The beginning of life is the beginning of an illusion to the effect that there is such a thing as free will and that there is such another thing as necessity—the recognition of the fact that there is an “I can” and an “I cannot,” an “I may” and an “I must.”

The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
Lord, What is Man?

We have got into life by stealth and petitio principii, by the free use of that contradiction in terms which we declare to be the most outrageous violation of our reason. We have wriggled into it by holding that everything is both one and many, both infinite in time and space and yet finite, both like and unlike to the same thing, both itself and not itself, both free and yet inexorably fettered, both every adjective in the dictionary and at the same time the flat contradiction of every one of them.

The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Lord, What is Man?

Man must always be a consuming fire or be consumed. As for hell, we are in a burning fiery furnace all our lives—for what is life but a process of combustion?

The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
Lord, What is Man?

He is a poor creature who does not believe himself to be better than the whole world else. No matter how ill we may be, or how low we may have fallen, we would not change identity with any other person. Hence our self-conceit sustains and always must sustain us till death takes us and our conceit together so that we need no more sustaining.

The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
Lord, What is Man?

When I was a boy at school at Shrewsbury, old Mrs. Brown used to keep a tray of spoiled tarts which she sold cheaper. They most of them looked pretty right till you handled them. We are all spoiled tarts.

The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
Lord, What is Man?

He rises and begins to round, 
He drops the silver chain of sound 
Of many links without a break,   
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,   
All intervolv’d and spreading wide, 
Like water-dimples down a tide 
Where ripple ripple overcurls 
And eddy into eddy whirls; 
A press of hurried notes that run 
So fleet they scarce are more than one, 
Yet changingly the trills repeat 
And linger ringing while they fleet, 
Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear 
To her beyond the handmaid ear, 
Who sits beside our inner springs, 
Too often dry for this he brings, 
Which seems the very jet of earth 
At sight of sun, her music’s mirth, 
As up he wings the spiral stair, 
A song of light, and pierces air 
With fountain ardor, fountain play, 
To reach the shining tops of day, 
And drink in everything discern’d 
An ecstasy to music turn’d, 
Impell’d by what his happy bill 
Disperses; drinking, showering still, 
Unthinking save that he may give 
His voice the outlet, there to live 
Renew’d in endless notes of glee, 
So thirsty of his voice is he, 
For all to hear and all to know 
That he is joy, awake, aglow, 
The tumult of the heart to hear 
Through pureness filter’d crystal-clear, 
And know the pleasure sprinkled bright 
By simple singing of delight, 
Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d, 
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d 
Without a break, without a fall, 
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical, 
Perennial, quavering up the chord 
Like myriad dews of sunny sward 
That trembling into fulness shine, 
And sparkle dropping argentine; 
Such wooing as the ear receives 
From zephyr caught in choric leaves 
Of aspens when their chattering net 
Is flush’d to white with shivers wet; 
And such the water-spirit’s chime 
On mountain heights in morning’s prime, 
Too freshly sweet to seem excess, 
Too animate to need a stress; 
But wider over many heads 
The starry voice ascending spreads, 
Awakening, as it waxes thin, 
The best in us to him akin; 
And every face to watch him rais’d, 
Puts on the light of children prais’d, 
So rich our human pleasure ripes 
When sweetness on sincereness pipes, 
Though nought be promis’d from the seas, 
But only a soft-ruffling breeze 
Sweep glittering on a still content, 
Serenity in ravishment. 
 
For singing till his heaven fills, 
’T is love of earth that he instils, 
And ever winging up and up, 
Our valley is his golden cup, 
And he the wine which overflows 
To lift us with him as he goes: 
The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine 
He is, the hills, the human line, 
The meadows green, the fallows brown, 
The dreams of labor in the town; 
He sings the sap, the quicken’d veins; 
The wedding song of sun and rains 
He is, the dance of children, thanks 
Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks, 
And eye of violets while they breathe; 
All these the circling song will wreathe, 
And you shall hear the herb and tree, 
The better heart of men shall see, 
Shall feel celestially, as long 
As you crave nothing save the song. 
Was never voice of ours could say 
Our inmost in the sweetest way, 
Like yonder voice aloft, and link 
All hearers in the song they drink: 
Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, 
Our passion is too full in flood, 
We want the key of his wild note 
Of truthful in a tuneful throat, 
The song seraphically free 
Of taint of personality, 
So pure that it salutes the suns 
The voice of one for millions, 
In whom the millions rejoice 
For giving their one spirit voice. 
 
Yet men have we, whom we revere, 
Now names, and men still housing here, 
Whose lives, by many a battle-dint 
Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint, 
Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet 
For song our highest heaven to greet: 
Whom heavenly singing gives us new, 
Enspheres them brilliant in our blue, 
From firmest base to farthest leap, 
Because their love of Earth is deep, 
And they are warriors in accord 
With life to serve and pass reward, 
So touching purest and so heard 
In the brain’s reflex of yon bird; 
Wherefore their soul in me, or mine, 
Through self-forgetfulness divine, 
In them, that song aloft maintains, 
To fill the sky and thrill the plains 
With showerings drawn from human stores, 
As he to silence nearer soars, 
Extends the world at wings and dome, 
More spacious making more our home, 
Till lost on his aërial rings 
In light, and then the fancy sings.

George Meredith (1828 -1909)

Meredith's theme expands upon the sonnet False Poets and True by Thomas Hood (1799-1845), addressed to William Wordsworth, and is of course in debt to Shelley's Ode To a Skylark.

How loosely our thoughts must hang together when the whiff of a smell, a band playing in the street, a face seen in the fire, or on the gnarled stem of a tree, will lead them into such vagaries at a moment’s warning.

The Note-Books of Samuel Butler  
Lord, What is Man?

We are like thistle-down blown about by the wind—up and down, here and there—but not one in a thousand ever getting beyond seed-hood.

The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
Lord, What is Man?

We are like billiard balls in a game played by unskilful players, continually being nearly sent into a pocket, but hardly ever getting right into one, except by a fluke.

The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
Lord, What is Man?