confine him to the few congenial spirits who were students of similar subjects, and apt at following their relations. This serious obstacle to his reputation arose, if we do not mistake, among other deteriorating influences, from the very greatness itself of his mind. It should be remembered, that he was remarkable as a poet as well as philosopher; and if we do not very much err, would have been more distinguished as the first than the last. He possessed the finest elements for the formation of the poetic character, and such as will ever be successful, where circumstances do not deter or drive the current of thought and feeling in a different direction. His fancy was active, free, and brilliant; his imagination powerful and splendid. Yet it was this very combination of noble faculties, a small portion of which, with a shrewder and more calculating, and less artless spirit, would, as it does daily, have brought the highest distinction, that lessened with Coleridge his excellence as a poet, and his value as a philosopher. With that great gift, the imaginative faculty, his thoughts were ever floating on a sea of gold; and his mind, moving mid its magnificence, and dazzled by its lustre, became too glowing and excited to stay its progress among dry details, or droop its wings of fire over the dark chasms of mere

reason.

He saw too much and too far. With his great erudition new suggestions were ever rising; and, with the roll of his mind, new views, delicate differences, and obscure analogies thronged the way, till thought became distracted, mid the variety and vastness, and formidable array of obstacles. It is probable that he kept in his hand the clue to the labyrinthine movements of his ideas, though to others all was seemingly dark, confused and chaotic. Whatever may have been the pleasure to himself, of looking on the beauty of a subject, of seeing all its relations, of marking the infinite extent into which it seemed to expand as his mind contemplated it, and his imagination imbued it with its splendour, and then, after all these elements were disposed and arranged, of viewing it as a whole, he imparts but little to those who cannot keep pace with him, and hold on the same course with equal power and rapidity. For this reason all his labours seem but fragments, portions of a vast rock, that a giant has broken off, but without a trace of any connection,there are all the evidences of great strength suddenly exerted, but none of regular or continued effort. He followed or seems to have followed, and it may have been consistently, some one principle or set of principles, on, which he had based the importance of his works; their future value and bearing on the moral and intellectual condition of men. But he made an unfortunate mistake in not eradicating his early love for mys

tical theology, the learning of the schools, and their dark and harsh obscurity, which was enough to dull the edge and weigh like lead on the life and vivacity of any mind. This bias was an early and fatal affection; the one that withered his usefulness, by confining the interest men felt in his productions, and which he afterwards, with an almost unaccountable wilful perversity, increased by plunging in the poisonous flood of metaphysics. He was conscious, as we have shown in a former extract, of this bar to his popularity; and why not at once have torn away the disposition before it became an immedicable disease, and followed the star of glory that rose before him in the form of poetry, and which beamed upon him in all the attractive splendour of present reputation, and the lustre of immortality? This, at last, will be all or nearly all the record left of him; for we are not sure, that ten years will not bring oblivion over his name as a philosopher. The editor of the Table Talk predicts for him a proud destiny.

"Nevertheless, desultory as his labours, fragmentary as his productions, at present, may seem to the cursory observer, my undoubting belief is, that in the end it will be found that Coleridge did, in his vocation, the day's work of a giant. He has been melted into the very heart of the rising literatures of England and America; and the principles he has taught are the master light of the moral and intellectual being of men, who, if they shall fail to save, will assuredly illustrate and condemn the age in which they live. As it is, they bide their time."

We believe the first paragraph to be true, but doubt, though with every wish that we may be mistaken, the extent of the influence, and its lasting character, implied in the second. But we will extract from his "Biographia" his appreciation of his own labours. The chapter whence we take it, is a denial of the assertions of those who have charged him with idleness: and the manner is so gentle, and the indignation so melancholy and subdued, that we cannot help feeling he was unjustly accused.

"Would that the criterion of a scholar's utility were the number and moral value of the truths which he has been the means of throwing into the general circulation; or the number and value of the minds whom, by his conversation or letters, he has excited into activity, and supplied with the germs of their after growth! A distinguished rank might not, indeed, even then, be awarded to my exertions; but I should dare look forward with confidence to an honourable acquittal."

There are some lines among his poetry that give his own idea of his powers, and the reason why they have never yielded the full harvest of their promise: perhaps there is too much self depreciation about them, and too lofty a self praise; and if these are both true, his estimate may be the real one, and instead of vanity or conceit dictating the verdict, it may be but justice to himself and the result of an accurate self-knowledge.

They are from "Lines on a friend who died of a frenzy fever, induced by calumnious reports."

"As oft, at twilight gloom, thy grave I pass,
And sit me down upon its recent grass,
With introverted eye, I contemplate
Similitude of soul, perhaps of-fate;

To me hath Heaven, with bounteous hand assigned
Energic reason, and a shaping mind,

The daring ken of truth, the patriot's part,

And pity's sigh, that breathes the gentle heart,

Sloth jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand

Drop friendship's precious pearls, like hour-glass sand."

And in the Table Talk, we have another opinion of himself that gives us a perfect idea of the man.

"Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking: and it is curious, and at the same time, strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should be impelled, at last, by mere accident, to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so."

