1772—Born at Ottery St. Mary, Oct. 21, 1782—Admitted to Christ’s Hospital. 1791—Enters Cambridge University. 1793—Enlists in the Light Dragoons. 1794—Returns to Cambridge; meets Southey at Oxford; Pantisocracy hatched; leaves Cambridge and goes to London. 1795—Goes to Bristol; marries Miss Fricker, and settles at Clevedon. 1796—First volume of poems; The Watchman. 1797—Removes to Nether Stowey; first meeting with Wordsworth; the “Lyrical Ballads” begun. 1798—“Lyrical Ballads” published; visits Germany with the Wordsworths. 1799—Returns to England; Morning Post and “Wallenstein.” 1800—Removes to Greta Hall, Keswick. 1801—Broken health; the “Kendal Black Drop.” 1802—Dejection and family discord. 1803—Visits Scotland with the Wordsworths. 1804—Sails for Malta; made secretary to Sir Alexander Ball. 1805—Visits Sicily and Rome. 1806–10—At Coleorton with Wordsworth; lectures on the poets at the Royal Institution, London; at Grasmere; projects the Friend. 1811–12—In London; lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. 1813–16—“Remorse” at Drury Lane; lectures at Bristol; goes to Calne; settles at Highgate with the Gillmans; publishes “Christabel.” 1817—“Biographia Literaria” and “Sibylline Leaves.” 1818—Lectures in London; meets Thomas Allsop and Keats. 1818—Failure of publishers. 1820–22—Hackwork. 1825—“Aids to Reflection;” Pension. 1825–34—Last years at Highgate.

  Works: “Fall of Robespierre” (act I. by Coleridge; acts ii., iii. by Southey), 1794; “Moral and Political Lecture delivered at Bristol,” 1795; “Conciones ad Populum,” 1795; “The Plot Discovered,” 1795; “The Watchman,” 1796; “Ode on the Departing Year,” 1796; “Poems on various subjects,” 1796; “Fears in Solitude,” 1798; “France,” 1798; “Frost at Midnight,” 1798; “Ancient Mariner” contributed to “Lyrical Ballads,” 1798; Poems contributed to “Annual Anthology,” 1800; “The Friend,” 1809–10; contributions to Southey’s “Omniana,” 1812; “Remorse,” 1813; “Christabel, Kubla Khan and Pains of Sleep,” 1816; “The Statesman’s Manual,” 1816; “Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters: a lay Sermon,” 1817; “Biographia Literaria,” 1817; “Sibylline Leaves,” 1817; “Zapolya,” 1817; “Aids to Reflection in the formation of a Manly Character,” 1825; “Poetical Works, including Dramas,” 1829; “On the Constitution of Church and State,” 1830. Posthumous: “Table-Talk,” 1835; “Literary Remains,” 1836–38; “Letters, ed. by T. Allsop,” 1836; “Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit,” 1840; “Treatises on Method” (from “Encyclopædia Metropolitana”), 1845; “Hints towards a formation of a more comprehensive Theory of Life,” 1848; “Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare,” 1849; “Essays on his Own Times, forming a second series of ‘The Friend,’” 1850; “The Relation of Philosophy to Theology,” 1851; “Lay Sermons,” 1852; “Notes upon English Divines,” 1853; “Notes theological, political and miscellaneous,” 1853; “Anima Poetæ; from the unpublished notebooks of S. T. Coleridge, ed. by E. H. Coleridge,” 1895; “Letters; edited by E. H. Coleridge,” 1895. He translated: Schiller’s “Wallenstein,” 1800. Collected Works: in 7 vols., ed. by W. G. T. Stedd, 1884; “Poems,” ed. by W. Bell Scott, 1894. Life: by H. D. Traill, 1884.

Personal

  My Father was very fond of me, and I was my Mother’s darling: in consequence whereof I was very miserable. For Molly, who had nursed my brother Francis, and was immoderately fond of him, hated me because my Mother took more notice of me than of Frank; and Frank hated me because my Mother gave me now and then a bit of cake when he had none…. So I became fretful and timorous, and a tell-tale; and the school-boys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me. And hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly…. And I used to lie by the wall, and mope; and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, and in a flood;—and then I was accustomed to run up and down the church-yard, and act over again all I had been reading on the docks, the nettles and the rank grass. At six years of age I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarles; and then I found the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, one tale of which … made so deep an impression on me … that I was haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark: … So I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity; and I was fretful and inordinately passionate; and as I could not play at anything, and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys; and because I could read and spell, and had, I may truly say, a memory and understanding forced into almost unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women.

  Every sight and every sound reminded me of him—dear, dear fellow, of his many talks to us, by day and by night, of all dear things. I was melancholy, and could not talk, but at last I eased my heart by weeping—nervous blubbering says William. It is not so. O! how many, many reasons have I to be anxious for him.

	O capacious Soul!
	Placed on this earth to love and understand,
	And from thy presence shed the light of love,
	Shall I be mute, ere thou be spoken of?
	Thy kindred influence to my heart of hearts
	Did also find its way.

  His countenance is the most variable that I have ever seen; sometimes it is kindled with the brightest expression, and sometimes all its light goes out, and is utterly extinguished. Nothing can convey stronger indications of power than his eye, eyebrow, and forehead. Nothing can be more imbecile than all the rest of the face; look at them separately, you would hardly think it possible that they could belong to one head; look at them together, you wonder how they came so, and are puzzled what to expect from a character whose outward and visible signs are so contradictory.

  Coleridge has been lecturing against Campbell. Rogers was present, and from him I derive the information. We are going to make a party to hear this Manichean of poesy.

  He confined himself to “Romeo and Juliet” for a time, treated of the inferior characters, and delivered a most eloquent discourse on love, with a promise to point out how Shakespeare has shown the same truths in the persons of the lovers. Yesterday we were to have a continuation of the theme. Alas! Coleridge began with a parallel between religion and love, which, though one of his favorite themes, he did not manage successfully. Romeo and Juliet were forgotten. And in the next lecture we are really to hear something of these lovers. Now this will be the fourth time that his hearers have been invited expressly to hear of this play. There are to be only fifteen lectures altogether (half have been delivered), and the course is to include Shakespeare and Milton, the modern poets, etc.!!! Instead of a lecture on a definite subject we have an immethodical rhapsody, very delightful to you and me, and only offensive from the certainty that it may and ought to offend those who come with other expectations. Yet, with all this, I cannot but be charmed with these splendida vitia, and my chief displeasure is occasioned by my being forced to hear the strictures of persons infinitely below Coleridge, without any power of refuting or contradicting them.

  Coleridge has a grand head, but very ill balanced, and the features of the face are coarse—although, to be sure, nothing can surpass the depth of meaning in his eyes, and the unutterable dreamy luxury in his lips.

  Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!—How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar—while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy!

  His complexion was at that time [1798] clear, and even bright—

“As are the children of yon azure sheen.”

His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them, like a sea with darkened lustre. “A certain tender bloom his face o’erspread,” a purple tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful complexions of the Spanish portrait-painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured and round; but his nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing—like what he has done…. His hair (now, alas! gray) was then black and glossy as the raven’s, and fell in smooth masses over his forehead.

	Father, and Bard revered! to whom I owe,
	Whate’er it be, my little art of numbers,
	Thou, in thy night-watch o’er my cradled slumbers,
	Didst meditate the verse that lives to shew
	(And long shall live, when we alike are low),
	Thy prayer how ardent, and thy hope how strong,
	That I should learn of Nature’s self the song,
	The lore which none but Nature’s pupils know.

	Stop, Christian passer-by: Stop, child of God,
	And read, with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
	A poet lies, or that which once seemed he—
	O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.—
	That he who many a year with toil of breath
	Found death in life, may here find life in death:
	Mercy for praise,—to be forgiven for fame,—
	He asked, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same.

  You know how long and severely he suffered in his health; yet, to the last, he appeared to have such high intellectual gratifications that we felt little impulse to pray for his immediate release; and though his infirmities had been grievously increasing of late years, the life and vigor of his mind were so great that they hardly led those around him to think of his dissolution. His frail house of clay was so illumined that its decaying condition was the less perceptible. His departure, after all, seemed to come suddenly upon us. We were first informed of his danger on Sunday, the 20th of July, and on Friday, the 25th, he was taken from us…. When he knew that his time was come, he said that he hoped by the manner of his death to testify the sincerity of his faith; and hoped that all who had heard of his name would know that he died in that of the English Church.

  After trial and temptation; after sorrow and pain; after daily dyings to the world; after daily risings into holiness; at length comes that “rest that remaineth unto the people of God.” After the fever of life; after wearinesses and sicknesses; fightings and despondings; struggling and failing, struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this troubled and unhealthy state, at length comes death, at length the White Throne of God, at length the Beatific Vision.

