THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY UPON HIS PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL OPINIONS. EDITED BY PROFESSOR SHEDD. IN SEVEN VOLUMES. VOL. III. NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, Nos. 329 AND 331 PEARL STREET, FRIANKLIN SQUARE. 1854. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred andfifty-three, by HAlRPER & BRIOTrHERS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. COWPLETE WOR KS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. VOL. III. BIOGRAPttIA LITERIARIA. NE Y O R K: HlARPER & BROTHERS. 1 o ~A' BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA; OR, BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF MY LITERARY LIFE AND OPINIONS. BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. PREPARED FOR PUBLICATION IN PAIn BY THE LATE HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE, COMPLETED AND PUBLISHED BY HIS WIDOW. NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS. 1854. TO WILLIAM WORDS)WORTH, Esq., P. L. MY DEAR MR.'WOnDSVOrTH, I have received with great pleasure your permission to inscribe to you this new edition of my Father's Biogra)hica Literarica. You will find in it some of the latest writings of my dear departed Husband;-some too of my own, to which I know you will be indulgent; but my chief reason for dedicating it to you is, that it contains, though only in a brief and. fragmentary form, an account of the Life and Opinions of your friend, S. T. Coleridge, in which I feel assured that, however you may dissent from portions of the latter, you take a high and peculiar interest. His name was early associated with yours from the time when you lived as neighbors, and both together sought the Muse, in the lovely Vale of Stowey. That this association may endure as long as you are both remembered,-that not only as a Poet, but as a Lover and a Teacher of Wisdom, my Father may continue to be spoken of' ill connection with you, while your writings become more and more fully and widely appreciated, is the dearest and proudest wish that I can form for his memory. I remain, dear Mr. WVordsworth, With deep affection, admiration, and respect, Your Child in heart and faithful Friend, SARA COLERIDGE. REGENT'S PAFrK, January 30, 1847. ADVERTISEMENT. THIS new edition of my Father's Biog'raphia Litera'in was partly prepared for publication by his late Editor. The corrections of the text in the first nine or ten chapters, and chapters xiii. xi-v. xv. and perhaps xvi. are by his hand; the notes signed " Editor" were written by him; and he drew up the Biographical Supjplenzent (the first three chapters of it containing the Letters), which is placed at the end of the volume. His work it has fallen to me to complete, and the task has been interesting, though full of affecting remembrances, and brought upon me by the deepest sorrow of my life. The biographical sketch I have published as I found it, with trifling alterations and omissions, filling up a few gaps and supplying the mottoes. Had the writer himself taken it up again, he would probably have improved and continued it. I have only to add that my thanks are due to many kind friends, who have assisted me in my part of the undertaking with advice, information, or loan of books; especially my Father's dear Friend and Fellow Student, Mr. Green, Archdeacon Hare, and my brother-in-law, Mr. Justice Coleridge. I am also much indebted for help toward my work to Mr. Pickering, by Mwhom a great number of the books referred to in the notes were placed in my hands CO NTE N T S. PAGE INTRODUCTION............... Xi CHAPTER I. Motives to the present work-Reception of the Author's first publication-Discipline of his taste at school —Effect of contemporary writers on youthful minds-Bowles's Sonnets-Comparison between the poets before and since Pope............ 143 CHAPTER II. Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of factsCauses and occasions of the charge —Its injustice..... 164 CHAPTER III. The Author's obligations to Critics, and the probable occasion-Principles of modern Criticism-Mr. Southey's works and character.. 178 CHAPTER IV. The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface-Mr. Wordsworth's earlier poems -On Fancy and Imagination-The investigation of the distinction important to the Fine Arts............. 191 CHAPTER V. On the law of Association —Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley 207 CHAPTER VI. That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts........ 2215 viil CONTENTS. CHAPTER VII. Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory-Of the original mistake or equivocation which procured its admission-l)emoria technica.......... 231 CHAPTER VIII. The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes-Refined first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia preestabilita —Hylozoismn-Materialism —Nlone of these systems, or any possible theory of Association, supplies or supersedes a theory of Perception, or explains the formation of the Associable.... 239 CHAPTER IX. Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its conditions?-Giordano Bruno-Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order-The Author's obligations to the Mystics-to Immanuel Kant-The difference between the letter and the spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of prudence in the teachings of Pbilosophy-Fichte's attempt to complete the Critical system-sIts partial success and ultimate failureObligations to Schelling; and among English writers to Saumarez. 24" CHAPTER X. A Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power-On Pedantry and pedantic expressions-Advice to young authors respecting publication-Various anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress of his opinions in Religion and Politics... 272 CHAPTER XI. An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors............. 314 CHAPTER XII. A Chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or omission of the chapter that follows.......... 322 CONTENTS. ix CHAPTER XIII. PAGE On the Imagination, or Esemplastic power......... 356 CHAPTER XIV. Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposedPreface to the second edition-The ensuing controversy, its causes and acrimony-Philosophic definitions of a Poem and Poetry with scholia..... 364 CHAPTER XV. The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis of Shakspeare's Venus and Adonis, ands, and pe of Lucrece.... 375 CHAPTER XVI. Striking points of difference between the Poets of the present age and those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries-Wish expressed for the union of the characteristic merits of both........ 382 CHAPTER XVII. Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth-Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavorable to the formation of a human diction —The best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of clowns or shepherds —Poetry essentially ideal and generic-The language of Milton as much the language of real life, yea, incomparably more so, than that of the cotttager.... 394 CHAPTER XVIII. Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially different from that of prose-Origin and elements of metre-Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction..... 410 CHAPTER XIX. Continuation-Concerning the real object which, it is probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical preface-Elucidation and application of this.............. 434 At x CONTENTS. CHAPTER XX. PAGE The former subject continued-The neutral style, or that common to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from Chaucer, Herbert, and others.....................443 CHAPTER XXI. Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals.... 451 CHAPTER XXII. The characteristic lefects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the principles from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced-Their proportion to the beauties-For the greatest part characteristic of his theory only...................460 SATYRANE'S LETTERS..................505 CHAPTER XXIII. Critique on Bertram.....a.. 555 CHAPTER XXIV. onclusion..................... 583 BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT............... 599 APPENDI..................691 INTRODUCTION, MR. COLERIDGE S OBLIGATIONS TO SCHELLING, AND THE UNFAIR VIEW OF THE SUBJECT PRESENTED IN BLACKWVOOD S MAGAZINE. SoME years ago, when the late Editor of my Father's works was distantly contemplating a new edition of the Biograp/hia Literaria, but had not yet begun to examine the text carefully with a view to this object, his attention was drawn to an article in Blackwood's Magazine of March, 1840, in which " the very large and unacknowledged appropriations it contains from the great German Philosopher Schelling," are pointed out; and by this paper I have been directed to those passages in the works of Schelling and of Maasz, to which references are given in the following pages,-to most of them immediately, and to a few more through the strict investigation which it occasioned. Whether or no my Father's obligations to the great German Philosopher acre virtually unacknowledged to the extent and with the unfairness which the writer of that article endeavors to prove, the reader of the present edition will be able to judge for himself; the facts of the case will be all before him, and from these, when the whole of them are fully and fairly considered, I feel assured that by readers in general, —and I have had some experience on this point already,-no such injurious inferences as are contained in that paper will ever be drawn. The author, it must be observed, before commencing his argument, thinks fit to disclaim the belief, that conscious intentional plagiarism is imputable to the object of his censure; nevertheless, throughout great part of' it Mr. Coleridge is treated as an artful purloiner and selfish plunderer, who knowingly robs others to enrich himself, both the tone and the language of the article expressing this and no other meaning. Such aspersions will not rest, I think they never have xii INTROD UCTION. rested, upon Coleridge's name; the protest here entered is a duty to his memory from myself rather than a work necessary to his vindication, and the remarks that follow are made less with a view to influence the opinions of others than to record my own. The charge brought against my Father by the author of the article appears to be this, that, having borrowed largely from Schelling,* he has made no adequate acknowledgments of obligation to that philosopher, only such general admissions as are quite insufficient to cover the extent of his debt; that his anticipatory defence against a charge of "s ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism" is no defence at all; and that his particular references are too few and inaccurate to vindicate him from having dealt unfairly toward the author from whom he has taken so much. The plaintiff opens his case with giving as the whole of this defence of my Father's, —(that it is not the whole will appear in the sequel,)-certain parts of' a passage upon Schelling that occurs in the ninth chapter of the Biographia Litercaria; and although, in that passage, the author desires, that, " whatever in this or any future work of his resembles or coincides with the doctrines of his German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him," yet he insists that Coleridge has defraLded Schelling of his due, and seeks to support the impeachment on these two grounds, first, that very " absence of distinct references to his books," which he himself plainly admits and particularly accounts for; or, in the accuser's own words, his omission of specific acknowledgments in the instances in which he was indebted to him; secondly, his having affirmed that he had in some sort anticipated the system which he proposed to teach. Now it must be remarked, by way of preliminary, that no man can properly be said to defraud another, nor ought to be so spoken of, who has not a fraudulent intention: but it never yet has been proved, after all the pains that have been taken to this effect, that Mr. Coleridge intended to deprive Schelling of any part of the honor that rightfully belongs to him, or that he has, by * The passages borrowed by my Father from Schelling and Maasz are pointed out in this edition in notes at the foot of the pages where they occur. For the particulars and amount of the debt, therefore, readers are referred to the body of the work, chapters v. vii. viii. ix. xii. INTROD UCTION., xiii Mr. Coleridge's means, been actually deprived of it, even for an hour. With regard to the first ground of accusation, it is doubtless to be regretted by every friend of the accused, that he should have adopted so important a portion of the words and thoughts of Schelling without himself making those distinct and accura'te references, which he might have known would eventually be required as surely as he succeeded in his attempt to recommend the metaphysical doctrines contained in them to the attention of students in this country. Why did Mr. Coleridge act thus, subjecting himself, as he might well have anticipated, aware as he was of the hostile spirit against his person and principles, that existed in many quarters, to suspicion from the illiberal, and contumelious treatment at the hands of the hard and unscrupulous? Why he so acted those who best knew him can well understand, without seeing in his conduct evidence of unconscientiousness: they see the truth of the matter to be this, that to give those distinct and accurate references, for the neglect of which he is now so severely arraigned, would have caused him much trouble of a kind to him peculiarly irksome, and that he dispensed himself from it in the belief, that the general declaration which he had made upon the subject was sufficient both for Schelling and for himself. This will be the more intelligible when it is borne in mind, that, as all who knew his literary habits will believe, the passages from Schelling, which he wove into his work, were not transcribedfobr the occasion, but merely transferred from his note-book into the text, some of them, in all likelihood, not even from his note-book immediately, but from recollection of its contents. It is most probable that he mistook some of these translated passages fbr compositions of his own, and quite improbable, as all who know his careless ways will agree, that he should have noted down accurately the particular works and portions of works from which they came. "But even with the fullest conviction," says Archdeacon Hare, " that Coleridge can not have been guilty of intentional plagiarism, the reader will, probably, deem it strange, that he should have transferred half a dozen pages of Schelling into his volume without any reference to their source. And strange it undoubtedly is. The only way I can see of accounting for it is from his practice of keeping note-books or journals of his thoughts, filled with observations and brief dissertations on such matters as xiv INTRODUCTION. happened to strike him, with a sprinkling now and then of extracts and abstracts from the books he was reading. If the name of the author from whom he took an extract was left out, he might easily, years after, forget whose property it was, especially when he had made it in some measure his own, by transfusillng it into his own English. That this may happen I know from experience, having myself been lately puzzled by a passage which I had translated from Kant some years ago, and which cost me a good deal of search, before I ascertained that it was not my own."'k My Father says himself, in the ninth chapter of this work, "I have not indeed (ehenz! res angusta domi!.) been hitherto able to procure more than two of his books, viz. the first volume of his collected Tracts, and his System of Tcranscendental Idealismz; to which, however, I must add a small pamphlet against Fichte, the spirit of which was to mzy feelings painfully incongruous with the principles, and which (with the usual allowance afforded to an antithesis) displayed the love of wisdom rather than the wisdom of love." From this pamphlet (entitled Dar'legzong, &c. Exlposition of the t?'ue relation of the Philosophy of NXatur-e to the improvedl doctrine of Fichlte) he had just cited a striking passage, and it is represented as strangely disingenuous, that he should have given that extract merely as " observations from a contemporary writer of the continent,"t without specifying the particular work from which it was taken, or even the writer's name. So indeed it may appear on an examination undertaken ostensibly for the love of wisdom, but a still closer one, conducted in the wisdom of love, will convince any reader that there was as little of self-regard in this transaction as of accuracy. At that stage of his work, at which the citation is made, my Father had not yet introduced Schelling to his readers, readers unacquainted, as he doubtless imagined, with the German philosopher and his writings. He immediately proceeds, however, to give an account of the authors whom he successively studied, when he had "found no abiding place for his reason" in the " schools of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley;" and then, * From Mr. Hare's defence of Coleridge in the British Magazine of January, 1835, pp. 20, 21. t See p. 250. Of the use made by the writer in B31. of this passage I shall have to speak again further on. INTRODUCTIONf. xv after doing honor to Kant and justice to lFichte, he speaks of Schelling by name, and mentions every work of his to which he ever owed any thing. The " Vorlesungenz fiber die 2Methbde des Academischen StudiLurn," which, as well as the Da'rlegung, is mentioned as containing the word In-eins-bildung, the original, as is supposed, of his " esemplastic," he never possessed and probably never saw. In mentioning the pamphlet against Fichte, he, naturally enough, described its general. character, and probably either forgot, while he was so doing, that from this same work his previous citation had been made, or felt that for readers to whom the very name of Schelling was new, such particularity as that of reciting its long title, and referring to it the passage he had brought forward, was superfluous. Ideen zu einer Philosollhie der Xiatutr was one of the works of Schelling, which my Father had not in his possession, when he composed the Biographicia Literaria, and it is remar~ked that he entitled it Schelling's Nlatzur-Philosophie.' —that he had presumned to contract the proper name of a book he had once read, from its fuller form in the title-page, to that abridged one, which it probably wore upon its back. No comment is made, indeed, upon this important fact, but that is supplied by the strain of the article. His accuser urges against him that he did not elaborate over again what he had borrowed and thus make it, in some sense, his own. It is not easy to see how that which is borrowed can ever, strictly speaking, become the property of the borrower, so as to cease to be that of the original possessor; the new form il which he invests it, or the fiesh matter which he engrafts upon it, will be his, but the debt to him who has furnished the substance, in the one case, or the niuclezs, in the other, is not cancelled because of these additions, and honesty as well as gratitude would equally require its acknowledgment, though the obligation will be less apparent to the general reader. And surely if there had been any design of app2]ropriating in my Father's mind, he would have sought to make the borrowed passages appear his own, by change of expression at least. It has been well said of the genuine Plagiary that his " Easy vamping talents lies First wit to pilfer, then disguise'" xvi INTRODUCTION. This is the plan which all crafty plagiarists adopt; this is the way in which numberless writers have dealt with my Father himself, the major part of them, however, not craftily or selfishly, but doubtless unawares to themselves; there being far less of conscious, far more of unconscious, plagiarism among authors than the world is apt to suppose. But Coleridge repeated the very words of Schelling, and in so doing made it an easy task for the German to reclaim his own, or for the dullest wight that could read his books to give it him back again. Must he not have been careless of the mieum at least as much as of the tumun, when he took whole pages and paragraphs, unaltered in form, from a noted author-whose writings, though unknown in this country, when he first brought them forward, were too considerable in his own to be finally merged in those of any other man,at the same time that he was doing all that in him lay to lead Englishmen to the study of that author, and was referring readers to his works both generally, and in some instances, and those the most important, particularly? From his accuser's blustering conclusion-" Plagiarism, like murder, will out!" it might be supposed that Mr. Coleridge had taken pains to prevent his "plagiarism" from coming out,-that with the "stealthy pace" of the Iurdclrer he had " moved towards his design like a ghost." Verily, if no man ever tried to murder an author's good name with more of malice prepense than he to steal one, the literary world would be freer from felonious practices than it is at present.* One of the largest extracts my Father accompanies with these words in a parenthesis (See Schell. Abhandl. zur Erlaiter, des Id. der Wissenschaftslehre).t " But from this reference," asks * "Of a truth," says Mr. Hare, "if he had been disposed to purloin, he never would have stolen half a dozen pages from the head and front of that very work of Schelling's which was the likeliest to fall into his reader's hands; and the first sentence of which one could not read without detecting the plagiarism. Would any man think of pilfering a column fronm the porch of St. Paul's? The high praise which Coleridge bestows on Schelling would naturally excite a wish in such of his readers as felt an interest in his philosophy, to know more of the great German. The first books of his they would take up would be his Natur-Philosophie, and his Transcendental Idealism; these are the works which Coleridge himself mentions; and the latter, from its subject, would attract them the most."-Brit. Mag. of 1835, p. 20. j See p. 332. INTRODUCTION. xvui the censor, "would not a reader naturally deduce the inference that C. was here referring to Schelling in support of his own views, and not literally translating and appropriating the German's?" There are some who have eyes to see, and microscopically too, but only in certain directions. To those whose vision is more catholic I address the plain question, Did not my Father say fully enough to put every reader of a studious turn, every reader able to take up his philosophical views in earnest,-(and to whom else were these borrowed passages more than strange words, or Schelling's claims of the slightest consequence?) —into the way of consulting their original source? Thle longer extr'acts are all either expressly acknowledged, as that from the DarleguLng in chap. ix. and that beginning at p. 332; or taken from tlhe Transcendental Idealism, whiceh he speaks of mzore than7 once, or f'rom the above-snentioned tr-eatise, of which he gives the long title. Most of these extracts the Writer in Blackwood refers, nzot to the t9reatise, uwhicah may Father clid name, but to the collection at large-the Philosojphische Sc]hriften —which it so happened that he did not; and moreover he asserts, that it would be nzext to impossible for a reader to find the tract referred to by this same long title, for that it is " buried among a good many others in Schelling's Phil. Schrift." of which it occupies 137 pages out of 511 as if it could not possi6ly enter his head or the head of any bookseller that he might employ, to look for it in the " volume of Schelling's collected Tracts" which my Father speaks of in chapter ix. If the works of Schelling were as good as dead and buried for all here, that was not through any fault of his; had he named every one of their titles at full length, and given an abstract of all they contained, the bill of fare, at that time, would have attracted no guests. Grill would be Grill, and have his unmetaphysic mind. Fairly considered his conduct in this matter does but help to prove the truth of his assertion, that he " regarded Truth as a divine ventriloquist, not caring from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible." The Writer in Blackwood, however, takes a very different view of it; he rather supposes the true interpretation of my Father's conduct to be that he would have nothing ascribed to Schelling, xviii INTRODUCTION. which appeared in the works of both, though he desires that every thing may be, and that this expression was used to provide a refuge for himself, should he ever be discovered to have " cabbaged from his works ad libitzum." The style of these strictures resembles the reasoning; things look rouglh and coarse on the wrong side, and the reasoning they contain is of that kind, which turns things wrong side out. It represents my Father's apology as being penned under a notion that he should gain credit for the transcendentalism contained in his book, while at the same time no comparison betwixt his writings and those of the original transcendentalist would for years, if ever, be made. It was the fact that for years his obligations to Schelling were not discovered; but it is ridiculous to suppose that he calculated on this, with the amount of those obligations distinctly present to his mind, for this could only have happened through the failure of the attempt he was making to interest his countrymen in the transcendental system. When a doctrine comes into credit, in days like these, the first teacher of it is as soon discovered as the lake that feeds the glittering brook and sounding waterfall is traced out, when thley have gained the traveller's eye. It is not true, that to the end of his life my father enjoyed the credit of originality;-originality was not denied him, simply because he had no enjoyment and no credit. The fact is, that these " borrowed plumes" drest him out but poorly in the public eye, and Sir Walter Scott made a just observation on the fate of the Biographia Literaria, when he said that it had made no impression upon the public. Instead of gaining reputation as a metaphysical discoverer, at the expense of Germany, the author was generally spoken of as an introducer of German metaphysics into this country, in which light he had represented himnself, —a man of original power, who had spoiled his own genius by devoting himself to the lucubrations of foreigners. It is the pleasure of the Writer in Blackwood to give him a vast metaphysical reputation, founded on the Biographia Literaria, and, at the end of one of his paragraphs, he implies, that the passages taken from Schelling had been "paraded for up: wards of twenty years as specimens of the wonderful powers of the English philosopher.." Some, perhaps, have been weary enough of hearing him called wvonderful,-but the friends of Coleridge well know, that the work was generally neglected till INTRODUCTION. xix the author's name began to rise by various other means; and that although passages of his writings have been often quoted of late years, and some in the B. L. have been in the mouths of many, while the book itself was in the hands of a very few, yet that the transcendental portions of it were unknown to his admirers in general, till some of them, after his decease, were declared to be the property of Schelling in Tait's Magazine. If the transcendentalism adopted in the Biographiac be a jewel of great price, no gem lodged in a dark unfathomed cave of ocean was ever more unseen and unknown than this was for many a year. In making an estimate of a man's intellectual wealth we can not abstract the influence upon his thoughts of other thinkers, precedent or contemporary; but all Mr. Coleridge's direct debts to the great Transcendentalist may be refunded, and whatever obligations reflective men of this age have felt and acknowledged that they owe to him, the sum of them will not be sensibly diminished. In other quarters Mr. Coleridge has been accused of denying his obligations to Schlegel; yet he never denied having borrowed those illustrations and detached thoughts, which are brought forward in support of the charge. His words on the subject neither say nor imply, in assertion of his originality, more than this, that, in his first course of lectures, which were delivered "before Mr. Schlegel gave his on the same subjects at Vienna,"-(I believe it was in 1804, previously to his departure for Malta,)-he put forth the same general principles of criticism as in the following courses; so that whatever substantial agreement there might be between them, on this head, must be coincidence. It was said of my Father by his late Editor, that, " in thinking passionately of the principle, he forgot the authorship-and sowed beside many waters, if peradventure some chance seedling might take root and bear fruit to the glory of God and the spiritualization of man."* He was ever more intent upon the pursuit and enunciation of truth than alive to the collateral benefits that wait upon it, as it is the exclusive property of this or that individual. The incautious way in which he acted upon this impulse was calculated to bring him under suspicion with those to whose minds any such feeling was alien and inconceivable. Yet no unprejudiced person, who reviews my Father's life, on an inti* Preface to the Table Talk of S. T. Coleridge, V1. INTPOT)DUCTION mate acquaintance with it, will deny that he showed an unusual disregard of this property in thought, where his own interests were concerned, and that he spent in letters and marginal notes, and in discourse at all times and to all auditors a great deal both of thought and brilliant illustration, which a more prudential and self-interested man would have kept back and presented in a form better fitted to procure for himself a permanent reward; that he would spend time and labor on a critical examination of the works of others, and earnest consideration of their affairs, for their sakes only, in a manner almost peculiar to himself. If he was not always sufficiently considerate of other men's property, he was profuse of his own; and, in truth, such was his temper in regard to all 2proper'ty, of what kind soever; he did not enough regard or value it whether for himself or his neighbor. Nor is it proof to the contrary that he did at times speak of his share in the promulgation of truth and awakening of reflection, and of the world's unthankfulness. This he did, rather in self-defence, when he was accused of neglecting to employ or of misemploying his natural gifts, than from an inordinate desire to parade and exalt them. He was goaded into some degree of egotism by the charges continually brought against him, that he suflered his powers to lie dormant, or to spend themselves in a fruitless activity. But they who spoke thus on the one hand under-rated his actual achievements, the importance of which time and trial were to discover, since speculations like his show what they are worth in the using, and come into use but slowly; and on the other hand, over-rated his powers of literary execution. They were struck by his marked intellectual gifts, but took no note of his intellectual impediments,-were not aware that there was a want of proportion in the faculties of his mind, which would always have prevented him from making many or good books; for, even had he possessed the ordinary amount of skill in the arranging and methodizing of thought with a view to publication and in reference to the capacities of a volume, this would have been inadequate to the needs of one whose genius was ever impelling him to trace things down to their deepest source, and to follow them out in their remotest ramifications. His powers, compounded and balanced as they were, enabled him to do that which he did, and possibly that alone. Great as was the activity of his intellect in its own congenial INTRODUCTION. xxi sphere, he wanted that agility of mind, which can turn the understanding from its wonted mode of movement to set it upon new tasks necessary to the completeness and efficiency of what has been produced of another kind, but uninteresting in themselves to the mind of the producer. He loved to go forward, expanding and ennobling the soul of his teaching, and hated the trouble of turning back to look after its body. To the healthful and vigorous such trouble appears nothing, simply because they c(re healthful and vigorous; but to feel all exertion a labor, all labor pain and weariness, this is the very symptom of disease and its most grievous consequence. The nerveless languor, which, after early youth, became almost the habit of his body and bodily mind, which to a great degree paralyzed his powers both of rest and action, -precluding by a torpid irritability their happy vicissitude,-rendered all exercises difficult to him except of thought and imagination flowing onward freely and in self-made channels; for these brought with them their own warm atmosphere to thaw the chains of frost that bound his spirit. Soon as that spontaneous impulse was suspended, the apathy and sadness induced by his physical condition reabsorbed his mind, as sluggish mists creep over the valley when the breeze ceases to blow; and to counteract it he lacked any other sufficient stimulus: With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll; And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul! 1lork without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope, without an object, can not live. He had no hope of gainful popularity, even from the most laborious efforts that he was capable of making; nor would this in itself have been an adequate object of hope to him, without a further one, more deeply satisfying, a dream of which was ever unbracing his mind, but which life, such as he had made it, and such as it was given him from above, had not afforded. Then the complaints and warnings from " all quarters," of the obscurity of his prose writings, were, as he expressed it, like " cold water poured" upon him. It may be questioned whether they who thus complained were making any attempt to meet him halfway, —whether they had done their part toward understanding what they called unintelligible. It is the chief use and aim of xxii INTRODUCTION. writings of such a character as his to excite the reader to think,to draw out of his mind a native flame rather than to make it bright for a moment by the reflection of alien fires. All literary productions indeed demand some answering movement on the part of readers, but, in common cases, the motion required is so easy, so much in known ways and smooth well-beaten tracks, that it seems spontaneous and is more like rest than labor. This is the difficulty with which introducers of new thought have to contend; the minds that are to receive these accessions must themselves, in order to their reception of them, be renewed proportionately, renewed not from without alone, but by co-operation from within,-a process full of conflict and struggle, like the fermenting of raw juices into generous wines. Though my Father understood this well in the end, he was by no means prepared for it, and for all its consequences, in the beginning; coming upon him as it did, it acted as a narcotic, and by deepening his despondency increased his literary inertness. Speaking of " The Friend" he observes, " Throughout these Essays the want of illustrative examples and varied exposition is the main defect, and was occasioned by the haunting dread of being tedious." The Biographia Literaria he composed at that period of his life when his health was most deranged, and his mind most subjected to the influence of bodily disorder. It bears marks of this throughout, for it is even less methodical in its arrangement than any of his other works. Up to a certain point the author pursues his plan of writing his literary life, but, in no long time his "slack hand" abandons its grasp of the subject, and the book is filled out to a certain size, with such miscellaneous contents of' his desk as seem least remote from it. To say, with the writer in Blackwood, that he stopped short in the process of unfolding a theory of the imagination, merely because he had come to the end of all that Schelling had taught concerning it, and thus to account for the abrupt termination of the first volume, is to place the matter in a perfectly false light; he broke down in the prosecution of' his whole scheme, the regular history of his literary life and opinions, and this not for want of help in one particular line, but because his energies for regular composition in any line were deserting him, at least for a time. It is suggested, that "interspersed throughout the works of Schelling, glimpses and indications are to be found of some stupendous theory on the subject INTRODUCTION. xxiii of the imagination;" that Coleridge expected to " catch and unriddle these shadowy intimations," but that, finding himself unable to do this, he " had nothing else for it but to abandon his work altogether, and leave his readers in the lurch." What these glimpses of a " stupendous theory" are, and where they are, except " throughout the works of Schelling," the announcer does not inform us: his own imagination liay have discovered to him what was never discerned by Coleridge, in all whose notes upon Schelling not a hint is given of this stupendous theory in em6ryo. In the last part of the Trcanscendental Idealism,, which relates to the Philosophy of Art, at p. 473, a passage occurs in which the poetic faculty and the productive intuition are identified, and that which is active in both, that one and the same, declared to be the imagination: but this appears to be the crown and completion of a system already laid down, not a germ of a system to be evolved in future. The Imagination is also characterized in aphorisms 34, 35, of Schelling's Wissenschaftliche Abhandlunyen: but we must strain our eyes very much to find any indications of a grand philosophical design there.* I suspect that this " stupendous theory" has its habitation in the clouds of the accuser's fancy,-clouds without water, though black as if they were big with showers of rain. The extent of Schelling's teaching on the subject of the Imagination my father well knew before he commenced the Biographia Literaria, and he must also have known how far he was able to " catch and unriddle his shadowy intimations;" what he did not know or sufficiently consider was the space, which such a disquisition ought to occupy in his work, and the relation which it had to his undertaking. But for the failure of his powers, he might have recast what he had already written, and give it such shape and proportions, as would have made it seem suitable to the work in which he was engaged. Of this effort he felt incapable, and the letter was devised in order to enable him to print what he had already written without farther trouble. But he still cherished the intention of continuing the subject, thus commenced, in a future work, which was to explain his system of thought at large, and to this object he devoted much time and thought, during the latter years of his life,-with what fruit will, it is to * I have asked two students of Schelling if they ever met with this theory in traversing his works, but could learn nothing of it from either of them, xxiv INTRODUCTION. be hoped, hereafter appear in a philosophical work by his friend and fellow-student Mr. Green. The second great ground of accusation against my father is his having laid claim to " the main and fundamental ideas" of Schelling's system. "W~e ourselves," says the critic, "in our day have had some small dealings with' main and fundamental ideas,' and we know thus much about them, that it is very easy for any man or for every man to have them; the difficulty is in bringing them intelligibly, effectively, and articulately out,-in elaborating them into clear and intelligible shapes." He proceeds to illustrate his argument, on the hint of an expression used by Mr. Gillman, in his Life of Coleridge, with a choice simile. " Wasps," says he, " and even" other insects, which I decline naming after him, "are, we suppose, capable of collecting the juice of flowers, and this juice may be called their' fundamental ideas;' but the bee alone is a genuis among flies, because he alone can put forth his ideas in the shape of honey, and make the breakfast-table glad." True or false, all this has little to do with any thing that my father has said in the Biogr'aphica Literarica. As for the bare " raw material" (to use the critic's own expression), out of which intellectual systems are formed, it is possessed by every human being, from Adam to his children of the present day, by one just as much as another. Clodpates, who draw no lines save with the plough across the field, have all the geometry folded up in their minds that Euclid unfolded in his book: Kant's doctrine of pure reason is a web woven out of stuff that is in every man's brain; and the simplest Christian is inzplicitly as great a divine as Thomas Aquinas. But when a man declares that the findamental ideas of a system are born and zmatzured in his mind, he evidently means, not merely that he possesses the mere material or elements of the system, but that the system itself, as to its leading points and most general positions, has been evolved from the depths of his spirit by his own independent efforts; this has certainly more relation to the wrought honey than to the raw. My father's allegation, that the principal points of Schelling's system were not new to him when he found them uttered in Schelling's words shall be considered presently; his own full belief of what he asserted, I, of course, do not make matter of question or debate. First, however, reverting for a moment to the simile of the INTRODUCTION. xxv "wasps," I beg to observe, that even if such insects might suck the juice of flowers if they would, mechanically might (though their organs are not adapted for the purpose like those of bees), yet it is certain that instinctively they never do. In vainl for them not only the " violets blow," but all the breathing spring beside. On the other hand, a habit of' searching the nectaries of delicate blossoms, far sought on heights or in hidden glades, has been found by naturalists to be generally connected with honey-making faculties: and thus, without admitting any proper analogy betwixt flower-juice, and futndamental ideas, I will so far avail myself of the illustration as to suggest that, in like manner, he who sought truth far and near, amid the pages of abstruse and neglected metaphysicians of former times, and discovered the merits of new ones, just sprung up in a foreign country, before they were recognized in his own, was probably led to such researches by some special aptitude for studies of' this nature and powers of thought in the same line. The wasps and baser flies of literature neither collect juice nor make honey; they only buzz and sting, flitting around the well-spread board, to which they have never furnished one wholesome morsel, to the disturbance of those who sit thereat; a meddlesome but not, like certain wasps of old, thle manliest race,* fobr they most attack those who have the powers of the w6rld least on their side, or, being gone out of this world altogether, can neither resist nor return their violence. -Time was that when a lion died bees deposited their sweets in his careass; but now, too often, wasps and vulgar flies gather about the dead lion, to shed upon hlis motionless remains only what is bitter and offensive!t * dvdlptUcT-a7ov uEv'oc. Ramce, v. 1077. t "No sooner is the lion dead than these hungry flesh-flies swarm about him, verifying a part only of Samson's riddle, they find meat, but they produce no sweetness." Omniana, I. p. 234. I certainly did not recollect this sentence when I wrote the sentence above. My father did not recollect Samson Agonistes, 1. 136, "When insupportably his foot advanced-" at the time of his writing in the France, " When insupportably advancing Her arm made mockery of the warrior's tramp." Mr. Dequincey represented him as denying the debt to Milton. Now I verily think that I had never read the passage in the Omniana, when the lion illusVOL. II. ]B xxvi INTRODUCTION. To insects of this class too much countenance is given by the tone and spirit in which Mr. Coleridge's censor conducts his argument. In order to find full matter of accusation against him, he puts into his words a great deal which they do not of themselves contain. According to him my Father's language intimates, that what he was about to teach of the transcendental system in the Biographia Literaria was not only his own by some degree of anticipation, but his own and no one's else-that "he was prepared to pour from the lamp of an original, though congenial, thinker a flood of new light upon the dark doctrines in which he so genially coincided." Now, so far from pretending to pour a flood of new2 light upon the doctrines of Schelling, he not only speaks of him as " the foundcle-r of the Philosophy of Nature and most successful improver of the Dynamic system,"* but declares that to him "we owe the completion, and the most important victories of this revolution in philosophy."t He calls Schelling his predecessor though contemporary. Predecessor in what? Surely in those same doctrines which he was about to unfold. That he had not originally learned the general conceptions of this philosophy from Schelling he does indeed affirm, but he expressly ascribes them to Schelling as their discoverer and first teacher, nor does he claim to be considered the author of the system in any sense or in any degree. All he lays claim to, and that only by anticipation, as what he hoped to achieve, is "' the honor of rendering it intelligible to his countrymen," and of applying it to "the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes:" and certainly in the application of philosophical principles to the explanation, and, as he believed, support of the Catholic faith, by which means the soundness of the principles themselves is tested, he had a walk of his own in which " no German that ever breathed" has preceded or outstripped him.? Plainly enough it was -the sum of his future labors in the furtration occurred to me; I never yet have read the book through, though I have had it within reach all my life. It is not worth acknowledging like the other; but this and a thousand similar facts make me feel how much of coincidence in such matters is possible. If my father had read Sameson Agonistes, still he may have thought that he should have written the line even if he had not. * Biog. Lit. chap. ix. f Ib t Mr. Dequincey said of him, with reference to another application of his thoughts, that, "he spun daily, from the loom of his own magical brain, INTRODUCTION. xxvii therance of truth, not his metaphysical doctrines alone, but his entire system of thought that he had in contemplation, when he intimated a confident belief, that the work he should produce would " appear to be the offispring of his own spirit by better tests than the mere reference to dates:" and although his actual performance fell very far short of what he was ever expecting to perform, yet surely his writings at large contain an amount of original thought sufficient to render this anticipatory pretension at least not ridiculous. That his meaning was thus general more clearly appears from the circumstance that, just before this appeal concerning his originality of authorship, he refers to his design of applying philosophy to religion; and without doubt his 9religious philosophy diflered materially from that of the great German. In connection, too, with the same subject he mentions " this or any futuz e work of his;" so that to suppose him, when he thus expressed himself, to have had in his mind's eye just that portion of his teaching in the B. L. which he had borrowed or was to borrow from Schelliug, is gratuitous indeed.* Is it conceivable that Mr. Coleridge would have appealed to tests of originality, which his future writings:were to furnish, had he.not believed in his heart that they would furnish those tests?