Listen, once more, in Youth and Age: "Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying, When I was young!" "Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like; O! the joys, that came down shower-like, "Dew-drops are the gems of morning, That only serves to make us grieve, In Coleridge, throughout his life, there is a distinct growth of metrical power. He continually becomes less, not, as some poets, more artificial. The poems of the period 1800-3, such as The Happy Husband, Recollections of Love, and The Pains of Sleep, are a distinct advance; and The Garden of Boccaccio has at least as much easy charm and grace as any poem he ever wrote. Coleridge is not perfect. His bane was egotism and self-consciousness. There is too much literal Coleridge in his poems. What does he say himself of the drama ?1"It is not a copy, but an imitation of nature. This is the universal principle of the The Coleridge of Coleridge's poems is too much a copy. fine arts." In his earliest preface Coleridge says, "I do not hesitate to affirm" (he never did about this period) "that the most interesting passages in all writings 1 Drama.] Lectures and Notes on Shakspere, &c. are those in which the author develops his own' feelings." If the author in point is one of a high order, the affirmation is just. But a poet of a high order will be always sparing of personal allusions. Probably his whole life will be found, in one form or another, in his works; but it will not be found in a simply autobiographical form. The poet idealizes himself. He aims at a higher truth than the literal truth. Biographers of poets too much forget this. The poet regards his loves 2 and joys and griefs as just so much material, which he modifies at will. He knows well that mere autobiography is not poetry. He makes free with nature, with books, with men and women, with himself,-all after a like fashion. Wordsworth's friend Matthew, for example, is a life-like and charming picture of healthy and intelligent old age. You feel that you would like to know him. If you are not in the secret, you never doubt but that he existed. Yet Wordsworth him 'His own, &c.] "The highest pleasures we receive from poetry are derived from the sympathetic interest we all take in beings like ourselves."-Joanna Baillie, 1798. Not, however, necessarily, like the poets who portray them. 2 Loves, &c.] It must be borne in mind that it is not at the moment of suffering, or enjoying, that he writes, but when the moment is passed. 3 Not poetry.] Coleridge himself knew this perfectly well. In his Biographia Literaria he says,- "Where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensations and experience, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power." Nature.] Coleridge was quite aware of this also, that accurate description of nature, merely as such, is a snare :- "Examine nature accurately," he says in the Table Talk, Sept. 22, 1830, "but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory." self tells us that he put Matthew together out of a dozen men he had known. The Pedlar of The Excursion much more nearly resembles Wordsworth than does the narrator of the story. Would you believe the tale of Margaret to have been written in Dorsetshire, before The Excursion was thought of? Can you figure that Lucy Grey was composed amid the snows of Goslar? The great fault of Coleridge is that he puts too much of himself, unidealized, into his verses. He muses so much on himself, that when he gives us simply himself, he thinks it is enough for us. Egotism and self-consciousness, as we have said, were his bane. Hence, morbidness, and unwholesomeness, and triviality. 2 Wordsworth well remarks1 that "latterly " Coleridge "had so much acquired the habit of analyzing his feelings, and making them matter for theory or argument, that he had rather dimmed his delight in the beauties of nature, and injured his poetical powers." Such is the fact. And his metaphysical studies did not improve matters. As Wordsworth says again,-"But for the habit of metaphysical reasoning, learned in Germany, he would have been the greatest, the most abiding poet of his age." It is so far true, that we regret it sorely. For ourselves, we would willingly give up no little that he wrote on politics, religion, and metaphysics, for another Ancient Mariner. At the same time we state as our opinion, that there were deeper causes 1 Remarks.] Prose Works, iii., 427. 2 Feelings.] For example,-is "Though stomach should sicken, and knees should swell," a detail of Coleridge's experience we care to dwell on? See Ode to the Rain. than his "habit of metaphysical reasoning" for the poet Coleridge's eclipse. Anything Coleridge says of himself in his poems may be accepted as actual fact, with certain reservations, which hold equally for his prose. Further. There is, unfortunately, in Coleridge a certain want of judgment, a lack of self-restraint,a strange wish to tell all, and a craving for sympathy in his hearers, and a childlike trust in them,—which often led him to say what he had better have left unsaid. Coleridge was sufficiently sensuous. We wonder if he knew it. He is never consciously guilty of impropriety, nor do we charge him with any,—but he pushes at times too far a naïve analysis of forbidden subjects.1 He does not fall into the pit; but he leads us to the edge,—holding fast our hand, while we look in. As in many of his earlier pieces he makes us too familiar with his domestic joys, so in too many of his later ones we hear of his griefs. "Not easily forgiven Are those, who setting wide the doors, that bar But Coleridge is naïveness itself. Coleridge,-Gillman says,- -was rather humorous than witty. This may be so. As his affection borders 2 1 Subjects.] Read The Happy Husband, and our notes on Love. 2 Witty.] Cottle says of Coleridge, and we think the remark contains truth," If Mr. Coleridge's nature had been less benevolent, and he had given full vent to the irascible and the satirical, the restrained elements of which abounded in his spirit, he would have obtained the least enviable of all kinds of pre-eminence, and have become the undisputed modern Juvenal."-Cottle's Early Recollections, &c., v. i., p. 245. 1 at times on the maudlin,1 so does his wit on coarseness, though "the Lake poets," as Lord Byron remarked, are never vulgar." We may add that Coleridge was an inveterate punster. 66 $ 3. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF COLERIDGE'S POEMS. "A garden stored with poesy; Where flowers and herbs unite, and haply some weeds be, That, wanting not wild grace, are from all mischief free." Wordsworth. "What flowers are these! In Dioclesian's gardens the most beauteous, WE proceed to give a brief account of the various editions of Coleridge's Poems and Dramas. We shall also insert in it the more valuable portions of his numerous Prefaces, together with a few longer notes, which would too much burden the text. Coleridge's earliest publication was The Fall of Robespierre. An Historical Drama. It was published at Cambridge, where Coleridge was still a student, in 1794. He had brought it up from Bristol, and Southey had written the second and 1 Maudlin.] Read over, for example, the last verse but two of Lines written at Shurton Bars, by the poet to his betrothed. |