  In height he might seem to be about five feet eight (he was, in reality, about an inch and a-half taller, but his figure was of an order which drowns the height); his person was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence; his complexion was fair, though not what painters technically style fair, because it was associated with black hair; his eyes were large, and soft in their expression; and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess which mixed with their light that I recognised my object…. I examined him steadfastly for a minute or more; and it struck me that he saw neither myself nor any other object in the street. He was in a deep reverie; for I had dismounted, made two or three trifling arrangements at an inn-door, and advanced close to him, before he had apparently become conscious of my presence. The sound of my voice, announcing my own name, first awoke him: he started, and for a moment seemed at a loss to understand my purpose or his own situation; for he repeated rapidly a number of words which had no relation to either of us. There was no mauvaise honte in his manner, but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in recovering his position amongst daylight realities. This little scene over, he received me with a kindness of manner so marked that it might be called gracious…. In the evening, when the heat of the day had declined, I walked out with him; and rarely, perhaps never, have I seen a person so much interrupted in one hour’s space as Coleridge, on this occasion, by the courteous attentions of young and old.

  [To] pass an entire day with Coleridge, was a marvellous change indeed. It was a Sabbath past expression deep, and tranquil, and serene. You came to a man who had travelled in many countries, and in critical times; who had seen and felt the world in most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and weaknesses; one to whom all literature and genial art were absolutely subject, and to whom, with a reasonable allowance as to technical details, all science was in a most extraordinary degree familiar. Throughout a long-drawn summer’s day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear and musical tones, concerning things human and divine; marshalling all history, harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and of terror to the imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind, that you might, for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act of conversion. And this he would do, without so much as one allusion to himself, without a word of reflection on others, save when any given act fell naturally in the way of his discourse,—without one anecdote that was not proof and illustration of a previous position;—gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with a calm mastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward for ever through a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some magnificent point in which, as in a focus, all the parti-coloured rays of his discourse should converge in light. In all this he was, in truth, your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that he was other than a fellow-student and the companion of your way,—so playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the glance of his pleasant eye!

  The manner of Coleridge was rather emphatic than dogmatic, and thus he was generally and satisfactorily listened to. There was neither the bow-wow nor the growl which seemed usually to characterize Johnson’s method of speaking; and his periods were more lengthened and continuous…. Coleridge was a mannerist. It was always the same tone—in the same style of expression—not quick and bounding enough to diffuse instant and general vivacity…. There was always this characteristic feature in his multifarious conversation—it was delicate, reverend, and courteous.

  William Coope tells us that he used often to see S. T. Coleridge till within a month of his death, and was an ardent admirer of his prominent blue eyes, reverend hair and rapt expression. He has met Charles Lamb at his house. On one occasion Coleridge was holding forth on the effects produced by his preaching, and appealed to Lamb, “You have heard me preach, I think?” “I have never heard you do anything else,” was the urbane reply.

  His benignity of manner placed his auditors entirely at their ease; and inclined them to listen delighted to the sweet, low tone in which he began to discourse on some high theme. Whether he had won for his greedy listener only some raw lad, or charmed a circle of beauty, rank, and wit, who hung breathless on his words, he talked with equal eloquence; for his subject, not his audience, inspired him. At first his tones were conversational; he seemed to dally with the shadows of the subject and with fantastic images which bordered it; but gradually the thought grew deeper, and the voice deepened with the thought; the stream gathering strength, seemed to bear along with it all things which opposed its progress, and blended them with its current; and stretching away among regions tinted with ethereal colors, was lost at airy distance in the horizon of fancy. His hearers were unable to grasp his theories, which were indeed too vast to be exhibited in the longest conversation; but they perceived noble images, generous suggestions, affecting pictures of virtue, which enriched their minds and nurtured their best affections…. He usually met opposition by conceding the point to the objector, and then went on with his high argument as if it had never been raised; thus satisfying his antagonist, himself, and all who heard him; none of whom desired to hear his discourse frittered into points, or displaced by the near encounter even of the most brilliant wits.

  Whatever might have been his habits in boyhood, in manhood he was scrupulously clean in his person, and especially took great care of his hands…. In his dress also he was as cleanly as the liberal use of snuff would permit, though the clothes-brush was often in requisition to remove the wasted snuff. “Snuff,” he would facetiously say, “was the final cause of the nose, though troublesome and expensive in its use.”

  After dinner he got up, and began pacing to and fro, with his hands behind his back, talking and walking, as Lamb laughingly hinted, as if qualifying for an itinerant preacher; now fetching a simile from Loddige’s garden, at Hackney; and then driving off for an illustration to the sugar-making in Jamaica. With his fine, flowing voice, it was glorious music, of the “never-ending, still-beginning” kind and you did not wish it to end. It was rare flying, as in the Nassau Balloon; you knew not whither, nor did you care. Like his own bright-eyed Marinere, he had a spell in his voice that would not let you go. To describe my own feeling afterward, I had been carried, spiralling, up to heaven by a whirlwind intertwisted with sunbeams, giddy and dazzled, but not displeased, and had then been rained down again with a shower of mundane sticks and stones that battered out of me all recollection of what I had heard, and what I had seen!

  The Mercury at these times was generally Mr. Coleridge, who, as has been stated, ingeniously parried every adverse argument, and after silencing his hardy disputants, announced to them that he was about to write and publish a quarto volume in favor of Pantisocracy, in which a variety of arguments would be advanced in defence of his system, too subtile and recondite to comport with conversation. It would then, he said, become manifest that he was not a projector raw from his cloister, but a cool calculating reasoner, whose efforts and example would secure to him and his friends the permanent gratitude of mankind. From the sentiments thus entertained I shall represent Mr. Coleridge, in the section of his days which devolves on me to exhibit, just as he was, and that with a firm belief that by so doing, without injuring his legitimate reputation, I shall confer an essential benefit on those to come, who will behold in Mr. C. much to admire and imitate; and certainly some things to regret. For it should be remembered, Mr. Coleridge, from universal admission, possessed some of the highest mental endowments, and many pertaining to the heart; but if a man’s life be valuable, not for the incense it consumes, but for the instruction it affords, to state even defects, (in one like Mr. C. who can so well afford deductions without serious loss), becomes in his biographer, not optional, but a serious obligation.

  The house which Mr. Gillman occupied is now occupied by a Mr. Brendon. There is nothing remarkable about the house except its view. Coleridge’s room looked upon a delicious prospect of wood and meadow, with a gay garden full of color under the window. When a friend of his first saw him there, he said he thought he had taken his dwelling-place like an abbot. There he cultivated his flowers, and had a set of birds for his pensioners, who came to breakfast with him. He might be seen taking his daily stroll up and down near Highgate, with his black coat and white locks, and a book in his hand; and was a great acquaintance of the little children.

  Coleridge was as little fitted for action as Lamb, but on a different account. His person was of a good height, but as sluggish and solid as the other’s was light and fragile. He had, perhaps, suffered it to look old before its time, for want of exercise. His hair was white at fifty; and as he generally dressed in black, and had a very tranquil demeanor, his appearance was gentlemanly, and for several years before his death was reverend. Nevertheless, there was something invincibly young in the look of his face. It was round and fresh-colored, with agreeable features, and an open, indolent, good-natured mouth. This boy-like expression was very becoming in one who dreamed and speculated as he did when he was really a boy, and who passed his life apart from the rest of the world, with a book, and his flowers. His forehead was prodigious—a great piece of placid marble; and his fine eyes, in which all the activity of his mind seemed to concentrate, moved under it with a sprightly ease, as if it was pastime to them to carry all that thought.

  Every body has heard the often told story of Coleridge’s enlisting in a cavalry regiment under a feigned name, and being detected as a Cambridge scholar in consequence of his writing some Greek lines, or rather, I believe, some Greek words, over the bed of a sick comrade, whom, not knowing how else to dispose of him, he had been appointed to nurse. It has not been stated that the arrangement for his discharge took place at my father’s house at Reading. Such, however, was the case.

  Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life’s battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there…. The good man, he was now getting old, sixty perhaps; and gave you an idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking, he rather shuffled than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he spoke as if preaching,—you would have said, preaching earnestly and almost hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his “object” and “subject,” terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sang and snuffled them into “om-m-mject” and “sum-m-mject,” with a kind of solemn shake or quaver, as he rolled along. No talk, in his century or in any other, could be more surprising.

  Coleridge was a marvellous talker. One morning he talked three hours without intermission about poetry, and so admirably that I wished every word he uttered had been written down. But sometimes his harangues were quite unintelligible, not only to myself but to others. Wordsworth and I called upon him one forenoon when he was lodging in Pall Mall. He talked uninterruptedly for about two hours, during which Wordsworth listened to him with profound attention, every now and then nodding his head as if in assent. On quitting the lodging I said to Wordsworth, “Well, for my own part I could not make head or tail of Coleridge’s oration; pray, did you understand it?” “Not one syllable of it,” was Wordsworth’s reply.

