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gusts of a veering storm, the solemn sound of a great north wind, blowing, for days, with one unmitigated tone, added to a certain unearthly modulation which an Æolian harp may image. How many varieties of versification has he attempted-to succeed in all! In his early poems, and in his "Remorse," he has woven greater fire and passion, with the melody of Otway and Rowe. In his two principal odes, how great the pomp and swell of sound! In his sonnet to Schiller, the Jew's harp structure of the sonnet "becomes a trumpet." In his "Lines on Mont Blanc," he dares to lift the lyre which was light only in Milton's hand. In "Kubla Khan," his dreaming soul produces a solemn and sustained sweetness, which is not of this earth. In the "Rime of the Anciente Marinere," he gives aspecimen of every variety of rhythm, as well as of language, the homely, the harsh, the soft, the abrupt, and the dreamy. And in "Christabel," he has wedded one of the purest of poetical creations to a harmony soft as the whispers of love, and sweet as the talk of Elysium. Ages may occur ere the combination of fancy, feeling, and ear, all moving to the tune of an etherial inspiration, produce such "soft and soul-like sounds" again. It is as if pines, and waterfalls, and roses, and winds, and seas, and storms, and harps, and organs had yielded up their deepest secrets of harmony to the soul and the song of Coleridge.

Coleridge was a poet, a philosopher, a talker, and, (incredible as it may seem!) a man. His poems are fragments of an undiscovered orb of song, fallen down from the sky-snatches of superhuman melody dropping from the clouds-touches on a key which more than mortal hands were required to sustain ecstacies filched before the time from the treasured glories of futurity, gay or serious, mild or mystic, placid or Promethean-" voices from a loftier.

climate." Above almost all the poets of the day, he answers to our idea of a bard, a Vates, clad now with the beaming robe, and now with the "deep-furrowed garment of trembling" which the prophet wears; less an author wielding his pen to write down his thought, than a pen seized and guided by the strong and sudden, or slow and solemn hand of overhanging and invisible power. If we were to try to state, in one word, the leading quality of his poetry, we should say, with an eloquent critic in The Quarterly, that it was unexpectedness-the occurrence of sentiments, images, and sounds, other than either you or the author were prepared for. This almost morbid agility of mind has led to the charges usually brought against his poetry, of mysticism, exaggeration, oddity, &c.; all which spring from an ignorance of the unavoidable action of the poet's mind, who met new thoughts at every turn of his way, and who, at least in his youth, when nearly all his poetry was produced, was

"

Inspired beyond the guess of folly

By each rude shape, and wild unconquerable sound."

Another characteristic of his poetry is the use he has made in it of his philosophical powers. Not that he has sought, like Lucretius or Akenside, to reduce any particular system to rhyme; nor that, when he wrote his leading poems, had his philosophical views assumed that total and expanded form which they took afterwards in his mind and talk; but you cannot read a page of his wildest verse without feeling that you have to do with a mind eminently watchful of mental phenomena, possessed of the introverted eye, "which broods and sleeps on its own heart." For example, how subtly has he refined on, as well as poetically represented, the passion of remorse; and though there are

far better acting plays than this contribution of Coleridge to his country's stage, we question if there be one, save the "Cenci," which in modern times so gratifies the metaphysical "searcher of dark bosoms." And how amazingly daring to suspend the interest of a tragedy so wide and deep as that of the "bright-eyed Marinere," upon the shooting of a bird! This, in fact, was another contribution to the philosophy of the same dark passion which gives the name to his principal play, which he had studied in his own heart, and which he knew could be startled up into all its hydra horrors and giant stature from a very small egg, and a very slight trampling upon it. Besides these two peculiarities, unexpectedness and philosophical tendency, the poetry of Coleridge is remarkable for the variety of its keys; he is little of a mannerist: how unlike "France, an Ode," to the "Hymn written in the Valley of Chamouni ;" or "Christabel," to his "Fears in Solitude;"-for the width of its sympathies; for its tenderness of feeling; for the shade of sorrow flung by early grief upon it all, up from its plaintive strains to its most victorious raptures; for the sensibility he shares with all the lake poets, to the sights and sounds of nature-a sensibility which he and his brethren cherish, partly as an infantine emotion, and partly as a philosophical delight, and which they have nursed into a passion of the blood and the soul; and for a spirit of profound piety, which has made his verse an organ, uniting his heart with heaven. He is chargeable with occasional obscurity of purpose; with a certain mawkishness, produced by the excess of his sympathy; here and there with an unnatural and unmanly despondence; in his earlier poems with the usual splendid sins of a boy-genius, imitation and turgidity of language; in his later productions with faults exactly the reverse-simplicity approaching silliness; all

