the first time, he grasped that which all his life he had not known. He who creates such a wealth of beauty and splendour cannot be merely austere and harsh. And in his dejection he was consoled by the hope that God was good, merciful and loving. ”

“ But if we succeed in deceiving others, it is harder in good faith to delude ourselves. Whereas, from a height, through the blurred glass of faith, the little white light, beyond the edge of the visible world, by which we are enabled sincerely to see what we do not see brings us the surest realization of human hope.
And, kind readers, if any one of you ever has any doubts, even though you sit in your armchair at home, follow the advice of the guide on the Venetian lagoon: "Half close your eyes——" and you will see Giambolo. ”

“ SPLURGE SPLUTTER have the heart or tongue to drop his pearls of eloquence to the swine of empty pews? And how dreadful for the gifted soprano, Miss SCREECH, to tune her melodious voice to earless aisles! And then it is so easy to "set" examples by sitting in soft pews, doing to church should be a matter of conscience. Every body not a dolt admits conscience to be a good thing, though a thing every body cannot boast of possessing. I like people of conscience—that is, I should like them if I knew any. ”

“ For if he remains in any quarter, when he gets an opportunity, he suggests thoughts to men's hearts; and they, not knowing whence they come, believe the suggestions of the demons, as if they were the perceptions of their own souls. Thus they suggest to some to follow pleasure by occasion of bodily necessity; they excuse the passionateness of others by excess of gall; they colour over the madness of others by the vehemence of melancholy ”

“ There, in bold relief, is the deep penetrative mind—one that has power to read the masses as they pass before her mental vision. Her's is the heart that opens wide to the one crushed and broken by the uncharitable sect called "the world." ”

“ The task I set myself to acquire, constant calmness of mind, arose less from a desire to relieve my unhappiness than from a persuasion how undignified, unworthy, and injurious, was a temper opposite to this, I mean a continued state of excitement and anxiety. An excited mind ceases to reason; carried away by a resistless torrent of wild ideas, it forms for itself a sort of mad logic, full of anger and malignity; it is in a state at once as absolutely unphilosophical as it is unchristian. ”

“ Mill, at any rate, must find a basis in fact, and for him the ultimate facts must be feelings. The reality at least of a feeling is undeniable. The Penser c'est sentir, or the doctrine that all 'ideas' are transformed sensations is his starting-point. ”

“ I need not describe the pleasure I felt; it appeared as if we were no longer separated; and we discoursed in the silent intercourse of the spirit, which, when every other medium is cut off, in the least look, gesture, or signal of any kind, can make itself comprehended and felt. ”

“ Some temperaments of a peculiarly sensitive order will fall into the clairvoyant condition while engaged in thought. The thread of thought is broken, and there appears a vision wholly unconnected with the subject but a moment ago in the mind. It would appear that the soul of the sensitive, while probing the depths of its inner consciousness, suddenly comes into contact with the thin partition which may be said to divide the outer world of thought and doubt from the inner world of intuition and direct perception, and, breaking through, emerges into the light beyond. ”

“ The naturalist laughed scornfully; the veins swelled angrily in Pentaur’s forehead, and his voice took a threatening tone as he asked:
“And do you believe that your finger and your eyes have lighted on the truth, when the noblest souls have striven in vain for thousands of years to find it out? You descend beneath the level of human understanding by madly wallowing in the mire; and the more clearly you are convinced that you have seized the truth, the more utterly you are involved in the toils of a miserable delusion.” ”

“ It really was true—as true as tables and chairs—that there was a life after this, and that personality survived. Never again could he doubt that for one instant, even in the gloomiest mood. So long as a man walks by faith, by the acceptance of authority, human or Divine, there is always psychologically possible the assertion of self, the instinct that what one has not personally experienced may just conceivably be untrue. ”

“ And if it should be asked,—How comes it that we are so liable to be affected by this dulness of spirit and of general habit?—we have to reply that it is because of the sensitiveness of the human soul to surrounding influences.
It is because our souls are so receptive, so imitative, and in consequence so easily perverted, darkened, blinded, or misled. I suppose we are all of us conscious of this sensitiveness of the moral and spiritual nature; we should all say, if questioned, that we are quite aware of it, and that no one would dispute it. ”

“ It is intimated that human minds, as they uttered themselves to their fellows, and human speech in that utterance, were to prove capable of taking fire, so as to brighten and burn with the truth and power of God's Spirit. Such was the kind of preaching that was set a-going at Pentecost, and by it the world was to be won. ”

“ Spirit ministers to spirit; and when the spirit goes out of the body that spirit can see other spirits, beings of the same character and nature, and we shall find when we have emerged from this body, that we will be in the company of a great many persons like ourselves ”

“ The great service which a false psychology has rendered to the cause of necessity is easily seen. For having identified an act of the will with a state of the sensibility, which is universally conceived to be necessitated, the necessitarian is delivered from more than half his labours. By merging a phenomenon or manifestation of the will in a state of the sensibility, it seems to lose its own characteristic, which is incompatible with the scheme of necessity, and to assume the characteristic of feeling, which is perfectly reconcilable with it ”

“ That spirit exists wherever there is a particle of material substance; that spirit is round about it, and in it, and through it; but that we may comprehend it, it must be manifested through organisms. The perfection of its manifestation is in the personality of a being called God. That is a person who has passed through all the gradations of being, and who contains within Himself the fullness, manifested and expressed, of this divine spirit which is called God. ”

“ O, deluded heart!—ever bartering away substance for shadow!"
I grow philosophic sometimes. Thought will, now and then, take up a passing incident, and extract the moral. But how little the wiser are we for moralizing! we look into the mirror of truth, and see ourselves—then turn away, and forget what manner of men we are. ”

“ When temptations are presented, the understanding opposes them, but the carnal mind indulges them, and there is a contest between the judgment, and the will, and we hesitate which to obey, till the warning bell of conscience rings through the soul, and gives distinct notice of his awful recognition; and when we turn away recklessly from his faithful admonitions, we hear low mutterings of wrath stealing along the avenues, and the quick sound of writing-pens in the recording office, causing every denizen of the mental palace to tremble.
There is a good conscience, and an evil conscience. ”

“ The rise and fall of the balance of cheerfulness and despair maintained their addled brains in a totally new fluctuation of longing and peace of soul. And in that period psychology served not only to cast suspicion on everything human but to wound and scourge it, to crucify it. ”

“ The psychologist tells us of a state, in which the affections and images of the mind become so dominant and overpowering, that they press into their service the outward senses, and make them give tangible shape to the inward imagining. Who shall measure what an all-pervading Spirit may do with these capabilities of our mortality, or the ways in which He may encourage the desponding souls of the desolate? If the poor forgotten slave believes that Jesus hath appeared and spoken to him, who shall contradict him? ”

“ Here in the darkness, in the sorrow, in the trial, in the pain, in the adversity, we have to learn what is right and distinguish it from what is wrong, and lay hold of right and truth and learn to live it. ”

“ When I consider his Wisdom, I attribute nothing at all to my own, but I believe all Things are done by him righteously and justly, although they may seem to human Sense absurd or unjust. When I animadvert on his Goodness, I see nothing in myself that I do not owe to free Grace, and I think there is no Sin so great, but he is willing to forgive to a true Penitent, nor nothing but what he will freely bestow on him that asks in Faith. ”