  “What do you think of Dr. Channing, Mr. Coleridge?” said a brisk young gentleman to the mighty discourser, as he sat next him at a small tea-party. “Before entering upon that question, sir,” said Coleridge, opening upon his inquirer those “noticeable gray eyes,” with a vague and placid stare, and settling himself in his seat for the night, “I must put you in possession of my views, in extenso on the origin, progress, present condition, future likelihoods, and absolute essence of the Unitarian controversy, and especially the conclusions I have, upon the whole, come to on the great question of what may be termed the philosophy of religious difference.”

  His voice was deep and musical, and his words followed each other in an unbroken flow, yet free from monotony. There was indeed a peculiar charm in his utterance. His pronunciation was remarkably correct; in some respects pedantically so. He gave the full sound of the l in talk, and should, and would.

  In all, he was physically of an enervated nature—I mean the reverse of muscular. His action was most quiet and subdued, even when most energetically declaiming: and his hand … was as velvety as the sheathed paw of cat or mole, and might have manifested the veriest Sybarite that ever lived for luxury alone.

  Meadows, in these our pleasant perambulations, was wont to speak of an old lady who kept the Lion and Sun Hotel in that neighbourhood [Highgate]. This was a favourite resort of Coleridge, and the communicative landlady used to remark that he was a great talker, and “when he began there was no stopping him.” Whenever she returned to the room, she said, after leaving it for a short time, he would still be “going on,” and sometimes he made such a noise that she wished him further.

  I recollect him only as an eloquent but intolerable talker; impatient of the speech and opinions of others; very inconsecutive, and putting forth with a plethora of words misty dogmas in theology and metaphysics, partly of German origin, which he never seemed to me to clear up to his own understanding or to that of others. What has come out posthumously of his philosophy has not removed this imputation upon it.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge was like the Rhine,

That exulting and abounding river.

He was full of words, full of thought; yielding both in an unfailing flow, that delighted many, and perplexed a few of his hearers. He was a man of prodigious miscellaneous reading, always ready to communicate all he knew. From Alpha to Omega, all was familiar to him. He was deep in Jacob Behmen. He was intimate with Thomas Aquinas and Quevedo; with Bacon and Kant, with “Peter Simple” and “Tom Cringle’s Log;” and with all the old divines of both England and France. The pages of all the infidels had passed under his eye and made their legitimate (and not more than their legitimate) impression. He went from flower to flower, throughout the whole garden of learning, like the butterfly or the bee,—most like the bee. He talked with everybody, about anything. He was so full of information that it was a relief to him to part with some portion of it to others. It was like laying down part of his burden.

  The upper part of Coleridge’s face was excessively fine. His eyes were large, light gray, prominent, and of liquid brilliancy, which some eyes of fine character may be observed to possess, as though the orb itself retreated to the innermost recesses of the brain. The lower part of his face was somewhat dragged, indicating the presence of habitual pain; but his forehead was prodigious, and like a smooth slab of alabaster.

	Like desert pools that show the stars
	Once in long leagues,—even such the scarce-snatched hours
	Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers:—
	Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars.
	Six years, from sixty saved! Yet kindling skies
	Own them, a beacon to our centuries.

  Recently an old laborer here, very old and fearing death, sent for the curate of the parish, who discovered that he was using laudanum for his rheumatism, and warned him of the risks he ran. The old man replied: “Why, I know better, Parson; my brother was doctor’s boy to Mr. Gillman fifty years or more ago, and there was an old chap there called Colingrigs, or some such name, as Mr. Gillman thought he was a-curing of drinking laudanum, and my brother he used to fill a bottle with that stuff from Mr. Gillman’s own bottles, and hand it to me, and I used to put it under my jacket and give it to h’old Colingrigs, and we did that for years and it never hurted him.”… Mrs. Dutton, a charming old lady greatly respected in Highgate, lives in an ivy-covered cottage on the Grove, and remembers Coleridge well. She used to sit on his knee and prattle to him, and she tells how he was followed about the Grove by troops of children for the sake of the sweeties of which his pockets were always full.

  If Coleridge was at any period guilty of offence against the moral law it must have been in those early days when, as he says, he knew “just so much of folly” as “made maturer years more wise.” In later years his walk became, more than ever, that of a man who had never so much as a temptation to such offence. It is a curious fact, which any careful reader of his letters may verify, that when he became a slave to opium, his spiritual consciousness became more active, and his watchfulness of the encroachments of the baser impulses of his nature more keen. If his excesses in this regard were what Southey described them, guilty animal indulgences, it is a strange problem in psychology why the whole spiritual nature of the man should undergo a manifest exaltation. Every one who was brought into contact with Coleridge in the darkest days of his subjection to opium, observed this extraordinary moral transfiguration.

  A gentle peace soothed these last years. He had fought a terrible battle against the most insidious foe that can attack man. He had suffered many a defeat, and had gained many a victory, but at last the soul rose triumphant over the weakened body. In the days of his humiliation he had written books that are sought and studied by scholars, for their clear philosophy and their Christian teaching. The mists of doubt and questioning had long since cleared away, and his faith grasped the Bible and all its teachings as the only sure guide…. At this time, during the long days and nights, when the Past with all its phases and mistakes rose before him, he could feel that at least he had always believed and written honestly, and that the principles of his youth were the principles of his age, only modified by the clearer vision gained by life’s varied experiences. His early friends were still the friends of his last years, and he had never stooped to truckle for favor or influence.

  In writing of the man of the “graspless hand,” the biographer’s own hand in time grows graspless on the pen; and in reading of him our hands too grow graspless on the page. We pursue the man and come upon group after group of his friends; and each, as we demand, “What have you done with Coleridge?” answers, “He was here just now and we helped him forward a little way.” Our best biographies are all of men and women of character—and, it may be added, of beautiful character—of Johnson, Scott, and Charlotte Brontë.

  A brief dawn of unsurpassed promise and achievement; “a trouble” as of “clouds and weeping rain;” then, a long summer evening’s work done by “the setting sun’s pathetic light”—such was Coleridge’s day, the after-glow of which is still in the sky. I am sure that the temple, with all the rubble which blended with its marble, must have been a grander whole than any we are able to reconstruct for ourselves from the stones that lie about the field. The living Coleridge was ever his own apology—men and women who neither shared nor ignored his shortcomings, not only loved him, but honored and followed him.

  Coleridge’s domestic life was not fortunate or wisely managed, but at Clevedon, for some time after his early marriage, he was as happy as a lover. Every one who knows his early verse remembers the frequent references to his beloved Sara, which are provoking in their lack of real characterisation. With the most exquisite feeling for womanhood in its general features, he seems to have been incapable of drawing strongly the features of any individual woman. His nearest approach to the creation of a heroine is perhaps in his Illyrian queen, Zapolya. Even Christabel is a figure somewhat too faintly drawn, a figure expressing indeed the beauty, innocence, and gentleness of maidenhood, but without any of the traits of a distinctive personality. All his other imaginings of women are exquisite abstractions, framed of purely feminine elements, but representing Woman rather than being themselves veritable women.

  Domesticity was never a shining virtue in him; and wife, and cottage, and Arcadia somehow fade out from the story of his life—as pointless, unsaving, and ineffective for him, all these, as the blurred lines with which we begin a story, and cross them out.

  Coleridge’s life gilded slowly away, calm outwardly, but animated by inner and never resting intellectual and emotional forces. The close of his life was attended with many physical sufferings. He was troubled greatly by nightmare…. What Coleridge appeared to me to lack was force of character and individuality. His life was centred in his imagination. His world was not our every-day working world, but one created out of his own inner consciousness. Coleridge was a Richter without his vivid humanity and humour. He was about 5 feet 9¹/₂ inches in height, but looked shorter. When a youth, his hair was black and glossy; but it was white at fifty. His complexion was fair; his countenance thoughtful and benevolent. In advanced years he was a great snuff-taker; but always scrupulously clean.

Poetry

	Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here,
	To turgid ode, and tumid stanza dear?
	Though themes of innocence amuse him best,
	Yet still obscurity’s a welcome guest.
	If Inspiration should her aid refuse
	To him who takes a Pixy for a Muse,
	Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass
	The bard who soars to elegize an ass.
	How well the subject suits his noble mind!
	He brays, the laureat of the long-ear’d kind.

	He was a mighty poet—and
	A subtle-soul’d psychologist;
	All things he seem’d to understand,
	Of old or new—of sea or land—
	But his own mind—which was a mist.
	This was a man who might have turn’d
	Hell into Heaven—and so in gladness
	A Heaven unto himself have earn’d;
	But he in shadows undiscern’d
	Trusted,—and damn’d himself to madness.

