And when, O friend! my comforter and guide! And thy deep voice had ceased yet thou thyself Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close, And when I rose, I found myself in prayer." Of the "Ancient Mariner and "Christabel,” the two prime creations of the Nether Stowey period, nothing need be said. Time has now stamped these with the signet of immortality. The view with which. these two masterpieces were begun, as the brother poets walked on the green heights of Quantock, has been detailed elsewhere. Coleridge was to choose supernatural or romantic characters, and clothe them from his own imagination with a human interest and a semblance of truth. It would be hard to analyze the strange witchery that is in both, especially in "Christabel; the language so simple and natural, yet so aerially musical, the rhythm so original, yet so fitted to the story, and the glamour over all, a glamour so peculiar to this one poem. The first part belongs to Quantock, the second was composed several years later at the Lakes, yet still the tale is but half told. Would it have gained or lost in power had it been completed? It has been asked whether there is in Coleridge's poetry any trace of the peculiar vein of thought which afterwards appeared in him as philosophy. There is first a delicacy and subtlety of thought and imagery strange to English poets for at least two centuries. It is in him we find "The stilly murmur of the distant sea His, too, is "A dream remembered in a dream," and his "Her voice that even in its mirthful mood Hath made me wish to steal away and weep." In him too it is that the vision of Mont Blanc awakens that idealism "Most dread and silent mount! I gazed upon thee Till thou, still present to my bodily sense, Hadst vanished from my thought; entranced in prayer, But besides these separate subtleties, are they mistaken who see in the unearthly weirdness of the “ Ancient Mariner,” and the mysterious witchery of “ Christabel" those very mental elements in solution which, condensed and turned inward, would find their most congenial place in "the exhausting atmosphere of transcendental ideas?” His third poetic epoch includes his whole sojourn at the Lakes, and the fourth the remainder of his life. The poems of these two periods are few altogether, and what there are, more meditative than formerly, sometimes even hopelessly dejected. "Youth and Age," written just before leaving the Lakes, with a strangely aged tone for a man of only seven or eight and thirty, has a quaint beauty; to adapt its own words, it is like sadness, that "tells the jest without the smile." There are some pieces of this time, however, in another strain, as the beautiful lines called "The Knight's Tomb," and "Recollections of Love." After the Lake time, there was still less poetry; only when, as in the "Visionary Hope" and the "Pains of Sleep," the too frequent despondency or severe suffer ing of his later years sought relief in brief verse. Yet, belonging to the third or fourth periods, there are short gnomic lines, in which, if the visionary has disappeared, the wisdom wrought by time and meditation is excellently condensed. Such are these : “Frail creatures are we all; to be the best Is but the fewest faults to have; Look thou then to thyself, and leave the rest Or the Complaint and Reply : "How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits Or any merit that which he obtains." REPLY. "For shame, dear friend! forego this canting strain Or throne of corses which his sword had slain ? The good great man! Three treasures, life, and light, If from his own poetry we pass to his judgments on the poetry of others, we shall see an exemplification of the adapted adage, "Set a poet to catch a poet." Here for once were fulfilled the necessary conditions of a critic or judge, in the highest sense; that is, a man possessing in himself abundantly the originative poetic faculty which he is to judge of in others, combined with that power of generalization and delicate, patient analysis which, if poets possess, they but seldom express in prose. This is but another way of saying, that before a man can pass worthy judgment on a thing, he must know that thing at first and not at second hand. The other kind of critic is he who, though with little or none of the poetic gift in himself, has yet, from a careful study of the great master-models of the art, deduced certain canons by which to judge of poetry universally. But a critic of this kind, as the world has many a time seen, whenever he is called upon to estimate some new and original work of Art, like to which the past supplies no models, is wholly at fault. His canons no longer serve him, and the native sympathetic insight he has not. To judge aright in such a case takes another order of critic; one who knows after another and more immediate manner of knowing; one who does not judge merely by what the past has done, but who, by the poet's heart within him, is made quick to welcome whatever new thing, however seemingly irregular, the young time may bring forth. Such a critic was Coleridge. An imagination richer and more penetrative than that of most poets of his time; a power of philosophic reflection and of subtle discrimination, almost over-active; a sympathy and insight of marvelous universality; and a learning "laden with the spoils of all times," these things made him the greatest-I had almost said the only truly philosophic -critic England had yet. seen. Of his critical power, the two most eminent examples are his chapters on Wordsworth's poetry in the Biographia Literaria," and his notes on Shakespeare in the "Literary Remains." If a man wished to learn what genuine criticism should be, where else in our country's literature would he find so worthy a model as in that dissertation on Wordsworth? An excellent authority has lately said that the business of criticism is "to know the best thing that is known or thought in the world, and to make this known to others." In these chapters on Wordsworth, Coleridge has done something more than this. In opposition to the blind and utterly worthless criticism which Jeffrey then represented, he thought out for himself, and laid down the principles on which Wordsworth or any poet such as he should be judged, and showed these principles to be grounded, not on caprices of the hour, but on the fundamental and permanent elements which human nature contains. He gave definitions of poetry in its essential nature, and showed more accurately than Wordsworth in his preface, wherein poetry really dif fers from prose. Let any one who wishes to see the truth on these matters turn to Coleridge's description of the poet and his work, as they are in their ideal perfection. Then how truly and with what fine analysis he discriminates between the language of prose and of metre ! How good is his account of the origin of metre ! "This I would trace to the balance in the mind, effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion." There is more to be learned about poetry from a few pages of that dissertation, confined though it is to a specific kind of poetry, than from all the reviews that have been written in English on poets and their works from Addison to the present hour. Nor is the result of the whole a mere defense or indiscriminating eulogy on Wordsworth, rudely as that poet was then assailed by those who were also Coleridge's own revilers. From several of Wordsworth's theories about poetry he dissents entirely, especially from the whole of his remarks on the sameness of the language of prose and verse. At times, too, he finds fault with his practice, and lays his finger on faulty passages and defective poems here and there, in which he traces the influence of |