-that he would have defied a comparison of dates, had he been claiming originality merely on the score of what he had consciously borrowed? But that pretension of his to having anticipated much of what Schelling taught has been treated with vehement scorn, as a mere pretence. His accordance with the German philosopher, it is peremptorily asserted, could not have been coincidence, because lie gave forth Schelling's own doctrine in Schelling's own words, without any important addition or variation. "Genial coincidences, forsooth! where every one word of the one author tallies with every one theories more gorgeous by far, and supported by a pomp and luxury of images, such as no German that ever breathed could have emulated in his dreams." * His goodfriend in the Ed. Review of Aug. 1817, sees this matter in a truer light, for he says Mr. C. "proceeds to defend himself against the charge of plagiarism, of which he suspects that he may be suspected by the readers of Schlegel and Schielling, when he comes to unfold, infulness of time, the mysterious laws of the drama and the human mind." Fas est ab hoste jsuvari. Xxviii INTRODIUCTION. word of the other!" That it is ill-judged in any man to tell the world, in his own favor, one tittle more thanl he is prepared to prove, I ihave no inteltioii to dispute, nor is it!or the sake of maintaining my father's claims as a metaphysical seer, that I trouble myself with the above position; for another reason, more deeply conlcerning, I must contend, that his having neither added to, nor varied from, the doctrines of Schelling does not make it clear as noonday, that he had not some original insight into them, nor is even his adoption of Sclhellinlg's words any absolute proof, that he hid in no degree anticipated their sense. There can be no reasonable doubt, that he was at least in the same line of thought with him, —was in search of what Schelling discovered -before -Ie met with his writings: and on this point it is to be remarked, that the writer in Blackwood, though he professes to give the cwhole of AMr. Coleridge's defence, omits a very important part of it, that in which he accounts for his averred coincidence with the German writer, and thus establishes its probability.* True enough it is that the transcendental doctrine contained in the Biogrca,2hia LZiter'aria is conveyed for the most part in the language of Schelling, and this seems to show, that he had not formed into a regular composition any identical views of his own before he read that author's works;t but that the main concep* See, in the ninth chapter of this work, the passage beginning, " We had studied in the same school-" p. 264. J1 This admission refers to such parts of the book as expressly convey the transcendental doctri)e. Certain observations on religious philosophy cited by MNr. Coleridge he declares himself to have anticipated in -\writing. A few sentences with which he prefaces the extract in the linth chapter, which have been strongly animadverted upon, I give here, togoether with the defence of them, in order to avoid any recurrence to the present subject hereafter: "While I in part translate the following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let me be permitted to premise, that I migiht have transcribed the substance from memtorlxanda of my own, which were written many years before his pamphlet w, as given to the world; and that I prefer another's words to my own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was possible." "This passage," says my Falher's late Editor, "is; noted with particular acrimony by the writer in Blackwood, as'outraging common sense and the capacities of human belief,' with more about'cool assurance;' and'taking upon him to say,' and the like. And why all this? Is there any thing in the substance or leading thought in the following paragraph so peculiar and extraordinary, as to make it incredible, INTRODUCTION=. xxix tions of Schelling's system were wholly new to his mind, when he met with them there, can not be determined by any such test. Coincidences in the discoveries of science are more common, especially among contemporaries, than in the products of fancy and imagination, because these are not, like the last, mere arbitrary combinations of materials drawn from the storehouse of the universe, capable of being infinitely varied; but revelations of truths which manifest themselves, one and the same, to every inquirer who goes far enough in a certain direction of thought to meet with them-which lie in the path of the human intellect, and must be arrived at, when it has made a certain progress in its pre-appointed course. In all scientific product two factors are required; energy of thought in the discoverer, and a special state of preparation for the particular advance in the state of science itself. Real Idealism could never have dawned on the mind of Schelling had he not been born into the meridian light of the Idealism of Kant, which was surely founded on the Idealism of that the same may have passed through the mind of such a man as even this writer seems to admit Mr. Coleridge to have been? He studied in Germany in 1798, and Schelling's pamphlet was published in:1806. The writer can not comprehend how Mr. C. could take upon him to say,'that coincidence only was possible' in the case,'except on the ground, that it was impossible for any human being to write any thing but what he (Mr. C.) had written before.' And yet no human being but one could ever sr.ppose that Mr. Coleridge meant any such folly. What can be simpler'?:Ie says he had before 1806 noted down —and his friends and his enemies-(that he should have such still!)-know his habit in this particular-the substance, that is, as most people understand it, the general thought of the paragraph. If that were so, there having been no personal intercourse between Schelling and Coleridge, coincidence, in Italics or Roman, was only possible in the case." A complaint is also made. that a passage of 49 lines comprising six only of original writing,- should be said to be only in part translated; which Coleridge never said. "The following observations" very obviously extend to the words " William Law," two pages beyond the 49 lines; qf /ahe whole it is truly said, that it is partly translated, about one half of it, in different parts, not being so. H. N. C. Upon this false supposition that my father referred only to the 49 lines in his acknowledgment, he is not only attacked for having spol en of them as in port translated, but declared to have taken without acknowledgment': two other long sentences from the D)arleeugag," which occur in the following paragraph, and which, because he altered them a little for the occasion, he is reproached with having " curiously transmogrified." xxx INTRODUCTION. Berkeley. Is it any thing then so very incredible, that a man, from his childhood an ardent metaphysical inquirer, who had gone through the same preparatory discipline with Schelling, by reflection upon the doctrines of Kant, their perfect reasonableness, so far as they advanced beyond all previous thought, their unsatisfactoriness where they stopped short, and clung, in words at least, to the old dogmatism, might have been led into modes of rectifying and completing his system similar to those which Schelling adopted? That Coleridge does not appear to have gone beyond the subtle German in the path of discovery is insufficient to prove, that he might not independently have gone as far; for we do not commonly see that more than one important advance is made in metaphysical science at any one period. Berkeleyanism presented itself to the mind of Arthur Collier before he had read a syllable of Berkeley's metaphysical writings, and he maintained the non-existence of matter by arguments substantially the same as those employed in the Principles of Ilumaqn Knowclecdge and Dialogtues betwzeen Hylas anzd Philonoous, without communication, as we may reasonably suppose, with their admirable author.* Let us suppose Collier to have been a man careless and immethodical in his habits, continually diverted from regular scientific inquiry by a " shaping spirit of imagination,"-one whose disposition led him to be ever seeking matter for new thought, rather than laboring to reduce into presentable order that which he had already acquired; let us further suppose that, before he had given expression to his views in a regular treatise, the works of Berkeley had fallen in his way; would it not almost inevitably have happened, that the conceptions, floating in his mind, but not yet fixed in language, would have mixed themselves up indistinguishably with those of the older author, and assumed the same form? But if the formr into which his thoughts were thrown had been the same with that adopted by his "predecessor though contemporary," the philosophy of the two would have been identical, for Collier's view neither materially added to Berkeley's nor varied from it. On such considerations as these it may surely be deemed possible, that my Father did not wholly deceive himself, much less wilfully seek to deceive others, when he affirmed that " the main and fundamental ideas" of Schelling's system were born and mnae See Mr. Benson's Memoirs of Collier, pp. 18, 19. INTROD)UCTION. xxxi tured in his mind before he read the works of Schelling; and if such a belief' would do no great discredit to the head of any inquirer into this question, how much more honorable to his heart would be the readiness to think thus, especially of one whose services in the cause of truth are at this time wholly denied by none but his personal or party enemies, than the impulse to fling it aside with a scornful " credat Jiudcezs Apella, non ego.!" Those were the words of a Heathen Satirist. We Christians know, that it was not credzulity, but want of faith and of a spirit quicker to discern truth and goodness than to suspect imposture and evil, by which they of the circumcision were most painfully characterized.* * When I had written thus far I received a letter from Mr. Green, containing the following remarks: " It would not be difficult, I apprehend, to show that he (Coleridge) might have worked out a system, not dissimilar to Schelling's in its essential features. What however did Coleridge himself mean by the fitudcamentcd truths of Schelling's scheme? It is very true that the reader of the Biographia is under the necessity of supposing, that he meant the doctrines, which he has adopted in the passage taken from Schelling's works: but I confess that I strongly doubt that such was the meaning of Coleridge. My acquaintance with S. T. C. commenced with the intention of studying the writings of Schelling; but after a few interviews the design was given up, in consequence of Coleridge's declaring his dissent from Schelling's doctrines; and he began immediately the exposition of his own views. " This perhaps renders the Biograpohia more inexplicable. For herein S. T. C. assumes the originality of Schelling —which can only be received with great qualifications-and is content to have it admitted, that the agreements between himself and Schelling were the coincidences of two minds working on the same subject and in the same direction. Now this is the more remarkable, that it may be shown, that many or most of the views entertained by Coleridge, at least at the period of our first acquaintance, might have been derived from other sources, and that his system differs essentially from that of Schelling. Some light might perhaps be thrown upon this interesting question by a knowledge, which unfortunately I do not possess, of the circumstances under which the friagment called the Biographia -was drawn up. It is possible, no doubt, that Coleridge's opinions might have undergone a change between the period, at which the B. L. was published, and that at which I had the happiness of becoming acquainted with him. But at the latter period his doctrines were based upon the self. same principles, which he retained to his dying hour, and differing as they do fundamentally from those of Schelling, I can not but avow my conviction, that they were formed at a much earlier period, nay that they were growths of his own mind, growing with his growth, strengthening with his strength, the result of a Platonic spirit, the stirrings of which had already XXXii INTROD UCTION. But the writer- in Blackwood, out of' his great zeal inz behalf of the plunderede acnd aggrieved, would not only deprive Coleridge of his whole credit as a philosopher-he would fain take from him " some of the brightest gems in his poetic wreath itself." It is thus that two couplets, exemplifying -the Homeric and Ovidian metres,~* are described by his candid judge; and in the same spirit he describes my Father as having sought to conceal the fact, that they were translated fitom Schiller, a poet whose evinced themselves in his earIy boyhood, and which had been only modified, and indirectly shaped and developed by the Germlan school" "That in the B. L. when developing his own scheme of thounht, he adopted the outward form, in which Sehelling had clothed his thoughts, knowing, that is to say,. that tfhe ormulal was Schelling's, though forgetting that it was also the language of Sehelling, may be attributed to idleness, careiessness, or to any fault of the kind which deserves a harlsher namebut certainly not to disbonestv, nor to any desre, of obtaining reputation at the expense, and b- the spoliation, of the intellectual labors of another -and can form no grournd for denying to him the name of a powerffil anG' original thinker. And the unnaeknoawledged use of the quotations fromn Schelling in the B. L. which have been the pretext fir branding him with the opprobrious namne of llagiarist, are only evidences, in my humble judgment at least,. of his disregard to reputation, and of a selflessness (if I may be allowed such a term, in order to mnark an absence of the sense of self, which constituted an inherent defect in his character), w-hich caused him to neglect the mleans of vindicating his claim to the originality of the systems which was the labor of his life and the fruit of his genius." * He pronounces them in part worse, in no respect a whit better than the orig'mals. Im pentameter drauf flIlt sie melodisch herab; In the pentameter aye falling in melocldy back To my ear, as I faoqsY, the light dactylic flow of the latter half of the pentameter, is still more exquisite in the English than in the German, though the spondec which commences the latter is an advantage. The English line is rather the more liquid of the two, and the word " bac," -with which it closes, almost imitates the plasll of the refluent water against the ground. Even from the sentence on the inferiority of Coleridoge's Homeric verses there might perhaps be an appeal: but neither in German nor in English could a pair of hexameters be made to present such variety in unity, such a perfect little whole, as the elegiac distich. Readers may compare the translated verse with the original in the last edition of Coleridge's Poems in one volume; where they will also find the poem of Stolberg, which suggested, and partly produced, mly Father's Lisi~s ion a, Cataract. INTRODUCTION. xxxiii works are perhaps as generally read here as those of Shakspeare in Germany. The expression " brightest gems," however, is meant to include Lines on a Cataract, which are somewhat more conspicuous in Coleridge's poetic wreath than the pair of distiches; in these he is said to have closely adopted the metre, language, and thoughts of another man. Now the metre, language, and thoughts of Stolberg's poem are all in Coleridge's expansion of it, but those of the latter are not all contained in, the former, any more than the budding rose contains all the riches of the rose full blown. " It is but a shadow," says the critic, " a glorified shadow perhaps," but still only a shadow cast fiom another man's " substance." Is not such glory the su6zstacnce, or part of the substance, of poetic merit? How much of admired poetry must we not insubstantialize, if the reproduction of what was before, with additions ana improvements, is to be made a shadow of? That which is most exquisite in the Lines on a Cataract is Coleridge's own: though sonmei may even prefer Stolberg's striking original. These and the verses from Schiller were added to the poetical works of Mr. Coleridge by his late Editor. Had the author superintended the edition, into which they were first inserted, himself, he would, perhaps, have made references to Schiller and Stolberg in these instances, as he had done in others; if he neglected to do so, it ~could not have been in any expectation of keeping to himself what he had borrowed from them. Lastly, Mr. Coleridge's obligations to Schelling in Lecture VIII. on Poesy and Art are spoken of by the writer in Blackwood, after his own manner. It is true, that the most important principles delivered in that Lecture are laid down by the German Sage in his Oration orn the relationshtip of the Plastic Arts to iXature, — yet I can not think it quite correct to say that it is " closely copied and in many parts translated" from Schelling's discourse. It not only omits a great deal that the other contains,' but adds, and, as it seems to me, materially, to what is borrowed: neither, as far as I can find, after a second careful perusal of the latter, has it any passage translated from Schelling, only a few words here and there being the same as in that great philosopher's treatise. Let me add, that EMrR. Coleridge did lnot publish this Lecture * Phil. Schrift. p. 343. xxxiv INTRODUCTION. himself. Whenever it is re-published, what it contains of Schelling's will be stated precisely.'Would that an equal restitution could be made in all quarters of all that has been borrowed, with change of shape but little or no alteration of substance! In this case, not a few writers, whose originality is now unquestioned, would lose more weight from their coinage than my Father will do, by subtraction of that which he took without disguise from Schelling and others:-for how commonly do men imagine themselves producing and creating, when they are but metamorphosing! "' That Coleridge was tempted into this course by vanity," says the writer in Blackwood toward the end of his article; " by the paltry desire of applause, or by any direct intention to defiiaud others of their due, we do not believe; this never was believed and never will be believed." Truly I believe not; but no thanks to the accuser who labors to convict him of " wanting rectitude and truth;" who reads his apologies the wrong way, as witches say their prayers backward;-who hatches a grand project for Schelling in order to bring him in guilty of a design to steal it; who uses language respecting him which the merest vanity and dishonesty alone could deserve. This never has been or will be believed by the generous and intelligent, though men inclined to fear and distrust his opinions are strengthened in their prejudices by such imputations upon their maintainer, and many are prevented from acquiring a true knowledge of him and of' them. What Schelling himself thought on the subject will'be seen from the following extract of a letter of Mr. Stanley, author of the Life of Dr. Arnold, kindly communicated to me by Archdeacon Hare. " Schelling's remarks about Coleridge were too generally expressed, I fear, to be of any use in a vindication of him, except so far as proving his own friendly feeling toward him. But as far as I can reconstruct his sentence it was much as follows, being in answer to a question whether he had known Coleridge personally.' Whether I have seen Coleridge or not, I can not tell; if he called upon me at Jena, it was before his name had become otherwise known to me, and amongst the number of young Englishmen, whom I then saw, I can not recall the persons of individuals. But I have read what he has written with great pleasure, and I took occasion in my lectures to vindicate him from the charge, which has been brought against him, of pla INTRODUCTION. xxxv giarizing from me, and I said that it was I rather who owed much to him, and that, in the Essay on Prometheus, Coleridge in his remark, that " Mythology was not allegorical but tautegorical,"* had concentrated in one striking expression (in einem schlagenden Ausdruck) what I had been labori'g to represent with much toil and trouble. This is all that I can be sure of.' " Such was this trzuly g'recat lia7's feeling about the wrongs that he had sustained from my Father. Had the writer in Blackwood pointed out his part ill the Biographia Literaria without one word of insltt to the author's memory, he would have proved his zeal for the German Philosopher, and for the interests of literature mnore clearly than now, because more purely, and deserved only feelings of respect and obligation fiom all who love and honor the name of Coleridge. It will already have been seen, that no attempt is here made to justify my Fatlher's literary omissions and inaccuracies, or to deny that they proceeded from any thing defective in his frame of mind; I would only maintain that this fault has not been fairly reported or becomingly commented upon. That a man who has been 1" more highly gifted than his fellows," is therefore to have less required of him in the way of " rectitude and truth," that he is to be " held less amenable to the laws which ought to bind all human beings," is a proposition which no one sets up except for the sake of taking it down again, and some man of genius along with it; but there is another proposition, confounded by some perhaps with the aforesaid, which is true, and ought, in justice and charity, to be borne in mind; I mean that men of " peculiar intellectuzcl conformation," who have peculiar powers of intellect, are very often peculiar in the rest of their constitution, to such. a degree that points in their conduct, which, in persons of ordinary faculties and habits of mind, coucld only result from conscious wilful departure from the rule of right, may in their case have a different origin, and though capable, more or less, of being controlled by the will may not arise out of it. Marked gifts are often attended by marked deficiencies even in the intellect: those best acquainted with my Father are well aware that there was in him a special intellectual flaw; Archdeacon Hare has said, that his memory was " notoriously irretentive;" and it is' true that, on a certain class of subjects, it was extraordinarily con* Lectures on Shakspeare, IV. p. 351. xxxvi INTROD UCTION. fused and inaccurate: matter of fact, as such, laid no hold upon his mind; of' all he heard and saw, he readily caught and well retained the spirit, but the letter escaped him: he seemed incapable of paying the due regard to it. That it is the duty of any man, who has.such a peculiarity, to watch over it and endeavor to remedy it, is unquestionable; I would only suggest that this defect, which belonged not to the moral being of Coleridge but to the frame of his intellect, and was in close connection with that which constituted his peculiar intellectual strength, his power of abstracting and referring to universal principles, often rendered him unconscious of incorrectness of' statement, of which men in general scarcely could have been unconscious, and that to it, and not to any deeper cause, such neglects and transgressions of established rules as have been alleged against him, ought to be referred.* * At all times his incorrectness of quotation and of reference and in the relation of particular circumstances was extreme; it seemed as if the door betwixt his memory and imagination was always open, and though the former was a large strong room, its contents weire perpetually mingling with those of the adjoining chamber. I am sure that if I had not had the facts of my Father's life at large before me, from his letters and the relations of friends, I should not have believed such confusions as his possible in a man of sound mind. To give two out of numberless instances,-in a manusclript intended to be perused by his firiend Mr. Green, he speaks of a composition by Mr. Green himself, as if he, S. T. Coleridge, were the author of it. A man, who thus forgets, will oftener ascribe the thoughts of another, when they have a great cognateness with, and a deep interest for, his own mind, to himself, than such cognate and interesting thoughts to another; but my Father's forgetfulness was not aluways in the way of appropriation, as this story, written to me by Mrs. Julius Hare, will show. She says, it was "told him (Archdeacon Hare) many years ago by the Rev. Robert Tennant, who was then his Curate, but afterwards went to Florence and died there. He had a great reverence and admiration for Mr. Coleridge, and used occasionally to call upon him. During one of these visits, Mr. C. spoke of a book (Mr. Hare thinks it was on Political Economy), in which there were some valuable remarks bearing upon the subject of their conversation. Mr. Tennant immediately purchased the book on this recommendation, but on reading it was surprised to find no such passages as Mr. C. had referred to. Some time after he saw the same book at the house of a friend, and mentioned the circumstance to him; upon which his friend directed him to the margiia of the volume before him, and there he found the very remarks in mr. C.'s own writing, which he had writen in as 2narginalia, and forgotten that they were his own and not the author's. Mr. Hare had always intended asking Mr. T. to give -him this story in detail in writing, but unfor INTROD UCTION. xxxvii A certain infidelity there was doubtless in the mirror of his mind, so strong was his tendency to overlook the barrier between imagination and actual fact. No man had a keener insight into character than he, or saw moral and mental distinctions more clearly; yet his judgments of particular persons were often relatunately delayed it too long till Mr. T.'s very sudden death prevented it altogether; but he can vouch for its general correctness." My Father trusted to his memory, knowing it to be powerful and not aware that it was inaccurate, in order to save his legs and his eyes. I suspect that he quoted even longish passages in Greek without copying them, by the slight differences that occur. Another phwnomenon of his memory was its curious way of interchanging properties; as when he takes from Hobbes and gives to Des Cartes, what is not to be found in the latter and is to be found in the former. (See chapter v.) This he did in the face of Sir James Mackintosh, one of the most clear-headed and accurately learned men of the day, after inciting him to examine his own positions by contradiction; so incautious and dreamy was he. It seems as if he was ever dreaming of blows and caring for them no more than for the blows of a dream. HIow much strength of memory may co-exist with weakness, the intellect remaining quite sound in the main, may often be observed in old men. Just so many a nervous man can walk twenty miles when he can not walk straight into a room, or lift a cup to his lips without shaking it. It was from this same mixture of carelessness and confusedness that my Father neglected all his life long to make regular literary acknowledgments. He did it when he happened to think of it, sometimes disproportionately, at other times not, but without the slightest intention, and in somle cases without the possibility of even temporary concealment. He published Tile Fall of Robespierre as An1 Historic Drama by S. 2' Colsridcqe, without joining Mr. Southey's name with his in the title-page, though my Uncle and all his many friends knew that he wrote the second and third act of it; and in a note to the Conciones he spoke of the first act only as his own. He did not call the Catullian Ilendecasyllables a translation, though at any hour I might have seen the original in the copy of Matthisson's poems which he had given me, and in which he had written, after the presentation, " Die Kinderjahre, p. 15-29; der-Schacetterlinsg, p. 50; and the Alpenreise, p. 75, will be especial favorites with you, I dare anticipate. 9th May, 1820, Highgate." His Hendecasyllables contain twelve syllables, and as metre are, to my ear, a great improvement, on Matthisson's eleven-syllable lines. He acted in the same way with regard to two epigrams of Lessing's, one in the Poetic Works, ii. p. 18, called Nfames, and another on Rufa and her Lapdog, which has been printed somewhere,-(Die Nnamen and An Die Dorilis. Works of Lessing, vol. i. p. 19 and p. 46.) ~ He had spoken of them as translations to Mr. Cottle. Mr. Green tells me that in the Conjfessions are a few phrases borrowed from Lessing, which will be pointed out particularly hereafter. My Father once talked of translating all that author's works. An epigram printed in the Remains, Houase Meevius is also from. the Ger xxviii INTRODUCTION. tively wrong; not that he ascribed to them qualities which they did not possess, or denied them those which they had, but that his feelings and imagination heightened and magnified that side or aspect of a mind, which was most present to him at the time when his estimate was drawn: the good and the beautiful, which man; he seems to have spoken of it as such to Mr. Cottle. The fourth and sixth stanzas of Separation, VII. p. 198. are adopted fromt Cotton's COlorinda. The late Mr. Sidney Walker thought that my Father was indebted to Casimir's xiiith Ode for the general conception of his Lines in answer to a melancholy Letter, one of the Juvenile Poems. The second stanza looks like an expansion of the commencement: Non si sol semel occidit, Non rubris iterum surget ab Indiis. I see no likeness elsewhere, except of subject. Mr. S. W. also pointed out to mnc an image taken from the opening of Ossian's'lar of Inisthomna, in Lines on ans Autumnnal Evening, " As when the Savage," &c. (VII. p. 42.) The Rose (VII. 43.) is, I believe from the French. "And I the while, the sole unbusy thing Nor honey make, nor build, nor pair, nor sing," VII. p. 271. would probably have been written, even if Herbert had not written, as Mr. Walker reminded me, All things are busy; only I Neither bring honey with the bees, Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandry To water these. (Em]nployment, Poems.) I think it will hardly be supposed that Mr. Coleridge meant to cheat Casimir, Cotton, Lessing and Matthisson of the articles he borrowed from them. The two former he celebrated in his writings, when they were not much in the world's eye: the two latter are popular and well-known authors, whose works are in every hand in Germany, and here in the hands of many. Mr. Dequincey says he relied' too much upon the slight knowledge of German literature in this country;"-a blind remark! Who relies for concealment on a screen which he is doing his best to throw down? Had my Father calculated at all he would have done it better; but to calculate was not in his nature. If he ever deceived others it was when he was himself deceived first. Hazlitt said he " always carried in his pocket a list of the Illustrious Obscure." I think he made some writers, who were obscure when he first noticed them, cease to be so; and it will be found, that he did not generally borrow from the little known without declaring his obligations; that most of his adoptions were from writers too illustrious to be wronged by plagiarism. It is true that Maasz, from whom he borrowed some things, never INTRODUCTION. xxxix he beheld at the moment, appeared in his eyes the very type of goodness and beauty: the subjects of it were transfigured before him and shone with unearthly hues and lineaments. Of principles he had the dearest intuition, for that which is without degree is in no danger of being exaggerated; nor was he liable, from his peculiar temperament, to miss poetic truth; because nature, as she lends to imagination all her colors, can never be misrepresented by the fullest expenditure of her own gifts upon herself. And even in his view of the particular and individual,though, as has been said of him in his literary character, " often like the sun, when looking at the planets, he only beheld his own image in the objects of his gaze, and often, when his eye darted on a cloud, would turn it into a rainbow,"* —yet possibly even here far more of truth revealed itself to his earnest gaze than the world, which ever observes too carelessly and superficially, was aware of. Many of his poems, in which persons are described in ecstatic language, were suggested by individuals, and doubtless did but portray them as they were constantly presented to him by his heart and imagination. Such a temper is ever liable to be mistaken for one of fickleness, insincerity, and lightness of feeling; and even so has Coleridge at times been represented by persons, who, judging partially and superficially, conceived him to be wanting in depth of heart and substantial kindness, whose depths they had never explored, and with whose temperament and emotions there was no congeniality in their own. But it is not true, as others will eagerly testify, that the affections of Coleridge were slight and evanescent, his intellectual faculties alone vigorous and steadfast: though it is true that in persons constituted like him, the former will be more dependent on the latter, more readily excited and determined through the powers of thought and imagination than in ordinary cases. His heart was as warm as his intellectual being was lifesome and active,-nay, it was from warmth of heart and keenness of feeling that his imagination derived its glow and vivacity, the condition of the latter, at least, was intimately connected with that of the former. He loved to share all he had with others; and it is the opinion of one who knew was famous: but had he " relied" on the world's ignorance of him he would not have mentioned him as a writer on mental philosophy at all. eSee Guesses at Truth, 2d edit. p. 241. xi PINTRODU'CTION. him well and early, that, had he possessed wealth in his earlier years, he would have given great part of it away. If there are any who conceive that his affections were apt to evaporate in words, I think it right to protest against such a notion of his character. Kind words are not to be contrasted with good deeds, except where they are substituted for them, and those kindly feelings which, in the present instance, so often overflowed in words, were just as ready to shape themselves into deeds, as far as the heart was concerned; —how far the hand can answer to the heart depends on circumstances with which the last has no concern. Had there been this tenuity and shallowness in his spirit, he could never have made that sort of impression as an author, which many thoughtful persons have received from his works, much less as a man have inspired such deep love and esteem as still waits upon his memory from some who are themselves loved and honored by all that know them well.* That the objects of his affections oftener changed than consisted with, or could have arisen in, a happy even tenor of life, was, in his case, no symptom of that variableness which results from the union of a lively fancy with a shallow heart: if he soon formed attachments, this arose from the quickness of his sympathies,the ease with which he could enter into each man's individual being, loving and admiring whatever it contained of amiable or admirable; friom a "'constitutional communicativeness and utterancy of heart and soul," which, speedily attracting others to him, rendered them again on this account doubly interesting in his eyes; if he "stood aloof," during portions of his life, from any once dear to him, this was rather occasioned by a morbid intensity and tenacity of feeling than any opposite quality of mind, -the same disposition which led him to heighten the lights of every object, while its bright side was turned toward himself, inclining him to deepen its shadows, when the chances and changes of life presented to him the darker aspect,-the same temper which led him to over-estimate marks of regard, rendering him too keenly sensible of, or quick to imragine, short-comings of love and esteem, his claims to which he not unnaturally reckoned by * Some persons appear to have confounded the general courtesy and bland overflowing of his manners with the state of his ayfections, and because the feelings which prompted the former flitted over the surface of his heart, to suppose that thelatter were flitting and superficial too. 1NTRODUCTION. xli his readiness to bestow, which was boundless, rather than his fitness to receive, which he ever acknowledged to be limited. He was apt to consider affection as due simply to affection, irrespectively of merit in any other shape, and felt that such a " fund of love" as his, and that too from one so highly endowed as few denied him to be, ought "almost" to "supply desert." He too much desired to idolize and be idolized, to fix his eye, even in this mortal life, only on perfection, to have the imperfections which he recognized in himself severely noted by himself alone. "For to be loved is all I need, And whom I love, I love indeed." This turn of mind was at least partly the cause of such change and fluctuation in his attachments through life as may have subjected his conduct to unfavorable construction: another cause he himself indicated, at an early period of his career, when, after speaking of the gifts assigned him by heaven, he sadly exclaims, and from my graspless hand Drop friendship's precious pearls like hour-glass sand!" Some of these precious pearls he let fall, not from wanting a deep sense of their value, or any lightness of feeling, but because he lacked resolution to hold them fast, or " stoop" to recover what he yet " wept" to lose. Still it was but a cruel half truth, when one strangely converted from a friend into an enemy, ever shootifng out his arrows even bitter words, spoke of him thus: " There is a man all intellect but without a will!" Sometimes indeed to will was present with him when he found not how to perform; all the good that he would he did not; but his performance, taken upon the whole, his involuntary defects considered, inspired his many friends with the belief -that he was not only a wise, but humanly speaking, a good man. "Good and great," some say: whether or no he was the latter, and how far,.let others declare, time being the umpire; it signifies, comparatively, nothing to the persons?most interested in and for himn what the decision onz this 2oint Zmay be; but the good qualities of his heart must be borne witness to by those in the present day who knew him best in private. Thus much may be said for the correctness of his intuitions and the clearness of his moral sense, _lii INTRODUCTION. that, through life, his associates, with few exceptions, were distinguished by high qualities of head and heart: from first to last of his course here below he was a discoverer and a proclaimer of excellence both in books and men. MR. COLERIDGE S RELIGIOUS OPINIONS; THEIR FORMATION; MISCONCEPTIONS AND MISREPRESENTATIONS ON THE SUBJECT. Such imputations as those I have had the painful task of discussing, are apt to circulate rapidly and meet a ready credence from part of the public, when they concern a writer whose writings are obnoxious to various parties in politics and religion, and who has never secured the favor and admiration of the lightreading and little thinking world. For one man who will fully and deeply examine any portion of the opinions, religious or philosophical, of a full and deep thinker, there are hundreds capable of comparing the run of sentences and paragraphs and being entertained by a charge of plagiarism: if some are grateful to him for light thrown, as their eyes tell them, upon truth, far more are offended because this same light reveals to them the untruth which they would fain not see in its proper hues and proportions; who, not being prepared to overthrow his reasonings by a direct attack, are glad to come at them obliquely, by lowering his personal character and thereby weakening his authority. The whole Romnish world was bent on convicting Luther of Antinomianism, and as they could not discover it in his writings, they were resolved, if possible, to find it in his life, and as it was not forthcoming in either, they put it into both; they took all his rhetoric the wrong way up, and hunted for unsoundness in his mind and libertinism in his conduct, as vultures hunt fbr things corrupt in nature.* The spirit evidenced in this proced* I believe that Bayle's article caused a dead silence on the subject of the great Reformer's personal " carnality" for ages. Of late years it has been revived, and there is a faint attempt to bring up some of the old stories circulated against him to the effect that he made liberty a cloak for licentiousness! (See on Luther's Life and Opinions IHare's AMlission of the Comforter, vol. ii. pp. 656-878.) It was an "easy feat" to put Pantheism into the "bottom of Luther's doctrine and personal character" (Essay on Development, p. 84), because the bottom of doctrine is one knows not where, and Pantheism, as modern polemics employ the term, one knows not what; but to fasten dissoluteness on his conduct is by -no means easy. INTRODUCTION. xiii ure, —that "ancient spirit is not dead;" religious writers, even at the present day, are far too prone to discredit a man's opinions at second-hand by tracing them to some averred evil source in his character, or perverting influence in the circumstances of his life. This seems exceptionable however gently done, first because it is a very circuitous and uncertain mode of arriving at truth; a man's opinions we know on his own statements of them: but in attempting to discover the means through which they have been formed, we are searching in the dark, or the duskiest and most deceptive twilight, and, having no clear light to guide us. are apt to be led astray by some ignisfatztus of our own prejudices and delusions. Let the opinions be tried on their own merits, and if this is beside the inquirer's purpose, and he chooses to assume the truth of' those he himself holds, considering them too certain and too sacred to be made a question of, in the same spirit let him disdain to snatch an argument in their favor, out of themselves, from doubtful considerations. Alas! how many of those who hold this lofty tone, calling their own belief the truth, and other men's belief mere opinion, only because they have an opinion of the validity of a certain test of truth which others can not assent to, will yet resort to questionable methods of recommending this their unquestionable creed, and bring elaborate sophisms and partial representations, fit only to impose upon prepossessed and ductile readers, to the aid of "practical infallibility!" But the second and even stronger objection to this mode of proceeding is, that the desire to find the origin of a man's way of thinking in the facts of his history, brings the inquirer under great temptation to depart from strict truth in regard to the facts themselves,-to mould them, often perhaps unconsciously, into such a shape as best suits his purpose. Now in order to show that these inconveniences do attach to the principle itself, I will take my example of its operation from a respectable quarter, where no unkindly spirit is manifested in tone or language. The seventh number of the Christian Miscellany of July, 1842, contains fifteen or sixteen pages of short extracts from Mr. Coleridge's writings, which are entitled " Contributions of S. T. Coleridge to the Revival of Catholic Truths." I would suggest, by the way, that if my Father had taught only as such eclectics from his works would have him appear to have xliv INTRODUCTION. taught, his contributions to'catholic truth would have been meagre enough, and might even have told in favor of much that he considered most uncatholic falsehood; had his views been compressed within the bounds into which an implicit faith in the fbrmal theology of early times must have compressed them, his system would have been lifeless and unreal as that which he was ever seeking to enliven and organize; he would have done little toward enlightening his genecration, though he might have aided others to strengthen particular parties by bringing up again for current use obsolete religious metaphysics and neglected arguments-a very different process from that of a true revival, which, instead of raising up the dead body of ancient doctrine, calls forth the life and substance that belong to it, clothed in a newer and more spiritual body, and gives to the belief of past ages an expansion and extension commensurate with the developed mind of our progressive race. Such was the revival of catholic truth at which he aimned, with whatever success, and to bring him in as an assistant in one of an opposite character, is, in my opinion, to do him injustice. My immediate purpose, however, was not to notice the extracts themselves, but certain observations, respecting my Father, prefixed to them. They are contained in the little introduction, which speaks as follows: "These excerpts are not brought forward as giving an accurate representation of Mr. Coleridge's opinions in all their modifications, or as specimens of his writings generally; they are rather the chance metal of a mine, rich indeed, but containing ores of every degree of value. They may, however, serve to show, how much he contributed by his elimination of powerful truths, in the then unhealthy state of literature, to the revival of sounder principles. In. doing this it is not surprising that one, who relied so much on himself, and was so little guided, at least directly, by external authority, should have fallen into some inconsistencies. These inconsistencies are rather the result of an undue development of certain parts of Christian philosophy, than the holding of opinions immediately heretical." "The circumstances in his Christian course, which we may regard as having impaired his power of duly appreciating the relative value of certain Catholic truths, were his profession of literature, his having edited a newspaper, and having been engaged INTRODUCTION. xiv In a course of heretical and schismatical teaching. That he was rescued from. these dangers and crimes, and to a great extent saved from their effects, is, it is not improbable, owing to the circumstances of his early education. He was the son of a clergyman, admitted into the Church, and taught its doctrines by his pious and simple-hearted father, was impressed by his instructor, the Rev. James Bowyer, with the unrealities and hollowness of modern literature, and during his whole life was the subject of severe afflictions, which he received in patience, expressing for his past and often confessed sins, penitence in word, and doubtless penance in deeds. Through those means he may have attained his happy privilege, of uttering the most important truths, and-clothing them in such language as rendered their reception more easy to minds not entirely petrified by the materialism of the day." For Mr. Coleridge's sake alone it might be thought scarcely worth while to discuss the accuracy of remarks, which are perhaps at this time remembered by few, and, like a thousand others of similar tendency, can not fail to be counteracted in their drift, so far as it is erroneous, by the ever-renewed influence of his writings, as the returning waters sweep from the sea-shore what children have scattered there during the ebb.* For the sake of right principle, I must observe, that in seeking to strengthen our own faith by casting any measure of discredit on minds which have not received it, we rather show our zeal in its behalf, than any true sense of its intrinsic excellence or confidence in its power. When a critic or biographer has a man's whole life,-. whole body of opinions-under review, he may fairly enough,though it is always a most difficult process, —attempt to show how, and to what extent, his character and modes of thought were affected by external circumstances; but I can not help thinking it very unfair to pre-occupy a reader's mind with two or three points of a man's life selected out of his personal history, The reader will perceive that I use this simile of the Sea to denote, not the size or importance, but the comparative permanence of my Father's writings. That he has achieved a permanent place in literature (I do not say what or where), I certainly believe; and I also believe that no persons well acquainted with his writings will be disposed to deny the position, except those who represent the Edinburgh Review of twenty and thirty years ago. Xtv1 INTRODUCTION. previously to introducing a few of his opinions to their notice. Every man who is in error, who can not see the truth when it is before him, labors under some defect, intellectual or moral, and this may have been brought outt,-I think such defects are never caused or imnplanted,-by circumstances; but it is hardly fair play to impute such defects to a writer or describe them as having corrupted his opinions, when the nature of the opinions themselves is adchuc sub lite among Christians and good men.