  He is superior, I think, to almost all our poets, except Spenser, in the deliciousness of his numbers. This charm results more from melody than measure, from a continuity of sweet sounds than from an apt division or skilful variation of them. There is no appearance of preparation, effort or artifice; they rise or fall with his feelings, like the unbidden breathings of an Æolian harp, from the deep intonations of passion to the light skirmishes of fancy. On the generality of readers it is to be feared this is all so much thrown away. Rapidity of reading hinders attraction to it. To enjoy the instrument one had need be in some such happy Castle of Indolence as Thomson has placed it in.

… dreamy Coleridge, of the wizard lay!

  It is to Mr. Coleridge that I am bound to make the acknowledgement due from the pupil to his master.

	O! Heart that like a fount with freshness ran,
	O! Thought beyond the stature given to man,
	Although thy page had blots on many a line,
	Yet Faith remedial made the tale divine.
	With all the poet’s fusing, kindling blaze,
	And sage’s skill to thread each tangled maze,
	Thy fair expressive image meets the view,
	Bearing the sunlike torch, and subtle clew.

	And visionary Coleridge, who
	Did sweep his thoughts as angels do
	Their wings with cadence up the Blue.

  His poetry is another matter. It is so beautiful, and was so quietly content with its beauty, making no call on the critics, and receiving hardly any notice, that people are but now beginning to awake to a full sense of its merits. Of pure poetry, strictly so called, that is to say, consisting of nothing but its essential self, without conventional and perishing helps, he was the greatest master of his time. If you could see it in a phial, like a distillation of roses (taking it, I mean, at its best), it would be found without a speck…. Oh! it is too late now; and habit and self-love blinded me at the time, and I did not know (much as I admired him) how great a poet lived in that grove at Highgate; or I would have cultivated its walks more, as I might have done, and endeavoured to return him, with my gratitude, a small portion of the delight his verses have given me.

	Lazy Coleridge, by the morning’s light,
	Gazed for a moment on the fields of white,
	And lo! the glaciers found at length a tongue,
	Mont Blanc was vocal, and Chamouni sung!

  Few minds are capable of fathoming his by their own sympathies, and he has left us no adequate manifestation of himself as a poet by which to judge him. For his dramas, I consider them complete failures, and more like visions than dramas. For a metaphysical mind like his to attempt that walk, was scarcely more judicious than it would be for a blind man to essay painting the bay of Naples. Many of his smaller pieces are perfect in their way, indeed no writer could excel him in depicting a single mood of mind, as Dejection, for instance…. Give Coleridge a canvass, and he will paint a single mood as if his colors were made of the mind’s own atoms. Here he is very unlike Southey. There is nothing of the spectator about Coleridge; he is all life; not impassioned, not vehement, but searching, intellectual life, which seems “listening through the frame” to its own pulses.

  Let me say here that I know of no English translation of a poem of any length which, a few passages excepted, so perfectly reproduces the original as this, [“Wallenstein”] and that if the same hand had given us in our language the other dramas of this author, we should have had an English Schiller worthy to be placed by the side of the German.

  A warm poetic joy in everything beautiful, whether it be a moral sentiment, like the friendship of Roland and Leoline, or only the flakes of failing light from the water-snakes—this joy, visiting him, now and again, after sickly dreams, in sleep or waking, as a relief not to be forgotten, and with such a power of felicitous expression that the infection of it passes irresistibly to the reader—such is the predominant element in the matter of his poetry, as cadence is the predominant quality of its form.

  His utterances were but part of his system; like the leaves of the Sibyl, they but scattered forth part of the fulness, inwardness, warmth, and completeness of his convictions; and his philosophy has been lost to us—save that he himself was the father of a school of earnest and humble thinkers, and will yet beget more. Of true poets he is one:—he has dared, and known, and doubted—has penetrated into the sanctuary of poetry, and trod the utmost limits of the knowable—and yet dares humbly to write himself a Christian. The example of Coleridge was great, valuable, beyond price, to the young men at the beginning of this century of doubt.

  From natural fineness of ear, was the best metrist among modern English poets.

  It is like distant music when the tone comes to us pure and without any coarser sound of wood or wire; or like the odour on the air when we smell the flower without detecting in it that of the stalk or of the earth.

  As a poet his place is indisputable. It is high among the highest of all time. An age that should forget or neglect him might neglect or forget any poet that ever lived. At least, any poet whom it did remember such an age would remember as something other than a poet; it would prize and praise in him, not the absolute and distinctive quality, but something empirical or accidental. That may be said of this one which can hardly be said of any but the greatest among men; that come what may to the world in course of time, it will never see his place filled. Other and stronger men, with fuller control and concentration of genius, may do more service, may bear more fruit; but such as his was they will not have in them to give. The highest lyric work is either passionate or imaginative; of passion Coleridge’s has nothing; but for height and perfection of imaginative quality he is the greatest of lyric poets. This was his special power, and this is his special praise.

  His best work is but little, but of its kind it is perfect and unique. For exquisite music of metrical movement and for an imaginative phantasy, such as might belong to a world where men always dreamt, there is nothing in our language to be compared with “Christabel,” 1805, and “Kubla Khan,” and to the “Ancient Mariner” published as one of the “Lyrical Ballads,” in 1798. The little poem called “Love” is not so good, but it touches with great grace that with which all sympathise. All that he did excellently might be bound up in twenty pages, but it should be bound in pure gold.

  As a poet, Coleridge’s own place is safe. His niche in the great gallery of English poets is secure. Of no one can it be more emphatically said that he was “of imagination all compact.” His peculiar touch of melancholy tenderness may prevent his attaining a high place in popular estimation. He does not possess the fiery pulse and humaneness of Burns, but the exquisite perfection of his metre and the subtle alliance of his thought and expression must always secure for him the warmest admiration of true lovers of poetic art.

  But it is less easy to follow Coleridge than to follow Southey, because it is more difficult to appreciate the full meaning of his conclusions. He loved to be mysterious and obscure; and this mystery and obscurity is constantly visible in his most beautiful poetry. Why was the Ancient Mariner to be doomed to perpetual mystery because he had shot an albatross? Why was the exquisitely pure Lady Christabel to be cursed for the performance of an act of Christian charity? The argument offends the reason as much as the language charms the sense.

  He is perhaps the finest instance we have in England of the critical and poetical power combined.

  Endowed with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fully master of his poetic means because of the very versatility of his artistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthful sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimely silenced Coleridge’s muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously considering criticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which would have sounded most movingly beneath his touch.

  There is no one of Coleridge’s sonnets which can be pronounced distinctly satisfactory. The one I have given seems to me on the whole the best. The famous one on Schiller’s “Robbers” has been much overrated—though Coleridge himself had a high opinion of it. Wordsworth showed his critical faculty when, on receipt of Dyce’s “Sonnet-Anthology,” he referred to the insertion of “The Robbers” as a mistake, on the ground of “rant.”… There are probably few readers of mature taste who would not consider Wordsworth’s epithet “rant” as literally applicable. One learns with a sense of uncomfortable wonder that Coleridge himself—this supreme master of metrical music—considered the last six lines “strong and fiery!” What a difference between this Schiller sonnet and the beautiful poem in fourteen lines entitled “Work without Hope.” If these lines had only been adequately set in sonnet-mould, the result would have been a place for this poetic gem among the finest sonnets in the language.

  Coleridge, who had little technical knowledge of any art but that in which, when he was himself, he supremely excelled—poetry—had nevertheless a deeper insight into the fundamental principles of art than any modern writer, with the sole exception of Goethe.

  Coleridge, the poet, sees clearer than Coleridge, the metaphysician.

	Those songs half-sung that yet were all divine—
	That woke Romance, the queen, to reign afresh—
	Had been but preludes from that lyre of thine,
	Could thy rare spirit’s wings have pierced the mesh
	Spun by the wizard who compels the flesh,
	But lets the poet see how heav’n can shine.

  The greatest master of the poetry of pure wonder which English literature has ever had is undoubtedly Coleridge. There is a subtle charm and magic, a witchery of sound and vision, in such poems as “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel” which has never been approached by any other English poet; and “The Ancient Mariner” still remains the most splendid effort of pure imaginative poetry in modern literature.

  Coleridge never met with a patron; he who surpassed every poet but one in genius; so he famished, exclaiming, “Work without hope, draws nectar in a sieve!”

  The debt was not all on one side. It was during the memorable year of his companionship with Wordsworth that Coleridge wrote nearly every thing that now remains as a measure of his wonderful poetic gifts. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel” were both written in that year, besides most of the short poems that make up the small volume of his poetical works. The presence by his side of the steady, resolute will of the Westmoreland dalesman seems to have for the time constrained his imagination from aimless wandering; and the lofty, unwavering self-confidence of his friend inspired him with a similar energy. Away from Wordsworth after that year he lost himself in visions of work to be done that always remained to be done. Coleridge had every poetic gift but one—the will for sustained and concentrated effort.

  Even Shakespeare’s grasp of Nature, though wider, is not, I think, more intimate than Coleridge’s. To take a figure from physical science, the union of Nature with the soul in him is chemical, not mechanical combination.

