work_id,theme,provenance,created_at,text,reviewed_on,id,comments,metaphor,dictionary,updated_at,context
5925,"",Reading,2003-07-18 00:00:00 UTC,"What would have been the fruit of deliberation, if I had had the time or power to deliberate, I know not. My thoughts flowed with tumult and rapidity. To shut this spectacle from my view was my first impulse; but to desert this man, in a time of so much need, appeared a thankless and dastardly deportment. To remain where I was, to conform implicitly to his direction, required no effort. Some fear was connected with his presence, and with that of the dead; but, in the tremulous confusion of my present thoughts, solitude would conjure up a thousand phantoms.
(I.xii, p. 326)",2007-06-26,15731,• Mervyn's reaction to Welbeck's narrative. Note the haunting of the mind implied in the last sentence. (Not included in database as a separate entry.),"""My thoughts flowed with tumult and rapidity.""","",2013-06-04 21:04:09 UTC,"Part I, chapter 12"
5987,Stream of Consciousness,Searching in HDIS (Poetry),2003-12-29 00:00:00 UTC,"Dear Anna--between friend and friend,
Prose answers every common end;
Serves, in a plain and homely way,
To express the occurrence of the day;
Our health, the weather, and the news,
What walks we take, what books we choose,
And all the floating thoughts we find
Upon the surface of the mind.
(ll. 109-168, pp. 263-5)",,15922,"•Published in William Hayley's The Life, and Posthumous Writings, William Cowper, Esqr., 3 vols. ,1803-4.","""And all the floating thoughts we find / Upon the surface of the mind.""","",2018-06-18 15:42:56 UTC,""
7120,"",Reading,2011-10-25 21:29:02 UTC,"CHORUS OF SPIRITS
From unremembered ages we
Gentle guides and guardians be
Of heaven-oppressed mortality;
And we breathe, and sicken not,
The atmosphere of human thought:
Be it dim, and dank, and gray,
Like a storm-extinguished day,
Travelled o'er by dying gleams;
Be it bright as all between
Cloudless skies and windless streams,
Silent, liquid, and serene;
As the birds within the wind,
As the fish within the wave,
As the thoughts of man's own mind
Float through all above the grave;
We make there our liquid lair,
Voyaging cloudlike and unpent
Through the boundless element:
Thence we bear the prophecy
Which begins and ends in thee!
(I, ll. 672-91)",,19297,"INTERESTING. Metaphor turned inside out as the similes unroll: the mind is liquid, and the spirits are as liquid as mind... REVISIT.","""And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the wind, / As the fish within the wave, / As the thoughts of man's own mind / Float through all above the grave; / We make there our liquid lair, / Voyaging cloudlike and unpent / Through the boundless element.""","",2011-10-25 21:29:02 UTC,Act I
7404,"",Reading,2013-06-06 19:21:48 UTC,"Mr. Coleridge bewilders himself sadly in endeavouring to determine in what the essence of poetry consists;--Milton, we think, has told it in a single line--
--'Thoughts that voluntary movePoetry is the music of language, expressing the music of the mind. Whenever any object takes such a hold on the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in love, or kindling it to a sentiment of admiration;--whenever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all other objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement of harmony, sustained and continuous, to the sounds that express it,--this is poetry. The musical in sound is the sustained and continuous; the musical in thought and feeling is the sustained and continuous also. Whenever articulation passes naturally into intonation, this is the beginning of poetry. There is no natural harmony in the ordinary combinations of significant sounds: the language of prose is not the language of music, or of passion: and it is to supply this inherent defect in the mechanism of language--to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself--to mingle the tide of verse, 'the golden cadences of poesy,' with the tide of feeling, flowing, and murmuring as it flows--or to take the imagination off its feet, and spread its wings where it may indulge its own impulses, without being stopped or perplexed by the ordinary abruptnesses, or discordant flats and sharps of prose--that poetry was invented.
Harmonious numbers.'