as lighted up by sunbeams from above.
Here is Lord Byron connecting, in the portrait of some poor melodramatic
hero possibly, some noble quality of courage or perseverance with scorn
the most puerile and senseless. Prone enough is poor degraded human
nature to find something grand in scorn; but, after this arbitrary
combination of Lord Byron's, never again does the poor man think of
scorn but it suggests to him moral greatness, nor think of greatness but
it suggests scorn as its indispensable condition.

Wordsworth is always recording phenomena as they are enjoyed; Coleridge
as they reconcile themselves with opposing or conflicting phenomena.

W. W.'s social philosophy is surely shallow. It is true the man who has
a shallow philosophy under the guidance of Christianity has a profound
philosophy. But this apart, such truths as 'He who made the creature
will allow for his frailties,' etc., are commonplace.

* * * * *

_Invention as a Characteristic of Poets._--I happened this evening
(Saturday, August 3rd, '44) to be saying of W. W. to myself: 'No poet is
so free from all cases like this, viz., where all the feelings and
spontaneous thoughts which they have accumulated coming to an end, and
yet the case seeming to require more to finish it, or bring it round,
like a peal of church bells, they are forced to invent, and form
descants on raptures never really felt. Suddenly this suggested that
invention, therefore, so far from being a differential quality of
poetry, was, in fact, the polar opposite, spontaneousness being the true
quality.

_Tragedy._--I believe it is a very useful thing to let young persons
cultivate their kind feelings by repeated indulgences. Thus my children
often asked when anything was to be paid or given to any person, that
they might have the satisfaction of giving it. So I see clearly that
young boys or girls allowed to carry abroad their infant brothers and
sisters, when the little creature feels and manifests a real dependence
upon them in every act and movement, which _matre praesente_ they would
not have done, which again seen and felt calls out every latent goodness
of the elder child's heart. So again (here I have clipped out the case).
However, feeding rabbits, but above all the action upon women's hearts
in the enormous expansion given by the relation to their own children,
develops a feeling of tenderness that afterwards sets the model for the
world,