I wielded a poetic wand, and had but to touch
a phenomenon to make it render up to me its moral significance. Every
landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates
into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each
detail. True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and
seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able at most
to attain as a final result. The soul of nature is divined by the poet;
the man of science, only serves to accumulate materials for its
demonstration.
November 6, 1852.--I am capable of all the passions, for I bear them all
within me. Like a tamer of wild beasts, I keep them caged and lassoed,
but I sometimes hear them growling. I have stifled more than one nascent
love. Why? Because with that prophetic certainty which belongs to moral
intuition, I felt it lacking in true life, and less durable than myself.
I choked it down in the name of the supreme affection to come. The loves
of sense, of imagination, of sentiment, I have seen through and rejected
them all; I sought the love which springs from the central profundities
of being. And I still believe in it. I will have none of those passions
of straw which dazzle, burn up, and wither; I invoke, I await, and I
hope for the love which is great, pure and earnest, which lives and
works in all the fibres and through all the powers of the soul.
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