glowworms.

5. Sports of infants; their excessive activity, the means being the end. Nature, how lovely a school-mistress!... Children at houses of industry.

6. Infant beholding its new-born sister.

7. Kissing itself in the looking-glass.

8. The Lapland infant seeing the sun.

9. An infant's prayer on its mother's lap. Mother directing a baby's hand. (Hartley's "love to Papa," scrawls pothooks and reads what he meant by them.)

10. The infants of kings and nobles. ("Princess unkissed and foully husbanded!")

11. The souls of infants, a vision (vide Swedenborg).

12. Some tales of an infant.

13. Στοργη. The absurdity of the Darwinian system (instanced by) birds and alligators.

14. The wisdom and graciousness of God in the infancy of the human species—its beauty, long continuance, etc. (Children in the wind—hair floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated trees below which they played. The elder whirling for joy the one in petticoats, a fat baby eddying half-willingly, half by the force of the gust, driven backward, struggling forward—both drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their hymn of joy.) [Letters of S. T. C., 1895, i. 408.]

15. Poor William seeking his mother, in love with her picture, and having that union of beauty and filial affection that the Virgin Mary may be supposed to give.

Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent and severe correction, may be cowed into dullness!

Peculiar, not far-fetched; natural, but not obvious; delicate, not affected; dignified, not swelling; fiery, but not mad; rich in imagery, but not loaded with it—in short, a union of harmony and good sense, of perspicuity and conciseness. Thought is the body of such an ode, enthusiasm the soul, and imagery the drapery.

Dr. Darwin's poetry is nothing but a succession of landscapes or paintings. It arrests the attention too often, and so prevents the rapidity necessary to pathos.

The elder languages were fitter for poetry because they expressed only prominent ideas with clearness, the others but darkly.... Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with Gray's "Bard" and Collins' Odes. The "Bard" once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure. From this cause it is that what I call metaphysical poetry gives me so much delight.

[Compare Lecture vi. 1811-12, Bell & Co., p. 70; and Table Talk, Oct. 23, 1833, Bell & Co., p. 264.]

Poetry which excites us to artificial feelings makes us callous to real ones.

The whale is followed by waves. I would glide down the rivulet of quiet life, a trout.

Australis [Southey] may be compared to an ostrich. He cannot fly, but he has such other qualities that he needs it not.

Mackintosh intertrudes not introduces his beauties.

Snails of intellect who see only by their feelers.

Pygmy minds, measuring others by their own standard, cry What a monster, when they view a man!

Our constitution is to some like cheese—the rotten parts they like the best.

Her eyes sparkled as if they had been cut out of a diamond-quarry in some Golconda of Fairyland, and cast such meaning glances as would have vitrified the flint in a murderer's blunderbuss.

[A task] as difficult as to separate two dew-drops blended together on a bosom of a new-blown rose.

I discovered unprovoked malice in his hard heart, like a huge toad in the centre of a marble rock.