On this page
-
Text (1)
-
Untitled Article
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
-
-
Transcript
-
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
Untitled Article
errors they be ) are those of an affectionate and faithful memory ; and the interest which , in the earlier portion of the biography ., is weighed down by the indiscriminate mass of correspondence , is powerfully revived towards the close of the volume by the letters
from America . It would be difficult to find , throughout the whole range of epistolary literature , anything more touching than these letters , more pictorial than the impression they convey of the aged philosopher in his banishment , inspired by his fate to struggle with the shocks of circumstances , sustaining cheerfulness and
devising good in the midst of his solitary sorrows , and feeding still an interior energy amid the waste of years . His seclusion there , seems like an appointed interval between two worlds , —a central point of observation between time and eternity . There is a quietude in his letters , which gives them the aspect of letters from the dead ; all the activity of life appears in them as viewed in
retrospect , and yet the peace of Heaven is still but in prospect ; and they send forth tones of indescribable melancholy , which , travelling over one of the world ' s broadest oceans , seem like com * munings from an unearthly state . Yet it is not that the Christian sufferer himself desponds *; the melancholy is not in him , but in the reader ; and it is the wonder that he could uphold his spirit
so nobly , which deepens the pathos of his history . It is obvious , throughout , that his self-possessed serenity comes from the past and the future , and not from the present ; and there is a simplicity , a reality , in his repeated allusions to his approaching immortality , which makes us feel perpetually that , step by step , we are passing with the venerable man to his grave , to meet him on the morrow in a home whence there is no exile .
But we are anticipating . Not that we shall attempt any chronological narrative of Dr . Priestley ' s life : our readers will , we trust , seek that from the volume whose title stands at the head of this article ;—a volume which , by recording not so much the events as the labours , the feelings , the habits , the discipline , the opinions , of a life ; by exhibiting the successive phases of a mind passing from darkness towards full-orbed truth , fulfils the
expectations with which the student of human nature has a right to turn to biography . This volume brings to a close Mr . Rutt ' s protracted and , we fear , ill-requited labours , as editor of Dr . Priestley ' s Theological and Miscellaneous Works ; and we would avail ourselves of the opportunity to present our readers with an analysis of Dr . Priestley ' s character as a theologian , a physician , a metaphysician , a moralist , and a Christian .
Few problems are more difficult than to determine the proportion between the internal and the external causes which create great minds . When genius , oppressed with difficulties , toils its way upwards to the light , it is not the difficulty that creates the genius , or every man who wrote in a garret might be a Johnson or a Sheridan . Still less when it flutters in the atmosphere of
Untitled Article
On the Life ^ Character * and Works of Dr . Priestley \ 21
-
-
Citation
-
Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1833, page 21, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2606/page/21/
-