some passages of Mr. Hawthorne's writings good-looking or the reverse as that life has -who was a middle-aged man from earli- been good or evil. On our features the est boyhood. And although middle-aged fine chisels of thought and emotion are eterpersons have lost the actual possession of nally at work. Beauty is not the monopoyouth, yet in virtue of this humour they can ly of blooming young men and of white and comprehend it, see all round it, enter imagi- pink maids. There is a slow-growing beaunatively into every sweet and bitter of it. ty which only comes to perfection in old They wear the key Memory at their girdles, age. Grace belongs to no period of life, and they can open every door in the cham- and goodness improves the longer it exists. ber of youth. And it is also in virtue of I have seen sweeter smiles on a lip of seventhis peculiar humour that Mr. Dickens's ty than I ever saw on a lip of seventeen. Little Nell to the contrary it is only mid- There is the beauty of youth, and there is dle-aged persons who can, either as poets also the beauty of holiness- a beauty much or artists, create for us a child. There is more seldom met; and more frequently no more beautiful thing on earth than an found in the arm-chair by the fire, with old man's love for his granddaughter; more grandchildren around its knee, than in the beautiful even- - from the absence of all ball-room or the promenade. Husband and suspicion of direct personal bias or interest wife who have fought the world side by -than his love for his own daughter; and side, who have made common stock of joy it is only the meditative, sad-hearted, mid- and sorrow, and aged together, are not undle-aged man who can creep into the heart frequently found curiously alike in personal of a child and interpret it, and show forth appearance and in pitch and tone of voice the new nature to us in the subtle cross-just as twin pebbles on the beach, exlights of contrast and suggestion. Imagina- posed to the same tidal influences, are each tively thus, the wrinkles of age become the other's alter ego. He has gained a feminine dimples of infancy. Wordsworth was not a something which brings his manhood into very young man when he held the colloquy full relief. She has gained a masculine with the little maid who insisted, in her something which acts as a foil to her wochildish logic, that she was one of seven. Mr. Hawthorne was not a young man when he painted "pearl" by the side of the brook in the forest; and he was middle-aged and more when he drew "Pansie," the most ex- And in any case, to the old man, when quisite child that lives in English words. the world becomes trite, the triteness arises And when speaking of middle age, of its not so much from a cessation as from a peculiar tranquillity and humour, why not transference of interest. What is taken tell of its peculiar beauty as well? Men from this world is given to the next. The and women make their own beauty or their glory is in the east in the morning, it is in own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton the west in the afternoon, and when it is speaks in one of his novels of a man "who dark the splendour is irradiating the realm was uglier than he had any business to be;" of the under-world. He would only follow. and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is ALEXANDER SMITH.

manhood. Beautiful are they in life, these pale winter roses, and in death they will not be divided. When Death comes, he will pluck not one, but both.

HOPEFULLY WAITING.

"Blessed are they that are Home-sick, for they shall come at last to the Father's House." - HEINRICH STILLING.

Nor as you meant, oh! learned man, and good,
Do I accept thy words of hope and rest;
God knowing all, knows what for me is best,
And gives me what I need, not what He could,
Nor always as I would!

I shall go to the Father's House and see
Him and the Elder Brother face to face,

What day or hour I know not. Let me be
Steadfast in work, and earnest in the race,
Not as a home-sick child, who all day long
Whines at its play, and seldom speaks in song.

If for a time some loved one goes away
And leaves us our appointed work to do,
Can we to him or to ourselves be true,
In mourning his departure day by day,

And so our work delay ?

Nay, if we love and honor, we shall make

The absence brief by doing well our task, Not for ourselves, but for the dear one's sake;

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-NO. 1129.-20 JANUARY, 1866.

From the North British Review.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

SECOND PART.

who can be said to have any opinions at all" These words were written five-andtwenty years ago. Whether he still exercises anything of the same influence over younger men seems more than doubtful. Very possibly Mr. Mill himself, and others of that way of thinking, may have superseded him. Yet though his name may have grown less, his works remain, and may be tested even by another generation that knew not Coleridge, by the thoughts which they contain.

If we have traced in any measure aright the course of Coleridge's life, no more is needed to show what were his failings and his errors. It more concerns us to ask what permanent fruit of all that he thought, and did, and suffered under the sun, there still remains, now that he has lain more than thirty years in his grave. To answer this fully is impossible in the case of any man, These works are most of them fragmentmuch more in the case of one who has been ary, and this forms one difficulty in rightly a great thinker rather than a great doer; estimating them. Another, and perhaps for many of his best ideas will have so greater, lies in the width, we had almost melted into the general atmosphere of said the universality, of their range. Most thought, that it will be hard to separate original thinkers have devoted themselves them from the complex whole, and trace to but a few lines of inquiry. Coleridge's them back to their original source. But thought may be almost said to have been the abler men of his own generation were as wide as life. To apply to himself the not slow to confess how much they owed to word which he first coined, or rather transhim. In poetry, Sir Walter Scott acknowl- lated, from some obscure Byzantian, to exedged himself as indebted to him for the press Shakspeare's quality, he was a opening keynote of The Lay of The Last"myriad-minded man.' He touched being Minstrel. In the metre, sentiment, and at almost every point, and wherever he drapery of that first canto, it is not difficult touched it, he opened up some shafts of to trace the influence of Christabel, then truth hitherto unperceived. He who would unpublished, but well known. Wordsworth, aloof from his contemporaries, and self-sufficing as he was, felt Coleridge to be his equal "the only wonderful man I have ever known." Arnold, at a later day, called him the greatest intellect that England had produced within his memory, and shared with, perhaps learned from, him, some of his leading thoughts, as that the identification of the church with the clergy was the first and fundamental apostasy." Dr. Newman pointed to Coleridge's works long ago as a proof that the minds of men in England were then yearning for something higher and deeper than what had satisfied the last age. Julius Hare speaks of him as "the great religious philosopher, to whom the mind of our generation in England owes more than to any other man." Mr. Maurice has everywhere spoken with deeper reverence of him than of any other teacher of these later times. Mr. Mill has said that "no one has contributed more to shape the opinions among younger men,

THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE.

fully estimate Coleridge's contributions to thought would have to consider him as a poet, a critic, a political philosopher, a moralist, and a theologian. But without hazarding anything like so large an attempt, a few brief remarks may be offered on what he has done in some of these so widely different paths.

It was as a poet that Coleridge was first known, and the wish has many times been expressed that he had continued to be so, and never tried philosophy. No doubt he had imagination enough, as some one has said, to have furnished an outfit for a thousand poets, and it may be that Christabel will be read longer than any prose work he has written. But this belongs both to the substance and the form of all poetry that is perfect after its kind. Gray's Elegy will probably survive longer, and will certainly be more widely read, than the best philo sophic pieces of Hume, Berkeley, or Butler. This, however, does not prove that these thinkers have not done more for human 1451. VOL. XXXII.

thought than that most graceful of poets. | most important, styled Religious Musings, Again, it may be that imagination such as which Bowles ranked so high, might easily, Coleridge's may be as legitimately employed notwithstanding some fine thoughts, sugin interpenetrating and quickening the rea- gest one of his rhapsodies in a Unitarian son, and revivifying domains of philosophy, chapel cut into blank verse. The religious which are apt to grow narrow or dead sentiments it contains are frigid and bomthrough prosaic formalism, as in purely bastic; the politics denunciatory of existpoetic creation. Moreover, there were ing things, of

perhaps in Coleridge some special powers of fine analysis and introvertive speculation, which seem to have predestined him for other work than poetry; just as there were some special wants, arising either from natural temperament or early education, which marred or impoverished his full poetic equipment. He had never lived much in the open air; he had no large storehouse of facts or images, either drawn from observation of outward nature, or from more than common acquaintance with any modes of human life or sides of human character, such as Wordsworth and Scott in different ways had. It was not the nature of his mind to dwell lovingly on concrete things, but rather, by its strong generalizing bias, to be borne off continually into the abstract. Therefore we cannot think that Coleridge would have done more, either for the delight or the benefit of mankind, if he had stuck wholly to poetry, or that he did otherwise than fulfil his destiny by giving way to his philosophic instinct.

"Warriors, lords, and priests, all the sore ills That vex and desolate our mortal life."

They contain, however, some true thoughts, well put, though tinged with his Revolution dreams, on the good and evil that have sprung out of the institution of property, and a fine apostrophe to all the sin-defiled and sorrow-laden ones, whose day of deliverance yet waits.

It had been well if the poems of the second period, which were mostly written during the Bristol and Nether Stowey periods, and now make up the chief part of the Sibylline Leaves, had been arranged in the order in which they were composed. This would have thrown much light on them, arising as they do out of either the events of the time or of Coleridge's personal circumstances. Compared with those of the former period, the stream flows more even and unbroken. The crude philosophy has all but disappeared, the blank verse is now more fused and melodious, the rhythm His daughter has said that he had four of thought more mellow, the religious sentipoetic epochs, representing, more or less, ment, where it does appear, no longer reaboyhood, early manhood, middle, and de- soning, but meditative, is more chastened clining life. To trace these carefully is not and deep. These poems, it must have for this place. The juvenile poems, those been, which were to De Quincey "the ray of the first epoch, though showing here and of a new morning, a revealing of untrodden there hints of the coming power, contain, worlds, till then unsuspected amongst men." as a whole, nothing which would make Such Wilson found them, and so in a measthem live, were it not for what came after- ure they have been to many since. wards. He himself has said that these in re-reading them, after an interval of poems are disfigured by too great exuber- years, this is somehow felt less vividly. Is ance of double epithets, and by general it that time has weakened the relish for turgidity. These mark, perhaps, the tumult of his thick-thronging thoughts, struggling to utter themselves with force and freshness, yet not quite disengaged from the old commonplaces of poetic diction, from "eve's dusky car," and from those frigid personifications of abstract qualities in which the former age delighted. Of these early poems, one of the most interesting is that on the death of Chatterton, in which, though the form somewhat recalls the odes of Collins and Gray, his native self ever here and there breaks through. Some of them are pensive with his early sorrow, others fierce and turbid with his revolutionary fervours. The longest and

But

poetry, or that the new fragrance they once gave forth has so filled the poetic atmosphere that it makes itself now less distinctly felt? Whichever way it be, these accidents of personal feeling do not affect their real worth. Of two fine poems written at Clevedon, the one on the "Eolian Harp," contains a passage that may be compared with a well-known, some might call it, a Pantheistic, one in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey." The other, "Reflections on leaving a Place of Retirement." breathes a beautiful, though too brief, spirit of happiness and content. In the same gentle vein are the "Lines to his Brother George," and "Frost at Midnight," in