United States or Tanzania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There was something incalculable, incommensurable, and daemonic in Shelley's genius; and what he might have achieved, had his life been spared and had his health progressively improved, it is of course impossible to say.
The wind at the end was the morning breeze entering through the open porthole and touching his face before the schooner could swing to the chilly gust. Yes! And all this rational explanation of the fantastic made it only more mysterious and weird. There was something daemonic in that dream.
Still, the main thing for me was that in the first great and wholly modern poets that I made acquaintance with, Byron and his intellectual successors, Lermontof and Heine, I recognised again the very fundamental trait that I termed daemonic, the worship of one's own originality, under the guise of an uncompromising love of liberty.
"Unknown, albeit lying near, To men the path to the Daemon sphere." But to men of genius "Minions of the Morning Star" the path is not unknown, and for this reason the daemonic element constantly shows itself in their works and in their lives.
That which I called the daemonic I had encountered for the first time outside my own mind in Lermontof's hero. Petsjorin was compelled to act in pursuance of his natural bent, as though possessed by his own being. I felt myself in a similar manner possessed. I had met with the word Daimon and Daimones in Plato; Socrates urges that by daemons the Gods, or the children of the Gods, were meant.
It tantalises; it suggests other meanings besides its plain and surface significance. This riddling quality is the daemonic element which he possessed in common with Plato; because of it these two are the masters of a refined and subtle irony, a source of the keenest pleasure.
And that, therefore, if there were a Spirit, a Daemonic Element, an universal Reason, a Logos, a Divine Element, closely connected with man, that one Reason, that one Divine Element, must be a person also?
We are spellbound, not so much by the sublimity or loveliness of the place, but by its absolute uniqueness, its total unlikeness to any other on the face of the globe, its kinship with the few incomparable marvels Nature has given us; creations of her mysterious, freakish, daemonic humour.
The fine poetry of ancient humor is all there, distilled from the dregs of folk-lore that have to us lost their true essence. There is in the music a daemonic quality, inherent in the subject, that somehow vanishes with the concrete tale. So we might say the tonal picture is a faithful likeness precisely in so far as it does not tell the facts of the story.
Also, he may be obstinate or persistent at the same low rate, and may even show sudden impulses which have a false air of daemonic strength because they seem inexplicable, though perhaps their secret lies merely in the want of regulated channels for the soul to move in good and sufficient ducts of habit without which our nature easily turns to mere ooze and mud, and at any pressure yields nothing but a spurt or a puddle.
Word Of The Day