This sets Coleridge before us like a mirror, and with this hint, we think that we could pursue him almost to the very depths of the inward man. We perceive sensibility, active and excitable, an eager and impassioned curiosity, an acute reason, a capacious understanding, a strong judgment, but which, from its depth, did not decide readily, and accompanied its conclusions with a doubt: all the elements of a great mind, but with one defect, a practical disposition. Thus he was ever philosophising, moralising, and sentimentalising, but wandering without a direct or immediate purpose, and thence comes the vagueness and mysticism with which he is charged. It should be remembered, that the being mystical, though no proof of greatness, is common, and we presume must be called a common failing, with great minds. There are conceptions which cannot be expressed by words, though they appear strongly, clearly, and vividly to the individual, yet when it is attempted to clothe them with language, they pass off, as the elements that form the strongest bodies, when let loose, mingle with the thinnest vapour of the air. It should be remembered too, that the horizon which limits the vision of the humbler spirits is not the same which bounds the view of the more powerful. The sphere of the one is of the earth, the other, in its quest of truth, seems to melt itself into the grandeur and the vastness of the realms in which it soars. It becomes one with the Eternal Power it strives to view, a portion of the spirituality that it feels is all which harmonizes with itself. The lustre of its own intelligence seems to present but imperfections, and it strives,

with a deep and anxious wish, to elevate that which it feels belongs only to human nature,-all that is mere intellect or sensation, into something that more peculiarly attaches to spirit. It loses sight of the objects of reflection, which come from the things about it, that it draws in and lays up for subjects and data, on which the mind is to dwell, and contemplates higher and purer sources, where, though there is no distinct consciousness, and all is shadowy and speculative, yet seem to be the proper position, the natural if not the necessary orbit, for the movements of these daring and aspiring souls. It is that they feel the advantage, if not the necessity, of withdrawing from the world of matter to the world of spirits,-of leaving the actual and the real, for that which thought cannot embody or language express. Perhaps this mysticism, this awakening of intelligence, beyond the regions of common knowledge, is an essential in the poet's character, if not the basis of all immortal verse. If we foreclose it, and require that every thing should be reduced to the simplicity and distinctness of a sum in arithmetic, we should do one of two bad things, reduce all poetry to the dull regulations of art, or destroy the fineness and the beauty of the feelings that dictate it. Let one take Wordsworth's noble ode, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," and try to give it the clearness of mathematics; and to what would he bring the music that breathes in every line, the surpassing power with which each thought is arrayed, the splendour that radiates through the whole, the majesty and dignity that swell simply and grandly through each verse? If it were attempted, it would be found, "that there hath past away a glory from the earth ;" and success would involve little but the assassin's selfish gratification. But we are not sure that Coleridge is open to the charge of mysticism in its strongest and worst sense, such as would apply to a religious enthusiast. His obscurity is the result of delicate and indistinct association; and this was an intellectual habit, arising partly from an original bias of the mind, and in an equal, if not greater degree, from the nature of his studies. The student's pedantry, and the metaphysician's ultra nicety of definition, made more obscure that which was already peculiar for its depth and distance from the usual modes of thinking. We will illustrate this by a passage from a note in his Aids to Reflection, where he speaks of the spirit that rules the church of England:-" Instead of a catholic (universal) spirit, it may be truly described as a spirit of particularism, counterfeiting catholicity by a negative totality, and heretical self-circumscription" which is well said, though to all appearance, jargon, and undeniably enveloped in very harsh and repulsive language; and this habit of making use of uncommon words,

seems at last to have become inveterate, and extended not only where they were unnecessary and uncalled for, but where they destroyed the pleasure of reading, by concealing and making difficult of discovery the beauty and tenderness of the sentiment.

But in attempting to offer an apology for Coleridge's style, we will bring to our aid his great cotemporary, Sir James Mackintosh; a man in some respects similar, whose mind was engaged in speculations as indefinite in degree, but more generally useful, though in no way of so lofty an intellectual character. He is speaking of the "Friend," a series of essays first published in a newspaper, where they were as misplaced as diamonds on a dunghill, and must have shone with a very peculiar lustre from the mass around them. They were the elements of his philosophy, and were afterwards embodied in his more continued works, though these again were still elements, parts of some great unfinished whole, which he was ever approaching but never nearing, as it grew with his contemplations, and widened its limit with the increasing vastness of his irregular and boundless conceptions. There are passages, however, in the "Friend," that remind us of the deep drawn splendour of Milton in his prose writings; though as a whole, they illustrate the truth of a remark one cannot help deriving from them, that a man may think well, and write badly. But we will give Mackintosh's opinion, which will be taken as true or not, according to the degree of admiration one may have for Coleridge.

"It ("The Friend") is a refutation of the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people. It is not without ideas of great value: but it is impossible to give a stronger example of a man whose talents are beneath his understanding, and who trusts to his ingenuity to atone for his ignorance. Talents are, in my sense, habitual powers of execution; they may be very disproportioned to mind. Coleridge has either so aimed at objects naturally beyond his reach, or, what I rather believe, he has so fluctuated between various objects, that he has never mastered his subjects, and matured his ideas in such a degree, as to attain the habitual power of expressing himself with order and clearness. Shakspeare and Burke are, if I may venture on the expression, above talent, but Coleridge is not."

From having given what we think the mental causes for Coleridge's inefficiency, we will offer two of his own, indolence and ill-health. They will, to some extent, account for the quality and quantity of his labours'; though only the initiated in these two evils can appreciate their full influence. Indolence is a fearful enemy to contend with, even where necessity compels exertion. It will always lessen the energy of the will, whatever be the capacity or the desire of success, or however terrible the terms on which we labour. There is a love of repose, a sweetness in inaction, after the mind has traversed a