For some remarks on the character of this publication, the Editor begs to refer the Reader to the Preface to the third volume of these Remains. That volume and the present are expressly connected together as one work.
The various materials arranged in the following pages were preserved, and kindly placed in the Editor's hands, by Mr. Southey, Mr. Green, Mr. Gillman, Mr. Alfred Elwyn of Philadelphia, United States, Mr. Money, Mr. Hartley Coleridge, and the Rev. Edward Coleridge; and to those gentlemen the Editor's best acknowledgments are due.
Lincoln's Inn,
9th May, 1839. Contents / Index
very true that we are always in the presence of God; yet methinks that they who converse with him in prayer are in his presence after a more particular manner; for they are seeing then that he sees them; whereas others may, perhaps, remain some days in his presence, yet without remembering that he looks upon them. A very pretty and sweet remark: truth in new feminine beauty!
In fine.
How incomparably educated was Teresa for a mystic saint, a mother of transports and fusions of spirit! - A woman;
- Of rank, and reared delicately;
- A Spanish lady;
- With very pious parents and sisters;
- Accustomed in early childhood to read "with most believing heart" all the legends of saints, martyrs, Spanish martyrs, who fought against the Moors;
- In the habit of privately (without the knowledge of the superstitious Father) reading books of chivalry to her mother, and then all night to herself.
- Then her Spanish sweet-hearting, doubtless in the true Oroondates style—and with perfect innocence, as far as appears; and this giving of audience to a dying swain through a grated window, on having received a lover's messages of flames and despair, with her aversion at fifteen or sixteen years of age to shut herself up for ever in a strict nunnery, appear to have been those mortal sins, of which she accuses herself, added, perhaps to a few warm fancies of earthly love;
- A frame of exquisite sensibility by nature, rendered more so by a burning fever, which no doubt had some effect upon her brain, as she was from that time subject to frequent fainting fits and deliquia:
- Frightened at her Uncle's, by reading to him Dante's books of Hell and Judgment, she confesses that she at length resolved on nunhood because she thought it could not be much worse than Purgatory— and that purgatory here was a cheap expiation for Hell for ever;
- Combine these (and I have proceeded no further than the eleventh page of her life) and think, how impossible it was, but that such a creature, so innocent, and of an imagination so heated, and so well peopled should often mistake the first not painful, and in such a frame, often pleasurable approaches to deliquium for divine raptures; and join the instincts of nature acting in the body of a mind unconscious of them, in the keenly sensitive body of a mind so loving and so innocent, and what remains to be solved which the stupidity of most and the roguery of a few would not simply explain?
- One source it is almost criminal to have forgotten, and which p. 12. of the first Part brought back to my recollection; I mean, the effects—so super-sensual that they may easily and most venially pass for supernatural, so very glorious to human nature that, though in truth they are humanity itself in the contradistinguishing sense of that awful word, it is yet no wonder that, conscious of the sore weaknesses united in one person with this one nobler nature we attribute them to a divinity out of us, (a mistake of the sensuous imagination in its misapplication of space and place, rather than a misnomer of the thing itself, for it is verily Greek: ho theÒs en haemin ho oikeios theÓs,) the effects, I mean, of the moral force after conquest, the state of the whole being after the victorious struggle, in which the will has preserved its perfect freedom by a vehement energy of perfect obedience to the pure or practical reason, or conscience. Thence flows in upon and fills the soul that peace which passeth understanding, a state affronted and degraded by the name of pleasure, injured and mis-represented even by that of happiness, the very corner stone of that morality which cannot even in thought be distinguished from religion, and which seems to mean religion as long as the instinctive craving, dim and dark though it may be, of the moral sense after this unknown state (known only by the bitterness where it is not) shall remain in human nature! Under all forms of positive or philosophic religion, it has developed itself, too glorious an attribute of man to be confined to any name or sect; but which, it is but truth and historical fact to say, is more especially fostered and favoured by Christianity; and its frequent appearance even under the most selfish and unchristian forms of Christianity is a stronger evidence of the divinity of that religion, than all the miracles of Brahma and Veeshnou could afford, even though they were supported with tenfold the judicial evidence of the Gospel miracles2.
Footnote 1: The works of the Holy Mother St. Teresa of Jesus Foundress of the Reformation of the Discalced Carmelites. Divided into two parts. Translated into English. MDCLXXV. Ed.
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Footnote 2: London 1685.
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