indications of analogies, his explanation of anomalies, that he enables the hearer or reader to get a glimpse of the extent of his practical knowledge. He is always reasoning out from an inner point, and it is the inner point, the principle, the law which he labours to bring forward into light. If he can convince you or himself of the principle à priori, he generally leaves the facts to take care of themselves. He leads us into the laboratories of art or nature as a showman guides you through a cavern crusted with spar and stalactites, all cold, and dim, and motionless, till he lifts his torch aloft, and on a sudden you gaze in admiration on walls and roof of flaming crystals and stars of eternal diamond. Το All this, whether for praise or for blame, is perceptible enough in Mr. Coleridge's verse, but perceptible, of course, in such degree and mode as the law of poetry in general, and the nature of the specific poem in particular, may require. But the main result from this frame and habit of his mind is very distinctly traceable in the uniform subjectivity of almost all his works. He does not belong to that grand division of poetry and poets which corresponds with painting and painters; of which Pindar and Dante are the chief;-those masters of the picturesque, who, by a felicity inborn, view and present everything in the completeness of actual objectivity-and who have a class derived from and congenial with them, presenting few pictures indeed, but always full of picturesque matter; of which secondary class Spenser and Southey may be mentioned as eminent instances. neither of these does Mr. Coleridge belong; in his Christabel,' there certainly are several distinct pictures of great beauty; but he, as a poet, clearly comes within the other division which answers to music and the musician, in which you have a magnificent mirage of words with the subjective associations of the poet curling, and twisting, and creeping round, and through, and above every part of it. This is the class to which Milton belongs, in whose poems we have heard Mr. Coleridge say that he remembered but two proper pictures-Adam bending over the sleeping Eve at the beginning of the fifth book of the Paradise Lost,' and Dalilah approaching Samson towards the end of the 'Agonistes.' But when we point out the intense personal feeling, the self-projection, as it were, which characterizes Mr. Coleridge's poems, we mean that such feeling is the soul and spirit, not the whole body and form, of his poetry. For surely no one has ever more earnestly and constantly borne in mind the maxim of Milton, that poetry ought to be simple, sensuous, and impassioned. The poems in these volumes are no authority for that dreamy, halfswooning style of verse which was criticized by Lord Byron (in language too strong for print) as the fatal sin of Mr. John Keats, and and which, unless abjured betimes, must prove fatal to several younger aspirants-male and female-who for the moment enjoy some popularity. The poetry before us is distinct and clear, and accurate in its imagery; but the imagery is rarely or never exhibited for description's sake alone; it is rarely or never exclusively objective; that is to say, put forward as a spectacle, a picture on which the mind's eye is to rest and terminate. You may if your sight is short, or your imagination cold, regard the imagery in itself and go no farther; but the poet's intention is that you should feel and imagine a great deal more than you see. His aim is to awaken in the reader the same mood of mind, the same cast of imagination and fancy whence issued the associations which animate and enlighten his pictures. You must think with him, must sympathize with him, must suffer yourself to be lifted out of your own school of opinion or faith, and fall back upon your own consciousness, an unsophisticated man. If you decline this, non tibi spirat. From his earliest youth to this day, Mr. Coleridge's poetry has been a faithful mirror reflecting the images of his mind. Hence he is so original, so individual. With a little trouble, the zealous reader of the Biographia Literaria' may trace in these volumes the whole course of mental struggle and self-evolvement narrated in that odd but interesting work; but he will see the track marked in light; the notions become images, the images glorified, and not unfrequently the abstruse position stamped clearer by the poet than by the psychologist. No student of Coleridge's philosophy can fully understand it without a perusal of the illumining, and if we may so say, popularizing commentary of his poetry. It is the Greek put into the vulgar tongue. And we must say, it is somewhat strange to hear any one condemn those philosophical principles as altogether unintelligible, which are inextricably interwoven in every page of a volume of poetry which he professes to admire. No writer has ever expressed the great truth that man makes his world, or that it is the imagination which shapes and colours all things-more vividly than Coleridge. Indeed, he is the first who, in the age in which we live, brought forward that position into light and action. It is nearly forty years ago that he wrote the following passage in his Ode on Dejection,' one of the most characteristic and beautiful of his lyric poems : 'A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, Have I been gazing on the western sky In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;- I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: And from the soul itself must there be sent O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Which wedding nature to us gives in