ART. VII.-The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge. 3 vols. London: Pickering. 1834. WE were engaged in preparing the following article, when we heard with extreme pain of the decease of Mr. Coleridge. Our renewed study of his poems had brought us into fresh communion with his spirit; he had become our companion; we were aware that he had long been stretched upon a couch of pain, but the intelligence that he was no more in this world, glowing with the creations of his own imagination, or absorbed in the profound abysses of his own original philosophy, awoke within us the anguish which friends feel when the sufferer expires, though hope-. lessness of recovery had long been tutoring them to endure the event. If in some of our subsequent remarks we have warmly eulogized Mr. Coleridge, we have not been misled by any false sympathies with death. We have ever thought him in possession of the highest qualities of true poetry, as well as the most comprehensive views of human nature. " Like those of his friend Mr. Wordsworth, his poems have been received with indifference and aversion and even contempt by some, with love and admiration by others. As he has himself complained in his Biographia Literaria, some of his enemies first accused him of "too ornate and elaborately poetic diction, and then, with disgraceful inconsistency, reversed the accusation and charged him with bald and prosaic language, with an affected simplicity both of matter and of manner. And many more have thrown them aside as unintelligible, and supplied their lack of judgment by the violence of aspersion. We pretend not to assert that Mr. Coleridge's compositions are faultless. Our readers will hereafter perceive that we allow some portions of them to be justly obnoxious to several charges; still as they do not form the character of his works, as at immense intervals they are but spots in a flood of light, it may be useful to inquire, Why did he originally meet with so cruel a reception? Why are many of his most extravagant admirers now, the very men who once most ruthlessly strove to consign him to oblivion? We recollect Mr. Wordsworth's dignified apology for his own poems, when in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, he accounted for our deteriorated taste by the social modifications which were rapidly taking place in the country. "A multitude of causes," he says, "unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the NO. XXXII.-OCT. 1834. D D mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events, which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse." We allow to a considerable extent the correctness of this reasoning, but believe it insufficient. We conceive that, perfectly independent of any civil modifications, the taste of the public has been materially formed by two authors, whose minds would have taken the same position at whatever period they might have lived. Without adducing it as a detraction of their works, we think that the poetry and the prose of Sir W. Scott, and the poetry of Lord Byron, so accustomed us to a love of sensuous popular excitement, an excitement of the more ostensible emotions of our being, as unfitted us for more profound and meditative compositions. It must be allowed that they restricted themselves to the more imposing sublimities of human nature; to the more stirring and obvious qualities of human passion. Their readers were thus borne onward by the torrent. They had to make no efforts themselves. It required no power of mind somewhat to sympathize with them; as the most unobservant must be arrested in terror at the lightning and the roar of heaven, or in awe at the foam and burst of the cataract, who would be perfectly insensible to the sublimities of an angel's song. The readers of England were thus kept in a mental fever. But all this is precisely the very opposite to that state of mind requisite for the due appreciation of Mr. Coleridge's writings. They are profoundly meditative. His readers must intensely think,-not only in order to realize his conceptions, but to detect the subtle yet true relations of his thoughts. Merely animal passion must be exorcised; and yet the soul must not divest itself of feeling, for there is nothing coldly abstract or frigidly intellectual. Most of his sublimities are not those of nature without, but of man within. And further, in accounting for Mr. Coleridge's reception with the public, it must not be forgotten that the character of his philosophy, which is interwoven with his poems, would of itself, at any time, have prevented their immediate efficiency. That philosophy is original as well as mystic. It demands the most patient thought, first in order to detect its meaning, and then the most vigorous judgment, either to harmonize it with acknowledged truths, or satisfy ourselves of its discrepancy. It must be very clear therefore that time is requisite for his success. Such a poet must create in his readers sympathies with himself. He must banish from them all love of passive, intellectual indulgence; he must make them work themselves. As he points to a rich and exhaustless mine, and offers to pioneer them, they must summon up effort to descend the shaft, and collect the ore for their own personal aggrandizement. What a revolution of mental habit must this be, when men had been wont luxuriously to yield themselves to the poet's humour, pleased with the easy and willing minister to their passion? Yet Mr. Coleridge had to effect this, when he attempted to procure readers and