  The poetic genius of Coleridge, the highest of his many gifts, found brilliant and fascinating expression. His poems—those in which his fame lives—are as unique as they are memorable; and though their small number, their confined range, and the brief period during which his faculty was exercised with full freedom and power, seem to indicate a narrow vein, yet the remainder of his work in prose and verse leaves an impression of extraordinary and abundant intellectual force. In proportion as his imaginative creations stand apart, the spirit out of which they came must have possessed some singularity: and if the reader is not content with simple æsthetic appreciation of what the gods provide, but has some touch of curiosity leading him to look into the source of such remarkable achievement and its human history, he is at once interested in the personality of the “subtle-souled psychologist,” as Shelley with his accurate critical insight first named him.

  No other poet, perhaps, except Spenser, has been an initial influence, a generative influence, on so many poets. Having with that mild Elizabethan much affinity, it is natural that he also should be “a poets’ poet” in the rarer sense—the sense of fecundating other poets. As with Spenser, it is not that other poets have made him their model, have reproduced essentials of his style (accidents no great poet will consciously perpetuate). The progeny are sufficiently unlike the parent. It is that he has incited the very sprouting in them of the laurel-bough, has been to them a fostering sun of song. Such a primary influence he was to Rossetti—Rossetti, whose model was far more Keats than Coleridge. Such he was to Coventry Patmore, in whose work one might trace many masters rather than Coleridge…. For the last thirty years criticism has unburdened its suppressed feelings about Coleridge, which it considerately spared him while he was alive; and his position is clear, unquestioned; his reputation beyond the power of wax or wane. Alone of modern poets, his fame sits above the power of fluctuation. Wordsworth has fluctuated; Tennyson stands not exactly as he did; there is reaction in some quarters against the worship of Shelley; though all are agreed Keats is a great poet, not all are agreed as to his place. But around Coleridge the clamour of partisans is silent: none attacks, none has need to defend…. Over that wreck, most piteous and terrible in all our literary history, shines, and will shine for ever, the five-pointed star, of his glorious youth; those poor five resplendent poems, for which he paid the devil’s price of a desolated life and unthinkably blasted powers. Other poets may have done greater things; none a thing more perfect and uncompanioned. Other poets belong to this class or that; he to the class of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The Ancient Mariner, 1798

  His “Ancient Mariner” is the most remarkable performance, and the only one that I could point out to anyone as giving an adequate idea of his great natural powers. It is high German, however, and in it he seems to “conceive of poetry but as a drunken dream, reckless, careless, and heedless, of past, present, and to come.”

  A wild, mystical, phantasmagoric narrative, most picturesquely related in the old English ballad measure, and in language to which is skillfully given an air of antiquity in admirable harmony with the spectral character of the events. The whole poem is a splendid dream, filling the ear with the strange and floating melodies of sleep, and the eye with a shifting, vaporous succession of fantastic images, gloomy or radiant.

  It is Coleridge’s one great complete work, the one really finished thing, in a life of many beginnings.

  The “Ancient Mariner” has doubtless more of breadth and space, more of material force and motion, than anything else of the poet’s. And the tenderness of sentiment which touches with significant colour the pure white imagination is here no longer morbid or languid, as in the earlier poems of feeling and emotion. It is soft and piteous enough, but womanly rather than effeminate; and thus serves indeed to set off the strange splendours and boundless beauties of the story. For the execution, I presume no human eye is too dull to see how perfect it is, and how high in kind of perfection. Here is not the speckless and elaborate finish which shows everywhere the fresh rasp of file or chisel on its smooth and spruce excellence; this is faultless after the fashion of a flower or a tree. Thus it has grown: not thus has it been carved.

  The “Ancient Mariner” is a poem of which (in the experience of most of us) the first impression dates back to those earliest years when the Bible and the “Pilgrim’s Progress” made up the whole body of serious reading; but if we could encounter it first of all late in life, after the stream of more modern literature had filtered into our minds, it would probably seem to us like meeting for the first time in person some great writer of whom we have known much through his books. For just as in the one case, many qualities of mind and heart which have endeared the writer to us, find to our heightened sense a kind of visible embodiment in the face, voice, gait and gesture of the man in whose work we recognised them; so in the other, many exquisite and original imaginative fantasies which we must have seen wandering through uncertain channels, would find their true place and fitting mission in the beautiful and complete conception from which they were borrowed.

  It is enough for us here that he has written some of the most poetical poetry in the language, and one poem, the “Ancient Mariner,” not only unparalleled, but unapproached in its kind, and that kind of the rarest. It is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland. Coleridge has taken the old ballad measure and given to it by an indefinable charm wholly his own all the sweetness, all the melody and compass of a symphony. And how picturesque it is in the proper sense of the word. I know nothing like it. There is not a description in it. It is all picture.

  The component parts were supplied to him, but their novel and organic combination was his own; and in art all depends on this power of construction. The real artist comprehends these things intuitively; but to the conscious psychologist they are as hidden as is the origin of life to the biologist. At the same time, it is well worth our while to track the artist’s footsteps; for the nearer we can come to him, the more we instinctively feel the action of genius, both in detail and in general laws.

  In “The Ancient Mariner,” his powers are revealed at their highest. As a mere story the subject matter is fanciful, but under the subtle alchemy of so exquisite a genius the unreality is lost, and the effect is irresistible. We feel it not the least in passages that surprise us by their quaint simplicity and unsophisticated truthfulness. Brevity and conciseness never fail, restraint is never relaxed. There is no rambling away into commonplace; even in the imagery the reader has scarcely realised the beauty of one figure before the narrative resumes its interest, or yet another simile claims his admiration. All is quick, tense, and nervous; sprightly in rhythm, concentrated in effect, apt and succinct in expression. The charm of its Saxon English never seems assumed or strained. Its scenes of weird horror fascinate but never repel. The cry of despair from that scorched deck in mid-ocean is utterly free from theatrical impressiveness; even in those parts that most abound with ornament we are hurried away from their contemplation with an impetuosity which forbids us to look back; half a dozen short verses bring us from the fogs and ice-floes of arctic seas to the hot silence of a tropic calm.

  If in outward form the poem cannot be called religious, in its spirit it is steeped in religious thought and conviction. Into it has passed, perhaps unconsciously to the poet himself, the profoundest human experiences which are indicative of the energy of the religious consciousness.

Christabel, 1805–16

  “Christabel”—I won’t have any one sneer at “Christabel:” it is a fine wild poem.

  It is common to hear everything which Mr. Coleridge has written condemned with bitterness and boldness. His poems are called extravagant; and his prose works, poems too, and of the noblest breed, are pronounced to be mystical, obscure, metaphysical, theoretical, unintelligible, and so forth; just as the same phrases have over and over been applied, with as much sagacity, to Plato, St. Paul, Cudworth, and Kant. But “Christabel” is the only one of his writings which is ever treated with unmingled contempt…. Throughout the poem there runs and lives one especial excellence, the beauty of single lines and expressions, perfect flowers in themselves, yet interfering as little with the breadth and unity of the general effect, as the primroses and hawthorns of the valley with its sweeping perspective of light and shadow. No one, I imagine, can fail to recognise in it the original germ of the “Lay of the Last Minstrel;” but how superior is it to that spirited and brilliant tale, in the utter absence both of defect and superfluity in the diction,—in the thrilling interest and beauty of every, the slightest circumstance,—in the relation of each atom to the whole,—and in the deep reflection, which is the very atmosphere and vital air of the whole composition!

  The thing attempted in “Christabel” is the most difficult of execution in the whole field of romance—witchery by daylight; and the success is complete. Geraldine, so far as she goes, is perfect. She is sui generis. The reader feels the same terror and perplexity that Christabel in vain struggles to express, and the same spell that fascinates her eyes. Who and what is Geraldine—whence come, whither going, and what designing? What did the poet mean to make of her? What could he have made of her? Could he have gone on much farther without having had recourse to some of the ordinary shifts of witch tales? Was she really the daughter of Roland de Vaux, and would the friends have met again and embraced?… We are not amongst those who wish to have “Christabel” finished. It cannot be finished. The poet has spun all he could without snapping. The theme is too fine and subtle to bear much extension. It is better as it is, imperfect as a story, but complete as an exquisite production of the imagination, differing in form and colour from the “Ancient Mariner,” yet differing in effect from it only so as the same powerful faculty is directed to the feudal or the mundane phases of the preternatural.

  Out of a hundred readers of “Christabel,” fifty will be able to make nothing of its rhythm, while forty-nine of the remaining fifty will, with some ado, fancy they comprehend it after the fourth or fifth perusal. The one out of the whole hundred who shall both comprehend and admire it at first sight must be an unaccountably clever person; and I am by far too modest to assume, for a moment, that that very clever person is myself.

