Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/388



I designing a Literaturblatt for some transcendental Deutsch journal—some hoenigsbergische magazine or weimarische gazette—instead of a "literary leaflet" for the New Monthly, I might plume myself in complacent anticipation on a host of readers—perhaps all of them graduated and salaried Professors —who would steadily wade through whatever sloughs and bogs of metaphysics I might guide them to. Be it true or no, to use a current phrase, that England loves not coalitions, true it is, past all gainsaying, that England loves not metaphysics. A political hotch-potch, after the recipe of "Cauld Kail in Aberdeen," she can swallow, with more or less of eupeptic ease; but a feast of Ontology is with her equivalent to a cannibal déjeûner—self-introspective philosophy is tantamount to a "feed" of human flesh and blood—the analysis of personal consciousness is as alien from her creeds and canons as a "smoked little boy in the bacon rack," or a "cold missionary on the sideboard." Virtually she accepts as faithful types of the metaphysical class, the subjects of Mat Prior's satirics, when he tells, in "Alma," howand howand once more, how

Only to exceptional minds is it given to be content, in studies of this order, to find no end in wandering mazes lost: if the end must remain an undiscovered bourn, people—in England at least—will resolve on