* My principal objection, however, to the statements I have quoted is, that they are incorrect either in the letter or the spirit or both. It is plain enough that the real aim of the Miscellanist was not to exhibit the amount of Catholicity in an individual mind, but to spread what he considered to be Catholic truth, and to this my Father's character as a man was made subservient. On first reading his prefix I regarded one of its assertions as a pure mistake, and on this subject received the following testimonial from Mr. Wordsworth, with whose great and honored name it must ever be the pride and pleasure of the friends of Coleridge to associate his. — " I feel absolutely certain that your Father never swas Editoir of any periodical publication whatsoever except The Watchman and The Fr-iend, neither of which, as you know, was long continued, and The Friend expressly excluded even allusion to temporary topics; nor, to the best of my remembrance, had The IWatchman any thing of the character of a newspaper. When he was very young he published several sonnets in a London newspaper. Afterwards he was in strict connection with the editors or at least proprietors of one or more newspapers, The Courier and The /Iornzing- Post; and in one of these, I think it was the latter, your Father wrote a good deal.""So convinced was I of the great service that your Father rendered Mr. Stuart's paper, that I urged him to put in his claim to * I wish the reader to observe that I attach little or no importance to the remarks of the Chr. Miscellany in themselves; as an index of a state of feeling in certain quarters and an instance of what is daily practised, to the production of injury and irritation more than any real good, they are not insignificant. Personality is a poisoned weapon in religious warfare; and all religious statements in these days are necessarily a warfare, open or undeclared. Personal character should never be dealt with at second-hand; it should be left to those who undertake the trouble and responsibility, while they possess the zeal, of the biographer. INTRODUCTION. xlviI be admitted a proprietor; but this he declined, having a great disinclination to any tie of the kind. In fact he could not bear being shackled in any way. I have heard him say that he should be sorry, if any one offered him an estate, for he should feel the possession would involve cares and duties that would be a clog to him."- * The "Newspaper" which is supposed to have retarded my Father's growth in Catholicism, it now occurs to me, may have been The Watchman, as in that miscellany the domestic and foreign policy of the preceding days was reported and discussed; but I still think, that the impression which this statement, together with the inference drawn from it, is calculated to convey, is far from just. To be for any length of time the editor of a periodical work, which is the successful organ of a party, whatever principles that party may profess, nay even if' they call themselves Catholic, is indeed to be in a situation of some danger to the moral and spiritual sense: but such was never my Father's situation. When he is described as having been impaired in his religious mind by editing a newspaper, would any one guess the fact to be this, that, in his youth, he put forth ten numbers of a miscellaneous work, one portion of which was devoted to the politics of the times, and was unable to make it answer because he would not adapt it to the ways of the world and of newspapers in general? Let those who have been led to think that Mr. Coleridge's services to public journals may have deadened his religious susceptibilities consider, not only the principles which he professes and the frame of mind which he displays on this very subject in the tenth chapter of the present work, but the character of his newspaper essays themselves; had the writer, to whose remarks I refer, done this, before he pronounced judgment, I think he could not have failed to see that my Father conformed the publications he aided to himself and his own high views, in proportion to the extent of his connection with them, not himself to vulgar periodical writing. The Edinburgh Reviewers indeed, in the year 1817, flung in his teeth, "I Ministerial Editor." With them the reproach lay in the word Ministerial. Tempora m utantunr-but the change of times has not yet brought truth to the service of my Father, or made him generally understood. * The reader is referred to chap. v. of the Biographical Supplement for an account of Mr. C.'s connection with Mr. Stuart, xlviii INTRODUCTION. Not however the connection with newspapers merely, but the proiession of literature is specified as one among other causes, which alienated my Father's mind from Catholicity. The peculiar disadvantages of the " trade of authorship" Mr. Coleridge has himself described in this biographical fragment; he has shown that literature can scarcely be made the means of living without being debased; but he himself failed in it, as the means of living, because he would not thus debase it, —would not sacrifice higher aims for the sake of immediate popularity. Literature, pursued not as a mere trade, is naturally the ally, rather than the adversary, of religion. It is indeed against our blessed Lord, if not for him; but though it has its peculiar danger, inasmuch as it satisfies the soul more than any other, and is thus more liable to become a permanent substitute for religion with the higher sort of characters, yet surely, by exercising the habits of abstraction and reflection, it better disciplines the mind for that life which consists in seeking the things that are above while we are yet in the flesh, than worldly business or pleasure. Inferior pursuits may sooner weary and disgust, but during their continuance they more unfit the mind for higher ones; and the departure of one set of guests does not leave the soul an empty apartment, swept and garnished for the reception of others more worthy. And how should literature indispose men toward Catholce views in religion? The conznzon argument in behalf of those which are com2tmonly so called rests upon historical testimony and outward evidence; why should the profession of literature render men less able to estimate proof of this nature? A pursuit it is which leads to reflection and inquiry, and what can be said for the soundness of that system to which these are adverse? Some indeed maintain that our persuasions in such matters depend little upon argument; that none can truly enter into the merits of the Church system, save those who have been in the habit of obeying it, and that from their youth up. Now it is not, of course, contended that my Father was, during his whole life, in the best position for appreciating Catholicity and becoming attached to it; but this may be fairly maintained, that he never was so circumstanced, as to be precluded from drawing nigh to any truthful system, existing in the world, and in due time coming under its habitual sway. Again in what sense can it be truly said of Coleridge that he INTRODUCTIONT. xlix disregarded authority? It would be difficult to instance a thinker more disposed to weigh the thoughts of other thinkers, more ready to modify his views by consideration of their's or the grounds on which they rest. Can those who bring the charge against him substantiate of it more than this, that he had not their convictions respecting the authority attributable to a certain set of writers of a certain age? And does it not appear that this theory of the consentient teaching of the Fathers and its "practical infallibility " involves the depreciation of authority, at least in one very important sense? He who binds himself by it, strictly, must needs hold human intelligence to be of little avail in the determination of religious questions, since it is the leading principle of this theory of faith, that our belief has been fixed by an outward revelation,-the commentary of tradition upon Scripture, —-and that we are not to look upon the reason and conscience of man, interpreted by the understandinog, as the everlasting organ of the Spirit of Truth? The weakest intellect can receive doctrine inzplicitly as well as the strongest, and to hand over that which has been already settled and defined requires no great depth or subtlety of intellect. If the weightiest matters on which the thoughts of man can be employed are already so determined by an outward oracle, that all. judgment upon them is precluded, and. the highest faculties of the human mind have no concern in establishing or confirming their truth, authority, as the weight which the opinion of the good and wise carries along with it, in regard to the most important questions, is superseded and set aside. And the fact is, I believe, that professors of this sort of Catholicity, whether for good or for bad, whether from narrowness or frorn exaltedness, are by no means remarkable for a spirit of respect toward highly endowed men, or for entering into the merits of a large proportion of those who have conciliated the esteem and gratitude of earnest and thoughtful persons. None are burning and shining lights for them except such as exclusively irradiate their own sphere (which is none of the widest); and their radiance appears the stronger to their eyes because they see nothing but darkness elsewhere. Let it be clearly understood that I here refer to that antiquarian theory, according to which every do&trine bearing upon religion, held by the Fathers, even though the matter of the doctrine be'rather scientific and metaphysical than directly spiritual and practical,-as for instance the doctrine of VOL. II, C I INTRODUCTION. free will, —constitutes Catholic consent, is the voice of the Holy Catholic Church, and therefobre the voice of its heavenly Head; that the early Christian writers, where they agree, are.to be considered practically infallible, on account of their external position in reference to the Apostles; that succeeding writers are of no authority, except so'far as they deliver what is agreeable to "Catholic doctrine," so understood, and in so far as they differ from it are at once to be considered unsound and unworthy of attention. If' such a theory is'not, as I imagine, maintained by a certain class of High Churchmen, I shall be very glad to find that it is only a shadow: though in this case I should be more than ever perplexed to understand what it is that the Catholic and orthodox so much disapprove in the opinion of my Father on the subject in question; or why he should be accused of disregarding authority, because, though he thought the consentient teaching of the early Christian writers worthy of deep consideration, he did not hold it to be absolutely conclusive upon theological questions, or certainly the voice of God. Something very different was, to his mind, implied in the promise of Christ to his Church; for without His presence in any special sense, as the life-giving Light, a fully developed system of doctrine, capable of being received implicitly, might have been transmitted from age to age. He saw the fulfilment of it, partly at least, in the power given to individual minds to be what the prophets were of old, by whom the Holy Ghost spake, religious instructors of their generation.* Literature, liberally pursued, has no other bearing on a man's religious opinions than as it leaves him more at liberty to form them for himself than any other. Looking at the matter in another point of view I readily admit, that, so far as it is the want of any regular profession at all, it may be in some degree injurious to the man, and consequently to the thinker.t But if * I find the same argument in Dr. Arnold's Fragment on the Church. He words it thus: "The promise of the Spirit of Truth to abide forever with his Church, implies surely that clearer views of truth should be continually vouchsafed to us; and if the work were indeed fully complete when the Apostles entered into their rest, what need was there for the Spirit of Wisdom, as well as of Love, to be ever present even unto the end of the world?' t After speaking in warm eulogy, according to his wont, of S. T. C. Dr. Arnold says, " But yet there are marks enough that his mind was a little INTRODUCTION. li a regular calling tends to steady the mind, restraining it from too tentative a direction of thought, and what may prove to be a vain activity, it tends perhaps in an equal degree to fix and petrify the spirit, of which I beleive abundant evidence may be found in the writings of professional men. Perhaps there is no fixed occupation which does not in some measure tend to disturb the balance of the soul; the want of one permits a man to commune with human nature more variously and freely than is possible for those to whom a stated routine presents persons and things with a certain uniformity of aLpect; it is not mere experience that gives knowledge, but a diversified experience, and the power of beholding the diversity it contains through the absence of a particular bias and leisure for contemplation. So far, therefore, as it presents facilities for the acquirement of the philosophic mind, even the want of a regular calling may in some degree facilitate the acquirement of truthful views in religion. "It is scarcely possible," said my Father himself, addressing 1Mr. Frere, " to conceive an individual less under the influence of the ordinary disturbing forces of the judgment than your poor friend; or from situation, pursuits, and habits of thinking, from age, state of health, and temperament, less likely to be drawn out of his course by the under-currents of hope or fear, of expectation or wish. But least of all by predilection for any particular sect or party; for wherever, I look, in religion or in politics, I seem to see a world of power and talent wasted on the support of half truths, too often the most mischievous because least suspected of errors."* It was the natural consequence of his having no predilection for any sect or party that parties and party organs have either neglected or striven against him; they were indeed his natural opponents, as they must ever be of any man, whose vocation it is to examine the truth of modes of thought in general, while an asszumption of the truth of certain modes of thought is the ground of their existence as parties, and the band that keeps them together. It has been observed by Mr. Newman, in condemnation of "the avowed disdain of party religion;" that diseased by the want of a profession, and the consequent unsteadiness of his mind and purposes: it alwrays seems to me, that the very power of contemplation becomes impaired or diverted, when it is made the main employment of life." See Arnold's Life and Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 57. * Church and State. Advertisement, VI. pp. 24, 25. lii INTRODUCTION. "Christ rundeniably made a party the vehicle of his doctrine, and did not cast it at random on the world, as men would now have it;"* and undeniable it surely is, that there is nothing radically wrong in the union of members for the support or propagation of truth. But then, from the weakness of human hearts and fallibility of human understandings it comes to pass, that while party union is right in the abstract, parties are generally more or less wrong, both in principle and conduct, and do more or less depart from truth in their resolution to maintain some particular portion or representation of it., The party that has our Lord at its head and fights for Him and Him only is one with the Church of Christ, considered as still militant; but this host, like the fiery one that surrounded Elisha, is invisible. The party which Christ instituted was not invisible, but it differs essentially from all parties within the precincts of Christendom for this very reason, that it was undeniably instituted by Hin, and that they who composed it had to defend the moral law in its depth and purity, theism itself in its depth and purity —(the acknowledgment of God as a Spirit, one and personal, with the relations to each other of the Creator and the creature a faint distorted shadow of which was alone preserved by Polytheists)-against a popular religion, which, though pious and spiritual in comparison with utter want of faith in the things that are above, was the very world and the flesh,t as opposed to Christianity. Thus they were striving for the life and soul which animates the religion of Christ, whereas I would fain believe, that the contentions * Sermons preached before the University of Oxford. Sermi. viii. p. 165. f Heathenism in Scripture is represented as one with sensuality, profaneness and disregard of the life to come; to work the will of the Gentiles was to run to every kind of evil excess; and almost the same, I suppose, may be said of the monstrous heresies, against which the Apostles and their successors spoke in terms of unqualified reprobation. In his Fragment on the Church, Dr. Arnold remarks, that "the heresies condemned by the Apostles were not melre erroneous opinions on some theoretical truth, but absolute perversions of Christian holiness; that they were not so much false as wicked. And further, where there was a false opinion in the heresy, it was of so monstrous a character, and so directly connected with profligacy of life. that it admits of no comparison with the so-called heresies of later ages," pp. 89, 90. Does it appear that our Lord ever rebuked either unbelief or misbelief, except as one and the same with worldliness and wickedness, or at least, as in the case of Thomas, subjection of the mind to the flesh? INTRODUCTION. liii among parties of Christians are less for this life and soul than for the forms in which they severally hold that it is most fitly clothed, and with which they identify it.* And this is no unworthy subject of contention, because the life and spirit are best preserved and most fully expressed in the truest forms, —a correct and distinct intellectual system is the best preservative of the essential portion of faith; but yet, because they are forms, the strife concerning them will be more apt to degenerate into an unholy warfare than a struggle pro a'is et focis,-for the very ideas of a spiritual religion and for a pure and pregnant morality, the testimony to which every soul may find at home, if it looks deep into its own retirements. In reference to the present subject, however, I need only observe that party compact operates chiefly for the preserving and extending of truth, considered as already established, while the discovery or development of it is only to be achieved by individual efforts; it even tends to retard such progress in the beginning, because, as essentially conservative, it ventures upon no experiments, but is bound to consider every departure from that form of teaching, which has hitherto served to convey and preserve spiritual truth, as endangering its purity and stability; and e To take the extreme case, Socinianism, I have long thought that a man may, that many a man does, athwart the negative lines of this creed, which in some cases appear to be quite negative in operation, behold in heart and spirit every deep truth on which Christians around them are dwelling, every truth meet to bring forth the fruit of good living, and to fit the soul for a higher life than the present. I hope and believe that such persons do practically embrace the divinity of Christ, because they worship, serve and obey Him,-they address their religious thoughts to Him habitually-they attribute to Him that which is properly divine, the work of Creation and Redemption, although they have wrong conceptions of the method of this work. On the other hand I should suppose that many Romanists must practically impute divinity to the blessed Mother of Jesus, from the addresses which they make to her, and the extent to which they seem to devote their religious minds to her. At best they appear to make her one with our Saviour, and not merely with the man Christ Jesus but with the Eternal Son of the Father, extending His attributes to her, and making of the twain two persons and one God. How awfully dangerous would it be to address Christ as the Mediator betwixt God and man if he were not himself both God and Man! It will not, I trust, be supposed that I am here: instituting any general comparison between Socinianism and Romanism with a preference of the former. I am merely considering what either may possibly be to the heart and mind of the professor. V1s INTRODUCTION. thus it may easily happen that, although religious doctrine may and must be diffused and maintained by men acting in concert, yet they who are laboring to advance the truth, to reform and expand the stock of divine knowledge, may be in continual antagonism and collision with those who are intent only on keeping it from going back. My Father's vocation, if he had any in this province, was to defend the Holy Faith by developing it, and showing its accordance and identity with ideas of reason; he has described himself as one who " feels the want, the necessity of religious support; who can not afford to lose any the smallest buttress; who not only loves Truth even for itself, and when it reveals itself aloof from all interest, but who loves it with an indescribable awe"-which causes him to-" creep toward the light, even though it draw him away from the more nourishing warmth."'" Yea, I should do so," he adds, " even if the light had made its way through a rent in the wall of the Temple."* But the gravest allegation contained in the passage I have quoted, is, that Mr. Coleridge was once engaged in " a course of heretical and schismatical teaching:"-a statement which seems to imply, that he had been at one time pledged to teach a particular set of doctrines, as a man is pledged upon undertaking the charge of a spiritual congregation, who expect that he shall confine himself within certain lines in his teaching, and will listen to him no longer than he keeps faith with them on that point. In such a case as this, supposing the doctrines false, to be engaged in a course of teaching them, must tend to confirm the man's mind in alienation from truth; because it weds him to the false doctrines, not by inward love and preference only, but by an outward and formal union. That Mr. Coleridge was never bound to Heresy and Schism by any such bonds as these might be gathered from the present work alone, and would be fully manifest to any one who considered the matter with care. Soon after leaving Cambridge he delivered lectures on revealed religion, in which he set forth such views as he entertained at the time: after this he preached occasionally at Bath, at Taunton, and as an " hireless volunteer" in most of the great towns which he passed through on a tour from Bristol to Sheffield. Once indeed he entertained thoughts of taking upon him the charge of an * It is best to peruse a fuller exposition of this sentiment in the passage itself, which occurs in the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. Letter I. V INTRODUCTION. lv Unitarian congregation; but after preaching one sermon, in which, from the account of an ear-witness, there seems to have been more of poetry and the general principles of religion than of vulgar heresy and schism, he abandoned the prospect that had been held out to him. Not that the ofier, by which he was suddenly called away from it, tended to bias his opinions in an opposite direction; it left them free as air, operating solely to detach him from all outward connection with religious bodies, and exempt him from the least temptation to place himself in binding relations with them, or any sort of dependence upon them. To this indeed it is unlikely he would ever have submitted; for, as he mentioned to, an acquaintance at the time, had he preached a second sermon at Shrewsbury, it would have been such an one as must " effectually have disqualified him for the object in view;" so little was he disposed to keep the bounds of doctrine marked out by any sect, or to let the body of his opinions live and grow under external form and pressure. It is extravagant to suppose that my Father was impaired for life in the power of religious discernment by a course of teaching, which taught himself to perceive the deficiencies and errors of the creed in which he had sought refuge; that he was perverted by the very process which his mind went through in order to arrive at a more explicit knowledge of the truth. That which to the passive and inert may be a tainting experience, to minds like his, full of activity and resistency, is but a strengthening experiment: he doubted and denied in order to believe earnestly and intelligently. His Unitarianism was purely negative; not a satisfaction in the positive formal divinity of the Unitarians, but what remained with him to the last, a revulsion from certain explanations of the Atonement commonly received as orthodox, together with that insight which he believed himself afterwards to have attained into the whole scheme of Redemption, so far as it can be seen into by man, and its deep and perfect harmony with the structure of the human mind as it it is revealed to the eye of Philosophy. Against-those, on the one hand, who describe him as " intellectually bold but educationally timid,"t those on the other who * See his own rernarks on this subject in the imiddle of the tenth chapter of the Biographia. + Quoted from a volume of poetical selections and criticisms -by Leigh Hunt, entitled " Imagination and Fancy." Having referred to this agree Elv ifa'T 1 ~IN TRl(IDUJTIO.C suppose him to have been indebted to his early education for all that is consonant with the true faith and Iear of the Lord in his religious creed, and lay to the account of after circumstances all that they disapprove in it, i must firmly maintain, that what they are so anxious, from the way in which their own spirit has been moulded, to cast upon outward things in the forrrmation of his opinions, was, in the main, the result and product of iis owrn intellect and will. When the years of childhood were past, he left behind him the Eden, as some consider it, of implicit faith' the wvorld of belief was all before him where to choose, and for a time he sojourned with the Unitarians, beholding in them only the firm and honest rejectors of a creed, which, as yet, he could not receive explicitly.'When lie had once entered their ranks no circumstances existed to prevent him fromr remaining a Psilanthropist and becoming more and more confirmed in opposition to the sum of tenets and opinions commonly called Catholic; many men so situated, even if they had been nurtured as he was in the bosom of the Church, would either have abode finally within those precincts or left them only to proceed in an opposite direction to that which he took, and combined German mrretaphysics with ant atheistic Pantheism, instead of bringing them to the service of revealed religion. On the other hand, when he had quitted the Unitarians, what oztztwarc influence was there to prevent him from adopting High Church doctrine, as it is taught either by Anglican or by Romish divines? Some men have passed from a deeper and earlier training in " heresy and schism" than his to that Church theory which exhibits an earthly and visible system and proclaims it the shrine of a mystic and heavenly one, not simply as God's instlument, whereby the spirit is awakened. in manr's heart and mind by communion -with Him, but as being in itself, independently of all such effects and prior to them, a receptacle of the divine Spirit and calls upon rmen to receive it able book I can not refrain fromu expreesing miy belief that, had the author gone as deep into Coleridge's theosophy as into his poetry, or made himself as well acquainted with his religious writings as with his poems, he could never have said that " nine tenths of his theology would apply equally to their own creeds in the mouths of a Brahmin or a Mussulman." On the contrary, nothing more chlaracterizes the religious conceptions of Coleridge than the ever-present aiml and endeavor to show that Christianity is religion itself, religion in its deepest, highest and fullest expression, the very ground as well aws the sunmit of di.vine truth. INTRODUCTION. lvii as thus divine not principally on internal evidence, the harmony of the whole scheme within itself, attested by its proper moral and spiritual effects, but on an outward historic proof, reaching no higher than probability, yet assumed to be that which only the unspiritual mind can reject. That he did neither the one nor the other, that hc came to consider the notions of the Church entertained by ordinary Protestants inadequate and unspiritual, without adopting the Romish doctrines respecting the clergy and the nature of their intervention betwixt God and man in the mode of salvation; tLat he exalted the spirituality of sacraments without admitting:he primitive materialism, by many styled Catholic, that he saw the very mind of St. Paul, in the teaching of Luther on the Law and Justification by Faith, yet was open-eyed to the misuse of that teaching and the practical falsities deduced out of it by modern Methodists —all this and much more in his system of religious opinion, distinguishing it equally from over-sensualized, and from " minimifTidian" Christianity, ought not to be traced to peculiar circumstances and to accident as its principal cause. Doubtless it was a blessing to " the Christian philosopher" that he had a good Christian for his father-that he had in him the pattern of " an Israelite without guile." But of his Churchmanship I believe that he was himself almost wholly the Father; and I verily think, that even if he had been born in the Church of Rome, or in the bosom of some Protestant sect, he would have burst all bonds asunder, have mastered the philosophy of his age, and arrived at convictions substantially the same as those which now appear on the face of his writings. There are some, perhaps, among the intelligent readers of Coleridge, who take a different view of the character of his opinions from that which I have expressed: who believe that, during his latter years, he became in the main what High Churchmen consider Catholic and orthodox, whilst any notions he still held of a different character were anomalies, remnants of his early creed, which would have been worked out of his mind had his years been prolonged. There are others amongst the proselytes to the Oxford theology, who see nothing more in his teaching than a stunted Anglo-catholicism; some of these aver that, in the beginning of their course they were conducted for a little way by the writings of Mr. Coleridge; that he first led them out of,C lviii INTRODUCTION. the dry land of negative Protestantism; but that now, by help of newer guides, they have advanced far beyond him, and can look down on his lower station from a commanding eminence. They view the Aids to Reflection as a half-way house to Anglocatholic orthodoxy, just as others, who have got beyond them, in a certain direction, consider their Anglo-catholic doctrine a halfway house to what they consider the true Catholicism, —namely that of the Church of Rome. My own belief is, that such a view of my Father's theological opinions is radically wrong; that although an unripe High Church theology is all that some readers have found or valued in his writings, it is by no means what is there; and that he who thinks he has gone little way with Coleridge, and then proceeded with Romanizing teachers further still, has never gone along with Coleridge at all, or entered deeply into any of his expositions of Christian doctrine; though there may be in many of them a tone and a spirit with which he has sympathized, and an emphatic condemnation of certain views of religion, which has gratified his feelings. But, though I conceive my Father's religious system, considered as to its intellectual form, to be diflferent throughout fromn that of Anglo or Roman Catholic, as commonly expounded, that it coincided in substance'with that which these parties both agree to consider Catholic doctrine, I entirely believe. If they are steering Northward, his course is to the North as much as theirs, but while they seek it by the West he reaches it'by an Easterly voyage; I mean that he is as consistently and regularly opposed to them in his 9'ationcale of doctrine as consentient with them respecting the great objects of faith, viewed in their essence; at least in his own opinion, though not in theirs; for he was accustomed to make a distinction between_ religious ideas and the intellectual notions with which they have been connected, or the dogmas framed in relation to them, to which they appear strangers. His Christian divinity agreed more with " Catholicism," than with the doctrines of any sect, since according to his judgment and feelings that contains, whether in a right or wrong form, the spiritual ideas in which the true substance of Christianity consists, more completely: on some points it coincided with the " Catholicism" of Rome rather than with that of Anglicans; he recognized for instance the idea of the immanence of spiritual power and light in the Church, independently of the authority of a revelation completed in past INTRODUCTION. lix ages, opposed as he was to the application of that idea made by Papists. His religious system, according to his own view of it, might be described as exhibiting the universal ideas of Christianity, not those which have been consciously recognized always, everywhere, and by all, but those which the reason and spiritual sense of all men, when sufficiently developed, bear witness to, explained according to a modern philosophy, which purports to be no mere new thinking, but inclusively, all the thought that has been and now is in the world. Such was the aim and design of his doctrine. How far he made it good is not to be determined here.* They who diffir from mie on this question may have gone deeper into my Father's mind than myself. I will only say in support of my own impressions, that they are derived from a general survey of his writings, late and early, such as few beside myself can have taken, and that I came to the study of them with no interest but the common interest in truth, which all mankind possess, to bias my interpretation. Indeed I can conceive of no influence calculated to affect my judgmefnt, except the natural wish, in my mind sufficiently strong, to find my Father's opinions as near as may be to established orthodoxy,-as little as possible out of harmony with the notions and feelings of the great body of pious and reflective persons in his own native land. To me, with this sole bias on my mind, it is manifest, that his system of belief, intellectually considered, differs materially from " Catholic" doctrine as commonly understood, and that this difference during the latter years of his meditative life, instead of being shaded ofl, Since the chief part of this preface was written I have become acquainted with Archdeacon Hare's Miission of the Comtforter, which I dare to pronounce a most valuable work, meaning that Ifind it so, without the presumption, which in me would be great indeed, of pretending to enter fully into its merits. I have had the satisfaction of meeting with remarks upon my Father in the preface and in the notes of which the second volume consists, confirmatory of some which I have ventured to make myself. Even the dedication coincides with the views given above, for it is this: " To the honored memory of S. T. Coleridge, the Christian philosopher, who through dark and winding paths of speculation was led to the light, in order that others by his guidance might reach that light, without passing through the darkness, these Sermons on the Work of the Spirit are dedicated, with deep thankfulness and reverence, by one of the many pupils, whom his writings have helped to discern the sacred concord and unity of human and divine truth." IX: INTROD UCTION. became more definite and boldly developed. How should it have been otherwise, unless he had abandoned that modern philosophy, which he had adopted on the deepest and fullest deliberation; and how, without such abandonment, could he have embraced a doctrinal system based on a philosophy fundamentally different? How could he who believed that " a desire to bottom all our convictions on grounds of right reason is inseparable from the character of a Christian," acquiesce in a system, which suppresses the exercise of the individual reason and judgment in the determination of faith, as to its content,; would have the whole matter, for the mass of mankind, decided by feeling and habit apart from conscious thought; and bids the soul take refihg in a homne of Christian t'ruth, in which its higher faculties are not at home, but reside like slaves and aliens in the land of a conqueror? To his latest hour, though ever dwelling with full faith on the doctrines of Redemption and original sin, in what he considered the deepest and most real sense attainable by man, he yet, to his latest hour, put from him some of the so-called orthodox notions and modes of explaining those doctrines. My Father's whole view of what theologians term g'race-the internal spiritual relations of God with man, his conception of its nature in a theoretical point of view, differs from that which most " Catholics" hold themselves bound to receive unaltered from the primitive and medimeval Christian writers; for in my Father's belief, the teachers of those days knew not what spirit was, or what it was not, metaphysically considered; in no wise therefore could he receive their explanations of the spiritual as sound divinity, readily as he might admit that many of them had such insight into the Christian scheme as zeal and the ardor of a new love secure to the student of Holy Writ. Religion must have somne intellectual form; must be viewed through the medium of intellect; and if' the medium is clouded the object is necessarily obscured. The great aim and undertaking of modern mental philosophy is to clarify this inward eye, rather than to enlarge its sphere of vision, except so far as the one involves the other-to show what spiritual things are not, and thus to remove the obstructions which prevent men from seeing, as mortals may see, what they are. Those who maintain certain doctrines, or rather metaphysical views of doctrine, and seek to prove them Scriptural, simply because they were doctrines of early Christian writers, ought to look in the face the plain fact that some of the most influential of those early writers verie miateriaists, not as holding the soul to be the mere result of bodily organization, but as holding the soul itself to be material;-'-ught gravely to consider, whether it is reasonable to reject the philosophy of a certain class of divinely and yet cling " limpet-like" to their forims of thought on religious questions, forms obviotisly founded tipon, and conformed to, that philosophy. They believed the soul to be material, —corporeal; Of this assertion, the truth ojf Whieh i wtell known to men who have examined into the history of metaphysical and psychological opinion,* I. can not give detailed proofs in this place, but in passing I refer the reader to Tertullian De Reszurr. Camr, capd xvii. and De Anima, cap. ix.; to Irenaus, Contra Hcereses, Lib. ii. cap. xix. 6, and to the preface of the learned Benedictine to the latter, p. 161, Artic. XI. De Animaruin natzura et statu post mnortem. What! are we to be governed in religious metaphysique and the rationale of belief by men who thought that the soul was poured into the body and there thickened like jelly in a mould?-that the inner man took the form of the outer, having eyes and ears and all the other members, like unto the body, only of finer stuff? —its corpulency being consolidated by densation and its e'figy formned by expression? This was the notion of Cyprian's master, the acute Tertullian, and that of Irenmus was like unto it. He compares the soul to water frozen in a vessel, which takes the form of the vessel in which it freezes,t evidently supposing, with Tertullian, that the firm substantial body moulded the fluent and aerial soul. —that organization was the organizer. It appears that in those days the vulgar held the soul to be incorporeal,~ according to the views of Plato and other * Mr. Scott, in his impressive Lectures on the evolution of Philosophy out of Religion, maintained the materialisml of the early Christian writers. f Contra ieareses. Lib. ii. cap. xix: 6. 5 A primordio enim in Adam concreta et configurata corpori anima, ut totius substantie, ita et conditionis istius semen efficit. Tertull. De Anima. Cap. ix. adfinenm. ~ Tertull. De Res. Car. Cap. xvii. in initio.-aliter anima non capiat passionem tormenti seu refrigerii, utpote incorporalis: hoc enim vulgus existimat. Nos autem animam corporalem et hic profitemur et in suo volumine probamnus, &c. On this passage Dr. Pusey observes in a note, that it attests "the immateriality of the soul" to have been "the general belief." I think it attests it to have been the belief of the common people, but not that it was the prevailing opinion with Christian divines of that age. lxrii INTRODUCTIOi2. stupid philosophers, combated in the treatise De Anima; but that orthodox Christian divines looked upon that as an impious unscriptural opinion. Justin Martyr argues against Platonic notions of the soul in his Dialogue with Trypho.* As for the vulgar, they have ever been in the habit of calling the soul incorporeal, yet reasoning and thinking about it, as if it had the properties of body. The common conception of a ghost accords exactly with Tertullian's description of the soul-a lucid aerial image of the outward man. Thus did these good Fathers change soul into body, and condense spirit into matter; thus did they reverse the order of nature, contradict the wisdom of ages, and even run counter to the instinctive belief of mankind, in recoiling from Gnosticism; thus deeply did they enter into the sense of St.'Paul's high sayings about the heavenly body and the utter incompatibility of flesh and blood with the Kingdom of Heaven! As they conceived the soul to be mzaterial, so they may very naturally have conceived it capable of receiving and retaining the Spirit, as a material vessel may receive and retain a liquid or any other substance; and, in their conception, within the sotul may no more have implied any affection of the soul itself, than within the box or basin implies any change in the stone or metal of which the receptacle was made. Indeed this sensuous way of conceiving spiritual subjects is apparent in some of the passages from old writers that are appealed to in support of what Archdeacon Hare happily calls, "baptismal transubstantiation;" as, for instance, one cited in the Tract for the Times called, by a misnomer, as I think, Sci2ptural views of Holy Baptism,t the * Ven. 1747, pp. 106 and 111, Justin Martyr and Tatian denied the original immortality of the soul on religious grounds, and the former affirms that it is not simple, but consists of many parts, p. 271. ~ "If the sun being without, and fire by being near or at a little distance from bodies, warmeth our bodies, what must we say of the Divine Spirit, which is indeed the most vehement fire, kindling the inner man, although it dwell not within but be without? It is possible then, in that all things are possible to God, that one may be warmed, although that which warmeth him be not in himself." From Ammonius. Scriptural Views, p. 264, 4th edit. This writer evidently supposes the proper Indwelling to be distinct from influence. My Father, in his MS. remains, declares against the opinion of those who make "the indwelling of the Spirit an occupation of a place, by a vulgar equivoque of the word within, inward, &c." "For example," says he, " a bottle of water let down into the sea.-The water contained and the surrounding water are both alike in fact outward or without the glass, INTRODUCTIONS. lxiii author whereof is so fervent, so scriptural in spirit and intention, that he almost turns all he touches into Scripture, as Midas turned all he touched into gold. How the gold looked when Midas was away I know not; but to me Dr. Pusey's Scriptural views, apart from his persuasive personal presence, which ever pervades his discourses and constitutes their great effect upon the heart, seem but brass beside the pure gold of Holy Writ; his alien piety gilds and hides them. The more we polish brass the more brassy it appears; and so, these views only seem to my mind the more discrepant from Holy Writ, the more clearly and learnedly they are set forth. In Scripture faith is required as the condition of all spiritual influence for purely spiritual and moral effects, and that primary regeneration, which precedes a moral one in time, and is not necessarily the ground of a change of heart and life, was never derived firom the Word of God, but has been put into it by a series of inferences, and is supported principally by an implicit reliance on the general enlightenment of the early Christian writers. The doctrine may not be directly injurious to morality, since it allows actual faith to be a necessary instrument in all moral renovation; but the indirect practical consequences of insisting upon shadows as if they were realities, and requiring men to accept as a religious verity of prime importance a senseless dogma, the offspring of false metaphysics, must be adverse to the interests of religion. Such dogmatism has a bad effect on the habits of thought by weakening the love and perception of truth, and it is also injurious by producing disunion and mutual distrust among Christians. The subtlest matter has all the properties of matter as much as the grossest. Let us see how this notion, that the soul consists of subtle matter, affects the form of doctrine, by trying it on that of baptism. The doctrine insisted on as primitive by a large party in the Church, nay set forth as the very criterion stantis vel cacdentis Ecclesice Anglicance., by some of them, is this, that, in the moment of baptism, the soul receives the Holy Spirit within it; that the Holy Spirit remains within the soul, but the antithetic relation of the former to the latter is expressed by the preposition in or within: and this improper, sensuous, merely relative sense of vwithin, indwelling, &e. it is alas! but too plain that many of our theological Routiniers apply, though without perhaps any distinct consciousness of their Thought, to spiritual Presence!' i5 fINTROD UCTION. even though the baptized, as soon as he becomes capable of moral acts, proves faithless and wicked, until it is expelled forever by a large but indefinite amount of wickedness, entitled utter repro6acy. How intolerable this doctrine is in its moral and spiritual aspect, how it evacuates the Scriptural phrase, Christ in us, of its emphatic meaning, it is useless to urge upon those, who believe it to have been taught by the Apostles. I now only allege that no man originally could have fiaramed such a conception as this, who had our modern conceptions of spirit, or had considered what is the idea involved in the words, presence of the Hily Spirit to oztr spiriit. When the doctrine is unfolded and presented to the masters and doctors of it, they fly off to the notion of an inward votential righteousness. But this mere cap;abiity of being saved and sanctified, we have from our birth, nor can it be increased, because it is essentially, extra gradum,-not a thing of degrees. Our capability of being spiritualized by divine grace is unlimited. W/h]o are they that explain away the bcaltismal gift into a shadow?"