I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with [Keats’ friend Charles Wentworth] Dilke, on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, & at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

John Keats (1795-1821)

from a letter to his brothers, December 1817
Norton Anthology of English Literature:
The Major Authors (Sixth Edition) p. 1818

Perception is hindered by nothing so much as by impatience and anxiety to attain it, and by trying to recall and dwell upon it when attained. “If the Lord tarry, wait for Him,” and then “He will not tarry, but will come quickly.” To them that wait in quietness, attention, and silence of their own thought, all things reveal themselves, but

None e’er hears twice the same who hears
the Songs of Heaven’s unanimous spheres,

and, if you would receive new perception, you must, as St. John of the Cross says, “Go forth into regions where nothing is perceived,” and seek always, with David, to sing “a new song.” These perceptions are “treasures laid up in heaven.” We need not be anxious about them. “The heart will not forget the things the eyes have seen.”

There was a truly divine epicureanism hidden in the reply of the Greek philosopher to some one who wondered how it was that he seemed to despise the delight of love: “I have tasted that sweetness once.” He that would be worthy of the Beatific Vision must fix his thoughts, not on the beatitude, but on the Vision. “The Vision,” writes St. Thomas Aquinas, “is a virtue, the beatitude an accident,” and the Psalmist says: “So let me behold Thy Presence in righteousness that I may wake up after Thy likeness and be satisfied with it.”

Coventry Patmore (1823-1896)

Magna Moralia XIII
Return to Tradition:a Directive Anthology p. 93
ed. Francis Beauchesne Thornton