text,updated_at,metaphor,created_at,context,theme,reviewed_on,dictionary,comments,provenance,id,work_id
"His emotion seemed to communicate itself, with an electrical rapidity, to my heart. My tongue faltered while I made some answer. I said, I had been seeking relief from the heat of the weather, in the bath. He heard my explanation in silence: and, after a moment's pause, passed into his own room, and shut himself in. I hastened to my chamber.
A different observer might have found in these circumstances no food for his suspicion or his wonder. To me, however, they suggested vague and tumultuous ideas.
(Part I, chapter 8, p. 296)",2009-09-14 19:44:28 UTC,"""His emotion seemed to communicate itself, with an electrical rapidity, to my heart.""",2003-07-16 00:00:00 UTC,Late night encounter with Welbeck,"",2007-06-26,"","•Welback and Mervyn are reminiscent of Caleb and Falkland, although the sympathy of the latter two is described as ""magnetic.""",Reading,15720,5925
"The saftey of Eliza was the object that now occupied my cares. To have slept, after her example, had been most proper, but my uncertainty with regard to her fate, and my desire to conduct her to some other home, kept my thoughts in perpetual motion. I waited with impatience tille she shoudl awake and allow me to consult with her on plans for futurity.
(Part II, chapter 8, p. 484)",2009-09-14 19:44:47 UTC,"Thoughts may be kept in ""perpetual motion""",2003-07-21 00:00:00 UTC,Mervyn has buried Eliza's sister,"",,"",•Usage,Reading,15825,5960
"On this occasion all my wariness forsook me. I cannot explain why my perplexity and the trouble of my tho'ts were greater upon this than upon similar occasions. However it be, I was incapable of speaking, and fixed my eyes upon the floor. A sort of electrical sympathy pervaded my companion, and terror and anguish were strongly manifested in the glances which she sometimes stole at me. We seemed fully to understand each other with the aid of words.
(Part II, chapter 17, p. 569-70)",2011-04-15 16:24:00 UTC,"""A sort of electrical sympathy pervaded my companion, and terror and anguish were strongly manifested in the glances which she sometimes stole at me.""",2003-07-21 00:00:00 UTC,"","",,"","Mervyn visits the wife of Amos Watson
•See the previous ""Emotion is communicated to the heart with electrical rapidity"" that characterizes Mervyn and Welbeck's relationship. On page 296. I have already noted that in Godwin's Caleb Williams sympathy is magnetic.",Reading,15844,5960
"Monticello, March 14, 1820. Dear Sir, A continuation of poor health makes me an irregular correspondent. I am, therefore, your debtor for the two letters of January 20th and February 21st. It was after you left Europe that Dugald Stewart, concerning whom you inquire, and Lord Dare, second son of the Marquis of Lansdowne, came to Paris. They brought me a letter from Lord Wycombe, whom you knew. I became immediately intimate with Stewart, calling mutually on each other and almost daily, during their stay at Paris, which was of some months. Lord Dare was a young man of imagination, with occasional flashes indicating deep penetration, but of much caprice, and little judgment. He has been long dead, and the family title is now, I believe, in the third son, who has shown in Parliament talents of a superior order. Stewart is a great man, and among the most honest living. I have heard nothing of his dying at top, as you suppose. Mr. Ticknor, however, can give you the best information on that subject, as he must have heard particularly of him when in Edinburgh, although I believe he did not see him. I have understood he was then in London superintending the publication of a new work. I consider him and Tracy as the ablest metaphysicians living; by which I mean investigators of the thinking faculty of man. Stewart seems to have given its natural history from facts and observations; Tracy its modes of action and deduction, which he calls Logic and Ideology; and Cabanis, in his Physique et Morale de l'Homme, has investigated anatomically, and most ingeniously, the particular organs in the human structure which may most probably exercise that faculty. And they ask why may not the mode of action called thought, have been given to a material organ of peculiar structure, as that of magnetism is to the needle, or of elasticity to the spring by a particular manipulation of the steel. They observe that on ignition of the needle or spring, their magnetism and elasticity cease. So on dissolution of the material organ by death, its action of thought may cease also, and that nobody supposes that the magnetism or elasticity retire to hold a substantive and distinct existence. These were qualities only of particular conformations of matter; change the conformation, and its qualities change also. Mr. Locke, you know, and other materialists, have charged with blasphemy the spiritualists who have denied the Creator the power of endowing certain forms of matter with the faculty of thought. These, however, are speculations and subtleties in which, for my own part, I have little indulged myself. When I meet with a proposition beyond finite comprehension, I abandon it as I do a weight which human strength cannot lift, and I think ignorance, in these cases, is truly the softest pillow on which I can lay my head. Were it necessary, however, to form an opinion, I confess I should, with Mr. Locke, prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion. These are things which you and I may perhaps know ere long. We have so lived as to fear neither horn of the dilemma. We have, willingly, done injury to no man; and have done for our country the good which has fallen in our way, so far as commensurate with the faculties given us. That we have not done more than we could, cannot be imputed to us as a crime before any tribunal. I look, therefore, to the crisis, as I am sure you also do, as one ""qui summum nec metuit diem nec optat."" In the meantime be our last as cordial as were our first affections.",2009-11-30 16:01:07 UTC,"""And they [Stewart, Tracy, Cabanis] ask why may not the mode of action called thought, have been given to a material organ of peculiar structure, as that of magnetism is to the needle, or of elasticity to the spring by a particular manipulation of the steel.""",2009-01-21 00:00:00 UTC,"",Magnetism,2009-11-30,"","",Reading,17211,6475
"They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; — must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, — how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions, — these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, — this he shall hear and promulgate.