admirers. As if some daring aspirant to fame called upon slaves of sense,--who on violet beds had been inhaling the wafted odours, to rise and gird themselves for some mountainous ascent, that amid Alpine snows and frosts they might catch the sublimity of a sunrise upon the blushing world. We cannot forbear a second quotation from Mr. Wordsworth in support of our observation. "The predecessors of an original genius of a high order will have smoothed the way for all that he has in common with them: and much he will have in common; but for what is peculiarly his own, he will be called upon to clear and often to shape his own road; he will be in the condition of Hannibal among the Alps." Should Poetry then be philosophical? Is she wise to place this difficulty towards obtaining popular admiration in her own path? Lucretius is not as extensively read as Virgil; ought this to be a beacon? Surely not; for what is the distinction of poetry? It is not simply the accident of rhythm or cadence. It is not simply the province of the imagination. We conceive that the most enlarged distinction between it and prose is, that whether it confines itself to fancy, or whether it interweaves fancy and reason, it must be characterized by passion. Prosaic philosophy must be abstract. It must not be an incarnation. But poetic philosophy must feel. And therefore, since philosophy can be the field of emotion, she can be poetic. Thus we give poetry an illimitable range. "She is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge: the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." There is impassioned poetry in astronomy, and Milton breathed it. There is impassioned poetry in botany, and it was the inspiration of Linnæus. Above all, there is the poetry of human nature, inclusive of all her laws and processes of thought and divine combinations. It would be a painful blank if this last department was disregarded. Nothing, irrespective of religious truth, can so well inculcate self-observation:-nothing so fill man with the consciousness of his own dignity. The mind that would be frozen by didactic, anatomizing metaphysics, glows with a healthy warmth when it imbibes the same truths, kindled with the appropriate passions of their poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge have both occupied the same field. They were friends from their youth. Originally some of their poems were published in the same volume. Nevertheless, there is an essential dissimilarity. We question if any one of their poems, had they been all confusedly intermingled, would, upon an arrangement of them, been erroneously referred to either author. There is more of gentie and calm observation in the author of the "Excursion:"—more of the tumultuous and violent in the author of " Remorse." One reminds us of the calm summer's eve, before the mists have arisen: all is soothing and distinct: there is no obscurity. But there is too much energy in the other for such a time. Neither has he sufficient contentment for the hour. Pain and disappointment and unsatisfied affections are too often obvious. Besides, there is a difference in their philosophy. Wordsworth, unquestionably, is more intelligible, more observant of the mind's phenomena than intent upon their latent causes; and he has therefore less profundity, and less error. The volumes before us contain the whole of Mr. Coleridge's previously published pieces and some new ones:—a curious assemblage of the gay and grave; the obvious and the profound; the rash and the matured; the religious and the irreverent. With all our avowed feelings of esteem and veneration and even love of Mr. Coleridge, we cannot withhold our last classification. As religious critics we must say,-especially, too, as we regard Mr. Coleridge in a religious light,-would that such a piece as the "Devil's Thoughts" had been expunged! It is neither worthy of his wit or of his religion. We shall now proceed to consider several of his principal poems, with the hope that our readers will, from their own examination, agree with our previous opinions respecting them. The observant reader may perceive in his juvenile poems many traits of his character and many earnests of his matured genius. His monody on the death of Chatterton, so full of pathos, so tenderly sympathetic, may be considered an emblem of one feature of his mind. He was fond of "weeping with those who wept;" sorrow was more congenial than exultation. "Poor Chatterton! he sorrows for thy fate And the stern Fate transpierced with viewless dart The last pale Hope that shivered at my heart!"-vol. i. p. 11. There is much power, mingled with the same tender sympathy we have already mentioned, in his tenth sonnet. "Sweet Mercy! how my very heart has bled To see thee, poor Old Man! and thy gray hair That hang from thy white beard and numb thy breast. And thou shalt talk, in our fire-side's recess, Of purple pride, that scowls on wretchedness. He did not so, the Galilean mild, Who met the Lazars turn'd from rich men's doors, And called them Friends, and healed their noisome sores!" vol. i. pp. 68, 69. The difficulties of poverty, increased by much physical pain and domestic distress, added to that melancholy temperament which is mostly in the society of poetic genius. It was but pourtraying his personal feelings, when, perhaps wounded by the insolence of wealth, and fretted with his own inferiority, he speaks of "Philosophers and Bardst Spread in concentric circles: they whose souls, This incipient dissatisfaction with things around him, blended |