A little instruction in the elements of chartography--a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topograp...hical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map--would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within, That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of ...>Glynn Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore When length was failure, and when breadth was but bitterness sore, And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain,-- Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face The vast sweet visage of space.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit t...o be a much better thing than experience, which they call coldness. They are but half mistaken; for though spirit without experience is dangerous, experience without spirit is languid and defective.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization. It... makes the meanest of us sacred--it installs the poet in his immortality, and lifts him to the skies. Death is the greatest assayer of the sterling ore of talent. At his touch the drossy particles fall off, the irritable, the personal, the gross, and mingle with the dust--the finer and more ethereal part mounts with winged spirit to watch over our latest memory, and protect our bones from insult. We consign the least worthy qualities to oblivion, and cherish the nobler and imperishable nature with double pride and fondness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that... endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Formerly they had a heaven adorned with a vast wealth of thoughts and imagery. The meaning of all that is, hung on the thread of l...ight by which it was linked to that heaven. Instead of dwelling in this world's presence, men looked beyond it, following this thread to an other-worldly presence, so to speak. The eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world; and it has taken a long time before the lucidity which only heavenly things used to have could penetrate the dullness and confusion in which the sense of worldly things was enveloped, and so make attention to the here and now as such, attention to what has been called 'experience', an interesting and valid enterprise. Now we seem to need just the opposite; sense is so fast rooted in earthly things that it requires just as much force to raise it. The Spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »