evening; S. T. C. the first, I the second, and Lovell the third. S. T. C. brought part of his, I and Lovell the whole of ours; but I..'s was not in keeping, and therefore I undertook to supply the third also by the following day. By this time S. T. C. had filled up his." They then proposed to dedicate it to Mrs. Hannah Moore, but the Bristol bookseller did not seem to have a taste for this kind of thing. Coleridge had not at that time finally left Jesus College, because he took the MS. thither and published it as his own, dating from the College, so that it has ever since been looked upon as his. We have printed it in this edition because it has been hitherto included in the works of Coleridge.

He now left Jesus College for the last time, and at Bristol, where the American trade (and slave trade too) then employed many vessels, the young men, enthusiastic for the principles of the French Revolution, and in despair for their ever being the rule of life in France, conceived the idea of a community to live in brotherhood in the far West, the famous Pantisocracy that De Quincey and others afterwards descanted on in endless magazine papers, which was to make Susquehannah the ground of a new world. Imagine the impracticability of men who could choose their new country from the sound of its name! And yet it is said such was the reason of their choice, a reason about as good as that of the old Scotch woman who liked the minister's sermon about Abraham, because Mesopotamia was a "bonnie word." The scheme itself is a noble one, which, alas, has been tried over and over again with a like result, because of the inherent illogical mistake that all men and women are alike, because their social rights are equal. If this emigration was ever seriously entertained, it was so but for a few months, all the three-Coleridge, Southey, and Lovell-were married within a year from the Robespierre performance, in one day to three sisters, the Misses Fricker, who rather wished to remain at home. This act, in perfect keeping with the frame of mind that planned the Pantisocracy, if it did not make them brothers, at least made them brothers-in-law, a dangerous relationship to men whose powers of work and tenacity of purpose were so utterly different.

Coleridge was now twenty-three, and in the following year his first publication, properly speaking, a prose tractate called Conciones ad Populum, appeared while he lived near Bristol. Very shortly he removed to Nether Stowey, at the foot of the Quantock hills, where he found a helpful friend, as he always did throughout life, the charms of his conversation, and his rhetorical powers of speech being immense, -as great as his powers of work were feeble. This friend was a Mr. Poole, but the decisive advantage brought about

by his cottage life under the Quantocks, was the neighbourhood of Allfoxden, where Wordsworth then lived, whose influence on Coleridge was even greater than that of Southey.

Wordsworth had shortly before returned from France, where he had had the great advantage of being present in the actual scene of the mighty drama then unfolding, the development of which into an aggressive military despotism was enough to confound, enrage, and utterly change the current of ideas in the minds of all believers in the philosophical politics of the Revolution. He is only short-sighted or purblind who blames any of these poets for turning against the movement which so culminated. The men we ought to blame and loathe were the malignant Tories who tried to bring about the ruin of the principles of the Revolution, to corroborate their own coarse prophecy of failure. At a time when forgery in England was punished with death, the government under Pitt imported forged assignats into the distracted country. These were printed at a paper mill in the north of England, and if William Pitt was privy to the crime, as almost certainly he was, we may reasonably call him, as Louis Napoleon was called after the Coup d'Etat, the greatest scoundrel then living in Europe. So timid and so scared by the liberty and equality theories then spreading from France, was the government of the day, that the trade of a spy was a flourishing one, and Coleridge had soon reason to believe himself watched and dodged about by the wretched creatures employed in the state police. This has been questioned, indeed, and by some treated as a delusion, but without any good reason. Wordsworth was known to have been in France not long before, and Bristol was exactly the place where young men of the Southey and Coleridge stamp would be recognised and suspected. The Fall of Robespierre did not certainly contain seditious tendencies, but to touch the subject at all, or mention the word Pantisocracy, was then enough. Happily our business here is with other matters, with the two poets who recognised themselves and each other as poets, with that unspeakable joy in the midst of care we all felt something of at the age of twentyfour. Neither had done any worthy work yet, though Wordsworth had published a mild poem called An Evening Walk two years before, but the determination of bringing poetry back to the "hearth and home of every one," had taken possession of him, which resulted two years after in the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, and Coleridge going with him fully, but still supremely affected by the far-off and the imaginative, had written the Ancient Mariner, which then appeared, and the few years following saw all his excellent things produced. The first part of Christabel, Remorse, Kubla Khan, the

Pains of Sleep, and others, were all written during a few months ; but the remainder of Christabel, the Three Graves, and many other good things were not visible till the century was out. Still if we give five years as the duration of his productive life as a poet, we allow an ample margin. This short period was besides the most eventful of his history in other ways, both his religious opinions and his politics veering round and gradually settling into an unromantic conservative orthodoxy, that eventuated, after his visit to Germany, and years of rumination, in the essay on Church and State according to the Idea of each, and other less definitive speculations.

Of the steps in these changes it does not appear very profitable to speak. From inorganic scepticism, towards which we may safely say every boy worth anything vibrates, to Unitarianism, is no remarkable length of journey, nor an uncommon one. In Coleridge's case it was rather a mystical than a rational Unitarianism, and in this he remained some years, preaching at Taunton, during some time, and lecturing occasionally on poetry. At last, and this is the characteristic part of the narrative, the mystical assumed more and more command over him, the rational in religious matters became more and more barren, and he arrived, as every one must have expected, at an active faith in the Divinity of Christ as the second person of the Trinity. Still it was an argumentative and philosophic orthodoxy, and after the excursion to Germany, where he lived more than a year by the friendly and liberal aid of the two Wedgwoods (the only liberal thing the Wedgwoods ever did, their poor patronage of Flaxman being a niggardly trading speculation, on which they and their descendants have thriven ever since), it is remarkable the final change took place, and ultimately became singularly associated with Schelling and the later forms of Kantism, when English and Scotch metaphysics—Locke and Dugald Stewart —became repulsive to him; analysis with all its victories appeared to him to lead to materialism, and syntheses, transcendentalism, and the archetypal idea of Plato occupied him in endless monologue and in much writing.

Much more important than all this, although this has its importance as well, is his poetry. Before leaving this field of speculation however, we must notice the fact that his admiration of Schelling led to De Quincey accusing him of unacknowledged borrowing, as it was found he had simply appropriated by translation an exposition of that writer's views as his own. Any one old enough to remember the amount of criticism regarding Coleridge and Wordsworth, that continued for a short period about forty-five years ago, will remember what a frightful nuisance such an accusation as that became, and

what undue importance it assumed, and will be glad I say no more about it. If he did it consciously, it was not worth his doing; if unconsciously, that is to say by absorption of the German system, and accidental omission of acknowledgment years after he had embodied the translation in his own speculations,-it is not worth our while to separate it again. And I fear we must acknowledge at once that he had no clearness nor wholeness in his metaphysical life, we never find on reading the Biographia Literaria and the Friend that he has led us forward, but rather we have been following detached radiations and curves,- eccentric ones having one end only fixed, the other waving about in space.

Much more important, and much more intimately connected with his poetry, its motiveless and fragmentary character in some of its finest manifestations, and with its cessation, is his habit of opiumeating. In the prefatory note to Kubla Khan he says, "In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading in Purchas' Pilgrimage,- Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, &c.' The author continued about three hours in this sleep, at least of the external sense, during which time he composed between two and three hundred lines, if that can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the corresponding expressions without any sensation or consciousness of effort." This is the earliest record of the disposition to be ecstatically affected by the use of sedative stimulants. The experience once indulged in, became an absorbing passion, breaking down every barrier, rending in pieces all his efforts, and for many years he lived far away from all his solid interests, in a dreamland of his own, peopled by beautiful ephemera. Coleridge says again of the little poem already mentioned, “The author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. Zaμepov adiov aow; but the tomorrow is yet to come. As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease." This is the still smaller poem The Pains of Sleep, which is also fragmentary. So again at the end of The Three Graves, breaking off without a termination, he writes, "Carmen reliquum in futurum tempus relegatum. To-morrow, and To-morrow, and To-morrow."

These we could have spared, for a fragmentary Kubla Khan, like

b

the Venus of Milo without her arms, has an unlimited charm on the score of its incompleteness. A string of lyrical jewels, like the couplets in that poem, may be longer or shorter, they are all sufficing in themselves, as the sway and motion of the body of the antique marble almost makes us dread the knowledge of the limbs a-missing, but in a narrative it is different; and I confess the breaking off of Christabel has haunted me all my life as a misfortune, and an additional sorrow to all those more real ones that actual life has accumulated. The second part was written three or four years after the first, and there it stopt for ever. Season followed season, and the nervose-phlegmatic man (we may suppose him standing in doubtful action whether to recede or advance, as in Maclise's portrait we give as a frontispiece) said to himself, It shall be done to-morrow, tomorrow, to-morrow; " but opium and its pains and pleasures made the undefined and the to-be more pleasant than the finished and so limited work of art. When at last he fought out the good fight and overcame the Demon of Dreams, the day was too far spent, and no to-morrow came.

For my own part I quite agree with Swinburne's verdict, recorded and indorsed by W. M. Rossetti, that it is the lyrical splendour of these things that entitle Coleridge to his high place as a poet. "The highest lyric work," he says, "is either passionate or imaginative. Of passion Coleridge's has nothing; but for height and perfection of imaginative quality, he is the greatest of lyric poets. This was his special power, and this is his special praise.” And yet the invention of the story in the Ancient Mariner, although founded on the narrative of an early navigator, and also in that of Christabel, is unique, and makes us the more regret the incompleteness of the latter, a regret shared by many in his lifetime and since his death. Frequently entreated to say how the poem was to end, he sometimes answered in this way. Geraldine, who was wholly evil and supernatural by some alliance with the devil, was to aim at the ruin of Christabel by taking various shapes, first as we see her in the poem, afterwards as Christabel's absent lover, but without the power of doing entirely away with a certain hideousness which she concealed under her dress. The wedding-night was to draw on, and the poem conclude happily by the advent of the real lover returning home. It appears to me this is, in a few words, very likely what Coleridge would have developed in "the three parts yet to come," and made truly wonderful, Geraldine being something of the Lamia, neither exactly a sorceress, witch, or devil. Quite other conclusions, however, have been attributed to him, and one in particular affording The most admirable field for the poet's peculiar powers. Geraldine