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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

1772-1834

WHAT a poet but for the metaphysician !

A poet feels; a metaphysician reasons. The one leaps; the other digs. Without imagination, the one cannot breathe; and the other cannot guess at the direction of a vein of thought. But for the poet, it is life; for the metaphysician, a stimulant. In the same mind the two tendencies conflict, unless one consent to serve. To his friends and the Highgate circle Coleridge was the more signal marvel because he united both. For posterity he would have been a profounder philosopher had he been less of a poet. Had he concerned himself less with the solution of mental problems, he must have filled a wider, not a more exalted, space in the history of poetry.

His positive poetical career was brief. The quantity of his work in the period is moderate. Virtually the whole bears an unmistakable stamp of high intelligence and noble feeling. Religious Musings abound in grand images and reflections; as, for instance, on the folly of hatred within our Heavenly Father's vast human family :

No Cain

Injures uninjured-in her best aim❜d blow
Victorious murder a blind suicide;

with the converse, in the lines immediately preceding, which Lamb declared to be without a rival in the whole compass of my poetical reading':

There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind,
Omnific. His most holy name is Love.
Truth of subliming import! with the which
Who feeds and saturates his constant soul,
He from his small particular orbit flies
With blest outstarting! From himself he flies,
Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze
Views all creation; and he loves it all,
And blesses it, and calls it very good!

This is indeed to dwell with the Most High !
Cherubs and rapture-trembling Seraphim

Can press no nearer to the Almighty's Throne :

and The Eolian Harp, in its author's belief, 'the most perfect poem he ever wrote:

Such a soft floating witchery of sound

As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve
Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-land!
O the one life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,

A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,

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Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere ! 2

No subtlety, the most intricate, daunts his Muse, when the theme crosses her path; not even David Hartley's Aether, with its

fluids, impacts, essences,

Self-working tools, uncaused effects, and all

Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves,
Untenanting creation of its God.3

A reader stands amazed at the more than equal courage of the Ne Plus Ultra :

Sole Positive of Night!

Antipathist of Light!

Fate's only essence! primal scorpion rod-
The one permitted opposite of God !—

Condensed blackness and abysmal storm
Compacted to one sceptre

Arms the Grasp enorm

The Intercepter—

The Substance that still casts the shadow Death!-
The Dragon foul and fell-

The unrevealable,

And hidden one, whose breath

Gives wind and fuel to the fires of Hell!—
Ah! sole despair

Of both th' eternities in Heaven!
Sole interdict of all-bedewing prayer,
The all-compassionate!

Save to the Lampads Seven
Reveal'd to none of all th' Angelic State,
Save to the Lampads Seven,

That watch the throne of Heaven! 4

Notwithstanding the encroaching waves even here of wrangling politics, the Ode to the Departing Year is a relief to the brain, with its invocation :

O Albion! O my mother Isle !
Thy valleys, fair as Eden's bowers,
Glitter green with sunny showers;
Thy grassy uplands' gentle swells
Echo to the bleat of flocks-
Those grassy hills, those glittering dells
Proudly ramparted with rocks—
And Ocean mid his uproar wild
Speaks safety to his island-child.

Hence for many a fearless age

Has social Quiet loved thy shore;

Nor ever proud invader's rage

Or sack'd thy towers, or stain'd thy fields with gore.5

Often too sensitive an imagination seems to be seeking refuge in any casual topic from thoughts, like Fears in Solitude, too troubling. The theme may be simple landscapepainting; moor and farmland :

The fruit-like perfume of the golden furze;
This burst of prospect, here the shadowy main,
Dim-tinted, there the mighty majesty

Of that huge amphitheatre of rich
And elmy fields;

forest-scenery, where

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with dun-red bark

The fir-trees, and the unfrequent slender oak,
Forth from this tangle wild of bush and brake
Soar up, and form a melancholy vault
High o'er me, murmuring like a distant sea;

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an effect of frost at midnight, with its quiet which may be felt :

'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange

And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,

Inaudible as dreams! 8

a Knight's Tomb, conjured up with the elegance of a Greek epigram, on a Westmoreland hill-side :

Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn?
Where may the grave of that good man be ?-
By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,
Under the twigs of a young birch tree!

The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,
And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year,

And whistled and roar'd in the winter alone,

Is gone and the birch in its stead is grown.—

The Knight's bones are dust, and his good sword rust :-
His soul is with the saints, I trust ; 9

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a picture of a mother with a new-born babe :

She listen'd to the tale divine,

And closer still the Babe she prest;
And while she cried, the Babe is mine!
The milk rush'd faster to her breast:

Joy rose within her, like a summer's morn;

Peace, Peace on Earth! the Prince of Peace is born;

ideal vers de société, such as:

I ask'd my fair one happy day,

What I should call her in my lay;

By what sweet name from Rome or Greece ;

Lalage, Neæra, Chloris,

Sappho, Lesbia, or Doris,

Arethusa, or Lucrece ;

'Ah!' replied my gentle fair,

'Beloved, what are names but air?

Choose thou whatever suits the line ;

Call me Sappho, call me Chloris,

Call me Lalage or Doris,

Only, only call me thine ; ' 11

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epigrams in swarms, political, social, merry, malicious, raging sometimes, as the terrible scream at Pitt in Fire, Famine, and Slaughter; 12 even sonorous sonnets, for example, on Schiller's 13 Robbers, and on Kosciuszko :

O what a loud and fearful shriek was there,
As though a thousand souls one death-groan pour'd!
Ah me! they saw beneath a hireling's sword

Their Kosciusko fall! 14

Then there is a sketch, the Three Graves, which its author had not the heart to complete; a thing shorn of all comeliness; squalidly tragic and cruel; wonderful in its harsh force :

‘O God, forgive me,' he exclaim'd;

'I have torn out her heart!' 15

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