* Miy Father, in his latter years, looked upon baptism as a formal and public reception into a state of spiritual opportunities (at least so I understand him), which is equivalent, I suppose, to the doctrine of some of our divines, Waterland among others, that it is a consignment of grace to the soul. It is conceivable that in consequence of such consignment, the soul, by the will of God, may have more outward means of receiving spiritual influence than it would otherwise have had; if prayer can affect the course and complex of events in favor of those who are not praying, so may the rite of baptism influence it in favor of the baptized, though he be passive in baptism. The objection to the Antiquitarian doctrine is not that it implies a mystery, not that it implies the reception of a spiritual opportunity independently of the will of the receiver, but that, as it is commonly stated, it contradicts the laws of the human understanding, and either affirms what can not be true, —what brings confusion into our moral and spiritual ideas,-or else converts the doctrine into an effectual vapor-" a potentiality in a potentiality or a chalking of chalk to make white white." My Father, as I understand * See remarks on this subject in the.2~ission of the Comforter, pp. 476-7 INTROIDUOTIOti. Ixv him, continued to deny that the gift of baptism is a spiritual recreation preceding actual faith or any moral capability, —an introduction of the spirit into the soul, which it passively undergoes as the dead cage receives the living bird, or a lodgment of the Spirit within it irrespectively of its own moral state; a total change wrought all in a moment conferring upon it no positive moral melioration but only a power unto righteousness,-a capability of being renewed by grace in addition to that which inheres in man from the first; or on the other hand a partial and incipient spiritual change; since regeneration ex,vi to'emini is something total and general; to be born again, re-natus, implies a new nature; is so described in Scripture and was so understood in the early Church. He looked upon it as an external grant, called regeneration in virtue of that which it is its object to promote and secure, a grant which comes into effect gradually, as the will yields to the pressure of the Spirit from without, but which may be made of none effect by the will's resistance. Such a view of the effect of baptism is well expressed by George Herbert in these linesTwo fallaecies are current on the subject of momentary baptismal transubstantiation. First-men say, that as we are passive in our original ereation, so we are passive in our spiritual re-creation. The answer may be given from the Angelical Doctor, who teaches that we are not passive in our original creation; and indeed it needs not the wisdom of an angel to see, that neither man nor any other animal can become alive without a corresponsive act on his part-a sub-co-operation. If we throw a stone into the still unmoving pool, the waters leap up: the pool has not stirred itself, but it co-operates in the production of motion. The second commonplace fallacy is this:-as a seed is set in the ground and remains inert and latent for a time, then germinates, shoots up and bears fruit, so grace may be poured into the soul of a child incapable of moral acts, may remain latent for a time, then, when reason and the moral sense have come into play, may produce good thoughts and good works, the fruit of the Spirit. The objection to this is that a spiritual being is not in a spiritual being as a material thing is inE a material thing; it is in it or present to it only inasmuch as it acts upon it. It is the heart itself which, by the power of the Spirit, must bear the fruit of virtue, not a something lodged within it, as the seed in the ground. Spiritual effects in the soul may exist unperceived by men,-nmay not produce outward works of holiness till long after they have been produced;'but when the deeds are evil, as they are in many who were baptized in infancy, we may fairly say that the effects were not produced —in other words, that the person who shows such an unspiritual mind, was not spiritually regenerated in baptism. lxvi INTRODUCTION. "0' blessed streams! either ye do prevent And stop our sins from growing thick and wide, Orelse give tears to drown them as they grow —" and is explained by himself in this passage from some of his manuscript remains: " I see the necessity of greatly expanding and clearing up the chapter on Baptism in the Aicls to Reflection, and of proving the substantial accordance of my scheme with that of our Church. I still say, that an act of the Spirit in timne, as that it might be asserted, at the moment of the uttering of the words, I baptize thee in the name, &c. —now the Spirit begins to act-is false in Philosophy and contrary to Scripture, and that our Church service needs no such hypothesis. Further, I still say, that the communication of the Spirit as of a power or principle not yet possessed, to an unconscious agent by human ministry, is without precedent in Scripture, and that there is no Scripture warrant for the doctrine-and that the nature of the tHoly Splirit communicated by the Apostles by laying on of hands is a very difficult questionand that the reasons for supposing it to be certain miraculous gifts of the Spirit peculiar to the first age of Christianity and duaring the formation of the Chur'ch, are neither few nor insignificant. " Observe, I do not deny (God forbid!) the possibility or the reality of the influence of the Spirit on the soul of the infant. His first smile bespeaks a Reason (the Light from the Life of the Word), as already existent, and where the Word is, there will the Spirit act. Still less do I think lightly of the Graces which the child receive` as a living Part of the Church, and whatever flows from the Communion of Saints, and the nseqitoildat; of the Spirit. " The true import is this. The operations of the Spirit are as little referable to Time as to Space; but in reference to our principles of conduct toward, and judgment concerning, our neighbor, the Church declares, that before the time of the baptism there is no authority for asserting, and that since the time there is no authority for denying, the gift and regenerative presence of the Holy Spirit, promised, by an especial covenant, to the members of Christ's mystical Body-consequently, no just pretence for expecting or requiring another new Inition or Birth into the state of Grace." INTRODUCTION. lxvii My Father denied not that the Spirit may influence the soul of an infant, but he still refused to separate the presence of the Holy Spirit from spiritual effects, and these from reason and the moral being. Those whom he differed from are wont to argue, not that, the infant is capable of moral effects in virtue of its awakening reason, but that it may be spiritually renovated in its whole soul before it is morally renewed at all; to this opinion he was ever wholly opposed. The new birth, as the change of the soul itself, is out of time; viewed phenomenally in its manifestations, it takes place, as my Father conceived, gradually, as a man becomes gradually a new creature, different from what he was by nature (or, in other words, a good Christian), the new bigrth indicating the spiritual ground, the new creature the effect and change produced. Mr. Coleridge's view of the Eucharist with his view of Sacraments generally has been adopted and explained by his younger son.* Would that all my labors in explaining our Father's views and clearing them from misrepresentations could be so superseded! But my brother's present avocations are all-engrossing, and more indispensable than the defence of opinions, however serviceable those may be deemed to the cause of truth. In connection however with the subject just touched upon, of primitive religious metaphysique, I am desirous, in times like these, to specify what my Father's notion of the real presence was not: that was not the notion of a real presence in bread and wine. My Father has been called a Pantheist by the blunderers of the day, because he believed in the real presence of God throughout the Creation animate and inanimate; that He is present to every blade of grass and clod of the valley, as well as to all things that breathe and live; that were He to hide his face, that is, withdraw his power, the World would vanish into nothing, But the presence in the Eucharist is a spiritual presence or agency for the production of spiritual effects. God sustains mere material things by his power, but is he present to them as the Sypirit of Holiness, the life-giving Word? Can bread and wine become holy and spiritual and be nourished to everlasting life? What do we gain by this strange self-contradictory dogma, except an X See the Scriptural Character of the English Church, &c., by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, M.A., now Principal of St. Mark's College, Chelsea. Last six sermnons, passint. See also Coleridge's Remains. lxvii; INTRODUCTION. articulation of air? The sacrament is not for the bread and wine, but for the soul of the receiver, and if we hope to receive the Spirit by means of the hallowed elements, have we not all that the doctrine can give us in the way of spiritual advantage? When I have urged this consideration upon a maintainer of the ancient view, the reply has been, "We must not rationalizemust not reason a priori on these matters, but receive faithfully what the voice of God has declared." Alas! that men should thus separate the voice of God from reason and the moral sense, which God has given us as an inward Holy of Holies, wherein He may appear to us, if we repair thither meetly prepared, our souls being,washed with pure woater! Alas! that they should so absolutely identify it with the voice of early Christian writers, men zealous and simple-hearted, but nursled for the most part in Paganism, and all kinds of " sensuous and dark" imaginations on the subject of religion! One of these early writers, if not more, believed in transubstantiation, that doctrine so condemned in our Church as not only irrational, but impious. Waterland interprets the passage in the ancient Father,* to which I refer, in his own way, only allowing him to be "' inaccurate in superinducing the Logos upon the symbols themselves, rather than upon the recipients;"t but I think if we attend, as the Benedictine editor requires, to the series of the holy Doctor's whole argumentation, we can not fail to perceive that the conception present to his mind was at least nearer to trans than to any kind of con substantiation.t He teaches that the Eucharist coni* renceus Contra lcereses, L. iv. c. 18, p. 251. Ed. Bened. Waterland's Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist, chap. vii. p. 221-et seq. f The same Divine, after explaining the holiness of the consecrated sylbols to be "a relative holiness," and declaring himself to be of the opinion judiciously expressed by Mr. Hooker, that grace is not to be sought in the sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament, presently adds, "Not that I conceive there is any absurdity in supposing a peculiar presence of the Holy Ghost to inanimate things, any more than in God's appearing in a burning bush." Surely this is no parallel case. Who imagines that Jehovah was joined or united with the burning bush, or that the Omnipresent Creator was present there as a man is present in a place? The luminous appearance in the bush and in the pillar of fire and in the Holy of Holies was a sensuous sign of a supersensuous reality, of the special agency, favor, and protection of Almighty God to the chosen people. Has this any thing to do with a spiritual presence in bread and wine? D Viss. Prev. in Iren, Lib. Art. xiv. 83-84-85. The Benedictine refers INTRODUCTION. lxix sists of two parts, an earthly and a heavenly; I think that by the earthly he understood not mere bread, but the material body of Christ; while by the heavenly he meant Christ's quickening Spirit: for he was contending against heretics who denied that our Lord was one with the Creator, and that the Word of God had assumed a true corporeal frame of substantial flesh and blood, and he uses the doctrine of the sacramental mystery as an illustrative argument against them.* But what becomes of this argument if the earthly part of the Eucharist is just that which it appears to be and nothing more? Waterland's interpretation of Irenmeus on that point is, in my opinion, a perfect anachronism; it imputes to him modern immaterializing views, quite alien from the general frame of his mind; and is not aln equal forgetfulness of the state of thought in those times evinced by his saying, that " the Christians despised the Pagans for imagining that Christ's body and blood were supposed to be literally eaten in the Eucharist?"t What the Pagans accused them of, and what they irejected with abhorrence," was probably this, that instead of bread and wine they placed upon the table real human flesh and blood, and partook of it under the name of their Lord's body. Irenamus, who understood literally the saying of our Saviour, 1. will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine till I drink it new with yo26 in my Father's kingdom, need scarcely be supposed to have been more refined than modern Romanists on the subject of the Eucharist.:4 Just in the same way Waterland modernizes Tertullian; just so he refines upon a sentence in that unrefined treatise De Resurrectione Carnis. Toward the end of an epigrammatic passage enumerating the benefits that acto Fisher's argument against CEcolampadius in which the same view of the passage in Irenneus is taken. * Tertullian expresses this plainly. He "proves the truth or reality of the Lord's body and blood against the phantasm of Marcion by the sacraments of the bread and the cup." Adovers. Marcion, L. v. cap. 8. f He supports this assertion by referring to a "fragment of Irenseus, p. 343, concerning Blandina," which does not, I think, really support it. t Contra Hcereses, Lib. v. cap. xxxiii. 1. He proves by the literal sense of Matt. xxvi. 29, the carnal resurrection of the disciples and millennial reign of Christ upon earth. Of course he takes Isaiah xi. vi. literally too, and presses into the service of his opinion of a future earthly Paradise every prophetic text about eating and drinking and sensuous delights that he can gather out of Holy Writ. 1xx INTRODIUCTION. crue to the soul through the body of flesh, and declaring, that as the flesh and the Spirit are fellow-workmen here, so they shall be partners in bliss hereafter, the ancient writer speaks thus: Cairo corpore et sanguine Ch)risti vescitur, ut et anZma de cleo saginetur. The Anglican Divine understands this "in a mystical and constructional sense," and for no other reason, apparently, than that any other would be gross and puerile. Yet who that reads Tertullian can imagine that he was nzot gross and puerile in his philosophy, however refined in the play of fancy and exercise of logic, unless he is predetermined to find him otherwise? Doubtless Tertullian thought, that the bread, which our Lord held in his hand at the last Supper, was but " a figure of his body;" the bread in the Eucharist, I verily think, he took to be the material body of our Lord. The sixth chapter of St. John many of the ancients seemr to have understood spiritually, because the meaning is expressly declared to be spiritual in the text itself (verse 63): and I think that the primitive Fathers always kept close to the text, though, when figurative, it sometimes led them away from the sense. Our divines have generally rejected transubstantiation as irrational and unspiritual. Any one who rejects it on this ground, yet holds the presence of the redeeming Spirit in bread and wine, strains at a gnat after swallowing a camel. "If on all sides it be confessed," says Hooker, " that the grace of baptism is poured into the soul of man, that by water we receive it, although it be neither seated in the water nor the water changed into it, what should induce men to think that the grace of the Eucharist must needs be in the Eucharist before it be in us that receive it?"* * Can any one who reads what Hooker has written on this subject before and after the sentence I have quoted, in Bk. V. ch. lxvii. (pp. 445-51 of vol. ii. of Mr. Keble's ed.) imagine that he himself held what he describes as utterly vain and unnecessary, and which is out of analogy with his doctrine of baptism? Of all the doctrines which suppose a presence in the elements my Father thought transubstantiation the best, and would have agreed, I believe, with Mr. Ward in denying the charge of rationalism brought against it by divines of the school of Dr. Pusey. How does it erplain the mystery a whit more than their own view? It does but affirm what that denies, that the bread and wine are gone without pretending to say how: it neither rationalizes nor reasons, internally at least; but bluntly affirms a senseless proposition without throwing a gauze veil over its face. INTRODtUCTION. lxxi But it was the ancient opinion that the spirit descended upon the water before it entered the soul of the baptized. It is not easy for a sensible man, like Hooker, to stick to ancient opinions on the subject of spirit. Yet Irenueus is an evar gelical writer when he is not theologizing, and loses sight of his Anti-Gnostic, which are often AntiPlatonic, metaphysics. Indeed he at all times leans with his whole weight upon Scripture and Reason, according to his notions of both, just as a Rationalist like S. T. C. may do now-adays. He seems to have no horror of rationalism at all, but looks as far into the internal consistency of things as he is able. Viewed in their place in the history of thought, these primitive writers are interesting and venerable. The attempt to make them practically our masters on earth in doctrine, under a notion that they received their whole structure of religious intellectualism ready built from the Apostles-this it is which anti-patricians of The attempt made by Mr. W. to reconcile it with our article, however, appears to me one of the most sophistical parts of the whole Tract Ninety Argument-which is saying a good deal. The article declares against " the change of the substance of bread and wine in the Supper of the Lord." Mr. Ward affirms that it speaks popularly, and hence does not conflict with the Romish metaphysique of the Eucharist, according to which the accidents of bread and wine remain while the substance is changed; it being assumed in his argument that to speak popularly, in the language of the plain Christian, who knows nothing of philosophy, is to identify accidents with substance so as to do away with the latter entirely. Now not to mention the gross improbability, that the framer of the article was ignorant of, or had no respect to the metaphysique, of the doctrine current in the schools of Rome, and controverted in the schools of the Reformed,-it is surely quite wrong to say, that the unmetaphysical man means nothing more by an object of sense than its sensible qualities. It is true that he identifies the qualities with the substance, but yet he has the idea of substance too. The notion that a thing is only a congeries of accidents, is the notion of the idealizing philosopher in his study; while the idea of a substrate or support of accidents is common to all mankind, and indeed is an original form of the htuman intellect. This is admitted in the reasonings of Berkeley, Schelling, and every other Idealist. By the substance of bread the plain man means not the mere qualities of bread, but a thing which has those qualities: he means the bread itself with all that belongs to it. Mr. Ward pretends to considerable knowledge of the nature and history of thought-and, I believe, not without reason; but he did not show his knowledge of it by this argument. Indeed he is rather apt to use his logical skill and metaphysical acumen for the purpose of cleverly confounding a subject instead of making it clear. lxxii INTRODUCTION. my Father's mind contemn. Belief in the phmenix was no sign that the early Christians were incapable of receiving a spiritual religion; but surely it is one among a hundred signs, that their intellectual development of it might be incorrect; that they had reflected but little on the nature and laws of evidence. I believe that the whole of the opinions which my Father expresses on the Eucharist* may be reduced to this, that both transubstantiation and Luther's doctrine of consubstantiation may be so stated as not to involve a contradiction in terms; but that neither doctrine is necessary, that there is no real warrant for either in Scripture, and that the spiritual doctrine of the Supper of the Lord involves a different statement. The gift and effect of the Eucharist he believed to be "an assimilation of the spirit of a man to the divine humanity." How he sympathized with one who fought against the old sensualism appears in his poem on the dying words of Berengarius. But Berengarius certainly taught a presence in the elements, for he said that the true body is placed on the table. To the imperfection of light vouchsafed in that day my Father seems to refer in the last lines of his poem: The ascending day-star with a bolder eye Hath lit each dew-drop on our trimmer lawn 1 Yet not for this, if wise, shall we decry The spots and struggles of the timid dawn; Lest so we tempt th' approaching noon to scorn The mists and painted vapors of our morn. That my Father, though an ardent maintainer of the Church as a spiritual power, organized in an outward body, co-ordinate with the Spirit and the Scriptures, did not admit the ordinary mysticism on the subject of Apostolical succession, seems clear from this passage from some of his manuscript writings, dated 1827. " When I reflect on the great stress which the Catholic or more numerous Party of Christians laid on the uninterrupted succession of the Bishops of every Church from the Apostles, the momentous importance attached by the Bishops themselves at the * Remains, V. pp. 65, 84, 188, 219, 220, 224, 225, 227, 245, 293, 382. The Romish dogma involves the supposition that a sensible thing can be abstracted from its accidents. This may not be false logic and yet may be false philosophy. The substance of the material body could do nothing for our souls: the substance of the divine humanity can be present to our souls alone. So it seems to many of the faithful. INTRODUCTi&O7, ixxid first general council to this unabroken chainl of the spiritual lightning, ever present to illumine in the decisions and to scathe in the anathemas of the Church-when I read, that on this articulated con.tinz~uuns which evacuated the time whl ich it measured, and reduced it to a powerless accitdent, a mere shadldow- fiom tI;e:carnal nature intercepting the light, a shadow thalt existed only fbr the eye of flesh, between which and the luminary ithe carnal nature intervened, so that every Bishop of the true Chutllh, speaking in and from the Spirit. might say,' Befbre Peter was, or Paul, I an1?."* —Well — Let all this pass for the poetry of the claims of the Bishops to the same Spirit, and, consequently, to the sanme authority as the Apostles, unfoitunately for the clairmn, enouglh of the vwritings of Bishops, ay, and of canonized Bishops too, are extant tso enable us to appreciate it and to know and feel'the woful diffierence between the Spirit that guided the pen of Tertullian, Irenseus, Epiphanius,. &e. asld the Spirit by which John and Paul sp ke and wrote Descending into the cooler element of prose, I confine myself to the fact of an uninterrupted,succession of Bishops in each Church, and the apparent human.advantages consequent on such a -means of preserviing and handing down the memory of important events and the steadfast form,of sound word.s,-and when I find it recorded that on this fact the Fathers of the Nicene Council grounded their main argument eagainst the Arians, &c., I can not help finding a great and perplexing difficulty in the entire absence of all definite Tradition concernitng the composition and delivery of the Gospels." He then goes on to -suggest a solution. of this perplexity. Xoscitu.r a sociis is a maxim very generally applied f we trust and love those who honor Awhom we honor. conllermn whom we ~ Afe ter describing Episcopal succession ns a "fixed outward mean by ~rh.ich the identity of the visib!e Church, as c -ordinl- -te with the written Word, is preserved, as the identity of an individual mamn is symbolized by the continuous reproduction of the same bodily orga.is," as, " mcore thanl t.his, not rmverely one leading symbol of permn anent visibility, but a co-efficient in every other," my brother says, "Yet it must be exanmined aceorcling to this idea. I dare not affect to think of it, in older to r ender it intelligible and persuasive to faithless and mechanical mindlcs, as of a mere physical continuity, by which the spiritual powers of the pastorate, are conveyed, liice a stream of electricity alolng a metal wire." My brother had never seen the passage from my Father's MS. Remains vwhich I have given in the text when he wrote this, and I believe it to be a perfect co-incidence. VOL. III, D Ixxiv INTRODUCTION. disapprove. My Father's affectionate respect for Luther is enough to alienate from him the High Anglican party, and his admiration of Kant enough to bring him into suspicion with the anti-philosophic part of the religious world; —which is the whole of it except a very small portion indeed. My Father was a hero-worshiper in the harmless sense of Mr. Carlyle; and his worship of these two heroes, though the honors he paid to the one were quite different from those he offered to the other, was so deliberate and deep seated, that it must ever be a prominent feature on the face of his opinions. He thought the mind of Luther more akin to St. Paul's than that of any other Christian teacher, and I believe that our early divines, including Hooker and Field, would, not have suspected his catholicity on this score. Indeed it is clear to my mind that in Luther's doctrines of grace (no one has ever doubted his orthodoxy on the subject of the divine nature, but his doctrine of the dealings of God with man in the work of salvation), there is nothing which ever would mortally have offended High Churchmen, Romish or Anglican; that they tried to find heresy in these because of the practical consequences he drew from them to the discrediting and discomfiture of their spiritual polity. On the doctrine of Justification he has been represented as a mighty corrupter; let us see how and how far he differs on that subject from his uncompromising adversaries.* There are but three forms in which that doctrine can possibly be presented to the mind, I mean there are but three ways in which St. Paul's:* My authorities for the following statements are the Decrees and Canons of Trent, Luther's Commentary on Galatians, and [able TWlk, Bishop Bull's Harsmonia with his thick volume of replies to the censures of it, and Mvr. Newman's Lectures on Justication, all of which I have dwelt on a good deal. I have not yet read St. Augustine on the subject, but suspect from extracts, that his view was the same as Luther's so far as he developed it. Mr. Newman says in his Appendix-" I have throughout these remarks implied that the modern controversy on the subject of justification is not a vital one, inasmuch as all parties are agreed that Christ is the sole justifier, and that He makes holy those whom He justifies." Yet one who professed to hold Mr. Newman's religious opinions in general, could talk of Luther's doctrine as a doctrine too bad for devils to hold consistently, contrary to natural religion, corruptive of the heart and at war with reason. It should be remembered that the state of mind in the justified is precisely the samne in all the different schemes. The dispute is only about the name to be given to certain constituents of it; whether they are to be called justifying or only inseparable from, or the necessmry product of, the justifying principle. INTRODUCTION. lxxv justified by faith without the deeds of the law can be scientifically explained or translated into the language of metaphysical divinity; —namely ~he Tridentine, or that set forth by the Council of Trent,-the Anglican or High Church Protestant, set forth by Bishop Bull;-and that of Luther. Nay, I think that, really and substantially, there are but two, namely the Tridentine and High Anglican or doctrine of' justification by faith and works as the condition of obtaining it, and Luther's solifidianism or doctrine of justification by means of' faith alone,-a faith the necessary parent of works. All parties agree that God is the efficient, Christ, in His sacrifice, the mneritorzious cause of salvation: all profess this in wor'ds, all the pious of all the cli/fferenzt parties believe it in their hearts. The dispute is not about the proper cause of salvation, but only concerning the internal condition on our part, or what that is in ius whereon justification ensues,-which connects the individual man with the redemption wrought by Christ for all mnankind. Bull teaches that this link within us to the redemption without us is faith informed with love and works-faith quickened byr love and put forth in the shape of obedience. The Tridentine teaches, in like marnner, that we are justified directly upon our holiness and works wrought in us by the Spirit,-that faith and all other graces of which it is the root, are the condition of acceptance with God. Between this statement and Bull's I see no real difference at all; it is but the same thought expressed in different words. The Anglican chooses to add that our holiness and works, in order to be thus justifying, must be sprinkled with the blood of the covenant; the Tridentine declines that wellsounding phrase: perhaps he thinks it a tautology offensive to Him who forbade vain repetitions; and, for my own part, I can not think that his Saviour requires it of him, whatever divines may do. His anathemas against those who say either more or less than he says on these points are, in my opinion, the only anti-Christian part of his doctrine of justification. Drive the thing as far back as we may, still there must be something in us -in our very selves which connects us with salvation; it seems rather nonsensical to say that this is the blood of Christ. WIre should never have obtained this something without Him; He created it in us and to Him it tends; what more can we say without nullifying the human soul as a distinct being altogether, xxvi INTRODUTCTION. and thus slipping into the gulf of Pantheism in backing away from imaginary Impiety and Presumption? Even if with Luther we call Christ the form of our faith, and hence the formal cause of our salvation, still there' must be that in our very selves which at least negatively secures our union with him; to that we must come at last as the personal sine quaz non of justification, whether we call it the proximate cause, or interpose another (the Holy Ghost dwelling in our hearts by faith), betwixt ourselves and heaven. The Anglican may call our holiness inchoate and imperfect, and may insist that only as sanctified and completed by Christ's merits is it even the conditional cause of salvation; still this holiness, if it connects us with the Saviour or precludes the impediment to such connection is, in one sense, complete and perfect, for it does this all-important work perfectly; it is no slight matter, for it is all the difference between salvation and perdition, as being indispensable to our gaining the first and escaping the last. Now in what other sense can the Romanist imagine that our holiness is perfect and complete? Does he think that it is perfect as God is perfect, or that it is more than a beginning even in reference to that purity which human nature may finally attain when freed fiorn a temptable body and the clog of the flesh?: I am even bold enough to say, after all South's valiant feats against the windmill giant, Human Merit, that the dispute on this subject seems to me a mere dispute about words. That in us which even negatively (by preventing the prevention of it), unites us with Christ, may be said to deserve Christ, and hence to be unspeakably meritorious. The Romanist has declared that all the merit qf procuring salvation is in Ch-rist-surely then he only leaves to man —what no man should seek to deprive hini of,-the being rendered by the Holy Spirit a meet receptacle and worthy dwelling-place for Itself. As ibr grace of congruity and condignity-our Lord says that he who hath to him shall be given-does not this imply that he who hath grace deserves more, that it is clte to his internal condition raised and purified by the Holy Spirit? Or does this notion really interfere with * To call our inherent righteousness inchoate in reference to the power of jystifying would be incorrect, would it not' —for it is the beginning and end of what we contribute toward our salvation, and certainly not the commencement of what is done for us. INTRODUCTION. 1xxvii the Scriptural truth, that we are unprofitable servants, and in our best performances can do no more than we are 6ouenlZ to do?* Is it essential to the idea of deserving reward, that hoe who deserves should be the original author and source of the services by which he deserves it? If it be, then the langeuage of the Council cf Trent is incorrect; but its doctrine is not incorrect, because thile very same sentence which affirms the good works of the justified to be merits declares them previously to be gifts of God. Very indefensible is the next sentence which anathemnatizes him who calls them only signs of justification obtained and fears to add that they are merits. The Tridentine and the Anglican statements of Justification eMy Father says, " I am persuaded, that the practice of the Romish Church tendeth to make vain the doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ alone; but judging by her most eminent divines I can find nothing dissonaut fiom. the truth in her express decisions on this article. Perhaps it vould be safer to say:-Christ alone saves us, working in us by the faith which includes love and hope." "I neither do nor can think, that any pious member of the Church of Rome did ever in his heart attribute any merit to any work as being his work. A grievous error and a mischievous error there was practically in mooting the question at all of the condignity of works and their rewards." Remains, V. pp. 49, 50. Canons 24 and 32 of the 6th Session of the Council of Trent are given in a note at the foot of the page to be compared with this opinion. I think there is no harm in them; they affirm that the good works of the justified are both gifts of God and merits of the justified person himself, that they deserve increase of grace and eternal life. Now in the only sense in which a believer in the primary merits of Christ can mean to affirm this I do not see how any rational Christian can deny it. There is a notion connected with this subject, which is taught not only in the Romish schools, but I grieve to say in some of our own schools too of late years, which does seem to me both presumptuous and unseriptural; I mean the notion, that a man can do more in the way of good works and saintliness than he is bound to do as a Christian,-or at least that there is a kind and degree of holiness which some men may and ought to seek and obtain, which the generality of the faithful can not attain and ought not to strive after. This seems to me both false and fraught with corruptive consequences to religion. When Peter said to Ananias respecting his land, was it not thine own-in thine own power?-he surely did not mean that in offering it Ananias did more than he was bound to do, as a Christian before God, but only that, as he was not compelled to surrender it by any outward force or authority, his pretending to give and yet not giving the whole of it, was a gratuitous piece of hypocrisy-sonzething worse than a simple falsehood extorted by fear lxxviii INTRODUCTION. are tantamount to each other,-may be resolved into each other; but there is a thidcl way of stating the matter-between this and the other two there is perhaps a logical, though, I believe, no practical difference whatever. I allude to the notion of Luther that faith alone is that in us which connects us with Christ, and consequently is our sole personal righteousness (or that which entitles us to freedom from the penal consequences of sin); that faith justifies (in this conditional and instrumental way) in its owvn rigTht, not as infobrmed with or accompanied by or productive of love and works, but as apprehending Christ. Luther maintained that faith, although it is righteous and the necessary parent of righteous works, justifies only in bringing Christ to dwell in the heart,* and that the righteousness which flows from this inhabitation, is not our justification but the fruit of it, or in other words that faith not love is the justifying principle. Now Ithink it is a notable fact in favor of my Father's opinion that these different views are all but different aspects of the same truth, and are not substantially different one from another, that Mr. Newman's splendid work on justification, which is generally considered by the High Anglican party as an utter demolition of Luther's teaching in the Commentary, and perhaps was intended to be so, is, in fact, a tacit establishment of it. or at least of its most important position; since on this cardinal point, this hinge of the question, whether faith justifies alone, as uniting us with Christ, or as informed with love and works, and as itself a work and a part of Christian holiness,-he decides with Luther, not with Tridentines or High Anglicans.t For he expressly states that Faith does in one sense (the sense of uniting us with Christ, which is the same as Luther's sense), justify alone; that it is the " only inward instrument" of justification; that, as such inward instrument, it is one certain property, act, or habit of the mind, distinct from love and other graces,? not a mere name for them all; that there is I" a certain extraordinary and singular sympathy between Faith and the grant of Gospel privileges, such as to constitute it, in a true sense, an instrument of it, that is of justification, * Galatians ii. 3. 1 Lecture X. throughout p. 256-287.: Ib. pp, 258-9 —" When it (faith) is called the sole instrument of justification it must stand in contrast to them (trust, hope, etc.), and be contemplated in itself, as being one certain property, habit, or act of the mind." INTRODUCTION. lxxix which includes them all:" that "it alone coalesces with the sacraments, &c., and through them unites the soul to God."* Further he identifies his doctrine with that of our Homilies which declares that repentance, hope, love and the fear of God are shut out from the office of justifying.t It seems as if, while he contended against Luther, the Lutheran doctrine laid hold of him, and held hinm cand would not let hitn go, till it brought him home to its own habitation. Surely after all this IMr. Newman's apparent hostility to Luther, in the matter of justification, is a mere shadow-fight. He may dislike his tone and language, and disapprove some subordinate parts of his view, either as false or half true, but on the main point he has adopted the Reformer's doctrine; and his new lHarzonica, which was to be the ruin of solifidianism, is solifidian itself, in the only sense in which any systematic divine ever was so. It i true trhat, while thus embracing Luther, unwillingly, he tries to fling the old giant away from him, by declaring that he holds an antecedent external instrument, even Baptismn; that Baptism gives to faith all its justifying power. But this does not in reality separate him one hair's-breadth from his unhonored master. Luther held the doctrine of regeneration in baptism as well as himself; he bids men cling fast to their baptism, recur to it as to a ground of confidence, and in the comment on verse 2'7 of chapter iii. of Galatians, he speaks of the " majesty of baptism" as highly as the Highest Churchman could speak of it, at the same time observing " these things I have handled more largely in another place, therefbre I pass them over briefly here.": Luther lb. pp. 58-9, 270-7t, 286, 333. f Sermon of Salvation, Part i. $ Luther received baptismal regeneration as it had been handed down to aim; he taught that " the renewing of the inward manu is done in baptism." Would that he had been a reformer in this article also-had renewed the form of the doctrine, while he maintained its life and substance!-then probably disbelievers in "baptismal transubstantiation" would not have been disquieted by the wording of our Liturgy. Dr. Pusey did once cite Luther ia his Scriptueral Vietus, p. 28, as a witness to the true doctrine of regeneration in baptism; why is not this remembered by writers of Dr. Pusey's school when Luther's doctrine of justification is under review? Luther auglht indeed that men are born again of the Word of God, that the Holy Ghost changes the heart and mind by faith in or through the hearing of the external word; but if the sayings of St. Peter and St. Paul and St, James, affirnming the same thing, can be reconciled with inward re tXXX tINTRODUTAION. believed in baptismal regeneration and must therefore have believed that every spiritual principle in the soul was derived fiom it: lhe taught that faith was the work of the Spirit and that the Spirit -was given inl baptism: his soliifidianismr is not incolspatible with a sourmti belief on that subject, unless Mlr. NTewman's is so too, for they are one and the same. What Luther fought against was neot an external instrument of salvation preceding actual faith and producing it: he saw no ha.'rn i,: liic n" itiotn; what he Ifought against with all his heart aid soul and sztreno'thg Was j' tstifieatimcx by charity and the deed&s f0 charity, or wit is commlfonly ealied a good life. He saw that practically saisvatvion was givesn to outw-mard works anid money g'ifts, lwhich mig'ht uproceed from evil mr en, while, in theory, it;was ascribed to, love and tl1e wsor0ks oi f the Spirit. He thought to preclude this absSe a- d establish Scripture at the same time by declaring fait}s a.lone the means of salvation, and good workls the necessary oispring of faith in the heart. And how could such a docs;ine erncourage Atinomianism, for is it not plain, that if good r;voriks flow feies-riTy from savintg Gith, where the works are rnot good, tlhe mi"nd wvhence they spring can not have saving ftith?* This Luuther expressly states. "Whose obeyeth the flesh," says- he,'" and conotirnuetlh Nwitkhout any fear of Good or relnorse of conscience in accomplishing tihe- desires anld lusts thereof, let him know that he pertaineth riot unto Christ."t The whole strain of his commentary on chapters v. and vi. of Galatians is an utter shattering of Antinomianism, which indeed is precluded by the doctrine of the co`mtmetntary from begifnning to end. In one respect a Solifidian like Luther is a more effectual opponent to Antinormians than a teacher of justification by faith and works, because he more eonp'letely wrsJots out of their han:ds those sayings of St. Paul: which seem to dony that works of any sort do in lany sense justify. -Bat it is an insult to the apostolic man's memory to defend him fiorn the charge of Antinomianism. He knocked down with his little fin ger more Antinomianism than his accusers with both hands. If his doctrine is the jaw-bone of newal in baptism, so can Lut.her's, for he x ent not, beyolnd Scrlptur'e on this point. There are certainly comings of the Holy Spirit spoken of in the N. T. unconnected with baptismn. See amnong other places John xiv. 23,. * Burnet urges this plea for solifidians, though not-one himself, t{ OJmmntary- on Galatians, chap.'v,rsa l8 IiNTRODUCTION. lxxxi an ass, he must have been a very Samson, for he tur-led numbers with this instrument from the evil of their lives; and the same instrument in the hands of mere pigmies in c.iomparison with him has wrought more amendment of life amonog the Poor than the most eloquent and erudite preachers of works and rites have to boast, by their preaczing. For this doctrine presents hope and fear more sharply to the mind than any other; it supplies the steam of encouragement and propels from behind while it draws on from before. The following charges are brought against Luther. It has been said that he denied the power of Christians to fulfil the law or produce really good w-orks; that he denlied the use of conscience in keeping Christians from sin and wickedness; and that he separated justifying faith from love. That he denied the good works of Christians is just as true as that he denied the sun in heaven. He beautifully compares them to stars in the night, the night and darkness of surrounding unjustification; and beautifully too does he say, that even as the stars do not mzlake heaven, but only trbim, and adorn it, so the charity of works does not constitute blessedness but mrakes it shine to the eyes of men, that they may gloiify the Father of Lights.* That Luther denied the work of the Spirit to be really good is one of the many charges against him which sound loud and go off in smoke. He considered them relatively good, just as any man else does,-saw a wide world of difference betwixt the deeds of the justified and of the unjustified. If he thought that, as sin remains in the best men, so likewise something of human infirmity cling;s about the best deeds, who shall convict him of error? That he denied any portion or quality of real goodness to be in the soul in which Christ lives, I can not find and do not believe. But when Luther said that because our righteousness is imperfect, therefore it can not be the ground of acceptance with God, he drew, in my opinion, a wrong infbrence from his premiss. Our faith is as imperfect as our works;.but if it unites us with Christ, it is (not of course the deepest ground, Christ alone is that), but the intermediate ground or condition of our acceptance. The question is, shall we call faith alone, or faith, love, obedience, all Gospel graces, the " connecting bond" between us and Christ? If faith alone, then faith alone is our " Table Talk, chap. xiv. p. 2322 lxxxii INTRODUCTION. intermediate ground of acceptance; and repentance, love and obedience are not excluded because they are imperfect, but because of their posteriority to faith. That Luther denied the power of Christians to fulfil the law is the self-same charge in another shape and false in that shape as in the other. He reiterates that the faithful do fulfil the law and that they alone fulfil it; that by faith they receive the Holy Ghost and then accomplish the law.* "1 I come with the Lord Himself," says Luther; " on Him I lay hold, Him I stick to, and leave works unto thee: which notwithstanding thou never didst." He shows that against the righteous there is no law, because he is a law to himself. " For the righteous," says he, " liveth in such wise that he hath no need of any law to admonish or constrain him, but without constraint of the law, he willingly doeth those things which the law requireth."t What more would we have a teacher of the Gospel say? Ought a Christian to perform the law unwillingly by a force from without? Luther teaches that in the justified there is an inward law superseding the outward: that the outward law remains, but only for the sinner: that it either drives him to Christ or bridles him in his carnality. This is the idea expressed in that passage at the end of the introduction to his commentary, which sets forth the argument of the Eluistle. "When I have this righteousness reigning in my heart, I descend from heaven, as the rain maketh fruitful the earth: that is to say, I come forth into another kingdom, and I do good works how and whensoever occasion is ofiered." What is there in this that is worthy of condemnation or of sarcasm? Is it not true Pauline philosophy to * Comm. Gal. v. 23. + Mr. Ward thinks the Commentary on the Galatians such a "silly" workl Shakspeare has been called silly by Puritans, Milton worse than silly by Prelatists and Papists, Wordsworth was long called silly by Bonaparteans; what will not the odium theologiceum or politizcwm find worthless and silly? To me, perhaps firom my silliness, his Commentary appears the very Iliad of Solifidianism; all the fine and striking things that have been said upon the subject are taken from it; and if thie author preached a novel doctrine, or presented a novel development of Scripture in this work, as Mr. Newman avers, I think he deserves great credit for his originality. The Commentary contains, or rather is, a most spirited Siege of Babylon, and the friends of Rome like it as well as the French like Wellington and the battle of Waterloo. INTRODUCTION. lxxxiii say, that the realm of outward works is another kingdom from the realm of grace?-that the true believer is freed from the compulsion of the law? —to call the sum of outward things and all deeds, considered as outward, the Flesh? To me this animated passage seems the very teaching of the Apostle to the Gentiles uttered with a voice of' joy. It is the unconfusing intoxication of Gospel triumph and gladness. Some say mocking, The man isfull of new wine; but Luther was not really drunk when he spoke thus; he spoke it in the noonday of his vigorous life, with all his wits, and they were sound ones, about him.