dower, A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud ;- And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, To this habit of intellectual introversion we are very much inclined to attribute Mr. Coleridge's never having seriously undertaken a great heroic poem. The 'Paradise Lost' may be thought to stand in the way of our laying down any general rule on the subject; yet that poem is as peculiar as Milton himself, and does not materially affect our opinion, that the pure epic can hardly be achieved by the poet in whose mind the reflecting turn greatly predominates. The extent of the action in such a poem requires a free and fluent stream of narrative verse; description, purely objective, must fill a large space in it, and its permanent success depends on a rapidity, or at least a liveliness, of movement which is scarcely compatible with much of what Bacon calls inwardness of meaning. The reader's attention could not be preserved; his journey being long, he expects his road to be smooth and unembarrassed. The condensed passion of the ode is out of place in heroic song. Few persons will dispute that the two great Homeric poems are the most delightful of epics; they may not have the sublimity of the Paradise Lost,' nor the picturesqueness of the Divine Comedy,' nor the etherial brilliancy of the Orlando;' but, dead as they are in language, metre, accent, obsolete in religion, manners, costume, and country,they nevertheless even now please all those who can read them beyond all other narrative poems. There is a salt in them which keeps them sweet and incorruptible throughout every change. They are the most popular of all the remains of ancient genius, and translations of them for the twentieth time are amongst the very latest productions of our contemporary literature. From beginning to end, these marvellous poems are exclusively objective; everything is in them, except the poet himself. It is not to Vico or Wolfe that we refer, when we say that Homer is vox et præterea nihil; as musical as the nightingale, and as invisible. If any epic subject would have suited Mr. Coleridge's varied powers and peculiar bent of mind, it might, perhaps, have been that which he once contemplated, and for which he made some preparations The Fall of Jerusalem.' The splendid drama which has subsequently appeared under that name by a younger poet, has not necessarily precluded an attempt on the epic scale by a master genius. Yet the difficulties of the undertaking are appalling from their number and peculiarity; and not the least overwhelming of them are involved in the treatment of those very circumstances and relations which constitute its singular attraction. We have twice heard Mr. Coleridge express his opinion on this point. The destruction of Jerusalem,' he said upon one occasion, is the only subject now remaining for an epic poem; a subject which, like Milton's Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy interested all Greece. There would be difficulties, as there are in all subjects; and they must be mitigated and thrown into the shade, as Milton has done with the numerous difficulties in the "Paradise Lost." But there would be a greater assemblage of grandeur and splendour than can now be found in any other theme. As for the old mythology, incredulus odi; and yet there must be a mythology, or a quasi-mythology, for an epic poem. Here there would be the completion of the prophecies; the termination of the first revealed national religion under the violent assault of Paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion; and then you would have the character of the Roman and the Jew, and the awfulness, the completeness, the justice. I schemed it at twenty-five, but, alas! venturum expectat.' Upon another occasion, Mr. Coleridge spoke more discouragingly. This subject, with all its great capabilities, has this one grand defect—that, whereas a poem, to be epic, must have a personal interest in the "Destruction of Jerusalem" no genius or skill could possibly preserve the interest for, the hero from being merged in the interest for the event. The fact is, the event itself is too sublime and overwhelming.' We think this is fine and just criticism; yet we ardently wish the critic had tried the utmost strength of his arm in executing the magnificent idea of his early manhood. Even nowvain as we fear any such appeal is-we cannot keep ourselves back from making a respectful call upon this great poet to consider whether his undiminished powers of verse do not seem to demand from him something beyond the little pieces, sweet as they are, which he has alone produced since his middle manhood. We know and duly value the importance of the essays in which his philosophical views have as yet been imperfectly developed, and we look with anxiety to the publication of the whole, or a part, of that great work in which, we are told, the labour of his life has been expended in founding and completing a truly catholicSystem of philosophy for a Christian man.' We would not, for the chance of an epic fragment, interfere with the consummation of this grand and long-cherished design. But is there any necessary incompatibility between the full action of the poet and the philosopher in Mr. Coleridge's particular case? He, of all men, would deny that the character of his studies alone tended to enfeeble the imagination, or to circumscribe the power of expression; and if that be so, what is there to prevent—what is there not rather to induce-a serious devotion of some portion, at least, of his leisure to the planning and execution of some considerable poem? Poterit si posse videtur; and could Mr. Cole VOL. LII. NO. CIII. ridge |