the errors, in short, into which Wordsworth was seduced by the adoption of a system; and above all, with the unfinished and fragmentary cast of all his characteristic efforts. This, it is true, is an age of fragments, more or less colossal. "Childe Harold " is a fragment, as well as "Christabel ;” "Don Juan," as really as "Kubla Khan;" "Faust," as well as "The Friend." Whence this fragmentary style has arisen, were a curious question. Is it from the union of immense ambition to limited power? or of creative energy disproportioned to artistic skill? or from a lack of mental foresight, and counting of intellectual cost? or is it from oddity and affectation? or from carelessness and caprice? or from a desire of piquing curiosity? or from the effect of those cold damps so incident to a high order of intellect, which often fall, even in the noon of genius, to quench its ardour, and the "hue of resolution to sickly o'er with the pale cast of thought?" or is it from the want of encouragement held out by a public, at once fastidious and incompetent, to truly original works? or is it from a combination of all, or many of these causes? In Coleridge, the influences which prevented him from completing his large and pregnant beginnings were various. It was partly indolence; partly opium; partly the "cold shade" of non-popularity and imperfect appreciation; partly the love of talk, which was far easier to him than writing; and partly the difficulty, in his manhood, of fully executing the designs of his teeming and glowing youth. And we can conceive few more melancholy sights than that of a great mind, conscious of the powers it once possessed, feeling the first dawnings of an Indian summer of late and unexpected success, but conscious, too, that its hour has gone by-that its nerve of purpose and power is broken-that it has all the ambitions, and all the cherished designs of its early days, but has lost the

sustaining illusions, the enrapturing enthusiasm, the freshness of feeling, as well as the strength of constitution and the firmness of mind, necessary to take advantage of the turned tide, and to catch the favourable gale. Imagine his misery, whose soul had thus, to all intents and purposes, slipped from his grasp; whose youthful designs and dreams, all bright and gorgeous as they were, were separated from him by entire continents of mental gloom, disappointment, guilt, grief, pain of body, and fever of soul; and could no more be called his, than the stars, "distinct, but distant; clear, but, ah! how cold," which shone down on his waking agonies, or on his drugged and desperate repose. Coleridge continue "Christabel!" As well might a man of sixty hope to rival the high leap, or the far and strong stone-cast of himself at twenty-six! And still fonder and vainer the dream, cherished by him to the last, of writing an English "Faust" on the subject of Michael Scott-writing what it took Goethe, in the hey-day of his blood, to produce, with that faltering hand, that languid and shadowy look, that scorched liver, and that premature old age!

Instead of speculating as to what he might have done, let us look to what he has done. His juvenile poems are full of the faults incident to youth, and the first liberty of power let loose from its antenatal stillness. And yet never was the youthful joy of genius-a joy fed from the senses, the feelings, the intellect, and the imagination, into a fourfold strength-more faithfully mirrored than in these. The French Revolution found in Coleridge at first one of its most devoted admirers. He sang of it in fierce odes, forming, perhaps, the finest poetry which shone out, like spray, from that ocean of blood. The "Ode on the Departing Year," bating some harsh and wild truculence in the language, is an effusion full of the very frenzy and lightning of lyric

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