* It is affirmed that Luther denied the use of conscience in religion, and this is the grand engine which Mr. Ward brings to bear upon him in his Ideal; you would think from the account of the Gospel hero's doctrine therein contained that he was a very advocate for unconscientiousness, and would have men go on sinning that grace may abound; would have them " wallow and steep in all the carnalities of the world, under pretence of Christian liberty," and continue withouat any fear of God or remorse of conscience in accomplishing the desires of the flesh; or at least that his teaching involved this: I wonder how men can have the conscience to write thus of Luther on the strength of a few misconstrued passages, while the broad front of his massive fortress of Gospel doctrine, a stronghold against Antinomianism, must present itself to their eyes unless they are stone blind.t Luther * Mr. Newman points out that fine passage on faith in Gal. ii. 16, and 334 Paulus his verbis, &c. and he quotes that admirable exposition of his on "incarnate faith or believing deeds," in Gal. vii. 10, in which he brings in the analogy of the Incarnation. f I have read Mr. Ward's Ideal with so much interest, and, I humbly hope, benefit, that I am far more grieved by the chapter on Justification than if the writer were a narrow, stupid, uncharitable man. I have heard persons say it was the clever palt of the book; the whole of the book is clever, but this part has no other merit than cleverness, and that is a sorry commendation of a discourse upon morals and religion: as the author himself would readily admit in general. It is the force with which he has made this and other cognate truths apparent, the way in which he has vitalized and, to use Luther's phrase, "engrossed" them, for which I have to thank him. But he special-pleads against Luther, and in a way which no pleader could venture upon in a court of Justice. He presents his doctrines upside down-wrong side before. If we tear up the rose-tree and place it root upward, with all its blossoms crushed upon the earth, where are its beauty lxsxxiv INTRODUCT'ION. teaches that the constraints and terrors of the law remain-to keep the flesh in subjection; what he says concerning conscience relates to sins that are past, riot sins to come. He exhorts men to lay hold of Christ: not to let the sense of their ungodliness which aioretime they bnave committed make them dcoubt of' his power to save them and purify their souls by the Holy Spirit. His reasons for illsisting on this doctrine are obvious; it was to prevent men from trusting for the washing out of sin to penance, the fearfil abuse, or rather u se, of which he had witnessed. His doctrine is, that in those who are in a state of grace through a living faith, the flesh rermlains, and is to be bruised, exercised, and kept downi by the Law,-(be it observed, that by the Law, he always means the Law viewed carnally or as a force from without) —while the spirit rejoices in God its Saviour, the conscience sleeping securely on the bosom of Christ. And surely, so far as we can contemplate rmfan in a. state of grace at all, having firm faith in the Redeemer and His power to save, he must be contemplated as free and its fragrance?-if we take the mirror and turn its leaden side to the spectator, where are its clear reflections and its splendor? By-the-bye, it struck me that M r. Ward, in his searches for Socinianism, after he had done demonizing the doctrine of Luther, slipped himself into something like heresy on the humann nature of our Lord. His words seemed (seem, for there they are still) to imply that our Saviour had not, while upon earth, a human mind as w, ell as a human body. He introduces the Godhead into the M'lanhood, so as to destroy, as it seems to me, the character of the latter. Certainly Pearson and South, who were ever held orthodox on the Incarnation, and good Patricians, teach that our Lord, while upon earth, had the " finite understanding" of a man; that he " stooped to the meanness of our faculties;" and indeed it is evident from the language of the Evangelists, that they supposed rnim to arrive at the knowledge of ordinary things in an ordinary way: to have groiwn in wisdpim and knowledge, an expression not applicable to Omnipotence. If He foreknew all that was to happen to him in one matter, so Abraham and Isaiah foreknew the future. Doubtless He knew far more of the mind of God than they, even as a man. Perhaps Mr. Ward was led to this error, as I believe it to be, from following too heedlessly certain remarks of the Tract for the Times against Jacob Abbott. But surely it is a great and fundamental error to deny by implication, the real humanity of our Lord-that he assumed the very soul of man; which he must have done in order to redeem it;;-a worse error than that of the Phantasmists, who denied hlis fleshly body. How he could be very God and very Man at the same time, is an inscrutable mystery, but no less than this is the Catholic Faith of the Incarnation, and to deny it is the heresy of Apollinaris. Shall " CathoMlic" rationalize away a mystery I INTRODUCTION. lxxxv and joyful, confident of salvation notwithstanding the infirmity of his mortal nature, not paralyzed by the Law in the conscience or agonized by a fearful looking back upon sinrs that are past. Surely the conscience may sleep on the bosom of Christ, if it be really His bosom on which it is resting; that is, if' we know that upon the whole our heart is set upon the things that are above we may safely cast our eye forward, in peace and gladness, hoping and. striving through grace to live better from day to day; not backward -upon the detail of our past transgressions, with a soulsubduing solicitude to balance theim by penance exactly proportionecl to their anmount. Luther affirmed that we must malke a god of the law out of the conscience, but that in the conscience it is a very devil. Doubtless he had seen fatal effects of the tyranny of the law in the conscience, had seen how, like the basilisk's eye, it benumbed the gazer, and prevented him from flying at once to Christ for pardon and purification and power to follow His steps; how it threw him into the hands of the priest, who, in those days, too often, instead of preaching faith in the Saviour and fulfilment of the law by faith, prescribed a certain set of outward observances, which never could take away sins, but which the terrified yet unrepentant spirit rested in, and substituted for general renovation. Looking at the law in this point of' view he called it with great force and truth the very diabolzus, the malignant accuser, who by its informations and treacherous representations kept the soul separate and estranged from the Prince of Life. Bunyan has worked upon this thought powerfully in the Pilgrim's Progress, and he too makes the murderous Moses give way to Christ when He appears, and " depart out of the conscience." " Luther," says Mr. Newman, contrasting him with the ancient Father, declares that " the Law and Christ can not dwell together in the heart; Augustine, that the Law is Christ." Weil! but what Law? Surely not the outward Law, which St. Paul declares dead for the Christian,* which Luther declares incompati* I know not whether there remains upon the face of the earth any of that generation of Scripture interpreters, who were wont to affirm, that, when St. Paul declared the law dead, he meant only the ceremonial law of Moses I That such people existed in Bishop Bull's time seems clear from his taking the pains to refute the notion methodically. See Harmonia, cap. vii. DiGs Post. Oxford edit. vol. iii. 120-21. lxxxvi INTRODUCTION. ble with Christ, but the inward law, " the law of grace, the law of the law, the law of liberty, righteousness, and, everlasting life," which Luther identifies with Christ from first to last of his evangelical commentary. Luther's language on the exceeding difficulty of believing unto salvation, on the relics of sin that cling even to the justified, does but show how searchingly, how earnestly he looked on these subjects-how hard he zwas to be pleased in matters that pertain to justification. Perhaps he should have taught more distinctly that all men are sinners, and require the coercions of the law more or less. Still it was but the remnants of sin which Luther spoke of; when he said, prospectively, that sin should not be imputed to the justified."* His fault as a teacher was that he stuck too close to Scripture in his mode of expression, and repeated without explanation, or imitated too closelyr, its strong figurative language. But this doctrine of his that the enormity of sin must not make the sinner despair, is no figure; it is literal Gospel truth. Though you~r sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow. Did Luther in all his strong language on the power of faith, that is of Christ dwelling in the heart by faith, go beyond this glad message of salvation? Blessed be his name for the courage wherewith he re-proclaimed a saving truth, which a selfserving, self-exalting clergy were putting out of sight-were hiding by the complicated superstructure of outward ways and means, which they erected upon it! Luther's a lax system!No man will find it such who tries to understand and practise rather than to criticize it. But the grand charge against Luther's doctrine remains behind. He is said to have separated saving faith from love.-' * See Commentary, chap. xi. ver. 17. "But it followeth not therefore that thou shouldst make a light matter of sin, because God doth not impute it;" and many other places in the Commentary. f Mr. Newman in Lecture XI. argues that faith is not a virtue or grace in its abstract nature, that it is "but an instrlment, acceptable when its possessor is acceptable." Faith apart from love is not a virtue, but this seems to be no proof that it is not a distinct grace; faith is not mere belief, though it includes belief; no one in common parlance would say, that he had faith in that which he merely believed. Faith is of the heart, not of the head only, or it is not faith. Nor can I think that it " differs from other graces" in that " it is not an excellence except it be grafted into a heart that has grace." Love, humility, meekness are all in the same case; abstract INTRODUCTION. lxxxvii The anti-Lutherans are never weary of harping upon this string. Having failed to convict him of Antinomianism on one side-the denial of good works to Christians, they try to thrust it upon him on the other,-to find it in his definition of faith. But after all where has he said, speaking analytically, that saving faith exists apart from love as a mere habit of the mind? "Luther confesses, in so many words," says Mr. Newman, "that the faith that justifies is abstract fides as opposed to concrete, in Gal. iii. 10." But if we look at Gal. iii. 10, 1 think we shall find, that by abstract faith as opposed to concrete he meant faith considered as a spiritual principle in opposition to faithful zvork.s, and that by iorkcs he meant not mere acts of the mind but outward actions. This is quite evident from his language, from the whole strain of his argument, and from all his illustrations. Let the reader, if he cares about the matter, look and see. Referring to firom these their direction, their object, and you leave a caput rnortuzm of mere human feeling. Love of God is excellent; love of man for God's sake, is excellent; but the mere adhesion of the soul to a certain object has no excellence in it. So humility, as a low estimation of ourselves is not necessarily virtuous; it is only a virtue when it arises from a clear view of our relations to divine perfection,-a clear view of the relative goodness of others, which the mists of self-love and pride are apt to conceal from our sight. Have we any natural good acts or habits of mind; do not all our affections require to be raised and purified by divine grace before they can be acceptable? To say the contrary is Pelagianism. Love is as little a virtue without faith as faith without love, for no man can love as Christ commands except he believe in God. It is not easy, indeed, to define Faith as a property of the will; but who can define primary feelings? Consistently with the notion that Faith, in its abstract nature, is only Belief, Mr. Newman denies that it is to be identified with Trust: Yet surely Faith and Trust are only different attitudes of the same habit, the difference being in the tense or time of the habit. Faith believes that there is an Infinitely Good Being, and that he is good to us: Trust believes that he will be good to us. The devils believe; but they have not religious faith: for this bieds us to its object. No man owes fealty except for benefit and protection. It is unwise to separate the idea of love of God or faith in Him from that of advantage to ourselves; they are reciprocal and co-inherent; the love of God is its own reward, its firuition union with Him. Mr. Newman teaches that faith in its own abstract nature is no grace; that it is merely such a sense of the spiritual as belongs to the devils; that union with love and all the graces of a religious spirit alone makes it virtuous; my Father looked upon Faith as that in the owill which correspoads to belief in the understanding; he thought that faith includes belief, but is more than belief; that it is a grace distinct from love though inseparable from it. lxxxviii INTRODUCTIOiN. the 11th chapter of Hebrews, he speaks of David who slew Goliath. The sophister, says he looks upon nothing but the outward appearance of the work; but we must consider what manner of person David was before he did this work-that he was a righteous man, beloved of God, strong and constant in faith. Luther could hardly have thought that David was without love" when he was beloved of God. Mr. N. represents it as a monstrous extravagance~ in the Reformer to teach that faith justifies before and iwithout charity. Yet it is evident enough, and must have been plain as noon-day to simple hearers, that when Luther speaks'of charity he speaks of this virtue-as it is manifested in the outwvard and visible course of life. Works he described as the bright children of salvation not the parents of it. He insisted that a man must believe in God before he could perform godly actions, must lay hold on Christ before he could walk as a Christian. His commentary is practical, popular, and highly rhetorical in form, not scientific, though I think that every word of it may be scientifically defended. Where does he say that justifying faith, apart from love,-faith in the shape of bare belief, such as devils may have,-comes first, lays hold of Christ, and then becomes the parent of all graces? He merely explains the saying of St. Paul, that by faith we have access to grace. His doctrine amounts to no more than what Mr. Newman himself confesses when he calls faith the "-sole inward instrument of justification." That pale phantom of justifying faith, which flits about, a mere outline, a line without breadth or thickness, is not to be found in Luther's pages, but only in the pages of Luther's adversaries. Nor knew he aught of that other meagre shadow, justification by imputed righteousness alone;t he said that those three things, Faith, Christ, and imputation should always go together, and * That Luther never " renounced" any of his " extravagances" directly or "indirectly," early or late, is a point strongly insisted on by Archdeacon Hare, in note W, pp. I12-13. His extravagances were strictly within the bounds of Scripture. t Mr. N. does not give this, I believe, to Luther, but calls it the high Protestant doctrine. High indeed in the heaven of absurdity. It should be sent to Milton's Limbo with a living Faith apart in time JfromI Love-and should not Mr. Newman's own Justification precedent to justifying Faith, go along with them? Indeed I think this last is the Queen Chimaera of the whole tribe. INTRODUCTION. Lxkxixx that faith and works should never be separated.* - They who say that Luther's scheme presents but half of the Gospel, know but half of his mind, and that not rightly.t Surely no one can think that the sentences quoted in the Lectures on Justification at p. 10, from Luther's Commentary, contain any proof that he thought or taught that "justifying faith is without love when it justifies," which Mr' N. declares to be plainly his doctrine, and " no matter of words." Luther, in themn, shows that faith not love is the root of good works, since Paul said Faith worketeih by Love, not Love worketh; he shows that charity or following works do not inform faith, that is, do not impart to it its justifying power, but that faith informs charity, and is " the sun or sunbeam of this shining." What is this more than Mr. N. himself asserts in Lecture X. when he teaches that faith, as faith, in its distinct character, unites the soul with God, or as he expresses it elsewhere, is "the only connecting bond between the soul and Christ." I say again, that everywhere in the Commentary Luther connects charity with works and the outward life, and nowhere describes justifying faith as existing apart fronm the habit of love. His doctrine on this point is merely an expansion of St. Anstin's sound maxim: per fider (hominem) posse justijicai'i etianasi Legis operaz non, prcecesse* The confusion respecting the priority of justifying faith to love perhaps arises in this way. Faith includes belief, or the mere assent of the understanding to divine truth; though it is more than belief; and intellectual assent or perception is the means whereby we obtain the faith of the heart, which is joined w-ith love. The one may not indeed precede the other in time; we may perceive the truth and embrace it spiritually at the saime noment; the willingness of the heart clearing the head and the head opening the heart; still there is a priority of faith to love in idea. Fides est Ihumane sa7ltis miti/zm, faudarlnet'em et radix oennis j'stificationis, says the Council of Trent. The Homily of Salvation shuts out love from the office of justifying; why is this, except that faith is conceived to have come first and done the work. Of course we make the notion both absurd and mischievous,:if we suppose that justification is obtained by some one act of f5ibh once acted. Faith is always coming first in the soul of the Christian, laying hold of Christ (or in Mr. Newman's words, uniting the soul to God), and producing good works. f Luther preaches the whole Gospel with an emphasis on particular parts to suit the exigencies of the day. So in our Tracts for the 7'imes there is an emphasis on sacraments, outward works, all kinds of ecclesiastical visibilities, and whatever can be brought forward relative to priestly poower and authority. x0 INTRODUCTION. rint; sequuntur enim, justificatumn non prcecedunt justificandumr. (Quoted by Mr. N. himself, p. 438.) Mr. Newman has beautifully described Luther's conception of justifying faith in his first Lecture. It was then perhaps that he fell in love with it, though he did not tell his love at the time, but acted the lover in Lecture X. taking it for better for worse. I hope he will never divorce it. Yes! Luther thought of' faith as the mere turning or adhering of the soul to Christ, which " may be said" not " by a figure of speech" but literally and truly to "live in Him in whose image it rests." He thought that love lost itself in the object, Christ dwelling in the soul; that love of our neighbor, charity, and all the family of outward works, when set up as our justification or a part of it, were as a solid screen betwixt us and the Saviour, while the former was a medium like the fluid air, colorless and transparent. St. Paul's language in the fo;rth of Romans prima facie favors Luther's view, because it so pointedly calls faith our righteousness, as if' we had no other justifying principle within us; and declares salvation to be of grace not of debt, and if it were obtained, even in a conditional sense, by our virtues, it would seem to be in some sort our due. But, on second thoughts, we perceive that what is true of faith may be safely ascribed to the sanctification that is one with it, and that salvation is of grace if secured by the graces given us from. above. St. Paul's only object was to show that men can not save themselves, and Luther's only object was to prevent the practical recurrence of this trust in self-salvation by detached and outside performances. The great opponent of Luther, on the article of Justification, agrees with him on the following points, which, I think, are all the points of this high game. First, in holding Christ living in the heart to be the true fbrin of our righteousness. This is the idea which is at the bottom of his whole theory, and it is very distinctly set fbrth in the comments on chap. ii. verses 16 and 20.* Secondly, in holding faith to be the sole inward instru* Mr. Newman gives him credit for this, in Lecture I. p. 22, and appendix, pp. 405 and 409,-" the bold, nay correct language of Luther, that Christ himself is theforma of our justification." —My Father's deep satisfaction in this thought may be seen from the following passage in the Remains, V. p. 289. " And I, my loving Brentius, to the end I may better understand this INTRODUCTION. xci ment by which the conjunction of the soul with Christ is effected. That Christ dwells in the heart by faith is directly affirmed in Scripture.* Thirdly, in holding works necessary,t in the order of salvation, as necessarily flowing from saving faith or rather from the Holy Ghost, united by faith with the soul, and the proper signs and manifestations of grace "impetrated by faith." Fourthly, in holding that the outward law for the righteous is superseded by the inward law of the mind, though it remains to keep the flesh in subjection. Fifthly, which might have been firstly, that saving faith is itself produced by the Holy Ghost.1 Sixthly, that the Holy Ghost is given, and the soul renewed, in baptism. Seventhly, that conversion is wrought, and I suppose I may add, since " St. James says so," and St. Peter too, that we are divinely begotten or born again, in some spiritual sense, by the Word of God. Wherein then do they differ? why truly in this. Luther denies that we are justified by the graces and works that flow out of our justification; Mr. Newman affirms that we are justified by them, that they help to justify together with the faith which makes themn what they are. This appeared to Luther a hysteron proteron; and it certainly does look like a contradiction in Mr. Newman's scheme, that after confessing faith to be the sole inward instrument of justification he should call graces and works instruments also;-that after agreeing. with the Homilist to shut them out from the office of justifying, he should think it essential case, do use to think in this manner, namely, as if in my heart were no quality or virtue at all, which is called faith, and love (as the Sophists do speak and dream thereof, but I set all on Christ, and say, my formalis juslitia, that is, my sure, my constant and complete righteousness (in which is no want nor failing, but is, as before God it ought to be) is Christ my Lord and Saviour." (Luther's Table Talk, p. 213.) "Aye! this, this is indeed to the purpose. In this doctrine my soul can find rest. I hope to be saved by faith, not by my faith, but by the faith of Christ in me.'' S. T. C. * Gal. ii. 20. Eph. iii. 17. 1 Commentary, chap. iii. verse 11, and elsewhere, Luther teaches that the righteousness which saves is a passive r'ighteousness given us fiom above. Had he taught that we were saved by faith, as an act of our own taking us to Christ and laying hold of Him, this would have been as false and injurious as to ascribe salvation- to outward works. The faith which accepts grace is itself the effect of grace. I Ib. chap. iii. verses 27, 28. Chap. iv. verse 6. sc-ii INTRODUCTION. to a sound belief —to shut them in again. Granted that the dispute is a verbal one, still if we decide that one fbrm of words is the correct form, we surely ought not to adopt another form which directly contradicts it. As for St. James, when he said that man is not justified by faith alone, he evidently meant by faith not what Luther defines it, a gift and a present of God in our hearts, the substan[ce whereof is our will,* but what Antinomians inean. by it, mere belief; for this is a common art of rhetorical argument to adopt the adversary's expressions and turn them against him. With him works stood for a working spirit, by that common figure which puts the effect for the cause, as a man might say, this " spring was health to me," meaning the cause of health. The outvwaG'd act of Abraham was nothing; in the mindl of Abraham were an act of faith and an act of obedience intimately united. Now Luther taught that theffaith in this joint act alone justified; and Mr. N. seems to say the same, when he calls faith the sole inward instrument of justification. Luther's opponents maintain, that the obedience, which is one with the faith, helps to justify, and this iMr. Newman affirms also: but how can he make it consist with the sole instrumentality of faith? Surely that which alone joins us to Christ alone justifies us. Now Mr. Newman declares that faith is "the only instrument or connecting bond between the soul and Christ." What signifies it, as against Luther, to say, that according to St. James, we are "justified in good works?" Luther only denied that we are justified by them. Mr. Newman has a great objection to Luther's explanatory phrase apprehensive; he will not say that faith justifies by laying hold of Christ and applying Him to the soul, though this is said in our Homilies, with which lhe yet seeks, in his work on Justification, to be in accordance. He calls this way of speaking a human subtlety and alleges that such words are not in Scripture: yet surely there is quite as much of human subtlety and * Table Talk, chap. 13. Of Faith, and the cause thereof. Luther was vacillating in his definiticns of faith, for he sometimes placed it in the understanding and sometimes in the will, whereas it is in both; but he always described it as a work of the Holy Ghost (Conmm. chap. iii. ver. 11), he calls it a believing with the heart, and he declares that it can not be separated from Hope which resteth in the will, the two having respect to the other, as the two cherubims of the mercy-seat, which could not be divided. My Father says he discoursed best on Faith in his Postills. Re7mains, V. p. 290. INTRODUCTION, xciii extra-scriptural language in his own scheme: where can we find it said by the Saviour or his Apostles, that faith is " but the secondary or representative instrument of justification," or its "sustaining cause," "not the initiation of the justified-state," or that "' it justifies as including all other graces in and under it,"' as having " an unexplained connection with the invisible world," or five hundred sayings of like sort? These are but inferences from Scripture-not Scripture itself. Luther's term laying hold of Christ seems to me a mere translation into figurative language of what Scripture repeatedly affirms, namely that Christ dwells in the heart by faith; and the very same thing appears to be implied in Mr. N.'s own admission that it alone unites the soul to God as the inward instrument of justification. Even if faith and works of faith are all one and what is true of the parent is true of the offspring, still if Christ alone is the meritorious cause of salvation, our personal righteousness justifies as connecting us with Him, that is as apprehensive, and not merely as purifying our souls in his sight. Luther denied that it justified in the latter sense at all and whether he was right or wrong in this,this is the doctrine of our Articles and Homilies, which certainly intimate that not the faithful work, but faith in the work justifies, by laying hold on Christ. They who condemn his teaching in the present day, copy his only fault, unfairness to his opponents-casting into one condemnation practical perverters with theoretic teachers-while they hide all his merits behind a bushel. Many of Luther's opponents remind one of Jack the Giantkiller's doughty host, they think they are belaboring Jack, while they are but beating a stuffed bolster. Mr. Newman is too skilful a combatant for this; but his fight against Luther is not more effectual; he keeps gazing at him with a look of deep hostility, but rather makes feints than really strikes him, and when he does aim a stroke at the old swordsman it descends upon his shield or his breast armor. There is one point in Mr. Newman's scheme, and one alone, which seems to me utterly false, not in words alone but in sense: I mean his assertion that justification precedes justifying faith; that faith does but take up and sustain a spiritual state already established in the soul; that the faith which is our access to ggrace is unjustified and unjustifying; contrary to the doctrine of Aquinas who teaches that the Spirit produces its own recipient, that it enters by the avenue of faith -B* xciv INTRODUCTION. which it first opens out. Luther's own view of baptism implies as much undoubtedly, and it seems to me that he is wrong in too much agreement with Patrician theology not in too much departure from it. As for the Apostolic teaching, I believe that it is quite on one side of these contentions; that the object of St. Paul was to refute Judaism, the notion that men can save themselves by the mere direction and compulsion of an outward law, without Christ in the heart; not to combat such an opinion as Bishop Bull's or that set forth in the Council of Trent; that the object of St. James was to put down Antinomianism, not such a Solifidian view as Luther's. I believe these inspired teachers would have assented to the statement of either party, and when they heard each confess Christ crucified and salvation by His merits, would have inquired no further. It is grievous to hear Christians accuse each other of irreligion and impiety on such grounds as their different views on this question.* " Satanic influence!" cry the parties one against another:- as if Satan was simple enough to spend his time in weaving webs of justification! The nets with which he catches souls are of' very different make and materials.t It was not these bubbles which my Father was thinking of' when he called " Luther, in parts, the most evangelical writer he knew after the apostles and apostolic men;" it was the depth of his insight into the heart of man and into the ideas of the Bible, the fervor and reality of his religious feelings, the manliness and * Bishop Bull observes that there is but the difference of a qua and a quac between his view and the Solifidian, when you come to the bottom of the latter; but is it not strange that he should ridicule the Lutheran because he fights fiercely for quac (the opinion that faith alone which worketh by love justifies), yet fight himself for qua (the opinion that faith inasmuch as it worketh by love justifieth), as if the safety of the Church depended on the decision. I think if he had fought with Luther himself instead of certain narrow-minded disciples of Luther's school, he would have been brought to see that the Solifidian statement was at least as good as his own. If quce can be wrested into Antinomianism more easily than qua, on the other hand qua more readily slips into Judaism than qua. f Either the Romanist or the Lutheran doubtless may add to his belief of Redemption by the merits of Christ what overthrows or overshadows it, in practice. But these practical falsehoods and heresies do not appear in formal schemes of Justification; let them be hunted out and exposed, but not confounded with theories and confessions of faith. INTRODUCTION. xcv tenderness of his spirit, the vehement eloquence with which he assails the Romish practical fallacies and abuses. He even contends with Luther when he lays too much stress on his Solifidian dogma, the exclusion of charity from the office of justifying; and on the certainty and perpetuity of faith in the elect preferred the notions of' Hooker to those of the earlier assertor of faith,* Perhaps it may be objected to Luther's teaching, that he does not expressly enough distinguish between the ideal and the actual, the abstract and the realized. Luther declares, after St. Paul, that the outward law remains for the outward man, is dead for the spiritual man; but in actual men and wornen the carnal and spiritual exist together in different proportions. If any Christian on the face of the earth should apply to himself without reserve what St. Paul and what Luther say of the spiritual man, he will fall into spiritual error of the deepest kind. There have been great disputes whether St. Paul in the viiit' chapter of Romans, and in Galatians v. 19, refers to the state of the justified or the unjustified. The disputants never seemed to ask themselves whether it appeared on the face of St. Paul's teaching, that he divided the world into the justified and unjustified, the regenerate and unregenerate, as the shepherd divideth the sheep from the goats, after the manner of modern schools. But surely to suppose, that in describing those contests between the flesh and the spirit, he spoke of the absolutely unjustified, of persons in the main under the dominion of sin, and of them exclusively, is further from the truth than Luther's interpretation, namely, that the desires of the flesh will remain even in those who are believers unto salvation, and for the most part are walking in the light. There was a tendency in his time to understand fleshly desires of sensuality alone. He set himself to combat this notion and to show, that though one set of vices might be wholly kept down in this life, the flesh was never wholly subdued. Again in Luther's language, copied from the Scripture, the flesh sometimes is to be understood in a neutral sense, and means the sum of outward things-that "other kingdom" distinct from the kingdom * Reminans, V. p. 288; His views on this subject are given in his note on Fenelon, Remains, V. p. 527 —in the notes on a Sermon of Hooker's, Ib. p. 47-on Donne, p. 91 —on Luther's TIrble Talk, lb. p. 269-on A Barrister's Hints, p. 464-on The Pilgrim's Progress, p. 252 —and in his Essay on Faith, V. p. 657. XCevi INTROD UCTION. of grace. This way of speaking offended Romanists, who were bent on exalting the outward. They sought to christen the whole visible creation, and I think they introduced flesh and blood too much into the kingdom of heaven. These were practical points, though'they seemed to be theory, and Luther's sins against Rome were of a practical description. His rationale of grace never made Catholic divines his fierce opponents. As for the " heroic mnan's" rhetorical atrocities, his " tigerlilies" of speech, as my Father called them, they are all capable of an innocent meaning at least; they are but "sheep in wolves' clothing," silly sheep enough perhaps, yet harmless to the persons to whom they were addressed, who took them as they were meant, knowing the speaker's mind at large. Now, adversaries of Lutheranism take up these spent rockets, and fling them into the arena of religious contention — of course they look black and smell sulphureously. What makes the host of Catholic divines a host of enemies to Luther, is his enmity to the mediseval Church system with all the net-work and ramification of doctrine developed for the temporal advantage of the clergy-all the branchery of mystic beliefs and superstitious practices, works, vows, religious abstinences, self-tortures, which supported, —all the mummeries rehearsed by Hans Sachs in his XNachtigall, which adorned, this clerical polity —his determination that men should read the Word of God itsef, though with every help to the understanding of it-his determination, powerfully carried out, to simplify the access of the soul to God, —not to make the narrow a broad way, as, in common with St. Paul, he is falsely reported, but a straight and short passage, though a passage through which no man could squeeze the bloated body of licentiousness-to batter down fbr as many as possible that labyrinth of priestly salvation, in the mazy windings of which the timid and tender-Conscienced wander weary and distressed, while for the worldling and careless liver there lies a primrose path outside its gloomy walls, through which, if he will pay for salvation, he may saunter pleasantly to a better world; with many a short cut, such as Milton describes,* and which my Father, when he visited Sicily, "And they, who to be sure of Paradise, Dying, put on the weeds of Dominick, Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised." Par. Lost, B. ii~. 1. 4$8. 1NTRODUCTiON, xe vii knew, as other sojourners in Roman Catholic countries have known,.to be actually provided by or in a church, which is rather too much all thin.rs to all men. It is for these things that staunch "Catholics" hate, for these things that my Father loved and honored, Luther's.namme. The Lutherall Church has not prospered we!l. But how would Clristendom have -fared without a Luther? —what w-Nould Rome have done and dared but for the Ocean of the Re-formed tfihat rounds her? Luther lives yet, —1ot so beneficially in the Lutheran Church as out of it,-an antafgoni-st spirit to Ronme, and a. purifying and preserving spirit in Christendom at large.* I do not deny but that the Romlish system, with its low checks and coarse incentives, may have somne special ifect in moralizing the Poor, while Protestantisrmr, except as Methodism, is apt to fly above them, or to fleet before them, like a cold and formless vapor. Paganism was more effectual upoin the minds of the mnany than Platonism; Judaism or ilf:salvation by outward works will restrain a few who catme not for Pauline doctrine: Montanismn did more for some than the discipline of the Church. Nevertheless whatever is the purest, highest and most spiritual form of faith, to that must men be raised up if possible. Make thean but spiritual enough to embrace it, and there will be no lack of - After describing, the Papacy, or "the Papal Hierarchy, which is, in truth, the dilated Pope," as "a power in the Clhristian Church, which, in the name of Christ, and at onee pretending' and usurping his authority, is systematically subversive of the essential and distinguishing characters and purposes of the Christian Church," my Father, in his Ch.-lrch.t aend State, proceeds to say:;"It is my full conviction, that the rites and doctrines, the agendaa ct credeesda of the Roman Catholics, could we separate them from the adulterating ingredients combined with, and the use made of them, by the sacerdotal Mamelukes of the Romnish monarchly, for the support of the Papacy and Papal hierarchy, would neither have brought about, nor have sufficed to justify, the convulsive separation under Leo X. Nay, that if they were fairly, and in the light of a sound philosophy, compared with either of the two main divisions of Protestantism, as it now exists in this country, that is, with the fashionable doctrines and interpretations of the Arminian and Grotian school on the one hand, and with the tenets and language of the modern Calvinists on the other, an enlightened disciple of John and of Paul would be perplexed which of the three to prefer as the least unlike the profound and sublime system he had learned from his grea.t masters. And in this comparison I leave out of view the extreme sects of hPotestantism, whether of the frigid or the torrid zone, Socinian or fanatic(: VI. pp. 110. 111 VOL. In, E Xcviii INTRODUCTION. power or of substance in a philosophical Christianity to fill the deepest and the widest soul that ever yet appeared among the sons of meln. Mr. Coleridge's love and respect for Luther I might well have allowed to vindicate itself, had I not felt so strong a desire to show how- deeply I sympathize with him on that subject; his esteem and adirXation of another great German, of a totally difer'ent spirit, a reformer of /philosoplhy, I wish to set in the true light, lest it be m:istaken for what it is not. Xy Father himself.supposed that he had fallenl into suspicion through his partial advocacy of Spinoza;* I believe he has done himself harm with those who, as Archdeacon Hare says, talk of Germany as if its history belonged to that of Kamschatka, by his language respecting Imnmanuel Kant.t Let the reader bear in mind that he spoke I My Father alludes to the defects in Spinoza's system in several of his writings. His ultimate opinion of that philosopher has been published in Mr. Gillhnan's Life of Coleridge, pp. 319-22. 1'" He calls Calvin a g;'eat man!"-T have seen specified as a chlage in a religious indictment. I can not sympatthize with that "catholicity" which looks upon Luther as a "bold bad man," and thinaks it, a crime to call Calvin a great one; defames the character of our noble Reformers, and disparages the glorious poetry of Hilton'; holds the memory of King William infamous, and that of Cromwell execrable; contemplates coldly the flames that consumned Latimer, and fires at remembrance of the axe that beheaded Laud; finds out that Dr. Arnold was over-happy to be a saint, and attributes the power of Mr. Carlyle's writings to the Prince of the Air. Mr. Carlyle's "irreligion"* as well as Mr. Irving's "religion" the author of The Doctor reckons among those non-entities which pass for substance with a misjudging world. To the religion of Irving Mr. Carlyle himself has paid a most beautiful and affecting tribute (see his Miscellanies, vol. v. pp. 1-6). He quotes this saying of one who knew him well; "His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with: I call him on the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough, found in this world, or now hope to find." But my dear Uncle saw Irving under the most unfavorable circumstances, when he had drunk that "foulest Circean draught, the poison of Popular Applause;" when "Fashion crowded round limn with her meteor lights and Baechic dances," and he seemed himself, perhaps, in some respects, like one of the empty, gaudy, intoxicated and intoxicating throng, —But who holds all this cluster of opinions? I * I find, on referring to the passage in lThe Doctor, that I have mistaken "i-r. Carlisle's irreligion," seriously meant for "Mr. Carlyle's irreligion" in the sense of irony. But the mistake is no misreport of my Uncle's opinion of Mr. Carlyle. INTRODUCTION. cix and felt thus at the same period when he was ardently defending Christianity among the Germans against those whom he deemed undoubtedly its opponents.* The truth was that he never beheld in Kant the foe of Christianity; he kept his eye on. the great characteristic parts of Kant's teaching, and these, he maintained, might be brought to the service of Christianity, as far as they went; might strengthen the faith by purifying it and bringing it into coincidence with reason. They who pronounce the writings of this great genius directly and positively adverse to pure religion, whether right or wrong, are but setting their judgment of what Christianity, historical as well as ideal, is and involves, of what Kant's doctrine is and involves, against my Father; they can not accuse him of supporting a system of infidelity without first begging the question against him on both points. Kant is know not whether any man holds them all, but the spirit of exclusiveness in the religious partisan has maintained every one of them, and earnestly too. Mr. Mi!aurice's remark, in his Boyle Lectures, on one strong point in Mr. Carlyle's writings, the sense they exhibit of an Absolute Will and the necessity of (absolute submission to it on the part of man, rwhich they bring out with special force in a practical way, is an instance of that power of recognizing the substancce of religion wherever it be, and under whatever form, which is so characteristic of his own genius. * This is an extract from a letter of Dr. Parry, printed by Dr. Carlyon in his recollections of my Father in Germany. "Eichorn, one of the principal theologists in Germany, and'a lecturer here, seems, from all accounts, to be doing his utmost to destroy the evidences on which we ground our belief. He is a good man and extremely charitable, but this attempt speaks neither for his head nor for his heart. Coleridge, an able vindicator of these important truths, is well acquainted with Eichorn, but this latter is a coward, who dreads his arguments and his presence. Even atheism is not altogether unfashionable here, in the higher, and sometimes among the lower classes of society. The priests are gener}ally weak and ignorant men, who pay little attention to their flocks, at least, out of the pulpit. They are, however, paid badly. I have twice mentioned Coleridge, and much wish you were acquainted with him. It is very delightful to hear him sometimes discourse on religious topics for an hour together. His fervor is particularly agreeable when contrasted with the chilling speculations of the German philosophers. I have had occasion to see these successively abandon all their strongholds when he brought to the attack his arguments and his philosophy." (Early Yeas and Late Recollections, pp. 100-101.) Dr. Carlyon himself, in my opinion, misunderstood my Father in many things, as he misunderstood soime of his favorite authors: but I am obliged to him for his testimony on this point. eC TAINTRODUCTION. called an Atheist: yet who but he overthrew the grand atheistical argurlaent of Hume? he is called a Pantheist, yet he it was who first discovered and clearly stated the fundamental error in the Pantheistic system of Spinoza: others had abused it as impious; he. alone proved it to be irrational.* Every thing that the Germans teach requires to be substantiated by the English mind, to be enlivened and spiritualized. They are analyzers,-all, more or less, what Kant was pre-eminently, Alles-zerinalneni7deirn —shatterers to pieces. But this process is a necessary preliminary to the construction of what is sound-a necessary work toward pure religion. They cean overthrow permanently only what is ready to fall, or incapable by its nature of re-construction. They can not extinguish the spiritual instincts of mankind, or blot out the records of history. The draining of marshes will never render a country dry and barren, while there are yet springs in the mountains whence clear streams may flow. If Germans disbelieve, it is not from their activity of intellect; their clear searching glances; it is more from what they leave undone than from what they do; from what they have not than from what they possess. Some of their marked writers * "Zimmermann," says Dr. Carlyon, " gave us his opinion ftreely of Kant's philosophy, and no one could have mlore cordially reprobated its general tendency. After maintaining, as Kant has done, that the existence of a God can never be proved; to what purpose, asked Z. is it to tell the world that the best argument which can be adduced in its favor is this very impossibility of proving it? The generality of mankind, he said, would recollect the possibility, but forget the inference." Dr. 0. adds, " Coleridge attended to what he said, without showing any desire to defend the Philosopher of K6nigsburg on this occasion." My Father perhaps thought it good economy to save his breath on that occasion, and to judge from the comments upon his writings of somne who were present, very wisely. But I thinkl I know what he would have said to this smart shallow objection of Zimnmermann's, that if good for any thing it is good against every philosophical and religious argument that ever was published. What is there in the way of reasoning that may not be made false and injurious by being cut in half? That treatise of Kant's was addressed and adapted to students, and, if students had not misrepresented it the world would not have misunderstood it. So it is with the teaching of Luther: the simple hearers, wEho expect that the teacher will bring forth what is true rather than what is false, what accords with their moral ideas raLter tlan what contradicts them, these found hill scriptural enough I date say. It was the systematic divines, the Reomish and Romanizing sophisters, that turned his commentary into Antinomianism. INTROD UCTION. ci want that imaginative power,-so necessary in religious speculation,-which brings the many into one, and judges the parts with reference to the whole. Mr. Arthur Hallarn, whose Remains inspire some who knew him not with deep regret that they are remains, not first fruits, and commencements, has said on this subject:* "I do not hesitate to express my conviction, that the spirit of the critical philosophy, as seen by its fruits in all the ramifications of art, literature, and morality, is as much more dangerous than the spirit of mechanical philosophy, as it is fairer in appearance, and more capable of alliance with our natural feelings of enthusiasm and delight. Its dangerous tendency is this, that it perverts those very minds, whose office it was to resist the perverse impulses of society, and to proclaim truth under the dominion of falsehood." The difference between the critical and the mechanical philosophy is this, that the latter is incongruous and inconsonant with Christianity; while the former (as far as it goes) is capable of flowing along with it in one channel and even blending with it in one stream, as I contend that it does in the Christian philosophy of my Father. The latter blunts the religious susceptibilities-perverts the habits of thought-suppresses the inward fire which, at the impulse of the external revelation, springs upward into a living flame, as the flint draws the hidden fire from the rock. But the critical philosophy cultivates the moral sense while it clears the eye of' reason; its positions are compatible with every spiritual truth, and to the spiritual are spiritual themselves. It is like the highest poetry-like the poetry of Mr. * Remains in Verse and Prose, p. 189. I think that Mr. A. Hallam might perhaps have modified his opinion of the Critical Philosophy, had he lived and thought longer. As a substitute for Christianity it is indeed but a beautiful shadow; unite the two and it becomes substantial. A really searching system can be injurious to none but those who are undone already and adopt it as a goodly cloak for their ownc bare and hideous heart-unbelief. There will ever be in the world born Mechanicians, Pelagi:.ns, Psilanthropists, Antinomians, Judaizers, who will have systems that suit their feelings. But these systems are positively false, and tend to corrupt the heart; while the Critical philosophy, considered apart from the religious opinions of Kant and some of his followers, has never yet been proved so by systematic and searching argument. See remarks in the llliasion of the Conforter, vol. ii. pp. 799-800, on injustice done to German writers by party judges, slightly acquainted with their writings, whose irrelevant fine sayings are taken for confutations of their untouched adversaries. cii INT'rODUCTION. Wordsworth, not religion itself, much less dogmatic divinity, but cognate with it and harmoniously co-operative.