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.-HOLLAND, SIR HENRY, 1871, Recollections of Past Life, p. 205. 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.-PROCTER, BRYAN WALLER, 1874? Recollections of Men of Letters, p. 144. 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.-CLARKE, CHARLES AND MARY COWDEN, 1878, Recollections of Writers, p. 35. Like desert pools that show the stars Once in long leagues,- -even such the scarcesnatched 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. ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL, 1881, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Five English Poets, Ballads and Sonnets. 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 ivycovered 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. -MARTIN, DR. E. B., 1884, Literary Landmarks of London, by Hutton, Letter, p. 58. 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.-CAINE, HALL, 1887, Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Great Writers), p. 136. 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. LORD, ALICE E., 1893, The Days of Lamb and Coleridge, A Historical Romance, p. 368. 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.-QUILLER-COUCH, A. T., 1893, Adventures in Criticism. 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. CAMPBELL, JAMES DYKES, 1894, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 281. 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.-DOWDEN, EDWARD, 1895, New Studies in Literature, p. 321. 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. MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1895, English Lands Letters and Kings, Queen Anne and the Georges, p. 312. Coleridge's life glided 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 9 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. --FORSTER, JOSEPH, 1897, Great Teachers. POETRY Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here. He was a mighty poet-and A subtle-soul'd psychologist; But his own mind-which was a mist. Trusted, and damn'd himself to madness. -SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE, 1819, Peter Bell the Third. 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.CARY, HENRY FRANCIS, 1823, Notices of Miscellaneous English Poets, Memoir, ed. Cary, vol. II, p. 299. dreamy Coleridge, of the wizard lay! -ELLIOTT, EBENEZER, 1829, The Village Patriarch, bk. iv. It is to Mr. Coleridge that I am bound to make the acknowledgement due from the pupil to his master.-SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1830, Lay of the Last Minstrel, Introduction. 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. -STERLING, JOHN, 1839, Coleridge, Poems, p. 154. And visionary Coleridge, who Did sweep his thoughts as angels do Their wings with cadence up the Blue. -BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1844, A Vision of Poets. 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 selflove 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.-HUNT, LEIGH, 1844, Imagination and Fancy, pp. 250, 255. 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! -HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL, 1846, A Rhymed Lesson. 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.OSSOLI, MARGARET FULLER, 1850? Art, Literature and the Drama, pp. 97, 98. 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.-BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN, 1859, Schiller, Orations and Addresses, p. 299. 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.-PATER, WALTER, 1865-80, Appreciations, p. 103. 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. FRISWELL, JAMES HAIN, 1869, Essays on English Writers, p. 313. From natural fineness of ear, was the best metrist among modern English poets. -LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1870, Chaucer, My Study Windows, p. 267. 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. DEVERE, AUBREY, 1873-97, Letters, Recollections, p. 197. 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. 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. 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. SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1875, Essays and Studies, p. 274. 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. BROOKE, STOPFORD A., 1876, English Literature (Primer), p. 152. 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.-BOYLE, G. D., 1877, Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth ed., vol. VI, p. 124. 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.--WALPOLE, SPENCER, 1878, A History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815, vol. I, p. 357. He is perhaps the finest instance we have in England of the critical and poetical power combined.-SHAIRP, JOHN CAMPBELL, 1881, Poetic Style in Modern English Poetry, Aspects of Poetry. 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. -TRAILL, HENRY DUFF, 1884, Coleridge (English Men of Letters), p. 65. 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.-SHARP, WILLIAM, 1886, Sonnets of this Century, p. 238, note. 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.-PATMORE, COVENTRY, 1889-98, Principle in Art, p. 12. Coleridge, the poet, sees clearer than Coleridge, the metaphysician. CHENEY, JOHN VANCE, 1891, The Golden Guess, p. 29. Those songs half-sung that yet were alldivine 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. -WATTS, THEODORE, 1892? Coleridge. 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. -DAWSON, W. J.. 1892, Quest and Vision, p. 269. 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!". HAKE, GORDON, 1892, Memoirs of Eighty Years, p. 77. 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 |