  For my part, I cannot compare “Kubla Khan” with “Christabel.” The magical beauty of the latter has been so long canonized in the world’s estimate, that to praise it now would be unseemly. It brought into English poetry an atmosphere of wonder and mystery, of weird beauty and pity combined, which was quite new at the time it appeared, and has never since been approached. The movement of its subtle cadences has a union of grace with power, which only the finest lines of Shakespeare can parallel. As we read “Christabel” and a few other of Coleridge’s pieces, we recall his own words:

	“In a half-sleep we dream,
	And dreaming hear thee still, O singing lark!
	That singest like an angel in the clouds.”

  I confess that I prefer the “Ancient Mariner” to “Christabel,” fine as that poem is in parts and tantalizing as it is in the suggestion of deeper meanings than were ever there. The “Ancient Mariner” seems to have come of itself. In “Christabel” I fancy him saying, “Go to, let us write an imaginative poem.” It never could be finished on those terms.

	Inhospitably hast thou entertained,
	O Poet, us the bidden to thy board,
	Whom in mid-feast, and while our thousand mouths
	Are one laudation of the festal cheer,
	Thou from thy table dost dismiss, unfilled.
	Yet loudlier thee than many a lavish host
	We praise, and oftoner thy repast half-served
	Than many a stintless banquet, prodigally
	Through satiate hours prolonged; nor praise less well
	Because with tongues thou hast not cloyed, and lips
	That mourn the parsimony of affluent souls,
	And mix the lamentation with the laud.

  “Christabel” is a fragment of most wonderful quality, and exhibits another singular feature of Coleridge’s poetry—his marvellous power of touching the sense of the supernatural.

Kubla Khan, 1816

  Were we compelled to the choice, I for one would rather preserve “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel” than any other of Coleridge’s poems. It is more conceivable that another man should be born capable of writing the “Ancient Mariner” than one capable of writing these. The former is perhaps the most wonderful of all poems. In reading it we seem rapt into that paradise revealed to Swedenborg, where music and colour and perfume were one, where you could hear the hues and see the harmonies of heaven. For absolute melody and splendour it were hardly rash to call it the first poem in the language.

  Were there left of Coleridge nothing but “Kubla Khan,” from this gem one might almost reconstruct, in full brightness, its great author’s poetic work, just as the expert zoölogist reconstructs the extinct megatherium from a single fossil bone. Of this masterpiece, the chief beauty is not the noted music of the versification, but the range and quality of the imaginings embodied in this music. Were there in these no unearthly breathings, no mysterious grandeur, the verse could not have been made to pulsate so rhythmically. The essence of the melody is in the fineness of the conception, in the poetic imaginations.

  To us “Kubla Khan” is a splendid curiosity, a lyrical landscape fairy tale, which we know not what to make of. Ninety years ago this specimen of emotional inspiration evinced a bold and powerful reaction. Shelley borrowed many a curiosity from it; for example, in “Marianne’s Dream” we have the Fata Morgana towers—the half-joyful, half-demoniacal sound in the lady’s ears—the bursting streams of light, and the feverishly-tossing floods—all without any practical object. And again, in the “Skylark,” the “high-born maiden” in a palace, and the harmonious madness of the singer. This is why Byron, Shelley, and Keats indulge so commonly in visions, distinctly so entitled—for example, “Darkness,” “Vision of the Sea,” “On a Dream”—seeking in all seriousness to forecast the future, and even placing the truth of the dream before that of the waking eye. The poetic atmosphere became purified, but, in the zeal for reform, too much rarefied.

Aids to Reflection, 1825

  Omitting, of course, one’s Bible and Shakespeare, which, if one really loves them, are mightier and more penetrating than any other books, the first that really went far—farther, perhaps, than any other—to the making of me was Coleridge’s “Aids to Reflection,” which I came across early in college days. I was still only a boy, and should have been at school for some years yet. I had no one to guide my reading, and came on the book by chance, for I readjust whatever happened to fall in my way. Brought up in the strictest sect of Calvinists, I had all along entered a silent protest against the thing I was taught for truth; but till now had never got any help in formulating that protest and obtaining a larger faith. On the religious side of my nature, this was the work that did most for me, and I soon found that my friend the impecunious grocer was quite as devoted to it as myself. We read it, quoted it, annotated it, and scraped enough money to get also “The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit” and Leighton’s “St. Peter.” But Leighton was not so much to me as Coleridge; the commentary touched me more nearly than the text, and there were times when I even thought they had little or no connection. But be that as it may. It is not my present business to criticise the book, but only to tell what it was to me in those years. Of course it led me soon to read his poems; but here again, as with Shelley, I had little affinity with the weird and eerie genius that sang “The Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel,” and was chiefly affected by the wonderful melody of his verse. I speak now only of those early years. Later, I came to see that the same mind was at work in the poems as in the thoughtful prose. On the whole, I am more indebted to Coleridge than to any one else for what is deepest and best in me.

  It was just after I left school, and before I went up to the university, that the first great crisis in my intellectual life occurred. I was introduced to the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I do not, of course, refer to the poetical works, but to that entirely unique collection of theologico-philosophical dogmatism, of profoundly suggestive hints and speculations, of hybrid mysticism, of subtile and pregnant criticism, of dreams and lightning flashes of genius to be found in the prose writings of the Highgate sage. To me, as to many another young man at that time (1844), the “Aids to Reflection” came as a new revelation. I cannot stop to explain how it was so, but the book took such hold of me that for years I rarely passed a week without reading out of it.

  No less devout adherent of that theology could have penetrated it so powerfully with his influence. But what was a condition of his immediate success has told fatally upon his lasting fame. Gold and clay are mingled, even more than in his political tracts, in the fragmentary records of his religious thought. In the “Aids to Reflection,” a profound spiritual emotion struggles for utterance among concatenated pedantries of phrase, and the terminology of Kant is constrained to the service of Anglican orthodoxy.

General

  Beyond all other political speculators, our author mingles important moral philosophical principles with his reasonings…. We cannot conclude without expressing an earnest wish, that this original thinker and eloquent writer may be persuaded to put the literary public speedily in possession, by successive volumes of essays, of an ample portion of those refined speculations, the argument and the strongest illustrations of which he is well known to have in an almost complete state in his mind—and many of which will never be in any other mind, otherwise than as communicated from him. The chief alteration desirable, for his reader’s sake, to be made in his mode of writing, is a resolute restriction on that mighty profusion and excursiveness of thought, in which he is tempted to suspend the pursuit and retard the attainment of the one distinct object which should be clearly kept in view; and, added to this, a more patient and prolonged effort to reduce the abstruser part of his ideas, as much as their subtle quality will possibly admit, to a substantial and definable form.

  A metaphysical dilettante.

	Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
	But like a hawk encumber’d with his hood,—
	Explaining metaphysics to the nation—
	I wish he would explain his Explanation.

	You will see Coleridge—he who sits obscure
	In the exceeding lustre, and the pure
	Intense irradiation of a mind,
	Which with its own internal lightning blind
	Flags wearily through darkness and despair
	—A cloud-encircled meteor of the air—
	A hooded eagle among blinking owls.—

  Very great but rather mystical, sometimes absurd.

  If Mr. Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of his age, he would probably have been the finest writer; but he lays down his pen to make sure of an auditor, and mortgages the admiration of posterity for the stare of an idler. If he had not been a poet, he would have been a powerful logician; if he had not dipped his wing in the Unitarian controversy, he might have soared to the very summit of fancy. But in writing verse, he is trying to subject the Muse to transcendental theories: in his abstract reasoning, he misses his way by strewing it with flowers. All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago: since then, he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice…. He walks abroad in the majesty of an universal understanding, eyeing the “rich strond,” or golden sky above him, and “goes sounding on his way,” in eloquent accents, uncompelled and free!

  Taken absolutely and in itself, the “Remorse” is more fitted for the study than the stage; its character is romantic and pastoral in a high degree, and there is a profusion of poetry in the minor parts, the effect of which could never be preserved in the common routine of representation. What this play wants is dramatic movement; there is energetic dialogue and a crisis of great interest, but the action does not sufficiently grow on the stage itself.

	Spirit! so oft in radiant freedom soaring
	High through seraphic mysteries unconfined,
	And oft a diver through the deeps of mind,
	Its caverns, far below its waves, exploring;
	And oft such strains of breezy music pouring,
	As, with the floating sweetness of their sighs,
	Could still all fevers of the heart, restoring
	A while that freshness left in Paradise;
	Say, of those glorious wanderings what the goal?
	What the rich fruitage to man’s kindred soul
	From toil of thine bequeathed?—O strong and high,
	And sceptred intellect! thy goal confest
	Was the Redeemer’s cross—thy last bequest,
	One lesson, breathing thence profound humility!

  Coleridge was, like Moses, forbid to enter into the promised land; but, from a Pisgah of his own, he saw it in clear vision.

