Читать книгу Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart онлайн

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——Him, serve and fear!

Of other creatures, as Him pleases best

Wherever placed, let Him dispose; joy thou

In what he gives to thee, this Paradise

And thy fair Eve!

And again:

——Love refines

The thoughts, and heart enlarges; hath his seat

In reason, and is judicious: is the scale

By which to Heavenly love thou may’st ascend!

None of the playing sparkle in this love, which belongs to the flame of my sea-coal fire that is now dancing, lively as a cricket. But on looking about my garret chamber, I can see nothing that resembles the archangel Raphael, or “thy fair Eve.”

There is a degree of moisture about the sea-coal flame, which with the most earnest of my musing, I find it impossible to attach to that idea of a waving sparkling heart which my fire suggests. A damp heart must be a foul thing to be sure. But whoever heard of one?

Wordsworth somewhere in the Excursion says:

The good die first,

And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust

Burn to the socket!

What, in the name of Rydal Mount, is a dry heart? A dusty one, I can conceive of: a bachelor’s heart must be somewhat dusty, as he nears the sixtieth summer of his pilgrimage—and hung over with cobwebs, in which sit such watchful gray old spiders as avarice, and selfishness, forever on the lookout for such bottle-green flies as lust.