* Let it be understood, however, that by the critical?philosophy, I mean the really critical part of Kant's teaching,-all his purely philosophical and metaphysical doctrines, which have a most important bearing ot religious belief piosterio);i, but do not treat of it directly —of whichl the bull of his works consist. I speak particularly of his Logic, P.rolegom2ena to every future system of lIetalAqlhsics, Critique (,f the Puvre Reason (his greatest production), Critiques of thJe j-.dgment and of the Practical Reason, Only possible gr'ou0ndc of proof for demonstrating the Existence of God, and nMetaphlzysical YEleements of NcNattural Philosophy. I do not speak of his Religion within the bounds of puire Reason so far as the doctrine of that work really conflicts with all outward Revelation and Historical Christianity. The treatise just mentioned, -which forms scarcely more than a four or five-and-twentieth part of the author's whole writings, though in the minds of some persons it seems to forni the whole-contains an application of the critical philosophy, which many, who embrace the philosophy itself, may and do reject-which certainly my Father never adopted. His argument in the first Lay Sermnon on miracles supposes the historical truth of' the miracles recorded in the Bible, and the admiration he expresses of the treatise above-mentioned refers not to any portion of it, which is irreconcilable with the substance of the Catholic Faith, but to that part only which serves to place it in more complete accordance with Practical Reason (the moral-intelligential mind), than the primitive or mediaeval conceptions. The general character and aim of the critical philosophy has been described by my Father, when he speaks of " that logical noonmLSslca JoxIxuartLxe, that critique of the human intellect, which previously to the weighing and measuring of this or that, begins by assaying the weights, measures, and scales themselves; that fulfilment of the * I do not speak here of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, or parts of The Excursion expressly Christian and Catholic, but of Mlr. Wordsworth's poetry in general, including much of an earlier date than those productions, in which formal religion is not apparent, but in which the spirit of Christianity is "the spirit of the whole." I do not say so much as this of the Ciitical Philosophy, but still I think it has been evolved by Christianity (that is, by the general spirit of the religion surrounding men's minds as an atmosphere), and agrees with it, though by itself it is not Christianity. INTROD UCTION. ciii heaven-descended nosce tei.psun, in respect to the intellective part of man, which was commenced in a sort of tentative broadcast way by Lord Bacon in his IArovlus Organurn, and brought to a systematic completion by Immanuel Kant in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, iKritik der Urtheilskraft, and Iletaphysisczhe Anfangs-gritnde der Vaturwissenschacft." It was of the Kantean Philosophy considered in this point of view that Schiller said, in his correspondence with Goethe, though its " formn shall one day be destroyed, its foundations will not have this destiny to fear; for ever since manklind has existed, and any reason among mankind, these same first principles have been admitted and on the whole acted upon." Mr. Dequincey has spoken with horror of Kant's table-talk infidelity. What authority he has for such a horri d charge I know not: he does not write well on personal points, though admirably always, when he keeps away from the 1larezn'ma or Snake Marsh of private anecdote. This is certain, that Kant's disciples and commentators'in general are a most silent and discreet set of men if their master "planted his glory in the grave and was ambitious of rottinig forever." They seem profoundly ignorant of this part of his creed. This also is certain that he has amongst the admirers of his writings Churchmen and good Christians, who have found a coincidence between the more important parts of his teaching and the ideas of the Catholic faith, together with suggestions, that throw light on some of the dark places of divinity by clearly exhibiting the structure and limits of the human mind,-which enlightens the object by pouring light into the subject. Is it of no use to religion to clear and correct its intellectual form? A great deal of superstition may hold a great deal of spiritual truth, as the wax of the honeycomb holds the pure nourishing honey. The honey nmay be drawn off into a. glass basin; and how necessary would this be if the comb were not merely insipid and innutritious but unwholesome or even poisolous! It should ever be remembered that intellectual error in religion injures those least who are least intellectual; and hence it is a fallacy to argue that because men in past times, or si2zp!e Christians at all times, have lived holy lives though their creed may be challenged as in part irrational, therefore contradiction * Works. Leipzig, 1839, vol. ii.-vol. vii. pp. 1-364.-vol. viii. pp. 4419gs. civ INTRODtUCTION, to the laws of the understanding in theological articles is of no consequence. It is of the more consequence the clearer-sighted ware become: it is one thing to shuit our eyes to falsehood, and quite another not in osee it..Most desirable is it that philosophy shoutld be independent of religious shackles n its operations in order that it rmay conlfirm religion. It is ev7en a benefit to the worid, however great a loss to himself, that Kant, iJth his mnighlty powers of thou:ht and aalr-lysis, was not reii0iously educated. Had he been brought up a Churlhimani he could never have divested hirnself of dogmatic divinity; he coueld niever th-ve given the c' priori map of the human mind as independently as he has given it; and, if it had been less independently and abstractly given, the correlation of' Christianity with the nw'ntal constitution of man cou!d never have been so evildent as it now is to those wF.ho have studied his writing's, and wnho kn. ow and love and revere the Bible. I do not, of course, mrean that mere spirituality interferes with speculative philosophy, but onily that religious pearsons are generally a1m'. as have come early under the sway of some dfogmatic sysbten, whicin has gu ided their thoughts from the first; nor do i mean, that P r3ani doo-matiecalIy educated may not become a great philosoph'i-;,'uit that it is an advanta[ge to religious philosophy to obtain thle unidireeted thoughts of a poowerful investigator, who has considered the humian mind by its own light alone; because thus the harmony of the outward revelation with our internal conform-ation is most incontrovertibly ascertained. No fervent devotee of the outward revelation could have done religion this particular service, or shown how perfectly the re. ports of the mere intellectual explorer in the region of mental metaphysics coincide: with the spiritual believer's- scheme of faith; and, as on a clear view of this coincidence all correctness of religious theory depends, they who value such correctness ought not to despise the labors of a subtle anialyst like Immanuel Kant, or deny, before examination, that they may be important "' econ tributions to Catholic Truth." There is a maxim current among religious Exclzsi ves, that he who is wrong positively or negatively in his creed can have no true insight into any province of human thought connected with Morals and Religion. This opinion if acted on would be raost injurious to the cause of both, because great powers of thought belong to some who, unhappily for INTRODUCTION, ov thernselves, are not devout or spiritual-minded. Truth is advanced by the efforts of various minds, and what an:rreligious man throws out may be converted to a use he little dreamed of by the religious. Mr. Dequincey has said finely of KEant contrasting him with my Father: " He was the Gog andl he was the!Magog of Hunnish desolation to the existing schemes of philosophy. He probed them; he showed the vanity of' vanities which besieged their fbundations,-the rottenness below, the hollowness above. But he had no instincts of creation or restoration within his Apollyon mind; for he had no love, no faith, no selfdistrust, no humility, no child-like'docility; all which qualities belonged essentially to Coleridge's mind, and waited only for manhood and for sorrow to bring them forward." It was because my Father had these qualities that to him the philosophy of Kant was religion; and, indeed, I think it may be maintained, that although. Kant's process was analytic rather than synthetic, and was occupied in clearing away rather than in erecting, it was by no means purely destructive, but, after the clearance, had materials enough left wherewith to construct the base of a philosophy coincident with a spiritual Christianity. It was affirmed by Hume that religion must rest on faith-that reason could not prove its truth. This proposition was re-affirmed by Kant, but with an utterly opposite inference from that which Hume drew from it, for he saw what Hume saw not, that there is a power in the human mind sufficient to support and substantiate religion, apart from the mere speculative faculty; that spiritual truths must have their own specific evidence; that if there is no absolute demonstration in these matters for the mere understanding, none is needed, none would serve any purpose of religion;. that theoretic reason has performed her whole office in religious proof when she has shown the impossibility of disproving the objects of faith. Reason can not oblige us to receive, said Kant, more than reason can prove. But what mere Speculative Reason can not oblige us to receive, the Moral and Spiritual within us may. This is the doctrine of the Aids to Refectionz; I believe that my Father, in his latter years, added something to it, on the subject of Ideas, which will appear, I trust, hereafter. The questionfor us is not, did Kant himself accept the outward Revelation, but does his teaching overthrow or does it -es cvi INTRODUCTION. tablish the religion of the heart and conscience? If it establishes the law written in the heart it will assuredly strengthen the outward Revelation, when rightly used. There are some who say, that God and Christ and Law and Nature and Scripture have all placed religion on the rock of external evidence. The larger and stronger this rock can be made to appear so much the better. To rest the whole structure of the faith upon it my Father ever held to be a most venturous and blind proceeding. He held that ben.ath this rock there is a broad and deep foundation, out of whic.h the rock grows and with which it coheres as one, —that this foundation was laid by the Creator himself-that His voice, both as'it speaks in the heart and reasonable mind, and as it is uttered in the Written W~ord, refers us to internal evidence as thp only satisfying and adequate evidence of religion;-that on this foundation, the accordance of the Bible with our spiritual walsts and aspirations, the internal coherency of the whole scheme of Revelation within itself to the eye of Reason and the Sp:rit, Christianity ever has been and ever must be supported and maintained. They who term external evidence the rock of the Faith, its only secure foundation, never scruple to adopt from those whom they condemn as Rationalists, because they hold the internal evidence indispensable, thoughts and sentiments which they, with their professions, have but little right to. They make themselves fine with borrowed plumes, and talk of spiritual ideas, instincts, needs, aptitudes, preconfigurations of the soul to religion and correspondences of the heart and spirit to doctrine.* They say that religion is to be known by its fruits, the nobleness, the blessedness, the inward peace and beauty that it produces. * Mr. Allies in his Church of England cleared'from the charge of Schism, and Mr. Archer Butler in his Letters on Mr. Newman's Essay on Development, have treated in a searching and masterly way certain portions of the external evidence against Romanism in defence of our church. A man who clearly and learnedly sets forth historical records must throw light on the truth; but no good is done to the cause of religion by those declaimers, who exalt outward evidence without bringing it forward, and condemn the demand for internal evidence while they are presupposing the need and existence of it in their whole argument; who look one way and row another' who rave at Rationalism while they are picking her pocket, and jumble together whatever is most specious in different systems, without regard to consistency. This kind of writing pleases the mob of the would-be orthodox the Majoritarians; but it is of no Bervice to religion. INTROD UCTION. evit Now if these deep ideas, these harmonies of the human spirit with objects of faith, presented by the Written Word and Tradition, exist, must not they be the rock that underlies the structure of external evidence and substantiates it? Casn we think that it is in the power of any appearance to the outward sense, any vision or voice, to imnplant the ideas of God or of any spiritual reality? Can these outward signs do more than excite it? Maintainers of external evidence, as the rock of the faith, insist that religion must first be proved historically, and then brought home to the heart by its internal merits. It never can be proved historically unless, as a whole, it be ideally true, and if the power of ideas within us show it to be such, this must be the deepest and only sufficient proof of its reality. To say that Reason and the Moral Sense may speak, but only after outward evidence has been given to the Understanding, is to annul the very being of Reason. For that is a spiritual eye analogous to the bodily one. What should we say of an eye that could not be sure whether a particu'lar object was black or blue, round or square, till it was declared to be so by authority? Should we not say that it had no power of sight at all? Let the maintainers of external evidence and historical proof guard this rock and make as much of it as they may; but let them not cry out angrily against those who seek to probe and examine it; for assuredly if it will not bear the hammers of all the Inquisitors in Christendom it is no true granite but crumbly sandstone. Doubtless religion, as far as it is outward history, and involves facts and'events, must be outwardly proved and attested: but how insignificant would be the mere historical and outward part of religion, how unmeaning and empty, if it were not filled and quickened by spiritual ideas, which no outward evidence can prove; which must be seen by the eyes of the spirit within us; mnst be embraced by the will, not blindly and passively received! Mr. Archer Butler, in his Letters on Development, observes: "A man who should affect to discard all revealed testimonies, and to prove the divinity of Christ or the Doctrine of the Trinity exclusively by internal reason, would be a rationalist, though his conclusion be not a negative, but a most positive dogmatic truth." Here the misemployment of reason, in which the formal nature of rationalism had just been declared to consist,* is assumed, and we are told that rationalism * "The formal nature of rationalism is the undue employment of reaso vi~i INTROD U CTION is the discarding revealed testimonies and trusting solely to the internal; and indeed the term is constantly applied in a manner that begs the question, —applied to those who insist upon the paramount necessity of internal evidence in the things of religion. Certainly he -who should discar.'d all external testimonies of the Gospel Revelation, would be irrational and ungrateful to God who has given them; but the endeavor to show, that by the light within us alone we may perceive their truth, is no misemployment of reason or evasion -of the obedience of' faith. Faithless far rather are they, who mistrust internal evidence and seek preferably the external; how must they want the spiritual mind, which sees what it believes and knows in what it is trusting! The question is this, Can external testimony by itself or principally and primarily prove the truth of revelation? The " rationalism" of my Father assigns to outward testimony and internal evidence independent functions in the instruction of man; he conceived that the former nmust prove religious truth, so far as it is historical and logical; the latter miust evidence it, so far as it is spiritual and ideal. Outward evidence can apply only to the outward event or appearance, and this, apart from the ideas of which it is the symbol, could never constitute an article of religion. The only office of external testimony with respect to the spiritual substance of the faith, in my Father's view, was that of exciting and evolving the ideas, which are the sole sufficient eviin the things of religion, with a view to evade in some way the simplicity of the obedience of faith." Rationalism in one of the Tractsfor the Times was called "asking for reasons out of place." According to these definitions rationalism is as general a term as impiety or presumption, with which indeed it is commonly identified. Now I think, that a man can be guilty of this error only in this way; he may ask for a kind of reasons in spiritual matters, which are inappropriate to such matters; he may ask for positive logical proof of spiritual verities, or outward evidence of that to which the spirit within can alone bear witness; but I believe, first that there is no religious article for the reception of which -we are not bound to.give a sufficient reason; secondly, that sufficient reason for the reception of any religious article can never be found extrinsically; that its internal character, tried by the religious faculties given us by our Maker, ought to determine its acceptance or rejection. Leibnitz' Discours (de la Confornzit6 de la Foi avee la Raison, contains a very clear view of this subject, as far as it goes. He maintains that the Fathers never simply rejected reason as modern teachers have done, both in the High Church and Puritan schools, eB. 51. dence of it, —at once the ground that supports it and the matter of which it is formed. The Incarnation and Atonement he believed to be both spiritual facts, eternal and incomprehensible, and also events that came to pass in the outward world of Time; he believed therefore, that in the proof of both, external and internal evidence must work together, but that the work of the last is the deeper and more essential. Before the publication of the Gospel no man could have discovered that the Son of God was to come in the flesh; nevertheless it is reason and the spirit that has, in one sense, shozuwn to men those deep truths of religion, the Redemption of mankind, the Divinity of the Redeemer, and the Tri-unity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Outward appearances have led men to the knowledge of them, but the recognition itself, which constitutes saving faith, is from within. To this rationalismn Professor Butler himself draws very nigh when he says, that " the fundamental error";' (of' Mr. N.'s whole Development system) " consists in this very thing, that it conceives Christianity is to be investigated as a mere succession of historical events in order to determine faith." " This," he says, " is to confound the knowledge of Church history as a succession of events, with the knowledge of Christianity as a Rule of Duty; to confound Christianity as a mixed earthly:Reality with Christianity as a pure heavenly Ideal." Can we attain the knowledge, of a pure heavenly Ideal or a Rule of Duty, by outward attestation? Is it not the law written in the heart that interprets and substantiates the teaching of the Scriptures?-and if the divinity of the Bible did not shine forth by its own light, could the belief of a certain number of persons, that it was the Word of God, have imposed it upon the world and sustained it in credit from age to age? This error of substituting historical for internal evidence runs through the whole Antiquarian theory of faith; that theory proposes to establish all religious doctrines by the former alone or chiefly, whereas but for the latter, the structure of external evidence would fall into a shapeless heap, as a brick wall would do if all the mortar were withdrawn. I will conclude this subject by referring the reader to a passage on the relations of evidence a posteriori and ca priori in the notes to the First Laey Sermon, Appendix' E., I. p. 495, and requesting that it may be read in connection with the statement of belief on the evidences of Christianity cdntained in Chapter Axxiv ci9 INTRODUTOION. p. 583, of this work. The whole is too long to quote, but this is a part of it: "In each article of faith embraced on conviction, the mind. determines, first intuitively, on its logical possibility; secondly discursively, on its analogy to doctrines already believed, as well as on its correspondence to the wants and faculties of our nature; and thirdly, historically, on the direct and indirect evidences. But the probability of an event is a part of its historic evidence, and constitutes its presumptive proof, or the evidence ad priori. Now as the degree of evidence ac posteriori, requisite in order to a satisfactory proof of the actual occurrence of any fact, stands in anl inverse ratio to the strength or weakness of the evidence a' priori (that is, a fact probable in itself may be believed on slight testimony), it is manifest that of the three factors, by which the mind is determined to the admission or rejection of the point in question, the last, the historical, must be greatly influenced by the second, analogy, and that both depend on the first, logical congruity, not indeed, as their cause or preconstituent, but as their indispensable condition; so that the very inquiry concerning them is preposterous (aqorlua ov~ atUTEqov 7OTegvov) as long as the first remains undetermined."* Lest what has been said on my Father's view of the Atonement should be misconstrued, I would say a few words more upon that point. It is too common, I fear, to confound a denial, that the language in which " the nature and extent of the consequences and effects of the Redemptive act" is described in Scripture, ought to be literally understood, with a denial that these terms stand for a real act on God's part. Thus they who mean only to deny, that " the essential character of the causative act of Redemption can be exactly defined by the metaphors used in Scripture to describe its effects and consequences, are spoken of as if they had denied the causative act itself —the remonstrance of those who humbly but firmly maintain that, this act being truly transcendent and mysterious, it can be known to us only in and through these effects and consequences; that the human conceptions in which the Sacred Writers present it to us do but shadow it forth, not properly express it; that we are not bound * Mr. Newman's Presumptive character of the Proof, in his Essay on De~velopment, p. 131, coincides, as far as it goes, with my Father's positions in the above passage. INTRODTUCTIONe xi to receive as Gospel all that divines have laid down respecting the vindictive justice of God, of this justice being satisfied by a substitution of the sufferings of the innocent for those of the guilty, and of the divine wrath being transferred from the sinful to the'sinless, —that " change of purpose" can not be pr~operly predicated of the eternal, omniscient, omnipotent God, any more than arms or wings or bowuels of mercy, is strangely supposed to imply a notion, that Atonement is true only in a subjective sense; that instead of Redemption having been wrought for us by the act of God and our Saviour Christ, only the phantom of such a thing is made to play befbre our eyes,-a scenic representation of it set forth upon the theatre of Holy Writ in order to produce certain effects on the souls of spectators! For proof that the two views are wholly distinct, and that the latter was foreign to the mind of Coleridge, I refer readers to the Aids to Reflection.* I believe too that it is foreign to other minds to which it has been imputed, " Thus Christ is emphatically said to be our Atonement; not that we may attribute to God any change of purpose towards man by what Christ has done; but that we may know that we have passed from the death of sin to the life of righteousness by him; and that our hearts may not condemn us.'' This passage has often been cited to fix a charge of deepest heterodoxy upon the writer, a living divine. It is conceived to contain a denial of the Atonement in any but a subjective sense, although it affirms that by what Christ has donze we have passed from the death of sin to the life of righteousness; but further, that this mystery has been presented to us under a certain figure, in order that we may judge rightly of its effects and consequences for them that believe. Thus to speak and think is, in the apprehension of some, to deny Redemption objectively considered! To believe that by what Christ has done we have passed from death unto life is nothing,-a mere shadow of faith, unless we are ready to say also, that the eternal Redemption, fore-ordained before the foundation of the world,t actually produced a change in the mind of Him who willed it, the Eternal, with whom is no variableness nor shadow of turning!-that after a manifestation made in these last times the designs of the Infinite were altered, * Ot Spiritual Religion. Comment on Aphorism, xix. I. p. 307. t See 1 Peter i. 20. Who verily was fore-ordained before thefoundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you cnxi tITRODUCTION~ and He began to consider that pardonable which before he had considered unpardonable. What has this latter doctrine beyond the former, save a contradiction? Can we ascribe change of purpose, in the literal sense, to the Omniscient God without contradicting the very idea of a God? We might indeed believe that a something, veiled not revealed by those words, is true, had we assurance to that effect; but this would not be what seems to be contended for, namely, an admission that they are true in the literal sense. I suppose there is no Christian who doubts that the mystery of Redemption has more in it than r ran can fathom. When I see how some men impregnate the writings of others with the products of their own swarming brains, supposititious heresies, felonies, fantasies, fooleries, false philosophies, demoniacal doctrines and so forth, I often recall a couplet of Dryden's respecting perversions of the Bible:The fly-blown text conceives an alien brood, And turns to maggots what was meant for food.* I would faiin learn of those, who look upon my Father's scheme of faith as something less satisfactory to a religious mind than that which they have embraced, if they can point out any important moral truth, any great spiritual idea, any soul-sustaining belief, any doctrine unquestionably necessary or highly helpful to the support and safety of the Christian faith, which was rejected or unrecognized by him. Can they show that his " rationalizing," as some designate the efforts he made to free the minds of Christians from schemes of doctrine, which seemed to him " absolutely irrational," and therefore derogatory to God and injurious to man, excluded him from participating in any practical results, that can be deemed favorable to a pure, deep, earnest Christianity. If they are unable to do this, and neither on the doctrine of the Church, of Original Sin, of the Inspiration of Scripture, of Sacraments, of Justification, as far as I am aware, has any opponent of his Christian philosophy hitherto even attempted to show that his conceptions were not as pregnant and spiritual, as deeply pervaded with the sense of the relations betwixt the creature and the Creator as those to which they adhere; instead of asserting that his creed is less pious and religious than their own, they should * Retigio Laici. This pungent couplet was pointed out to me, some years ago, by my friend, Mo.' H. C. Rorbiaon. INTRODUCTION. exiii try to prove that it is less reasonable and stands upon a less secure foundation. When they have shown this they will have inclusively proved, that, whatever spiritual ideas he may have possessed, his system did not properly contain them. But such a proof can only be furnished by strict logical processes; there can be no short cut to it by assumption, or representations concerning his state of mind, and the influences upon it, calculated to lessen the value of his testimony. I can not quit the subject of my Father's competency fbr the investigation of religious questions, without noticing another saggestion which has been thrown out on this same point, and which, from its partial truth, seems likely to confirm or convey what is very far from true. It has been observed that Coleridge was given to contemplation rather than to action, and that he even resembled Hamlet in carrying to excess the habit of abstracting. But religious doctrine is to be tried by its capability of practical application, its relation to appointed ends, and hence the speculative mind is ill qualified to judge truly on a subject of this nature; instead of acquiescing in a sound and pious creed, per.. sons of such a character are apt to prefer a shallow, unsubstantial and fantastic one, framed by their limited understanding and human imagination. The following is part of a passage once applied to my Father in a striking article in the Quarterly Review. "When a religious creed is presented, say to a disputatious and subtle mind, in which the action of the critical faculty overbears and absorbs all other energies, that faculty regards the creed proposed polemically, considers it with reference to logical and technical precision, and not in respect to its moral characteristics and tendencies, and wastes upon this theoretic handling of sacred themes all the sedulity which ought to be employed in seeking to give effect to the proffered means of spiritual amelioration."* All this may be true enough of the mere intellectualist; but who that was well acquainted with Coleridge, as an author or as a man, could suppose that such was his character, or speak of views like his as the product of understanding unirradiated by reason, and fancy uninspired by the spiritual sense? Of all men in the present age he was among the first and ever among the * See the Quarterly Review for December, 1841, pp. 11-12. The passage is from Mr. Gladstone's " Church Principles considered in their results," p. 68. cxiv INTRODUCTION. most earnest to maintain, that "religion must have a moral origin, so far at least that the evidence of its doctrines can not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of' the will:"* that "religion is designed to improve the nature and faculties of man, and that every part of religion is to be judged by its relation to this main end." - These maxims he insisted on during his whole course as a religious writer; they plainly had a deep hold on his mind, and were uttered by him, not with the lip only, as if learned from others, but as if they had indeed been drawn from " the fountain-head of" genuine self-research." If he then tried a religious creed " with reference to logical and technical precision, and not in?respect to its mnoral characteristics and tendencies," how strangely must he have deserted a principle which his own experience had established!-how unaccountably shut his eyes to the light of a " safety lamp,"$ which his own hands had hung up for the guidance of others! Let any candid reader consult on this subject the Aids to Reflection, especially that portion in which the author maintains, that " revealed truths are to be judged of by us, as far as they are grounds of practice, or in some way connected with our moral and spiritual interests," that " the life, the substance, the hope, the love, in one word, the faith,-these are derivatives from the practical, moral and spixitual nature and being of man;" and then ask himself whether he who wrote thus could be capable of falling into the error described above. And again let him see whether he can cite a single passage from his writings in which he appears to be trying a creed according to logical precision alone, without regard to its deeper bearings. So far from being apt to consider articles of belief exclusively in their intellectual aspect, in his departures from received orthodoxy he was chiefly influenced by moral considerations, by his sense of the discrepancy betwixt the tenet, in its ordinary form, and the teachings of conscience,-his conviction that the doctrine, as commonly understood, either meant nothing or something which opposed the spiritual sense and practical reason.~ X Biog. Literaria, p. 297. f Aids to Reflection, I. p. 223. t See the Aids to Reflection on Spiritual Religion. Comment on Aph. IL, I. p. 215. i The interesting Article on Development in the Christ. Remnembrancer INTRODUCTION. cxv The mere intellectualists,, who try divine things by human measures, had in my Father a life-long opponent. Why then is a charge of mere intellectualism brought against himself'? Is it because he resisted the insidious sophism which splits the complex being of man; separates the moral in his nature from the rational, for January, which has just come into 1my hands, and in which I find a confirmation of some remarks of mine, in this Introduction, on the Romish doctrine. of the Eucharist, contains the following sentences, which I take the liberty to quote for the sake of explaining more clearly my Father's mode of thought on the relation of divine truth to the mind of man: " Our ideas on mysterious subjects are necessarily superficial; they are intellectually paper-ideas; they will not stand examination; they vanish into darkness if we try to analyze them. A child, on reading in fairy tales about magical conversions and metamorphoses, has most simple definite ideas instantly of things, of which the reality is purely unintelligible. I-Iis ideas are paper ones; a philosopher may tell him that he can not have them really, because they issue, when pursued, in something self-contradictory and absurd; that he is mistaken and only thinks he has them; but the child has them, such as they are, and they are powerful ones, and mean something real at the, bottom. Our ideas, in the region of religious mystery, have this childish character; the early Church had such. It held a simple, superficial, childlike idea of an absolute conversion of the bread and wine into the Bodv and Blood; and with this idea, as with an hieroglyphic emblem of some mysterious and awful reality, it stopped short," pp. 135-6. Our ideas on the supersensual and spiritual are without the sphere of the understanding, the forms of which are adapted to a world of sense, though it is by the mediation of the understanding alone, by its " hieroglyphic emblems," that we can take any cognizance of them or bring them into the light of consciousness: still to describe these ideas as " superficial," and as merely indicating " some mysterious and awful reality," appears to be scarcely doing them justice. There is indeed a background of mere mystery and undefined reality in all our religious beliefs; exeunt osnnes in mysteriumn; but they have a foreground too, a substance apprehensible by faith, visible to the eye of reason and'the spirit, as truly and actually as the things of sense are perceptible by our senses. A vague belief that something, referred to by the words "conversion of bread and wine into the Body and Blood," is a religious reality,-can this be dignified with the name of an Idea? What can verify or attest the truth of a vague spiritual Something? What spiritual benefit can such vague belief confer upon our spirits? If religious ideas are vague and superficial, what ideas are positive and profound? Again, is it true that the ideas of children and of the early Church were of this description? I more than doubt that. A child who reads of magical metamorphoses has very ldefinite conceptions before his mind, and so had the early Church in regard to the Eucharist. The early Fathers seem to have held, that the consecrated elements became the material body and blood of Christ; that, his body being immortal, to feed upon it immortalized our bodies, even as his cxvii INTROD UCTION. the spiritual from conscience and reason; thrusts aside the understanding from its necessary office of organizing and evolving the whole mind, and thus brings half truth and confusion into every department of thought? Did he show himself unspiritual in declaring that superstition is not, as some will have it, a bebased fobrm of faith, but a disguised infidelity, since men become superstitious inasmuch as they are S" sensuous and dark, slaves by their own compulsion;" or heartless because he refused to establish faith on feeling and fancy, apart from reflection, and to adopt the slavish maxim, that forms of doctrine, which have been associated with religious ideas are to be received implicitly, -are not to be examined whether they stifle the truth or convey it rightly? No' it is not from a strict and careful examination of his writings that these notions have arisen, but from a partial view of his life and its bearing upon his character. It has been thought that he led too exclusively a life of contemplation to be thoroughly well qualified for a moral preceptor, that he dwelt too much on the speculative side of philosophy to have, in fullest measure, a true philosopher's wisdom. It has been affirmed that he dealt with " thoughts untried in action, unverified by application, mere exercises of the thinking faculty revolving into itself':" that he " lived a life of thinking for thinking's sake." I can not admit that this is true. Whether or no it would have been better for Mr. Coleridge's own mind and character had he exercised a regular profession, and been less withdrawn from family cares, it is not for me to determine: but this I can affirm, Word and Spirit gave eternal life to our souls; that by miracle the divine Body and Blood were multiplied as the loaves and fishes had been, and retained the phenomena of bread and wine. This ancient sensuous notion of the Real Presence is definite enough; and equally definite is the modern spiritual notion, that by the Body and Blood we are to understand the lifegiving power and influence of the Redeemer upon our whole being, body and soul, and that this power of eternal life is conveyed to us in an especial manner when we receive the appointed symbols in faith. The sensuous tenet has been exchanged for the spiritual doctrine because that sensuous tenet was no mere mystery but a plain absurdity,-a poor, weak, grovelling shallow conception. Yet this low conception preserved the substantial truth: it was a cocoon in which the spiritual idea was contained, as in a tomb-cradle, buried, yet kept alive. The spiritual ideas contained in the doctrine of the Eucharist, and the intellectual statement of the doctrine, are of course different things; the former ought to be positive and certain,the latter intelligible and distinct. INTRODUCTION. - that to represent him as having spent a life of inaction, or'of thinking without reference to practical ends, is an injustice both to him and to the products of his mind. To write and to think were his chief business in life; contemplation was the calling to which his Maker called him; but to think mnerely for thinking's sake,-merely for the excitement and pastime of the game, is no man's calling; it is an occupation utterly unworthy of a rational and immortal being. Whether or no he deserves such a judgment let men determine by a careful survey of his writillgs; in connection with all those studies which are necessary in order to make them understood; let them pronounce upon his character afterwards; perhaps they will see it with different eyes, and with clearer ones when they have finished the course. I can not of course attempt here to vindicate his claim to some " gift of genuine insight," as an ethical writer; but in reference to the remarks lately cited I ask, of what sort are the thoughts dealt with in The Friend, the Aids to Reflection, the Lay Sermons, the Churtch and State, the Literadry Remains? 3May it not be said that, of the thoughts they contain, one large class, that relating to politics, can not, by their nature, " issue out of acts," -out of the particular acts of an individual life,-or be tried and applied in action by the individual who treats of them, though they tend to acts and are to have practical consequences; seeing that they relate to national movements, interests of bodies, dealings of communities; while another still larger class, which concern the moral and spiritual being of man, are capable of being tried and verified in the life of every Christian, whether he be given to outward action, or whether activities of an inward character, have been his chief occupation upon earth? To deny their author this practical knowledge and experience would be a satire on his personal character rather than a review of his philosophical mind. All the poetry, all the poetical criticism which my Father produced has a practical end; for poetry is a visible creation, the final aim of which is to benefit man by means of delight. As fobr his moral and religious writings, if practical wisdom is not in them, they are empty indeed, for their whole aim is practical usefulness-the regulation of action, the actions of the heart and mind with their appropriate manifestations-the furtherance of man's well-being here and hereafter. This remark, that my Father lived a life of thinking for thinking's sake is either cxviii INTRODUCTION. the severest of judgments, more severe than his worst and most prejudiced enemies ever passed on him in the heat of conflict, or it is no censure at all, but rather a commendation; inasmuch as the soul is better than the body, and mental activity nobler than corporeal. It may interest the reader to see, in conclusion, Mr. Coleridge's own opinion of an excessive practicality, or what is commonly so called, for the term is commonly, though I believe incorrectly, applied to a mere outwar'd activity.* Thus he spoke of an excellent man, whom he deeply honored and loved, to his friend MIr. Stutfield: "I was at first much amused with your clever account of our old and valued friend's occupations-but, after a genial laugh, I read it again and was affected by its truth, and by the judicious view you have taken. My poetical predilections have not, I trust, indisposed me to value utility, or to reverence the benevolence, which leads a man of superior talents to devote himself to the furtherance of the Useful, however coarse or homely a form it may wear, provided, I am convinced that it is, first, actually useful in itself, and secondly, comparatively so, in reference to the objects in which he would or might otherwise employ himself...... It seems to me impossible but that this incessant bustle about little things, and earnestness in the removal of stupid impediments, with the irritations arising out of them, must * Men who are given to outward action think all else idleness or worse, while men of thought can estimate their usefulness and do them honor, when they are consistent and at one with themselves. But thought is the active business of a certain part of mankind. Literary men and teachers who affect to be men of the world and unite a great deal of ordinary practicality with their peculiar vocation, are apt to become low in their aims and superficial in execution. A poet is, in my opinion, far better employed in perfecting an ode, if it be worth writing at all, or conforming a drama to the rules of art, than in directing a farm or regulating a railway or arranging a public spectacle. If his poetry is what poetry ought to be, it is worth the devotion of all his time and energies, save what are required for the charities of life, or for procuring the means of subsistence. The article in the Quarterly, referred to above, speaks so well and powerfully of Mr. Wordsworth, that I the more regret its containing any thing calculated to strengthen misunderstandings in regard to my Father. They who best understand the Poet and Philosopher best understand the Philosophic Poet his Friend. Let them not be contrasted, but set side by side to throw light and lustre upon each other. INTRODUCTION. exix have an undesirable effict on any mind constituted for nobler aims;-and this unquiet routine is, in my judgment, the very contrary to what I should deem a salutary alterative to the qualities in our friend's nature, of which the peccant excess is most to be apprehended. It is really grievous, that with a man of such a head and such a heart, of such varied information and in easy circumstances too, the miracle of Aaron should be reversed, a swarm of little snakes eat up the great one, the sacred serpent, symbol of intellect, dedicated to the God of Healing. I could not help thinking, when I last saw him, that he looked more aged than the interval between that and his former visit could account for." MR. COLERIDGE S "REMARKS ON THE PRESENT MODE OF CONDUCTING PUBLIC JOURNALS." There is one other subject on which, after going through the present work in order to finish preparing it for the press, I have found it necessary to give some explanation. Throughout this edition I have abstained from interference with the text, as far as the sense was concerned, though the changes wrought in the course of thirty years would probably have led the author to make many alterations in it himself, had he republished the work at all in its present form. In one or two sentences only I have altered or removed a few words affecting the import of them, in order to do away with unquestionable mistakes respecting literary facts of slight importance. But from the end of the last chapter of the critique on Mr. Wordsworth's poetry I have withdrawn a paragraph concerning the detractors from his merits-the mode in which they carried on their critical warfare against him and some others-for the same reason which led the late Editor to suppress a note on the subject in Vol. I.