Substitute the following for the fifth to the eighth line. To sheath or blunt one happy ray, That wins new splendour from the day. That primal great lucific light, P. 267. Whit-Sunday. Nay, startle not to hear that rushing wind, To hear at once so great variety Of language from them come, &c. The spiritual miracle was the descent of the Holy Ghost: the outward the wind and the tongues: and so St. Peter himself explains it. That each individual obtained the power of speaking all languages, is neither contained in, nor fairly deducible from, St. Luke's account. P. 269. Trinity Sunday. The Trinity In Unity, And Unity In Trinity, All reason doth transcend. Most true, but not contradict. faith, as the eye to the telescope. Reason is to 264 EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF S. T. COLERIDGE TO W. COLLINS, R. A. PRINTED IN THE LIFE OF COLLINS BY HIS SON. VOL. I. December, 1818. O feel the full force o' the Christian religion Tit it is perhaps necessary, for many tempers, that they should first be made to feel, experimentally, the hollowness of human friendship, the presumptuous emptiness of human hopes. I find more substantial comfort now in pious George Herbert's Temple, which I used to read to amuse myself with his quaintness, in short, only to laugh at, than in all the poetry since the poems of Milton. If you have not read Herbert I can recommend the book to you confidently. The poem entitled "The Flower" is especially affecting, and to me such a phrase as "and relish versing" expresses a sincerity and reality, which I would unwillingly exchange for the more dignified "and once more love the Muse,” &c. and so with many other of Herbert's homely phrases. WE E want, methinks, a little treatise from some man of flexible good sense, and well versed in the Greek poets, especially Homer, the choral, and other lyrics, containing first a history of compound epithets, and then the laws and licenses. I am not so much disposed as I used to be to quarrel with such an epithet as "silver-winding;" ungrammatical as the hyphen is, it is not wholly illogical, for the phrase conveys more than silvery and winding. It gives, namely, the unity of the impression, the co-inherence of the brightness, the motion, and the line of motion. P. 10. Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen Disporting on thy margent green, The paths of pleasure trace; Who foremost now delight to cleave, The captive linnet which enthral? What idle progeny succeed This is the only stanza that appears to me very objectionable in point of diction. This, I must confess, is not only falsetto throughout, but is at once harsh and feeble, and very far the worst ten lines in all the works of Mr. Gray, English or Latin, prose or verse. P. 12. And envy wan, and faded care,' 2 3 1 Bad in the first, in the second, in the last degree. P. 15. The proud are taught to taste of pain. GRAY. There is a want of dignity-a sort of irony in this phrase to my feeling that would be more proper in dramatic than in lyric composition. On Gray's Platonica, vol. 1. p. 299.—547. Whatever might be expected from a scholar, a gentleman, a man of exquisite taste, as the quintessence of sane and sound good sense, Mr. Gray appears to me to have performed. The poet Plato, the orator Plato, Plato the exquisite dramatist of conversation, the seer and the painter of character, Plato the high-bred, highly-educated, aristocratic republican, the man and the gentleman of quality stands full before us from behind the curtain as Gray has drawn it back. Even so does Socrates, the social wise old man, the practical moralist. But Plato the philosopher, but the divine Plato, was not to be comprehended within the field of vision, or be commanded by the fixed immoveable telescope of Mr. Locke's human understanding. The whole sweep of the best philosophic reflections of French or English fabric in the age of our scholarly bard, was not commensurate with the mighty orb. The little, according to my convictions at least, the very little of proper Platonism contained in the written books of Plato, who himself, in an epistle, the authenticity of which there is no tenable ground for doubting, as I was rejoiced to find Mr. Gray acknowledge, has declared all he had written to be substantially Socratic, and not a fair exponent of his own tenets,* even this little, Mr. Gray has either misconceived or honestly confessed that, as he was not one of the initiated, it was utterly beyond his comprehension. Finally, to repeat the explanation with which I closed the last page of these notes and extracts, Volsimi e vidi Plato (ma non quel Plato) Che'n quella schiera andò più presso al segno, * See Plato's second epistle φραστέον δή σοι δι' αἰνιγμῶν κ. τ. λ. and towards the end τὰ δε νῦν λεγόμενα Σωκράτους iori, K. T. X. See also the 7th Epistle, p. 341. |