(p. 73)",2010-03-31 21:45:23 UTC,"""But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; — must relinquish display and immediate fame.""",2010-03-31 21:45:23 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,17770,6692
"Mason had more than once caught the old Astronomer watching Susannah with a focus'd Patience he recogniz'd from the Sector Room...as if waiting for a sudden shift in the sky of Passion, like that headlong change in Star Position that had led him to the discovery of the Aberration of Light,-- waiting for his Heart to leap again the way it had then, after Night upon Night of watching a little Ellipse, a copy in miniature of how the Earth was traveling in its own Orbit, enacted by London's own Zenith-star, Caput Draconis, the Dragon's Head, looking for the Star's Parallax, as had been Dr. Hooke before him. When the Star inexplicably appear'd to be moving, it took him some time to understand and explain the apparent Disorder of the Heavens he was observing. ""I thought 'twas meself,--all the Coffee and Tobacco, driving me unreliable."" He also saw the Time a Great Finger reaching in from the Distance, pausing at Draco and,-- gently for a Finger of its size, stirring up into a small Vortex of Stars there.
(pp. 188-9)",2010-11-08 16:04:37 UTC,"""Mason had more than once caught the old Astronomer watching Susannah with a focus'd Patience he recogniz'd from the Sector Room...as if waiting for a sudden shift in the sky of Passion, like that headlong change in Star Position that had led him to the discovery of the Aberration of Light,-- waiting for his Heart to leap again the way it had then, after Night upon Night of watching a little Ellipse, a copy in miniature of how the Earth was traveling in its own Orbit, enacted by London's own Zenith-star, Caput Draconis, the Dragon's Head, looking for the Star's Parallax, as had been Dr. Hooke before him.""",2010-11-08 16:04:37 UTC,Chapter 18,"",,"","",Reading,18009,6767
"How might I speak of my true ""Church,"" the planet-wide Syncretism, among the Deistick, the Oriental, the Kabbalist, and the Savage, that is to be,-- The Promise of Man, the redemptive Point, ever at our God-horizon, toward which all Faiths, true and delusional, must alike converge! Instead, I can only mumble and blurt, before the radiance of these young Pietists, something about being between preferments at the moment, so askew in my thoughts that Ive forgotten my new Commission, and indeed the Purpose of my Journey,-- even using ""interprebendary"" again, after promising a Certain Deity that I would refrain. But her innocent attention has reach'd unto the dead Vacuum ever at the bottom of my soul,-- humiliation absolute.
(p. 356)",2010-11-08 16:33:34 UTC,"""But her innocent attention has reach'd unto the dead Vacuum ever at the bottom of my soul,-- humiliation absolute.""",2010-11-08 16:33:34 UTC,Chapter 35,"",,"","",Reading,18013,6767
"258.
The spirals around the galactic core, the coin of hair over the drain, the mind looking down into itself--each formed by a hole it just barely avoids falling into.
(p. 54)",2011-06-03 19:54:43 UTC,"""The spirals around the galactic core, the coin of hair over the drain, the mind looking down into itself--each formed by a hole it just barely avoids falling into.""",2011-06-03 19:54:43 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,18585,6916
"My thirst increased, and grew more vehement. God did open my mouth wide, and he did fill it. My soul was held up by the power of God, as the needle by the loadstone, and I did by faith, with joy draw water out of these wells of salvation. I drank and was satisfied from the fulness of my unchangeable God, who has loved me with an everlasting love, and with loving kindness has drawn me. I hated sin bitterly, and myself for it. I renewedly chose my dear invaluable portion, my pearl of great price; my soul exulted, gloried, triumphed in her choice, and determined never to let him go, whom my soul loved! I gave up my all again, and again, into his merciful and faithful hands, and I am his own; he will keep what I committed to him, and I will cling to him and rejoice in him, for he is truth, and faithfulness in the abstract, yea, he is altogether lovely!
(p. 181)",2012-04-13 14:38:49 UTC,"""My soul was held up by the power of God, as the needle by the loadstone, and I did by faith, with joy draw water out of these wells of salvation.""",2012-04-13 14:38:08 UTC,"","",,"","",Searching in Google Books,19687,7215
"""With Julia Franklin,"" said Belcour. The name, like a sudden spark of electric fire, seemed for a moment to suspend his faculties--for a moment he was transfixed; but recovering, he caught Belcour's hand, and cried--'Stop! stop! I beseech you, name not the lovely Julia and the wretched Montraville in the same breath. I am a seducer, a mean, ungenerous seducer of unsuspecting innocence. I dare not hope that purity like her's would stoop to unite itself with black, premeditated guilt: yet by heavens I swear, Belcour, I thought I loved the lost, abandoned Charlotte till I saw Julia--I thought I never could forsake her; but the heart is deceitful, and I now can plainly discriminate between the impulse of a youthful passion, and the pure flame of disinterested affection.""
(II.xxiv, pp. 52-3; p. 93 in Penguin edition)",2013-05-29 19:37:09 UTC,"""The name, like a sudden spark of electric fire, seemed for a moment to suspend his faculties--for a moment he was transfixed; but recovering, he caught Belcour's hand, and cried--'Stop! stop! I beseech you, name not the lovely Julia and the wretched Montraville in the same breath.""",2013-05-29 19:37:09 UTC,Chapter XXIV. Mystery Developed ,"",,"","",Reading,20237,7396