  The Opium-eater calls Coleridge “the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive that has yet existed among men.” Impiety to Shakspeare! treason to Milton! I give up the rest, even Bacon. Certainly, since their day, we have seen nothing at all comparable to him. Byron and Scott were but as gunflints to a granite mountain! Wordsworth has one angle of resemblance.

  I think with all his faults Old Sam was more of a great man than any one that has lived within the four seas in my memory. It is refreshing to see such a union of the highest philosophy and poetry, with so full a knowledge, in so many points at least, of particular facts.

	No loftier, purer soul than his hath ever
	With awe revolved the planetary page,
	From infancy to age,
	Of Knowledge; sedulous and proud to give her
	The whole of his great heart for her own sake;
	For what she is; not what she does, or what can make.

  The name of Coleridge is one of the few English names of our own time which are likely to be oftener pronounced, and to become symbolical of more important things, in proportion as the inward workings of the age manifest themselves more and more in outward facts. Bentham excepted, no Englishman of recent date has left his impress so deeply in the opinions and mental tendencies of those among us who attempt to enlighten their practice by philosophical meditation…. The influence of Coleridge, like that of Bentham, extends far beyond those who share in the peculiarities of his religious or philosophical creed. He has been the great awakener in this country of the spirit of philosophy, within the bounds of traditional opinions…. It is hardly possible to speak of Coleridge, and his position among his contemporaries, without reverting to Bentham: they are connected by two of the closest bonds of association—resemblance and contrast. It would be difficult to find two persons of philosophic eminence more exactly the contrary of one another. Compare their modes of treatment of any subject, and you might fancy them inhabitants of different worlds. They seem to have scarcely a principle or a premiss in common. Each of them sees scarcely anything but what the other does not see. Bentham would have regarded Coleridge with a peculiar measure of the good-humoured contempt with which he was accustomed to regard all modes of philosophizing different from his own. Coleridge would probably have made Bentham one of the exceptions to the enlarged and liberal appreciation which (to the credit of his mode of philosophizing) he extended to most thinkers of any eminence, from whom he differed.

  A new era of critical opinion upon Shakspere, as propounded by Englishmen, may be dated from the delivery of the lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, at the Surrey Institution, in 1814. What that great man did for Shakspere during the remainder of his valuable life can scarcely be appreciated by the public. For his opinions were not given to the world in formal treatises and ponderous volumes. They were fragmentary; they were scattered, as it were, at random; many of them were the oral lessons of that wisdom and knowledge which he poured out to a few admiring disciples. But they have had their effect. For ourselves, personally, we owe a debt of gratitude to that illustrious man that can never be repaid. If in any degree we have been enabled to present Shakspere to the popular mind under new aspects, looking at him from a central point, which should permit us, however imperfectly, to comprehend something of his wondrous system, we owe the desire so to understand him ourselves to the germs of thought which are scattered through the works of that philosopher; to whom the homage of future times will abundantly compensate for the partial neglect of his contemporaries. We desire to conclude this outline of the opinions of others upon the works of Shakspere, in connection with the imperfect expression of our own sense of those opinions, with the name of COLERIDGE.

	To the honored memory
	OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE,
	the Christian Philosopher,
	who through dark and winding paths of speculation
	was led to the light,
	in order that others by his guidance might reach that light,
	without passing through the darkness,
	these Sermons on the Work of the Spirit
	are dedicated
	with deep thankfulness and reverence
	by one of the many pupils
	whom his writings have helped to discern
	the sacred concord and unity
	of human and divine truth.

  Coleridge was the first who made criticism interpretative both of the spirit and the form of works of genius, the first who founded his principles in the nature of things…. He had a clear notion of the difference lying at the base of all poetic criticism, between mechanical regularity and organic form.

	A brook glancing under green leaves, self-delighting, exulting,
	And full of a gurgling melody ever renewed—
	Renewed thro’ all changes of Heaven, unceasing in sunlight,
	Unceasing in moonlight, but hushed in the beams of the holier orb.

  A man resembling Shakspeare in width and subtlety, although not in clearness and masculine strength and directness.

  Atherton—You quoted Coleridge a minute since. He first, and after him Carlyle, familiarized England with the German distinction between reason and understanding. In fact, what the Epicureans and the Stoics were to Plotinus in his day, that were Priestley and Paley to Coleridge. The spiritualist is the sworn foe of your rationalist and pleasures-of-virtue man. Romance must loathe utilitarianism, enthusiasm scorn expediency. Hence the reaction which gives us Schelling as the Plotinus of Berlin, and Coleridge as the Schelling of Highgate.

  Coleridge, a catholic mind, with a hunger for ideas; with eyes looking before and after to the highest bards and sages, and who wrote and spoke the only high criticism in his time, is one of those who save England from the reproach of no longer possessing the capacity to appreciate what rarest wit the island has yielded. Yet the misfortune of his life, his vast attempts but most inadequate performings, failing to accomplish any one masterpiece,—seems to mark the closing of an era. Even in him, the traditional Englishman was too strong for the philosopher, and he fell into accommodations; and as Burke had striven to idealize the English State, so Coleridge “narrowed his mind” in the attempt to reconcile the Gothic rule and dogma of the Anglican Church, with eternal ideas. But for Coleridge, and a lurking taciturn minority uttering itself in occasional criticism, oftener in private discourse, one would say that in Germany and in America is the best mind in England rightly respected.

  Some of the peculiarities of Coleridge most familiar to theologians,—his tetrads and pentads, his doctrine of Church and State, his denial of the documentary inspiration of the whole Bible,—we pass by; not from any slighting estimate of their importance as parts of an organic whole, but in order to insulate the one character,—of religious Realism,—which is the inner essence of the system itself, and the living seed of its development in the school of Mr. Maurice.

  Among the men who have led the van of British thought during the present century, who have stamped the impress of their genius upon the forehead of the age, and moulded the intellectual destinies of our time, there is one name preëminently fraught with interest to the student of our internal history. That name is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In our schools of poetry, of philosophy, of theology—among our critics and our ecclesiastics, our moralists and our politicians—the influence of Coleridge has worked, silently and viewlessly, but with wide-spread and mighty power. As by a verbal talisman, his name opens to our mental gaze vast and varied fields of reflection, invokes grave, important, and thickly-crowding thoughts, and forms the centre round which countless subjects of discussion and investigation group themselves.

  In point of thorough knowledge of the meaning, and constant and scrupulous precision in the use, of individual words, I suppose Coleridge surpasses all other English writers, of whatever period.

  Those, indeed, who learnt, and still learn, from the “Friend,” perceive that it had one main purpose; that whether Coleridge discussed questions of art or questions of ethics, or—what have the largest place in the book—questions of politics, he was seeking to distinguish between those principles which are universal, which belong to one man as much as another, and those rules and maxims which are generalized from experience. Having this end in view he accepted Kant’s distinction between the understanding and the reason as of inestimable worth…. What we have said may help to remove the impression that any part of Coleridge’s influence arose from the unpractical qualities of his mind. Just in proportion as he yielded to these, or they prevailed over him, his influence was weakened. Whatever has been said, or may be said, to the contrary, he exercised no power through them. It is only by being in contact with the actual things which other men were thinking of, and with the thoughts which those things were awakening, that he gained a hearing in any quarter.

  Coleridge had less delicacy and penetration than Joubert, but more richness and power; his production, though far inferior to what his nature at first seemed to promise, was abundant and varied. Yet in all his production how much is there to dissatisfy us! How many reserves must be made in praising either his poetry, or his criticism, or his philosophy! How little either of his poetry, or of his criticism, or of his philosophy, can we expect permanently to stand! But that which will stand of Coleridge is this; the stimulus of his continual effort,—not a moral effort, for he had no morals,—but of his continual instinctive effort, crowned often with rich success, to get at and to lay bare the real truth of his matter in hand, whether that matter were literary, or philosophical, or political, or religious; and this in a country where at that moment such an effort was almost unknown…. Coleridge’s great action lay in his supplying in England, for many years and under critical circumstances, by the spectacle of this effort of his, a stimulus to all minds, in the generation which grew up round him, capable of profiting by it. His action will still be felt as long as the need for it continues. When, with the cessation of the need, the action too has ceased, Coleridge’s memory, in spite of the disesteem,—nay, repugnance,—which his character may and must inspire, will yet forever remain invested with that interest and gratitude which invests the memory of founders.

  The literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against the relative spirit. With a strong native bent towards the tracking of all questions, critical or practical, to first principles, he is ever restlessly scheming to “apprehend the absolute,” to affirm it effectively, to get it acknowledged. It was an effort, surely, an effort of sickly thought, that saddened his mind, and limited the operation of his unique poetic gift…. Perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of seriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of the perfect manner.

  He explored the wide field of literature and philosophy, and brought to light richer spoils than any scholar of his time, or since…. To follow him were an education in itself.

  The greatest imaginative intellect of the age.

