but a nightmare, which we are glad to forget in the sunshine of

An Idyll with Boccaccio's spirit warm.16

Imagination has transported the Georgian poet four long centuries back to a fate-defying Garden and its faery';

to

'

The brightness of the world, O thou once free,
And always fair, rare land of courtesy !
O Florence! with the Tuscan fields and hills,
And famous Arno, fed with all their rills;
Thou brightest star of star-bright Italy!
Rich, ornate, populous, all treasures thine,
The golden corn, the olive, and the vine.
Fair cities, gallant mansions, castles old,
And forests, where beside his leafy hold
The sullen boar hath heard the distant horn,
And whets his tusks against the gnarled thorn;
Palladian palace with its storied halls;
Fountains, where Love lies listening to their falls;
Gardens, where flings the bridge its airy span,
And Nature makes her happy home with man;
Where many a gorgeous flower is duly fed
With its own rill, on its own spangled bed.—
Thine all delights, and every muse is thine;
And, more than all, the embrace and intertwine
Of all with all in gay and twinkling dance!
Mid gods of Greece and warriors of romance,
See! Boccace sits, unfolding on his knees
The new-found roll of old Maeonides;

But from his mantle's fold, and near the heart,
Peers Ovid's holy book of Love's sweet smart.17

The tale of Coleridge's achievements in verse is, however, far from told yet. He could do anything with verse. If he did not compose an epic, we may be sure it was not because he could not. If his few songs are not perfect music,

it is that he would not sing without thinking. He produced plays, which are poems also; ideal translations, the Piccolomini and the Death of Wallenstein; and-besides prodigies which I am holding over in reserve-three great Odes.

That to France,

a solemn music of the wind,

is a proud declaration of the superiority of his loyal faith in Freedom to disenchantment by the greediness of renegades seduced, as had been Frenchmen,

To mix with Kings in the low lust of sway,

Yell in the hunt, and share the murderous prey.18

No dithyramb on the overwhelming glory of Alpine peaks has ever surpassed in splendour of diction his Hymn to Mont Blanc. It is immaterial that he was indebted for an outline of the poem to an obscure German poetess. That he had never seen the mountain or valley gave additional freedom to his enthusiasm. As it is, the conception moves apart on a high level from which it never descends :

Sole sovran of the Vale!

O struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars,

Or when they climb the sky or when they sink :
Companion of the morning-star at dawn,
Thyself Earth's rosy star, and of the dawn
Co-herald; wake, O wake, and utter praise!
Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in Earth?
Who fill'd thy countenance with rosy light?
Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?
And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad!
Who call'd you forth from night and utter death,
From dark and icy caverns call'd you forth,
Down those precipitous, black, jagged Rocks,
For ever shatter'd and the same for ever?

Ye ice-falls! Ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain—
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,
And stopp'd at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts !

Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet ?—
God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! 19

The perfection of stateliness, though pitched too entirely in one key! Yet not comparable, either for harmony or for thought, to the Ode to Dejection. Can that be given higher praise than that it is worthy to rank beside the Intimations of Immortality in the forefront of philosophical verse! If the scope is necessarily far less large, and as necessarily the prospect is darker, the narrower plan is as exactly balanced; any propensity to rhetoric is as well restrained. The melody, of which alone I can in a fragment give an idea, is always admirable:

What a scream

Of agony by torture lengthen'd out

That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that ravest without,
Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree,

Or pine grove whither woodman never clomb,
Or lonely house, long held the witches' home,
Methinks were fitter instruments for thee,
Mad Lutanist! who in this month of showers,
Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flowers,
Mak'st Devils' Yule, with worse than wintry song,
The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among.

Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds !
Thou mighty Poet, even to frenzy bold!
What tell'st thou now about?

'Tis of the rushing of a host in rout,

With groans of trampled men, with smarting wounds-
At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold!
But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence!

And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd,

With groans and tremulous shudderings-all is over—
It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud!
A tale of less affright,

And temper'd with delight,

As Otway's self had framed the tender lay,
'Tis of a little child

Upon a lonesome wild,

Not far from home, but she hath lost her way;
And now moans low in bitter grief and fear,

And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.20 I recognize the touch of greatness everywhere the abounding flood of majestic thought and imagery, which enraptured friends, and bewildered them no less than foes. It is possible to dissect piece after piece, and demonstrate the grandeur, the beauty. But the common reader of poetry who, like myself, reads poems to find out which of them he can love, is not drawn irresistibly back. These noble Odes, Hymns, Musings, Sonnets, even Epigrams, and jeux d'esprit are not in general of the poetry with which we care to live. And why?

Defects are visible on the surface of many. Often it is preaching instead of singing. Extraneous currents of thought are permitted to encroach. Indignation, in itself righteous, may be inopportune. It roars with a noisiness which fatigues. The fault is as in penmanship, when the upstroke and downstroke are equally dark. A suspicion is excited, as in the Chamouni Pindaric, that the eagle is flapping his wings to gain impetus for the flight heavenwards. Imagination itself effloresces into a confusing exuberance-fancy upon fancy-reflection upon reflection. The congeries is rather material for poetry than poetry

itself. Poems by other writers have, it is true, maintained their place in popular estimation in the face of drawbacks as considerable. But in Coleridge I cannot but suppose that they grew out of an essential misconception by him of the rights of verse over the versifier. Poetry demands the choicest of a man's powers; if great powers, the greatest, and all of them. He should have a will, and the will to mass the whole, and throw it into the lap of his theme. Coleridge had no sufficient sincerity in his vocation, no full conviction of the supreme obligations of the poet's mantle. Nature had bestowed the gift of verse upon him as his proper mode of expression; and he used it as lightly as he came by it. Apparently he was not conscious that there is agony as well as rapture in the due utterance of such a voice. A reader like myself is liable to the distasteful feeling that he has had offered to him a series of exercises instead of inspired messages; that they represent the obedience of a marvellous assemblage of human energies to their lord and master, and not the empire of his poetic spirit over himself.

The surprise is to turn a page, and be in a new world. Suddenly, with no audible herald to announce the advent, English literature found enshrined in it The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, though delayed in publication, The Tale of the Dark Ladie, The Nightingale, and— belated like Christabel-Kubla-Khan. Each differs in feeling, thought, tone, rhythm, from the rest; and all agree in being great, sweet, and satisfying. The Ancient Mariner is remarkable for more than its intrinsic merits; it is phenomenal as being from Coleridge. Never was there poet or thinker with a fondness like his for vagueness, ragged ends. Nothing of that is here; not one incident, nor one emotion, out of season and place; and the tempta