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Some means, somehow, must be raised. I have been compelled to stop my machine just at the moment of completion. I cannot move a step without running in debt, and that I cannot do. "As to the company that was thought of to carry the Telegraph into operation here, it is another of those ignes fatui that have just led me on to waste a little more time, money, and patience, and then vanished.
We have at most found some slight vantage-ground: thrown up a mole-hill of a Pisgah from which we can attain a distant view of what lies beyond the swamp, even if perchance we have taken some mirages and ignes fatui for solid landscape and actual illuminations. It is natural that the English nation, having a so much larger past, should be more influenced by it than the American.
Misfortune dodges the path of human life; the poetic mind finds itself miserably deranged in, and unfit for the walks of business; add to all, that thoughtless follies and hare-brained whims, like so many ignes fatui, eternally diverging from the right line of sober discretion, sparkle with step-bewitching blaze in the idly-gazing eyes of the poor heedless Bard, till, pop, "he falls like Lucifer, never to hope again."
If I should give myself up to sorrow and mourning I should die, and that cannot be, for I must live to wait for him to rescue him. How I know not yet; my thoughts and resolutions are so confused that they flicker like the ignes fatui. I will force my mind to be calm, and these wandering lights shall unite in one glowing flame to destroy the walls and obstructions which confine him.
The eloquent man that delivers, in Parliament or elsewhere, a beautiful speech, and will perform nothing of it, but leaves it as if already performed, what can you make of that man? He has enrolled himself among the Ignes Fatui and Children of the Wind; means to serve, as beautifully illuminated Chinese Lantern, in that corps henceforth.
They were like ignes fatui, flashing up from dank caverns and dying out while I looked upon them. Immortality knows neither commencement nor ending. If so, whither shall I go when this material framework is dissolved? to make other frameworks? to a final rest? Or shall the I, the me, the soul, lose its former identity?
To have exercised his vivifying and fertilising influence over the minds of others his intellect was bound to be of the dispersive order; it was essential that he should "take all knowledge to be his province," and that that eager, subtle, and penetrative mind should range as freely as it did over subject after subject of human interest; illuminating each of them in turn with those rays of true critical insight which, amid many bewildering cross-lights and some few downright ignes fatui, flash forth upon us from all Coleridge's work.
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