  His positions as a poet and a prose writer are entirely independent. He is the only man that is very great as an imaginative writer and as a logician, for though Plato is a great literary artist, we do not know that he was a poet of the first rank. Coleridge does not mix his reasoning and his poetry as Milton did, and as Wordsworth did. While his prose abounds in graphic and suggestive images, it is strictly argumentative prose; it holds no artistic element in solution. It is addressed primarily to the intellect. His poetry on the other hand is strictly representative, purely an art product. It makes no appeal to the understanding, but is the language of something higher.

  Our business is not so much to attempt any criticism of the value of Coleridge’s thought as to describe it as a new power. That it was such a power is beyond all question. It is not merely the testimony of such men as Archdeacon Hare and John Sterling, of Newman and of John Stuart Mill, but it is the fact that the later streams of religious thought in England are all more or less coloured by his influence. They flow in deeper and different channels since he lived. Not only are some of those streams directly traceable to him, and said to derive all their vitality from his principles, but those which are most opposed to him have been moulded more or less by the impress of his religious genius. There was much in the man Coleridge himself to provoke animadversion; there may have been aspects of his teaching that lend themselves to ridicule; but if a genius, seminal as his has been in the world of thought and of criticism as well as poetry, it is not to excite our reverence, there is little that remains for us to reverence in the intellectual world. And when literature regains the higher tone of our earlier national life, the tone of Hooker and of Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be again acknowledged, in Julius Hare’s words, as “a true sovereign of English thought.” He will take rank in the same line of spiritual genius. He has the same elevation of feeling, the same profound grasp of moral and spiritual ideas, the same wide range of vision. He has, in short, the same love of wisdom, the same insight, the same largeness—never despising nature or art or literature for the sake of religion, still less ever despising religion for the sake of culture.

  Coleridge’s prose, less unique than his verse, is more uniformly excellent, and has an almost unparalleled range of application to subjects grave and gay, easy and abstruse.

  Characteristically a poet, and never more so than when pouring forth his “divine philosophy,” he had the poet’s power to make the ideal life the real. Everything that passed through his mind suffered “a change into something rich and strange,” so that it could neither be identified nor reclaimed; but he would have acknowledged Kant as his master, and, whether or not he was an accurate teacher, he made the great outlines of his master’s philosophy known to English thought.

	A man to-morrow weak as are the worst,
	A man to whom all depths, all heights belong,
	Now with too bitter hours of weakness cursed,
	Now winged with vigor, as a giant strong
	To take our groping hearts with tender hand,
	And set them surely where God’s angels stand.

  Milton and Coleridge have certainly exercised deeper influence over my life and opinions than any other authors. I received the entire works of Coleridge, both prose and poetry, as a college prize, and became thoroughly familiar with them all. I have no space to mention the permanent lessons of philosophy and theology which I learnt from him, though I have never seen reason to alter the views which he taught me on two subjects of the utmost theological importance—the doctrines of the atonement and the inspiration of the Scriptures.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a true representative of Romanticism with all its bright and dark sides. He was a man of wide culture, of fine sensibility, of vivid imagination, of ready intellect; but as a thinker his efforts were spasmodic and fragmentary, lacking steadiness, consistency, and thoroughness; and he displayed a surprising want of moral strength.

  The influence of Coleridge has been scattered and fragmentary. In church, in state, in literature, his spirit has descended to many whose theories and purposes are otherwise widely different. John Henry Newman and Frederick D. Maurice alike owe their inspiration to him; John Stuart Mill can call him one of the two great moving forces of the century; Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold carried on in their different fashions his European and cosmopolitan culture of England. His literary criticism is of the same scattered and frutiful sort. In his suggestions lies the germ of a higher development, the spirit that must inform the great and enduring work of the future. Fragmentary as his writings are, there is yet opened through them an ideal criticism that has never been reached, and for which we can only hope if the clear intellectuality of the eighteenth century shall come to blend with the spirituality that complemented and destroyed it.

  One is a little apt to forget that his metaphysical bent was no less innate than his poetical,—even at Christ’s Hospital, his spiritual potation was a half-and-half in which the waters of a more or less authentic Castaly, and the “philosophic draughts” from such fountains as Jamblichus and Plotinus, were equally mingled. Whether or not a born “maker,” he was certainly a born theorist; and we believe not only that under all his most important artistic achievements there was a basis of intellectual theory, but that the theory, so far from being an alien and disturbing presence, did duty as the unifying principle which co-ordinated the whole.

  One of the greatest among poets, who was also—now and then, by fits and starts—a very great critic…. Coleridge was never systematic or coherent in criticism; on poetry, on philosophy, on theology, on politics, he delivered his soul at random, and after such a fashion as to call up the fancy of a first-rate player at billards or at chess who took pleasure in playing blindfold. His good hits, or his good moves, are naturally nothing less than admirable; indeed, no subsequent player can hope to follow them; but when he goes wrong he is more hopelessly wrong than the most incompetent novice.

  Coleridge is “sequacious,” even when he rambles; seer though he is, he omits no step; his style is not only redintegrating, but, at times, almost impartially so—as if narcotism had touched his selective faculty. He uses more “hooks-and-eyes” than any writer of his time, more, I presume, than any great English littérateur of the century. Of 300 sentences in the “Friend,” 100 are formally connected—up to that day a higher proportion than that of any man after Walton.

  The contributions which Coleridge made to modern thought, rich, ample, and suggestive as they are, have all the characteristics of his varied and eventful life. In Poetry, Criticism, and Philosophy he drove the shaft deep and gave us samples of the wealth of ore lying in their confines. Although he worked these mines only at irregular intervals and passed rapidly from one to the other, yet, by stimulating and quickening activity in his associates and followers, he caused the entire territory to be explored as it never was before in English history. If it cannot be said of him that he left us a rounded and complete system, yet it can be said—and it is a far nobler tribute—that he made it possible for us to grasp those principles which underlie all systems. His contribution to the literature of power is certainly unsurpassed by that of any writer of modern times.

  Like Nelson’s letter to Lady Hamilton, Coleridge’s “Letters,” to everybody almost, are not always agreeable reading. One lesson of Mr. Carlyle’s, a lesson which he preached by precept rather than example, we have partly learned. “Consume your own smoke,” said the sage. Coleridge, in his private correspondence, blew abroad the vapor of smoke which rose from, and often dimmed the fire of his unexampled genius. On that sacred flame it is no metaphor to say that he poured too many drugs, heaped “poppy buds and labdanum.” Hence ascended the smoke which he did not restrain or consume, but allowed to take its free way through heaven and earth. It may be said that there is an affectation, now, of reticence, and an affectation of manliness. Affectations if they be, these at least are imitations of virtues which Coleridge did not possess. He had a kind of mania for confessing himself, and crying mea culpa. Like the bad man in Aristotle, he is “full of repentance,” or of remorse. He is an erring creature, and knows it, and his confessions occasionally suggest, in a sense, the Scotch proverbial policy of “taking the first word of flyting.” One would rather see him more hardened, less “sensible.” To moralise about Coleridge is temptingly easy and absolutely useless.

  In disburthening himself of the ideas and imaginations which pressed upon his consciousness, in committing them to writing and carefully preserving them through all his wanderings, Coleridge had no mind that they should perish utterly. The invisible pageantry of thought and passion which forever floated into his spiritual ken, the perpetual hope, the half belief that the veil of the senses would be rent in twain, and that he and not another would be the first to lay bare the mysteries of being, and to solve the problem of the ages—of these was the breath of his soul. It was his fate to wrestle from night to morn with the Angel of the Vision, and of that unequal combat he has left, by way of warning or encouragement, a broken but an inspired and inspiring record.

  No English prose is nearer to that of Goethe in its power of carrying the reader along, with or without his consent, till he is left wondering what it is that has got hold of him. The spell that drew so many people, of all orders of intellectual constitution, to listen to Coleridge talking, may still be found in his philosophical and critical writings; and, in spite of the scorner, it is still possible to “sit under” the eloquence of his sermons, merely because it is true eloquence, and not a battery of separate notes and epigrams…. It is seldom that the prose of Coleridge is decorated in any adventitious way. There are many illustrations, but rarely any that look as if they had been stuck on forefeet.

  Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism is from first to last a continual quest of the evidences of organic structure, thus conceived. It illustrates both the value of the method and its perils. He made the first serious effort to grasp the totality of Shakespeare’s work, and to trace out the inner history of his mind through the chronological chaos in which the dramas were still involved. The method gives subtlety, sometimes over-subtlety, to his appreciation of character. Every obvious trait becomes the mask of an alien quality which it conceals. He insists upon the inadequacy of the traditional classifications. He refuses to see sheer folly or villainy; dwells on the intellectual greatness of Iago, of Richard; repudiates the “cowardice” of Falstaff, and finds in Polonius a wise man past his prime. He elicits the hidden pathos of humour, and is somewhat too prone to find profound judgment in a pun.