sider the abstract nature of poetry he did so with admirable balance and insight. His professed essays on the art are concerned rather with the evolution of language and metrical form than with the cosmic spirit of poetry, but his correspondents might profit, if they were able, by many swift words of profound critical understanding. Speaking of description, he says, 'I have always thought that it made the most graceful ornament of poetry, but never ought to make the subject,' and his letters to Mason about that industrious writer's work abound in observations that are worthy of a better subject. It is clear from these flashes of criticism scattered through the letters that he had a finer understanding of his art than, perhaps, any man of his age, however inconsistently he may have applied his understanding in practice, and although this, again, does not add to his stature as poet, it gives some new distinction to his place in the history of letters. The chief defect in his positive contribution to poetry is its unconcern with humanity. He peoples his poems with personages that are but rarely warm with life. Gray was not commonly fortunate in his choice of subjects. The Odes, which form the greater part of his work, each contain incidental and isolated passages that by their sudden rise to excellence of style or their clarity and intimacy of feeling are made memorable, but they do not command our interest either by their unity of conception, their sustained beauty of expression, or their nearness to our own experience. In the 'Elegy' alone among his more serious poems did he take a subject that by its simplicity and universality enabled him to write in complete accord with the impulse that was in him for direct and unstrained expression, and it is the 'Elegy' that we treasure as a complete poem, reading it from beginning to end when we turn back to it, not hastening forward for some rare glimpse of splendour that we know awaits us. In his lighter poems, notably 'The Long Story,' he attained something of this same warmth. His humour was always one of his most lovable qualities, and when he brings it to his poetry it is some compensation for the naturalness and depth that we miss in the Odes save at long intervals; nearly related as it is to the quick humanity that stirred him to utterance in the poem that popular affection has agreed with Dr. Johnson in proclaiming as his highest achievement. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE WHEN the psychologist comes who shall attempt 'An Inquiry into the Visitations of Genius,' he might well adopt, as the sole basis of his investigation, 'Coleridge's Complete Poetical Works.' We have them here in two volumes, admirably produced and edited, amounting to well over eleven hundred pages. By virtue of these, Coleridge, who was born in the year after Gray's death, and wrote his first known poem in 1787, takes a moderately distinguished place among the poets for whom we can only feel a certain compassionate reverence for their loyalty to an art that steadily refused to bestow any of its finer favours on their services. The eighteenth-century poets, those who were bound by, instead of transcending, their age, may not have been aware of their own rather painful limitations; but they were, at best, not allowed to know anything of the rarer ecstasy which is the poet's right, and to despise them is to despise a singularly unfortunate company of men. The good Mr. Akenside, had he lived a hundred years earlier, with all his desire and labour for poetry, might have set his heart dancing to some jolly song, in 1 The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. (Clarendon Press.) stead of laboriously spending it on a forlorn hope; and even he made some honourable endeavour to bridge the darkest years that poetry has known since its beginning in England, with little enough of the poet's one true reward, whatever he may have had of praise. And Coleridge normally save for some divine whim, always is of this company. He remarks of one of his earliest compositions that it is not beyond the power of any clever schoolboy; that it is no more than a putting of thought into verse. That was the staple industry of Coleridge and his fellows. Through eleven hundred pages we find thought being put into verse; thought sometimes witty, sometimes dull, very often pompous and sentimental; but, save at one or two blessed intervals, never thought transfused into imagination and poetry. It shines in the gay little 'Ode in the Manner of Anacreon'; it is elephantine in things like the 'Religious Musings'; it struggles towards something rarer in stray lines like: 'And scatter livelier roses round,' or stanzas such as: 'And oh! may Spring's fair flowerets fade, Ere...' or it trots merrily as in the lines 'Written After a Walk before Supper.' It can become amazing, as in the 'Lines to a Friend, who Died of a Frenzy Induced by Calumnious Reports,' beginning: 'Edmund! thy grave with aching eye I scan...' it can perform admirable tricks, as in the epigram on Donne: 'With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue, And then, when the technique has been brought under easy control by long use, and the philosopher has matured, it can reach true sublimity in 'The Hymn before Sunrise' and 'Dejection.' Coleridge made all the poetic adventures approved by his time, and told of them generally as well as another, occasionally better. He wrote plays, too, and they make up one of the present volumes. In these he was Elizabethan by intention, and remained sealed of the eighteenth century in result. The sturdy strength that gave even Webster the mastery over his most unconsidered horrors was beyond the reach of the author of 'Remorse,' whose terror is the make-believe of a child. For the eighteenth-century Coleridge and his peers, the tragic clashing of the natural world and of humanity was not a great emotional ecstasy, but something of which to make a ceremony. They called it horrific, and |