-namely this: that as those passages contain personal remarks, right or wrong, they were anomalies in my Father's writings, unworthy of them and of him, and such as I feel sure he would not himself have reprinted. This reason indeed is so obvious, that no explanation or comment on the subject would have been given, if I had not been told that Lord Jeffrey had of late years republished his reply to those remarks of Mr. Coleridge; this makes me feel it proper to say, that I suppress the passages in question, and should have done so if no contradiction had been offered to nXX INTRODITCTION. them, simply because they are personal, and now also because I believe that some parts of them, conveying details of fact, are inaccurate as to the letter; but at the same time with an assurance that in spirit they are just and true. They may be inaccurate in the letter: the speeches referred to may never have been uttered just as they were told to my Father and repeated by him; Mr. Jeffrey's language to himself he may not have recalled correctly; and I am quite willing to allow that in the way of hospitality he received more than he gave, the fact of apparent cordiality, however, being equally attested whether Mr. Jeffrey asked Mr. Coleridge to dinner or received a similar invitation from him. By the mention of these particulars my Father injured, as I think, a good cause; a volume of such anecdotes, true or false, would never have convinced men of the party which he had opposed, or brought them to confess, that the criticisms of' the E. Review were in great measure dictated by party spirit; to men not of the party, who should take the trouble of referring to them, I have little doubt, that this would be apparent on the face of those writings themselves,-from the manner and from the matter of them. I must repeat that I believe the suppressed passages to be neither mistaken nor untruthful as to their mzain drift, which I understand to be this: that the E. Reviewers expressed a degree of contempt for the poetical productions of their opponents in politics, which it is scarcely conceivable that they could have really felt, or would have felt had politics been out of the question-more especially with regard to the poems of Mr. Wordsworth, that they imputed a character to them, and as far as in them lay, stamped that character upon them to the eye of the public, which those productions never could have borne to the mind of any unprejudiced, careful, and competent critic-indeed such characters at once of utter imbecility and striking eccentricity as appear at first sight to be the coinage of an ingenious brain, rather than the genuine impression which any actual body of poetry could make upon any human mind, that was not itself either imbecile or highly eccentric. This charge was, indeed, not capable of a precise proof, and Mr. C. acted with his usual incaution in openly declaring what he felt quite certain of, but could not regularly demonstrate. Whether or no he had good reason to feel this certainty-waiving his personal recollections, even those that have not been denied-I willingly INTRODUCTION. cxxi leave to the judgment of all who are capable of comparing the critiques in question with the poems of Mr. Wordsworth, and with the general estimate of them in the minds of thoughtful readers and lovers of poetry in general, from the time when the Lyrical Ballads first appeared till the present day. There was doubtless a petitio principii on MIr. Coleridge's part in this dispute; lhe assumed the merits of his friend's poetry: for though this was a point which he often sought to prove, by showing that, taken at large, it treated of the most important and affecting themes that can interest the heart of man, and, for the most part, in a manner that would stand the test of any poetical rule or principle that could be applied to it, and this without contradiction from any one meeting him on his own ground, not merely baffling him by rude reasonless irony, and boisterous banter-those heavy blunt weapons of disputants who abound more in scorn than in wisdom,-still questions of poetical merit are so fine and complex, that they can hardly be decided altogether by rule, but must be determined, as spiritual matters are to be determined, by specific results and experiences, which are, in this case, the effects produced on the poetic mind of the community. Before this proof was complete he ir some sort assumed the point at issue;-he knew the critic to be possessed of superior sense and talent, and he felt sure that though it might be possible for a man of good understanding and cultivated taste not to love and admire the poetry of Mr. Wordsworth, it was almost morally impossible that the great body of it could appear to such a person as it was presented in the pages of The Ed. Review,-a thing to be yawned and hissed off the stage at once and forever.-Such strains of verse as Tintern Abbey, The Old Cumberland Beggar, Address to mzy infant Daughter, Boy of Wyncander-mere, Lines left upon a Yew-tree seat, Character of the Happy Warerior, -such poems as the Ode to Duty, Evening Walk, Rob Roy's Grave, Highland Girl, Yar'row revisited, Ruth, Landanmin, The Brothers, Fematle Vagrant, Fo~rsaken In;dian Woman?, The two April * This Complaizt of the perishing mother may be compared with Schiller's admired Nadowessische Todtenklage; but I think that both in poetry and in pathos the English poem strikes a far deeper note. The anguish of a bereaved mother's heart no other poet, I think, has ever so powerfully portrayed as Mr. Wordsworth.:Warmly as I admire the poetry of Keats I can imagine, that an intelli. VOL. mI. F exxii INTROD UCTION, MJiornings, The Fountain, Yew-trees, ~Nutting, Peel Castle,'Tis thought that some have died for love, Lines to H. M.; — such sonnets as that Conmposed on Westminister Bridcge, On the Eve of a. Friend's Mllarriage, the iVorld is too much with us, Miltoz! thou shouldst be living at this hozur, those four called Personal Talk, so frequently quoted-could any cultivated and intelligent man read these productions attentively without feeling that in them the author had shown powers as a poet which entitled him at least to a certain respect and even deference? Is there any thing very strange or startling in these compositions? Or are they flat and empty, with nothing in them-no freshness of thought or feeling o Seen through a fog the golden beaming sun looks like a dull orange or a red billiard ball — the fog that could rob these poems of all splendor must have been thick indeed! I have not mentioned all the most admirable of Mr. Wordsworth's poems; but those which a general acquaintance with poetry, and general sense of the. poetical might enable any one to understancd; for we may understand and respect what we do not deeply enjoy. The multitude of laughers knew nothing of Wordsworthian poetry but what they saw in the pages of the Review, through the Reviewer's tinted spectacles; the Reviewer himself must have, known it all, in its length and breadth. If he seriously avows that the pages of that Journal give a correct view of his notion of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, nothing more can be said than that it is a curious fact in the history of the human mind;-M-lr. Coleridge could but judge by appearances, and I think he has not misrepresented thezn. In regard to the review of the Lay Sermonsz, I am not surprised that the Editor saw nothing in it to disapprove; though few, I gent man might read the Endyionia with care, vet think that it was not genuine poetry; that it showed a sheer misuse of abundant fancy and rhbyth mical power. For its range is narrow; like the artificial comedy it has a world of its own, and this world is most harmonious within itself, made up of light rich materials; but it is not deep enough or wide enough to furnish satisfaction for the general heart and mind. The passion of love excited by beauty is the deepest thing it contains, and therefore, though its imagery is so richly varied, we have a sense of the monotonous in reading it long together. It is toujours perdrix or something still more dainty delicate, and we long for more solid diet, when we have had this fare for a little while. But if ever a poet addressed the common heart and universal reason it is MIr. Wordsworth. INTRODUCTION. crxxiii think, who, at this hour, standing without the charmec[ circle of party, perused that article, would fail to see, that it is not so much a critique of the Sermon as a personal pasquinade-(what are " caprice, indolence, vanity," but personal charges)?-penned by one, who had scanned the author narrowly, in order to abuse him scientifically, and with a certain air of verisimilitude.* He had enjoyed special opportunities of taking those observations, which he afterwards recurred to for such an ill purpose. My Father had received him (at Stowey and, I believe, once again at Keswick), with frank hospitality under his own roof, had extolled his talents when others saw no lustre in the rough diamond; had furnished his mind with pregnant hints-intellectual seed, which, as the soil was very capable, bore, in due time, a harvest of fruit for his own enrichment. I think he did not deny these obligations, even while he was privately expressing that personal pique and hostile feeling, which he vented to the public under cover of patriotism and concern for the people. Under cover, I say, without impugning his sincerity and earnestness in either; the fbrmer, the angry feeling against Mr. Coleridge, he made no secret of among his associates in general. Under the * This air of verisimilitude is less in that article than in the parent lampoon (in Mr. Hazlitt's Political -Essays), any distorted resemblance which the latter may be thought to contain, being frittered away, in the Edinboro' copy, by an evident desire that the portrait should be pure deformity. In the former Mr. Coleridge is described as "belonging to all parties," and " of service to none." This might be favorably interpreted; he who belongs to all parties at one and the same time, belongs to none in particular and can serve none in particular; but he may serve his country all the more. This feature was not copied; but the portion that follows, "he gives up his independence of mind," in which there was no truth at all, was carefully transfused,-the spirit of it at least,-into the second portrait. Both contain the same insinuation respecting my Father's fundamental religious principles —the same attempt to cast them into suspicion with the unphilosophic world-upon which I need make no remark. At that time it may perhaps have brought some additional discredit upon his name, that he imputed catholicity to his mother church. "The Church of England, which he sometimes, by an hyperbole of affectation, affects to call the Catholic Church"-!!! These things are said in the supposition that my Father was not wrong in believing the author of the critique in the E. R. and the writer of the two critiques in the Pol. Essays, to be the same person. Either they are identical, or the one is a close copyist of the other,-his spleen the same, only colder and more unrelenting. cxxiv INTRODUCTION. circumstances my Father was to be excused for supposing that this gentleman of "judgment and talents" had been employed to run down the Lay Sermon in the E. Review, on account of his known talents for satire, and the severe jzdgsents he had already published on himself in particular; but, as this has been denied, I have withdrawn two expressions which contain the imputation; the passage concerning the satirist himself I have not thought fit to withdraw. Mr. Jefirey's demeanor at the Lakes in 1810 should never have been brought into this question; but from a natural wish to maintain the general truthfulness, if not the prudence and propriety, of my Father's language on the subject, I can not help saying, that Lord Jeffrey's own account of it serves quite as well as Mr. Coleridge's, to illustrate the difference,-I think I may say the discrepancy,-between the gentleman conducting himself kindly and courteously in social life, and the same gentleman performing his duty as a reviewer. My Father had undergone no essential change, in the interval, either as a poet, a politician, or a man, nor had he shown any. The -Friend was before the public. To pay compliments, even when they are no more than the genuine overflow of the soul, is a mark of complacency; but to have made efforts to " gratify" a gentleman under a notion that he " liked to receive compliments," was a still greater exercise of politeness. The critique of Christabel did not seem quite symphonious with compliments paid to the poetic mind of him who was best known to the public as the author of'The Ancient MlIariner, a poem which, equally with that and on very similar grounds, deserved to be called a "' mixture of raving and drivelling."' " I * An article on Coleridge in the Penny Cyclopredia, which, together with some misstatements of fact, contains the Ed. Review opinions on my Father's merits as an author, to wit, that he had next to none at all, and seems to have been written by a disciple of the critic who pronounced Christabel worthless with the exception of one passage, after referring to what was pointed out on this subject by Mr. Dequincey, proceeds thus: " Of this habit (that of' trusting to others for suggestions which he improved, and for ideas which he elaborated'), another instance is supplied by Alvar's dungeon soliloquy in the Remorse (Act v. Scene 1), the ideas, and, to a certain extent, the words of which are derived from Caleb's prison soliloquy in Caleb Williams." Impressive writer in his own line as I knew Mr. Godwin to be, I was surprised to learn that he had written any thing so poetical as Alvar's dungeon soliloquy. Anxious however to give him his due I took INTRODUCTION. cxxv cheerfully acquit" the writer of any the least perception of merit in the poem; although Scott and Byron, the most admired poets of the day, were known to have expressed admiration of it, he up Caleb Williams, and for pleasure as well as duty, read it all through for the second time in my life. I perused with special care the three powerful chapters inl which Caleb describes his imprisonment; I found that -he dwells upon the "squalid solitude" of his forced abode, and Alvar mentions "friendless solitude;" that he speaks of a "groan" uttered in sleep, and Alvar speaks of " groaning and tears;" but with these exceptions I found neither the ideas nor the words of Alvar's soliloquy in Caleb Willianms. My Father may possibly have been led to make the reflections and form the images of that soliloquy by Godwin's striking novel, as Thomson was led to write The Seasons by the perusal of Nature; but he certainly did not borrow them ready-made therefrom. The closest resemblance to Caleb Williams that I can find in the Rlemorse is not in Act v. but in Act i. where Alvar says, " My own life wearied me I And but for the imperative voice within, With mine own hand I had thrown off the burthen." At the end of chap. xi. vol. ii. Caleb says, "I meditated suicide, and ruminated, in the bitterness of my soul, upon the different means of escaping from the load of existence." Caleb is restrained from self-murder, not by " an imperative voice within," a voice which " calmed" while it " quelled;" his words are, " Still some inexplicable suggestion withheld my hand. I clung with desperate fondness to this shadow of existence, its mysterious attractions, and -its hopeless prospects." The three preceding pages are very fine in their way, but have nothing in common with the Remorse except of the most general description. Indeed unless my Father had been the first man that ever described imprisonment, he could not have avoided some general similarity with former describers. The whole article I would recommend as a study to those who are desirous of acquiring the art of depreciation; the principle of which rests on the force of contrast with a pretence of candor, and may be thus thrown into the form of a rule: give the man praise 2l mninori in order to take away all the credit commonly given him ei rrajori: exalt other men, in order to pull him down from his seat, although these other men would themselves be the first to replace him in it. The Cyclopzedist denies my Father's originality of mind on plausible grounds, perhaps, and yet, I think, on insufficient ones. The habit of obtaining from others "suggestions to improve" and " ideas to elaborate" may be almost called common to the genus vaturm. Dante is esteemed a vigorous and original writer: yet it has been clearly shown that the vision of the boy monk Alberico, "served as a model for the entire edifice of his poem," and furnished him with some of his striking details.* * See the Essay on this subject, extracted from an ancient manuscript, prefixed to Zotti's Dante, pp. 19-42. cx~xvi INTRODUCTION. naturally preferred his own judgment; but I will take upon me to say, however true this may be, that no mere poetical demerits ever called forth such a vehement explosion, of hisses as that with which ChIristabel was greeted in the E. Review; that the hisses were at tfle author', because his " daily prose" was " understood Dante adopted every thing in the Vision that he could turn to advantage, and left it -'o his commentators to make his acknowledgments to the youthful Visionary. Milton borrowed from all quarters as may be seen in Todd's edition of his works. Tasso took wholesale from preceding Italian poets and from the Classics. Gray's Elegy in a Co'untry Churchyard contains scarcely a single image or sentiment that is entirely new, and in all his other poems he helps himself without scruple to the ideas and sometimes to the words of other poets. Shakspeare is full of borrowed pegs to hang his thoughts upon. Lord Byron declared that these charges of plagiarism against particular poets were a folly, since all poets are guilty of it. I think that almost all poets borrow a good deal in one way or another; but there is a difference in the mode of their borrowing; some take the thoughts and images of other writers and combine them with new matter; some take a great deal of what constitutes the substance and brilliancy of their compositions from historical or descriptive books in prose. Writers of a rich and ornate style borrow more than those of a severer cast: Byron borrowed far more from books than Crabbe, and Mr. Wordsworth has borrowed less, I believe, than any other great poet.- Nature is the book that he has studied the most. The Penny CyclopTedist has added nothing but a mare's nest to Mr. Dequincey's instances of borrowing in my Father, of which Mr. Dequincey himself thought so little, that in spite of them all, he " most heartily believed" my Father "as entirely original in all his capital pretensions, as any one man that ever has existed; as Archimedes in ancient days, or as Shakspeare in modern." An author is to be judged, in respect of original power, by the total result of his productions. Is the whole a new thing, or is there in the whole a something new interfused? Can you find the like elsewhere? By this test my Father's writings must be tried, and perhaps they will be found to stand it better than those of many an author, who has carefully abstained from any formal or avoidable borrowing. That his are "the works of one who requires something from another whereon to hang whatever he may himself have to say," is just such a specious objection as the former. But it should be (considered that every writer, in moral or religious disquisition, starts in fact from previous thought, whether he expressly produces it or not. In the Aids to Reflection and in the Remains my Father has given his thoughts in the form of comments on passages in the works of other men; and this he did, not from want of originality of mind, but friom physical languor,-the want of continuous energy,-together -with the exhaustive intensity, with which he entered into that particular portion of a subject to which his attention was directed. I do not believe, however, that the vidue of what he has left behind is so much impaired by its im iNTRODUCTION. cxxvii to be dedicated to the support of all that courtiers think should be supported:"* what Mr. Coleridge endeavored to support being first, the war against the would-be invader and subjugator of his country: secondly, the Church of England. No matter for the " compliments;" now in 1847; no, nor the disparagements either; " not of a pin;"-as the tedious man says in Measure for ]l3easure. I do not not recur to them on their own account. Perhaps an editor may " lawfully" make himself pleasant to gentlemen whom afterwards he shall be obliged to expose as " whining and hypochondriacal poets" in his review: but it does seem rather a special, and somewhat pliant and elastic law, that can permit a gentleman to be sociable and friendly in his private behavior toward persons, whom, some years afterwards, casting his eye back on their literary and political career, it will be his duty to stigmatize, not only as men of " inordinate vanity and habitual effeminacy,"-that is a trifle,-but-upon whose heads he is bound to pour that dark flood of politico-personal accusations which may be seen and analyzed at this day in pages 314-15 of'vol. xxviii. of the Ed. Review.t Utter disregard of consequences to the public,-vanity and effemilnacy,-violence and vulgarity, -fantastic trickery,-a morbid appetite for infamy with an ardent love of corruption,-folly that reels with a sickening motion methodical form as people at first sight imagine. The method and general plan of a literary work are often quite arbitrarly, and sometimes, for the sake of preserving regularity of structure in the architecture of a book, a wi-iter is obliged to say a great deal which is but introductory to that of his own which he has to impart. * Ed. Review, vol. xxvii. p. 67. tf This fine specimen of a modern Philippic,-an Edinboro', Anti-Lakiad, -is contained in the review of the Literarly,ife of August, 1817. I Iwould wish any reader who has the opportunity, to compare it with the language, tone, and character of Remarks on the present mode of conducting Critical Journals, contained in chapter xxi. of this work. The reviewer adds, " This is the true history of our reformed Anti-Jacobin poets, the life of one of whom is here recorded;" and then takes up Mr. C. by himself again, still more in that style, which is described in the B. L., where it speaks of the lcritic losing himself in the pasquillant. The readers of the E. R. of that day were not fond of subtleties or finedrawn sketches; otherwise we might say. of the writers: NsrtotL, ovk i(aetv Oa(rp rOZio ij,Utv Crdrroa. Such criticism prevents the assailed from seeing their real faults, while it precludes others from any knowledge of their excellencies. Cxxviii INTRODUCTION. from one absurdity to another,-adherence to notions that are audacious and insane, revolting and nonsensical,-entire want of charity, common sense, wisdom and humanity,-romantic servilitly, —heartless vice,-these are attributes of the marn-they can not be confined solely to the politician. We may charitably presume, indeed, that he who penned this tirade (one stroke of which I have passed by as too "'; ank" for my pen), never imagined that the characters he was blackening in effigy would look a single shade the darker to any one who beheld them as a neighbor of flesh and blood in actual life-the life of truth and reality; but is it not a strange state of things, when we must believe respecting an organ of public opinion, that it is not most unconscientious only because it is out of the domain of conscience altogether, and declaims upon virtue and vice, wisdom and folly,the vice and folly of individuals-without any earnest feeling or belief on subjects, which demand the utmost earnestness and carefulness from all who think or speak of them? Thirty years ago many things were done by honorable men which honorable men would not do now, or would gain great dishonor by doing; money intended for the benefit of the Public, especially for making men living members of the Church and followers of Christ, public functionaries too often thought they might employ according to their own private fancies; and such a notion has even been acted on by men undoubtedly public-spirited and disinterested. A dimness of vision on the subject of duty prevailed among the servants of the public in general; and reviewers were not more clear-sighted than the rest; they thought themselves quite at liberty to make the public taste in literature subservient to their own purposes as members of a party; to choke up with rubbish and weeds the streams of Parnassus, if' a political adversary might be annoyed thereby, though all parties alike had an interest in the water; —to bring the most sweeping and frightful charges against their opponents in general terms, whether they bad or had not the slightest power to verify them in particulars. Against this system the Biogr'aphia Literaria contains a strong protest, a protest to which private feeling has given a piquancy, but which int the main it has not corrupted or falsified. I regret that my Father, in exposing what he held to be wrong methods of acting on the public mind, should have been betrayed into any degree of discomposure in his own; but I feel confident, that he INTRODUCTIOlN. cxxix would not have given way to indignation on these subjects, if he had not believed his cause to be the cause of the public also; that the things of which he complained were parts of a system, the offences of which against principle it was matter of principle to point out. I have not brought forward these grounds of complaint out of any resentment against those who showed so much aiainst my Father, or-(I say it for my own sake, not as deeming it important to others)-in any feeling of disrespect for their characters in the main. I make no doubt of their possessing all the wit, worth, and wisdom which their friends ascribe to thenm, and am better pleased to think that my Father was beset and hi:ldered on his way by lions than by assailants of a more ignoble kind. I have recurred to those grounds of complaint in justification of the language used in this work on the "present mode of conducting publie journals," and also to justify the children of Coleridge in republishing it, aware as we are, that it will have an interest and even anr importance as a voice from the grave of one whom, now that he is removed from all eyes in this world, many desire to have heard and to have looked upon, which it had not when the author was still struggling through his earthly career. Some persons will say, that hostility which so little succeeded in its object of casting my Father's works into general contempt and oblivion, is unworthy of present regard. But there is a little anachronism in this. It is like saying, that because a few storms or an inclement season did not ruin a nascent colony, and years afterwards the colony is in a flourishing state, it was therefore of no consequence to the colonist and not worth mentioning in his history. The colony lives and blooms, like the bay-tree by the river-side, while the poor worn colonist moulders in the grave. What is literary reputation now to the author of Christa6el and the Lay Sermon?* Those works are read by many at this time, with as much pleasure as if they had never been declared * ily Father has observed, that an insignificant work was sometimes reviewed for the sake of attacking the author; on the other hand the more important works of obnoxious authors were often absolutely unnoticed. Some of his own were never reviewed in any leading journal; but Christabel, the Lay Sermon, and the Biographiai were caught up and violently twisted into whip-cord to lash him who had written them, and drive him if possible out of the temple. 4; exxx I~INTRODUCTION, worse than waste paper by the E. Review; they could not be slain by arrows of criticism if they had alny vitality of their own; if they had it not, who would wish to give them a galvanized life-the only life which some productions ever have to sustain them —a mere emanation from the hot orb of party spirit? But he who wrote those works wanted a "little here below" ere he went hence and was no more seen; he wanted a little encouragement from friends, a little fair play from adversaries, a little sympathy, and a little money. That he wanted these things was at least a grievance, whether it was most the fault of others or chiefly his own. But I think it will be granted by impartial persons, that there was some fault and deficiency on this score in others; an honest argumentative review, if ever so severe, would have done my Father's works good, had the reviewer strained every nerve to convict them of absurdity. But he was reviewed in a way not to expose his errors, but to prevent people from attending to him at all; not to make him understood, but to stamp upon him a character of hopeless unintelligibility; with an artful show of contempt, and a sort of ridicule, that might have been employed with equal success upon Plato or upon Shakspeare. A searching criticism, even from a determined opponent, would have been to him like that excellent oil of reproof, concerning which the Psalmist says that it breaks not the head nor depresses-it.* A few words, in conclusion, on Mr. Coleridge's "abuse of his contemporaries;" for on this score he was assailed in the review of the Biographia, with a particular reference to his critique on Bertram; though without a syllable to show that the censures it contained were unjust, or not rather a service to his contemporaries in general. This "abuse" was not, I think, of the same * The same method of shooting at him from a distance and declining close fight is practised even now by writers of a newer school, who dispose of him en passant, in their way to other objects of attack, by settling that he was certainly a man of some genius, and had a modicum of light to dispense, going before the torch-bearers of their party with his little fancylamp in his hand; but that he is by no means a safe or sound writer; though where, how, and why, he is unsafe and unsound they are far too much in a hurry to state. They seem indeed to consider him not only unsafe, but so dangerous, that prudence requires them to keep a good way off; as if the poor old steed, though unsound and superannuated, might still- give an uncomfortable kick, if you came too close to his heels. INTRODUCTION. cxxxm nature as that which he condemned in others. It was of two or three different kinds: the first, to which belong the Letters to Fox, Letters to Fletcher, strictures on Lord Grenville, character of Pitt, sketches of Bonaparte, consists in examinations of the public conduct and published opinions of eminent men under the light of principles; not a prejudging of their acts and opinions by supposed circumstances made to cast their coloring upon the former, as stained lamps dye the radiance of the flames they inclose; but an examination of the acts and opinions themselves, and only in due subordination to the former, if at all, a notice of' circumstances which may have tended to produce their peculiar character.* These treatises are chiefly composed of close reasoning and illustration; the censures they contain are expressed in stern and vehement, but not in coarse or bitter language; and they burst fbrth from a carefully constructed argument like strong keen flames from a well-heaped funeral pile. If they quiver as they stream upward-those flames of censureit is from a meditative emotion, not from the turbulence of a spirit agitated by personal or party rage. Could any specimen of " abuse" be extracted from his writings at all similar to that "true history of the Anti-Jacobin poets," referred to above, in which three men of difflrent characters and courses of life are put into a heap and conjointly accused of every turpitude which a politician can be guilty of, the language of the E. Review respeecting his " abuse of his contemporaries" would so far not be * The Character of Pitt, which I like the least of my Father's political writings, except certain passages against the same minister in his youthful Conciones ad Populum, the general drift of which, however, he has shown to be strictly in consonance with all his later politics,-and in these passages it is the tone and language, not the opinions that he would ever have wished to retract,-commences with an account of Mr. Pitt's education and the effect on the formation of his mind; "he was cast," my Father says, "rather than grew." But this is only a subordinate part of a general survey of his character as evinced in his public conduct. There is no attempt to characterize opinions not under examination by conjectures respecting the circumstances under which they may have been formed. The Choaracter contains also a few sentences relating to Mr. Pitt's private life; but it should be remembered that. some parts of a Prime Minister's private life, or what is private life in other cases, are necessarily before the public. My Father referred to tastes and habits of Mr. Pitt which were matters of notoriety. Still that passage is a blot in the essay, and I doubt not that, though interesting as a psychological analysis, the whole Character is too unmodified and severe, cxxxii INTRODUCTION. unmerited.'The strictures on that Journal in this work are also pieces of reasoning, and, when cleared from a few excrescences of personal anecdote and complaint, are not unworthy of a writer who ever strove to keep principle in view. Of the Critique of Bert'amn I have spoken elsewhere. The second sort of " abuse" that he dealt in, and which it were to be wished that all men would refrain from, consisted in pointed remarks, made in private respecting private things and persons. Some of these were as strictly true as they were clever and rememberable; some were just in themselves, but sounded unjust as well as unkind, when repeated unaccompanied by what should have gone along with them to take off their edge, expressed or understood by the utterer. Some, I dare say, were not wholly just: few men are wise or just at all hours; my Father had fits of satirizing with a habit of praising. I have heard a friend of his and mine remark, that some men " talk their gall cleverly," while there are others, who will show their cleverness though at the expense of being, for the moment, ill-natured. My Father's sharp speeches were riot mere improvements of gall. But I do not defend them. Psychological analysis on the living individual subject is an operation that can with difficulty be kept within the bounds of Christian justice and charity; even if we have a right to cut the pound of flesh at all, how can we be sure of cutting it exactly? But most to be blamed are they who repeat these keen sayings,-treasuring up the darts which they have not the skill to forge,-and bring them to the ears of those very persons, who are least likely to see their truth and most liable to feel their sharpness,-the persons of whom they are said. There is a third part of this subject, respecting which I refer the reader to an apology by Mr. C. himself, placed at the end of his Poetical Wtorks; I mean his flights of extravagant satire, the r'eal objects of which existed nowhere but in the Limbo of wild imagination. These extravagancies of his early day, though I believe his own account of them to be strictly true-indeed can see the truth of it on the face of the productions themselves,-have given me great pain; not for the vials of wrath that have been poured forth on occasion of them; they. were filled, I well knew, mainly from another cistern;* but be* It is not my Father's rash sayings, but his conscientious and wellweighed ones, his warm opposition to the "anti-national" policy, his free INTRODUCTION. cxxxiii cause I see in these productions, though inspired by a petulant fancy rather than by an angry heart, the orte stain upon the face of my Father's literary character. Yet though I deeply regret in regard to both, but by far the most in regard to one of them, that he should ever have penned such pieces or suffered them to get opinion of the philosophy of certain Northern schools,-his venturing to find fault with some of their Most -Profound and Irrefragable Doctors-that ever has excited, and still does excite, the animosity of the Northern critics against him. His politics were a reproach, his philosophy a disparagement to theirs, and the B. L. added vinegar to the bitters of the cup. What my Father said of Hume in the Lay Sernon, I. p. 448, is styled by the E. Reviewer (who puts on the Scotch mantle for the nonce),'a mean and malignant fabrication," " a transition from cant to calumny," " a sting, the venom of which returned into his own bosom, to exhaust itself in a bloated passage," &c. Supposing the anecdote untrue, of which the reviewer gives no proof (his calling it a fabrication of my Father's is a " gratuitous assertion" on his own part), where was the deep zalignily of ascribing to Hume at his death a sentiment undeniably consonant with the tenor of his'life? The reviewer could not deny that he "devoted his life to undermining the Christian re ligion;" why then should he rage so at the second clause of the sentence, "expended his last breath in a blasphemous regret that he had not survived it?" - Was it more discreditable to wish Christianity extinct than to have deliberately endeavored to destroy it? However if there be no authority for the anecdote reported in the Lay Sermon, a mark shall be set against it in future. }Mr. Coleridge's " ignorant petulance" on the subject of Hume's history has been amply confirmed by examiners on opposite sides in politics since the opinion was expressed. If that history be faulty at all, it is not superficially so but internally and radically-it is to a considerable extent virtually faithless and misleading; no one less cool, calm, and able than Hume could have given so misleading a representation of a certain most important part of English history. Like Hobbes, because he had no eye for a spiritual law, and because man must find firm ground to rest on somewhere, Hume rested his whole weight on human authority and kingship-an earthly divine right. Every one must admire his fine talents, must like his kindly and gentle naturle; but is not an Infidel writer's hand against every Christian, and must not every Christian's hand be against him,-not of course to write a word that is untrue concerning his life and actions, but to struggle with him when he strives against eternal hopes,-nay to trample on him, when, like Caiaphas in Dante's penal realm, he lies across the way-if that be the way of faith and salvation? Surely the Scotch may well afford to let Hume be judged according to his works,-I should rather say to let his works be judged according to their contents. They are not so deficient in worthies whom a Christian can approve that they must vehemently patronize the patron of despotism and infidelity. My Father did not abuse him because he was a Scotchman; he had contended warmly against Infidels in Germany, partial cxxxiv INTRODUCTION. abroad, I do not blame him for including them in his works when it was plain that they could not be suppressed. The wine was coarse and burning, but it was the same, however bad a sample, as that which glows in Kubla Khan and The Ancient iMae'iner, and no production, marked with a peculiar genius, if short and rememberable, will perish, though of small merit,-especially when other more considerable fruits of that genius are before the world. It will evei be a grief to those interested in my Father's name that, when a young man, he wrote a lampoon, in sport, upon a good and gifted contemporary: but I scarce know what he could do more, after shooting off an arrow, which others would preserve on account of its curious make or some fantastic plumage with which its shaft was adorned, than try to blunt its point, and beg that it might be considered only as a plaything. The Apologetic Preface has been much misrepresented: it has been represented as a defence and a sophistical one; if it were intended as a defence or vindication itwould be sophistical indeed; but it is no such thing: it is an apology in the modern sense of as he was to Germans and German writers. One thing I regret in Mr. Carlyle's admirable essay on Johnson, that deep-hearted essay!-the parallel at the end between Johnson and Hume. Oh! surelyJIume should not have been set over against Johnson, who could not have looked him in the face without shuddering, and turning pale for sorrow I Right loth should I be to consider these Boreal blasts and Scotch mists, that have so outraged and obscured the Exteesian domain, as coming from bonny Scotland at large. The man of genius-the wise and liberal critic — is always a true Briton-neither English, Irish, nor Scotch. Acer Septentrio to S. T. C.-but this is a syneedoche —part for the whole. I have necessarily been looking of late more at the bad weather of my Father's literary life,-the rough gales and chilling snow-falls,-than at its calm and sunshine: but these were not present always, and I trust they will henceforth be infrequent. Non semper imbres dulce-poeticos Manant in agros; nec mare lucidurn Vexaut inaequales procellke Usque; nec 6theriis in oris, Esteese Parens, stat glacies iners Menses per omnes; aut Aquilonibus Myrteta Colerigi laborant Vitibus et viduantur ultni. The twining vines are popularity and usefulness: the elms literary prow duetions of slow growth and stately character. INTRODUCTION. cxxxv the term: that is an excuse. " It was not my intention, I said, to justify the publication, whatever its author's feelings might have been at the time of composing it. That they are calculated to call forth so severe a reprobation from a good man, is not the worst feature of such poems. Their moral deformity is aggravated in proportion to the pleasure which they are capable of affording to vindictive, turbulent and unprincipled readers."* Notwithstanding this declaration, an admirer of Mr. Pitt has affirmed that "the Apology is throughout defensive." As this charge is made in the shape of mere assertion, " to refute it with not" will perhaps be sufficient. This and other assertions of the Pittite may be met with the counter-assertion, that the Preface contains neither " metaphysical jargon," "unphilosophical sentimentality," nor " wire-drawn argumentation," but expresses in clear language, and illustrates, I think, with some eloquence, the simple but not uninteresting psychological fact, that the wilder and more extravagant a satire appears, the more it contains of devious irrelevant fancy, and the less of individual application, or any attempt to give an air of reality and truth of fact to the representation, the less harm it does and the less of deliberate malice it shows.t Such attacks may indeed be insults, but they are very seldom'injuries, except so far as the one is the other. Had no one said worse of Mr. Coleridge himself than that the Old One was sure of him at last, he would never have complained so bitterly as he sometimes did of the mischiefs of the tongue. When Mr. Hatelight and Mr. Enmity employ a skilful artist to paint their enemy's portrait, he does not take a plain likeness of Satan * Poet. Works, VII. p. 207. The next sentence shows impliedly that palliation is the writer's aim. See also p 209. f Mere outward marks for the identifying of the object, as " letters four do form his name," are distinct from individualizipg features of mind. The admirer of Mr. Pitt, who is so dissatisfied with the Apologetic Preface, is highly displeased because Mr. Coleridge did not express the deepest contrition for his censures of that minister, without s1fficiently considering, that, as Mr. Coleridge's opinion of the Pitt policy continued pretty much the same throughout his life, he could not repent of it, to please Mr. Pitt's devotees; and that he expressed quite as much regret for, and disapproval of, his "' flame-colored" language on the subject as may suffice to satisfy any but partisans and bigots, whom he never considered it his duty to conciliate. Let them pour out their streams of " trash," " nonsense," "jargon,"" muddy metaphysics" over his pages; of the abundance of the head the mouth speakleth when it speaks at this rate. exxxvi INTRODUCTION. and put the enemy's name under it; he takes the enemy's face as a foundation and superinduces that of Satan upon it; there are perhaps few strongly marked minds that may not, with pains and skill, be made to assume somewhat of a Satanic aspect. On these points I think indeed that my Father, upon the whole, was more sinned against than sinning; but I should be far from attempting to vindicate all the condemnatory parts even of his serious writings. Since he was laid in the grave there have been vehement renewals of former attacks upon him; but if I had not been called upon to republish his Literary Life, personalities of' this sort would not have engaged my thoughts for more than a passing moment. He is at rest; no longer to be disquieted by injustice or capable of being harmed by it; "the storms, reproaches and vilifyings" of this angry world come not nigh his dwelling. But some willingly hear his voice, as it yet speaks in his written remains, and will read with pleasure the following extract from the Aids to Reflection, " on the keen and poisoned shafts of the tongue," which I give in conclusion, as applicable to the subject that has been discussed, but without intending any particular application whatever. " The slanders, perchance, may not be altogether forged or untrue; they may be the implements, not the inventions of malice. But they do not on this account escape the guilt of detraction. Rather it is characteristic of the evil spirit in question, to work by the advantage of real faults; but these stretched and aggravated to the utmost. It is not expressible how deep a wound a tongue sharpened to the work will give, with no noise and a very little word. This is the true white gunpowder, which the dreaming projectors of silent mischiefs and insensible poisons sought for in the laboratories of art and nature, in a world of good; but which was to be found in its most destructive form, in'the World of Evil; the Tongue.' "* I have heard it said that the lives and characters of men ought never to be handled by near relations and friends, whose pride and partial affection are sure to corrupt their testimony. This is like saying that animal food should never come to table because XI.p. PT11 INTRODUCTION. cxxxvii it is liable, in warm weather, to become tainted; reports of friends and relations are the flesh diet of the Biographical Muse, whereby she is kept in health and strength; without them her form would become attenuated and her complexion sallow and wan. Contemporary biography can only proceed either from friends, from enemies, or from indifferent persons; the last class may be the most unbiased in their testimony, but for the most part they have little testimony to give; they know nothing and care nothing about him whose life is to be recorded, till the task of writing it falls into their hands. It should be remembered too that a man's enemies,-(and it is wonderful how many enemies men of mark are sure to acquire —among the vulgar-minded, who hate genius, for its own sake, while they envy its outward rewards-among the high-minded and strong-headed, who are in violent antagonism to an individual genius through the bent of their own),that these will give their testimony against him gratuitously, and that unconcerned persons will adopt it for mere amusement's sake,-will carelessly repeat the severest judgments, insensible as the " two-handed engine" itself, that cares not whether it descends upon a reprobate or a royal martyr. The testimony of friends is needed, if only to balance that of adversaries: and indeed what better grounds for judging of a man's character, upon the whole, can the world have, than the impression it has made on those who have come the nearest to him, and known him the longest and the best? I, for my part, have not striven to conceal any of my natural partialities, or to separate my love of my Father from my moral and intellectual sympathy with his mode of thought. I have endeavored to give the genuine impressions of my mind respecting him, believing that if reporters will but be honest, and study to say that and that alone, which they really think and feel, the color, which their opinions and feelings may cast upon the subject they have to treat of, will not finally obscure the truth. Of this I am sure, that no one ever studied my Father's writings earnestly and so as to imbibe the author's spirit, who did not learn to care still more for Truth than for him, whatever interest in him such a study may have inspired. These few lines are an attempt to bring out a sentiment, which my Father once expressed to me on the common saying that "Love is blind." xxxnviii INTRODUCTION. Passion is blind, not Love: her wond'rous might Informs with three-fold pow'r man's inward sight:To her deep glance the soul at large display'd Shows all its mingled mass of light and shade:Men call her blind when she but turns her head, Nor scans the fault for which her tears are shed. Can dull Indifference or Hate's troubled gaze See through the secret heart's mysterious maze?Can Scorn and Envy pierce that " dread abode," Where true faults rest beneath the eye of God? Not their's,'mid inward darkness, to discern The spiritual splendors how they shine and burn. All bright endowments of a noble mind They, who with joy behold them, soonest find; And better none its stains of frailty know Than they who fain would see it white as snow. OMISSA........." principles in no danger of being exaggerated." Introd. p. xxxix. Principles can not go too far, because they have the boundless realm of spirit to move in: manifestations,-thoughts, words, deeds (for thoughts are manifestations to the mind of the subject)-are in that other kingdom of Space and Time, which is essentially limited; and hence they may exceed in degree, even if they correspond to what is right. We can not really possess any virtue in excess. Rashness, for example, is not exaggerated courage; it is courage unattended by good sense, consequently wrong in the mode, and possibly extreme in the measure of its manifestations; and the same may be said of every vice which appears to be the wrong side of a virtue; it is a vice, not from intensity of degree, but from the want of true discernment and just feeling, quoad hoc, in the subject. For surely the prodigal giver is not more liberal than the generous man; neither are the rash more courageous than the truly brave. To be rash is to be fool-hardy; to be prodigal is to be a spendthrift. The truth is, that the matter of every virtue and vice is simply indifferent; it is the form alone that constitutes it good or evil. The mere natural disposition, which may be called the base of a virtue or a vice, is neutral; it becomes good by the direction which it receives from the Practical Reason; or evil from the obliquity which it is sure to assume in the silence of the Divine Light. Compare with our 9th and 13th Articles....... "Waterland modernizes Tertullian." Ib. p. lxx. Dr. Pusey does the same, I think, when he argues that the ancient writer could not have separated the new birth from reception of the Spirit. (Script. Views, pp. 152-4 and Lib. of the Fathers, 10, p. 263.) From T.'s own language it seems clear enough that he did separate them; that he believed the soul to be reformed by water and supernatural virtue first, informed by the Spirit afterwards; the tenement to be prepared before the Divine INTRODUCTION. cxxxix Tenant entered. His words are (I give Dr. P.'s own translation, only changing water for waters, as more literal), "Thus man, who had aforetime been in the image of God, will be restored to God after his likeness, &c. For he receiveth again that Spirit of God, which he had then received by his breathing upon him, but had afterwards lost by sin. 1ot that we obtain the Holy Spirit in the waters, but being cleansed in the water, under the Angel, we are prepared fbr the Holy Sp4irit." To make his plain meaning doubly plain he adds, " For thus was John aforetime the forerunner of the Lord, preparing his way." I do not forget that, in those days, Anointing and Imposition of hands were immediate adjuncts of Baptism, and T. affirms that in them, " the Spirit descends upon the flesh;" but to call them parts of Baptism, is surely to use a deceptive phrase; if they were component parts, the Church could not have detached them from that which they helped to constitute; they are either distinct sacraments or no sacraments, in the higher sense here in question, at all. On this and other points Tertullian's doctrine of baptism differs essentially, as it seems to me, from that which is now set forth as the doctrine of the Fathers,-which was the doctrine of some of them. True it is, that such a separation of ideas as I have ascribed to Tertullian, argues an utter want of metaphysical insight into the ideas themselves; but I believe that in the early times of Christianity there was this want of insight in Christian writers; Hermas, the inspired Shepherd, as Irenwus and others then thought him, separates ideas still more strangely, and his strange separation seems to be adopted by Clemens Alexandrinus! (Hefele's edit. p. 224, with extract in note from Strom. II. p. 452.) "tacit establishment." Ib. p. lxxviii. I mean silent as to its coincidence with Luther's doctrine. But Mr. -N. expressly admits that Luther is " in the right" with regard to " the exact and philosophical relation of justification to sanctification," and "prefers" his statement scientifically considered, to that of St. Austin; Luther himself considered St. Augustine to be substantially of his mind in the matter. See liable Talk, p. 211. Truly as now Mr. N. teaches a "rationalistic Romanism," so formerly he taught a Lutherano-Anglicanism: he never has succeeded in blinding his mind's eye to one whole side of truth. His literary genius and intellectual power are as apparent in his last work as ever; but it is one thing to walk in the high road, and quite another to make paths in an untrodden territory. " faith justifies before and without charity." Ib. lxxxviii. In Gal. ii. 16, the grace, charity, is so connected with deeds of charity, bona opera, that it is not easy to tell, from the author's mere words, whether he meant the former by itself, or as incarnated in the latter, when he says, hcecfides sine et ante charitatem juestificat. But even if he meant that faith justifies before the inward grace of charity, this is but asserting that priority of faith, in the order of thought, which the mind can not reject,-which is involved in the Tridentine saying, that faith is the root of all justification: for the soot is before the stem and branches. Faith justifies before outward charity in time; before inward charity in order of nature. Mr. Newman asks, in reference to Melancthon's and Calvin's statements on this point, aXl INTROI)UCTION. "what is the difference between saying, that faith is not justifying unless love or holiness be with it, or with Bellarmine that it is not so, unless love be in it?" Answer, none at all, if in be taken merely to denote the relative situation of love and faith in the human mind. But that is not the point; the point is, does the justifying power belong to faith, as faith, or does love help it to justify? By denying that faith is informed with charity, Luther only meant to deny that it is rendered justifying by charity. Mr. N. himself teaches that faith has the exclusive privilege of connecting the soul with Christ, and thus implicitly denies, that love is in it for the purpose of such connection; while to works he seems to ascribe another sort of justifying power. What Lutheir meant to insist upon is, that it is the apprehension of Christ that justifies rather than any quality of the mind considered as such. " substituted for general renovation." Ib. p. lxxxv. Mr. Ward holds it a sure sign of moral corruptness in Luther's doctrine of faith that it is proposed as affording relief to the conscience. But how does it propose this? By deadening the conscience? No, but by giving it rest. He giveth his beloved rest; but they must be His beloved who can obtain this rest, according to Luther. It proposes to relieve the conscience by substituting simple faith in Christ as the means and instrument of justification, which includes righteousness and spiritual peace, for outward works of penance as the preparatory means. His opponents affirm that such performances are the way to true Faith; but this Luther denied; he thought that men might go on all their lives obeying a priest's prescriptions, yet never turn to God with their whole heart and soul, but be kept walking to and fro in a vain shadow; he saw too that spiritual physicians often acted selfishly, making a worldly profit of the means without the least real desire to promote the end, or render the patient independent of their costly services; that they even hid the Gospel, lest men should see by its light how, under God, to heal themselves. He denounced the whole system not merely as liable to corruption, but as certainly, in the long run, involving it, being based on untruth and mere human policy. The cross of the Christian profession, in the Bible, is wrapped up in Christian duty strictly performed; the Papist makes a separate thing of it, and thus converts it into an engine of superstition. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. So wenig er auch best'immt. seyn mag, andere zu belehren, so wunscht er doch sich dene n mitzutheilen, die er sich gleic/igesinnt weiss (oder hofft), deren Anzahl aber in der Breite der }Welt zerstresut ist; er wiunscht sein Verhidltniss zet den dltesten Freunden dadurchi wieder anzukniipyfen, mit neuen es fortzusetzen, und in der letzen Generation sich wieder anderefiir seine iibrige Lebenszeit zu gewinnen. Er wvinscht der Jugend die Umwege zu ersparen, auf denzen er sich selbst verirrte. (Goethe. Einleitung in die Propylien.) TRANSLATION. Little call as he may have to instruct others, he wishes nevertheless to open out his heart to such as he either knows or hopes to be of like mind with himself, but who are widely scattered in the world: he wishes to knit anew his connections with his oldest friends, to continue those recently formed, and to win other friends among the rising generation for the remaining course of his life. He wishes to spare the young those circuitous paths, on which he himself had lost his way. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, CHAPTER I. MOTIVES TO THE PRESENT WORK-RECEPTION OF THE AUTHOR S FIRST PUBLICATION —DISCIPLINE OF HIS TASTE AT SCHOOLEFFECT OF CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON YOUTHFUL MINDSBOWLES S SONNETS-COMPARISON BETWEEN THE POETS BEFORE AND SINCE POPE. IT has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain, whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I have lived, both from the literary and political world. M.vost often it has been connected with some charge which I could not acknowledge, or some principle which I had never entertained. Nevertheless, had I had no other motive or incitement, the reader would not have been troubled with this exculpation. What my additional purposes were, will be seen in the following pages. It will be found, that the least of what I have written concerns myself personally. I have used the narration chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part fobr the sake of the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by particular events, but still more as introductory to a statement of my principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy, and an application of the rules, deduced from philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism. But of the objects which I proposed to myself, it was not the least important to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long-continued controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction; and at the same time to divine with the utmost 144 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. impartiality the real poetic character of the poet, by whose writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been since fuelled and fanned.* In the spring of 1796, when I had but little passed the verge of manhood, I published a small volume of juvenile poems.t They were received with a degree of favor, which, young as I was, I well know was bestowed on them not so much for any positive merit, as because they were considered buds of hope, and promises of better works to comne. The critics of that day, the most flattering, equally with the severest, concurred in objecting to them obscurity, a general turgidness of diction, and a profusion of new coined double epithets.$ The first is the fault which * [The first volume of the Lyrical Ballads was published in the summer of 1798, by Mr. Joseph Cottle, of Bristol, who purchased the copyright for thirty guineas. That copyright was afterwards transferred with others to Messrs. Longman & Co. And it is related by Mr. Cottle, that in estimating the value the Lyrical Ballads were reckoned as nothing by the head of that firm. This copyright was subsequently given back to Mr. Cottle, and by him restored to Mr. Wordsworth. Would that he and his might hold it forever! The second volume, with Mlr. Wordsworth's Preface, appeared in 1800.Ed.] t [This volume was published by Mr. Cottle at Bristol in the Spring of 1796, in conjunction with the Messrs. Robinson in London. It contained fifty-one small pieces, of which the best known at the present day are the Religious Musings, Monody on Chatterton, Song of the Pixies, and the exquisite lines written at Clevedon, beginning, "My pensive Sara, &c." To this poem Mr. Coleridge many years afterwards added the magnificent passageO the one life within us and abroad, * * * * and the mute still air Is Music slumbering on her instrument. Poet. Works, p. 147. He was then twenty-three years and a half old. —Ed.] t The authority of Milton and Shakspeare may be usefully pointed out to young authors. In the Comus and other early poems of Milton there is a superfluity of double epithets; while in the Paradise Lost we find very few, in the Paradise Regained scarce any. The same remark holds almnost equally true of the Love's Labor Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, compared with Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet of our great Dramatist. The rule for the admission of double epithets seems to be this: either that they should be already denizens of our language, such as blood-stained, terror-stricken, self-applauding: or when a new epithet, or BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 145 a writer is the least able to detect in his own compositions: and lmy mind was not then sufficiently disciplined to receive the authority of others, as a substitute for my own conviction. Satisfied that the thoughts, such as they were, could not have been expressed otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, I forgot to inquire, whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a degree of attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry. This remark however applies chiefly, though not exclusively, to the Religious Musings. The remainder of the charge I admitted to its full extent, and not without sillncere acknowledgments both to mny private and public censors for their friendly adnmonitions. In the after editions,* I pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand, and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction1; though in truth, these parasite plants of youthful poetry had insinuated themselves into my longer poems with such intricacy of union, that I was often obliged to omit disentangling the weed, fI-om the fear of snLapping the flower. one found in books only, is lazsarded, that it, at least, be one word, not two words made one by mere virtue of the printer's hyphen. A language whlich, like the English, is almost without cses, is indeed in its very genius unfitted for compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word suggests itself to hzi, would seek for some other mode of expressing the satme sense, the chances are always g'reatly in favor of his finding a better word. Ut tanquastm scopulum sic fitgias inTsolesns verbues, is the wise advice of Caesar to the Roman Orators,` and the precept applies with double force to the writers in our own language. But it must not be forgotten, that the same COsar wrote a Treatiset for the purpose of reforming the ordinary language by bringing it to a greater accorda nce,with the principles of logic or universal gralmnar.: [The second edition appeared in iMay, 1797, with the same publishers' names. Upwards of twenty of the pieces contained in the first edition were omitted in this, and ten new poems were added. Amongst these latter were the Dedication to his brother, the Reverend George Coleridge, the Ode on the Departing Year, and the Reflections on having left a place of Retirement. (Poet. Works.) The volume comprised poems by Lamb and Lloyd, and on the title-page was printedthe prophetic aspiration: —Duplex nobis vinulwsn, et amicitie jizunctarumqsnqe Ca -?nzosartaun;-qucod dtirnasr neque m.ors solvat; szeqme teanporis loEginquitas! —Ed.] * [The expression is so given by A. Gellius (Noct. Att. i. 10). Macrobins says, infreqens atqute insolens versbsn. (Saturn, i. 5.) —Ed.] t [De Analogia Libri duo, the first of which contained the precept above mentioned.-Ed.] VOL. UI. G 146 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. From that period to the date of the present work I have published nothing, with my name, which could by any possibility have come before the board of anonymous criticism.* Even the three or four poems, printed with the works of a friend,t as far as they were cernsured at all, were charged with the same or similar defects (though I am persuaded not with equal justice), — with an excess of ornament, in addition to strained and elaborate diction. I must be permitted to add, that, even at the early period of my juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the superiority of an austerer and more nlatural style, with an insight not less clear, than I at present possess. My judgment was stronger than were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving a poetic coloring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent.-During several years of nay youth and early manhood, I reverenced those who had reintroduced the manly simplicity of the Greek, and of our own elder poets, with such enthusiasm as made the hope seem presumptuous of writing successfully in the same style. Perhaps a similar process has happened to others; but my earliest poems were marked by an ease and simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps with inferior success, to impress on my later compositions. At school (Christ's Hospital), I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe * [This is certainly not strictly accurate, if the date of the publication of the Biographia (1817) be taken as the period intended. The Remorse appeared in 1813, and Christabel in 1816. Zapolya, the two Lay Sermons, and the Sibylline Leaves, all came out nearly contemporaneously with this work. I believe the fact to be, that Mr. Coleridge wrote the passage in the text several years before 181'7, and never observed the misstatement which lapse of time had caused at the date of publication. The first Essays of The Friend, indeed, came out in 1809; but he probably did not consider them as constituting a published work in the ordinary sense of the term.-Ed.]. See the criticisms on the Ancient Mariner, in the Monthly and Critical Reviews of the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads.* * [The first volume of the Lyrical Ballads contained The Ancient Mariner, Love, The Nightingale, and The Foster Mot.her's Tale. —-l/.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 147 master, the Reverend James Bowyer.* He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius (in such extracts as I then read), Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan era: and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring'up, so as to escape his censure. I learned fromi him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of" the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of' science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original text. In our own Einglish compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education), he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words.ft Lute; harp, and lyree, iVItse, I/Iuses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Pa}rnassus, and Hippocrene were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming " Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean. Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" Nay certain introductions, similes, and examples, were placed by name on a * [See the Table Talk, VI. p. 413, and Lamb's exquisite Essay, Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty years ago. Prose Works, II. p. 26. —Ed].F This is worthy of ranking as a maxim (regzula maximas) of criticism. Whatever is trlanslatable in other and simpler words of the same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad. N. B. By dignity I mean the absence of ludicrous and debasing associations. 148 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. list of int rdiction. Among the similes, there was, I remember, that of tile manchineel fiuit, as suiting equally well with too many subijects; in which however it yielded the palm at once to the exam.?le of Alexander and Clytus, which was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and Clytus!-Flattery? Alexander and Clytus!Anger - runkenness- pride-friendship-ingratitude-late repentance?* Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises of agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation that, had Alexander been holding the plow, he would not have run his friend Clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old friend was banished by public edict in scecula sceculorug;m. I have sometimes ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index expzu'gatorius of certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both introductory, and transitional, including a large assortment of modest egoisms, and flattering illeisms, and the like, might be hung up in our Law-courts, and both Houses of Parliament, with great advantage to the public, as an important saving of national time, an incalculable relief to his Majesty's ministers, but above all, as insuring the thanks of country attorneys, and their clients, who have private bills to carry through the House. Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I can not pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy of imitation. He would often permit our exercises, under some pretext of want of time, to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence:might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the [" This lecture he enriched with many valuable quotations from the ancients, particularly from Seneca; who hath, indeed, so rwell handled this passion, that none but a very angry man can read him without great pleasure and profit. The Doctor concluded his harangue with the famous story of Alexander and Clytus; but, as I find that entered in my Common-place under title Drusnkenness, I shall not insert it here." The History of a Foundling, by Henry Fielding, Book vi. chap. ix.- Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 149 day. The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither lessen nor dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations. He sent us to the University excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and tolerable Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts, which we derived from his zealous and conscientious tutorage. He is now gone to his final reward, full of years, and full of honors, even of those honors, which were dearest to his heart, as gratefully bestowed by that school, and still binding him to the interests of that school, in which he had been himself educated, and to which during his whole lifb he was a dedicated thing. From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no models of past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on the youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary genius. The discipline, my mind had undergone, N~e falleretur rotundo sono et verszum cursus, cincinnis, et floribhs; sed ut inspiceret qu~tidnanm subesset, quce secles, quod firmeamrentum, quis fundus verbis; an figuree essezt gmzera ornatcura et orationis fa.cus; vel saznguMiszs e nmaterice ipsiZus corde elfl'uentis rubor quidan nativuts et incalescentia gezzcin;* —removed all obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in style without diminishing my delight. That I was thus prepared for the perusal of AIr. Bowles's sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased their influence, and my enthusiasm. The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race, in respect of which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a contempcrary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a:m-an for a matt. His very admiration is the wind which fans and. feeds his hope. The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one, who exists to receive it. * [I presume this Latin to be Mr. Coleridge's own —not being;ble to find the passage in any other author, and believing that incalescentix is a good word not countenanced by any classic writer of Rome.-d.] 150 BIOGRAPtIIA LITERARIA. There are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and are producing, youths of a very different stamp; modes of teaching, in comparison with which we have been called on to despise our great public schools, and universities, in whose halls are hung Armory of the invincible knights of old —* modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. And prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus produced;-prodigies of self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! Instead of storing the memory, (luring the period when the memory is the predominant faculty, with facts fobr the after exercise of the judgment; and instead of awakening by the noblest models the fond and unmixed love and admiration, which is th6 natural and graceful temper of early youth; these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught to dispute and decide; to suspect all but their own and their lecturer's wisdom; and to hold nothing sacred from their contempt, but their own contemptible arrogance;-boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in all the dirty passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. To such dispositions alone can the admonition of Pliny be requisite,.Neque enim debet opei s ejus es besse, quod vivit. An si inter eos, quos nunquam vidimnus, floruisset, non solurn libros ejus, verumn etiam imagines conquireremus, ejusclem nunc honor prcescnztis, et gratia quasi satietate languescet? At hoc pravum, sazlignumnque est, non admirari hominern adnriratione dignissimum, quia videre, comnplecti, nec laudare tantum, verum etiam amare contingitj.J I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet,$ were first made known and presented to me, by a schoolfellow who had quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time that he was in our first form, (or in our school language a Grecian,) had been my patron and pro* [Wordsworth. Poet. IV iii. p. 190.-Ed.] f [Epist. i. p. 16.-Ed.] t [The volume here mentioned appears to have been the second edition of Mr. Bowless Sonnets, published in 1789, and containing twenty-one in number. The first edition with fourteen sonnets only had been published half a year previously.-Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 151 tector. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned, and every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta: qui laudibus amnplis Jigenium celebrare aee?7m, calanmurnque solebat, Calcar aqens animo valimdon. Non omnia terrce Obru6ta; vivit amnor, vivit dolor; ora negatur Dulcia conspicere; at flere et mgeminisse relictitn est.* It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection, that I should have received from a friend so revered the first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal, with which I labored to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of' whatever rank, and in whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author. Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well aware, that I shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it will be well, if I subject myself to no worse charge than that of singularity; I am not therefore deterred from avowing, that I regard, and ever have regarded the obligations of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of gratitude. A valuable thought, or a particular train of thoughts, gives me additional pleasure, when I can safely refer and attribute it to the conversation or correspondence of another. My obligations to Mr. Bowles were indeed important, and for radical good. At a very premature age, even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysics, and in theological controversy.t Nothing else * [Petrare. Epist. I. 1. Barbato Subnonensi. Bishop Middleton left Christ's Hospital on the 26th of September, 1188, on having been elected to Pembroke College, Cambridge.-Ed.] { [" Come back into memory," says Lamb, "like as thou wast in the day. spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery columnn before thee-the dark pillar not yet turnedl-Samuel Taylor Coleridge.-Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!-How have I seen the casual passer through the cloister stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion b1etween 152- BIOGRAPHIA LITERiARIA, pleased me. History, and particular facts, lost all interest in my mind. Poetry —(though for a sEhool-boy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and had already produced two or three compositions which, I may venture to say, without refer.ence to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity,` and which had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old master was at all pleased with)-poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became. insipid to me. tn my fiiendless wanderings on our leavze-dcFays (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections in London), highly was I delighted, if' any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, would enter into conversation with ime. For I soon found the means of divecting it to my favorite subjects Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute, And found no end in wandering mazes lost;. This preposterous pursuit Nwas, beyond doubt, ilj urious'both to my natural powers, and to the progress of my educ-ation. it would perhaps have been destructive bad it been continued; but fiom this I was auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an acoidenmtal introduction to an amniable family, chiefly however by the genial influence of a style of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of [iir. Bowles. Well would it; have been for me perhaps had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had conti; ned to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest friom the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quiceksillver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after-time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and misthe speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep iand sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamlbliehus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, —while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy!"-Prose Works, ii. p. 46.-Ed.] L[See amongst his Juvenile Poems the lines entitled, Time real and imaginary (Poet. Works, p. 19), which is the first decided indication of his poetic and metaphysical genius together, and was written in his sixteenth year. —Ed.] t The Christ's Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether, but for those on -which the boyfs are permitted to go beyond the precincts of the school. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. lit managed sensibility in abstruse researches, which exeIcised the strength and subtilty of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there was a long and Ilessed interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develop themselves;-my fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds.* [For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From may own nature all the natural manThis was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that \which suits a. part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. Poet. Works, p. 181.'.he passage in the text has been more than once cited by those who cite nothing else from the writings of Coleridge, as warning authority against the pursuit of metaphysic science. With what candor or good sense let those judge, who know and appreciate the persistent labor of his life, and recollect that all the great verities of religion are ideas, the practical appr ehension of, and faith in whblich, have in every age of the Church been, as firom the constitution of the human mind they must necessarily be, vitally affected by the metaphysic systems from time to time prevailing. It is indeed to be observed, that those who are so zealous in decrying metaphysic, and more especially psychological investigations, and spend entire sermons in reasoning against reason, have nevertheless invariably a particular system of metaphysics and even of psychology of their own, which they will as little surrender as examine. And what system?-In nine cases out of ten, a patchwork of empirical positions, known historically to be directly repugnant to the principles maintained as well by the Reformers as the Fathers of the Catholic Church,' and leading legitimately to conclusions subversive of the fundamental articles of the Christian faith. That those conclusions indeed have not been able to obtain a fixed footing within our Church, as they have loug since done to a fearful extent elsewhere, is, under God's providence, mainly attributable to the reading of the Liturgy and Scriptures in the ears of the people. Yet who will not tremble at the dilemma in the case of an individual clergyman, who either sees the contrariety between his philosophical and religious creeds, and continues to hold both, or not seeing it, is at the mercy of the first Socinian reasoner who helps him to perceive it? This vulgar scorn of the science of the hnuman mind, its powers, capacities, and objects, as an essential part or fore-ground of the -science of theology, is to be found passim in the written and oral teaching of jhose who, to use a confessedly inaccurate but very significant phrase, lead the Calvinistic and Arminian parties within the Church in. England. To the former G*; BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration of these poems (to which let me add, though known to me at a somewhat later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe*), bears more immediately on my present subject. Among it seems more natural in respect of their being, upon the whole, men of lower education, meaner attainments, and more limited abilities; in the latter, and especially in the most eminent of the latter, it is self-contradiction, and has the appearance, to calm observers, of mere wilfulness. For in the perusal of the many eloquent volumes which have proceeded of late years from the latter, there may be found metaphysic and even psychological arguments, which show a knowledge of Aristotle, and also-quod mininze reris-an acquaintance with Coleridge,-the last, however, without recognition by name, and speedily atoned for in a following page by some religious dehortation, or sullen dogma of contrary import. It is evident, therefore, that the particular system is the object of dislike. Would it not be more agreeable to the sincerity of lovers of truth, and to the courtesy of men of letters, to meet, commend, or censure, adopt or reject, what stands in their path in a perfectly questionable shape, than to pass by on the other side in affected ignorance or contempt? Can the Aids to Reflection be honestly pretermitted by a divine of this day, or ought the only use made of it by a gentleman to be —to borrow from it without acknowledgment? But it is a true saying, that they who begin by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving their own sect or church better than Christianrity, and end in loving themselves better than all. This is something of a digression, but it is needed. It can hardly be necessary to remark, that Mr. Coleridge is only speaking relatively to his youth, and his vocation as a poet, and the proportion which metaphysical studies should bear in a well-ordered education to the exercise of the imagination, and the observation of external nature. Something also was, no doubt, intended against particular books and lines of research, which, in his almost limitless range, he had perused or followed. These are unwholesome books in metaphysics as there are in divinity and romance, but not so many or so injurious by half; and it is just as wise to proscribe the former on account of Spinoza or Hume, as it would be to prohibit the latter for Socinus or Paul de Kock. No man could be a great metaphysician, or make an epoch in the history of the science, without an acquaintance as extensive as hMr. C.'s with all that had been done or attempted before him; but such a course is not more necessary to the education of the mind in general, to which the elements of metaphysic knowledge are essential, than five years' attendance at the State Paper Office to the accomplishment of a gentleman in the history of England; and it may perhaps be admitted that the philosophic spell which overmastered Coleridge's advancing manhood forever slacked the strings of the enchanting lyre of his youth. But on this we can only speculate. —Ed.] * [Lewesdon Hill was first published in 1786; there was a second edition in 1788, and a third in 1804.-Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 155 those with whom I conversed, there were, of course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of these poems, they gave nme little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the presumption of youth withheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its -matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity, Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime, the matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last point I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's Botanic Garden,* which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only by the reading public in general, but even by those whose'genius and natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act foremost in dissipating these " painted mists" that occasionally rise from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge vacation,t I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold, and transitory. In the same essay too,: I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn * [The Botanic Garden was published in 1781.-Ed.] f [Mr. Coleridge entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, on the 5th of February, 1791.-Ed.] [I have never been able to discover any traces of this essay, which I presume was not printed.-Ed.] 166 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. from a comparison of' passages from the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they were borrowed, for the preference of' Collins's odes to those of Gray; and of the simile in Shakspeare How like a younker or a prodigal, The scarfed bark puts from her native bay, Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind! How like the prodigal doth she return, With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails, Lean, rent, and beggoar'd by the strumpet wind! (Mereb. of VYen. Act ii. se. 6.) to the imitation in the Bard; Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows While proudly riding o'er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, That hush'd in grim repose, expects its evening prey. (in which, by-the-bye, tile words "realm" and "sway'" are rhymes dearly purchased)-I preferred the original on the ground that in the imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various lines in Gray to their original in Shakspeare and Milton, and in the clear perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer, I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years afterwards, was recalled to me from the same thought having been started in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully, by Mr. Wordsworth; -namely, that this style of poetry, Wvhich I have characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that a youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on the force ork fitness of his BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 1te phrases, but the authority of the writer from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more'compendiously from his Gradus,* halves and quarters of lines, in which to embody them.t I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man from the age of seventeen to that of four or five-and-twenty, provided I find him always arguing on one side of the question. The controversies, occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honor of a favorite contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of great advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and critical opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of * [In the Rusticus of Politian* there occurs this line: Pura coloratos interstrepit unda lapillos. Casting my eye on a University prize-poem, I met this line: Lactea purpureos interstrepit u-nda lapillos. Now look out in the Gradus for purus, and you find as the first syn onyme, lacteus; for colorati-s, and the first synonymne is purpureuzs. I mention this by waay of elucidating one of the most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of these centos.].f [The description in the text may be true of those who never in any Iproper sense succeed in writing Latin verse. But the experience of many scholars in England, amongst boys, would enable them with sincerity to deny its universal application. The chief direct use of the practice of Latin verse composition consists in the mastery which it gives over the vocabulary and constructive powers of the language. But it is, perhaps, greatly to be regretted that spoken and written Latin has to so great a degree ceased to be a mean of communication between liberally educated Europeans. The pretence that the extended knowledge of modern languages is an adequate substitute, is in five cases out of ten generally, and in the pre-eminent instances of Germany and England, in three out of four, notoriously untrue. Mere school editions of the Classics may properly enough be accompanied with notes in a modern language, but every work designed for the promotion of scholarship generally ought, by literary comity, to be published in a language which every scholar can read. This remark does not touch the question of dictionaries; as to which nothing but necessity can justify the ordinary use of any interpretation but into the native idiom of the student. -Ed.] * Angelus Politianus was born July 14, 1454, at Monte Pulciano in Tuscany; died at Florence, September 24, 1494. The line quoted is the four teenth of the Silva cui titulus Rusticus.-S. C. 158 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. natural language, neither bookish nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp nor of the kennel, such as I will q'emember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair finery of; thy image on her wing Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets, from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth, Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my former passion for metaphysical investigations; I labored at a solid foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and importance. According to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;-first, that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry; — secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded from the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere novelty in the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the author. Oftentimes since then, in perusing French tragedies, I have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own cleverness. Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous under-current of feeling; it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakspeare (in'their most important works at least), without making the BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 159 poet say something else, or something worse, than he does say, One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic, out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English; in the latter, the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the starts of wit; the moderns, to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half' of abstract* meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand and account fbr the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody at Matlock, and the Hope,t of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West,j indeed, had the * I remember a ludicrous instance in the poem of a young tradesman: " No more will I endure love's pleasing pain, Or round my heart's leg tie his galling chain." f [The Monody at Matlock was published in 1791, and the Vision of Hope in 1196.-Ed.]: [Meaning, of course, Gilbert West, the Translator of Pindar; to whose merit as a poet, it may be doubted whether the author does full justice in the text. West's two imitations of Spenser are excellent, not merely, as Johnson seems to say, for their ingenuity, but for their fulness of thought and vigor of expression. The following stanza is but one of many other passages of equal felicity:Custom he bight, and aye in every land Usurp'd dominion with despotic sway O'er all he holds; and to his high command Constrains e'en stubborn Nature to obey; Whom dispossessing oft he doth assay To govern in her right; and with a pace So soft and gentle doth he win his way That she unawares is caught in, his embrace, And tho' deflower'd and thrall'd naught feels her foul disgrace. Education.-Ed.] 160 B3IOGRAPfIA LITERAF IA. merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-colored; while in the best of Warton's* there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present day; yet in a more sustained and elevated style, of the then living poets Cowper and Bowlest were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who com* [Thomas Warton; whose English poems, taken generally, seem as inferior to G. West's in correctness of diction as in strength of conception. Some of his Latin verse is-beautiful; and, if he had written nothing else, his epigram addressed to Sleep would perpetuate his name at least among scholars:Somne veni; et quanquame certissinza mortis imago es, Consortern cupio te tamen esse tori. Huec ades, haud abiture cito: nxam sic sine vita Vivere qtaem suave est-sic sine morte mori I A few stray lines of Warton's have crept into familiar use and application without ever being attributed to their author, such as:--- while with uplifted arm Death stands prepared, but still delays to strike. Ode to Sleep. O what's a table richly spread Without a woman at its head I Progress of Discontent. Nor rough, nor barren are the winding ways Of hoar Antiquity, but strown with flowers. Is Dulgdale's 3Ionasticon. Warton's best poem, as a whole, is the Inscription in a Hermitage: — Beneath this stony roof reclined, &c. But his great work is the History of English Poesy, imperfect and inadequate as it is: r7v re2ovivra raivel. It is somewhat remarkable that Mr. C. should not upon this occasion have mentioned Akenside, and, as compared with Warton, the beautiful Hymn to the Naiads.-Ed.] * Cowper's Task* was published some time before the Sonnets of Mr. Bowles; but I was not familiar with it till many years afterwards. The vein of satire which runs through that excellent poem, together with the * [Cowper's Task was first published in 1785-his Table Talk in 1782. Ed. Thomsonr was born in 1700; published his works, collected in 4to, in 1730. The Castle of Indolence, his last piece, appeared in 1746, —S. C.o] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 161 bined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head. It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction, which I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth. Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgment; and the compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years-(for example, the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which now form the middle and the conclusion of the poemn entitled the Destiny of Nations,* and the tragedy of Remorset)-are not more below my present ideal in respect of the general issue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who have done me the honor of putting my poems in the same class with those of my betters, the one or two, who have pretended to bring examples of' affected simplicity from my volume, have been able to adduce but one instance, and that out of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which I intended, and had myself characterized, as se'rnoni propioac.t Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, which will itself' need reforming. The reader will excuse me for noticing, that I myself was the first to expose rist honoesto the three sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second number of the Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom, I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had fobr its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the recurrence of favorite sombre hue of its religious opinions, would probably, at that time, have prevented its laying any strong hold on my affections. The love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion; and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. The one would carry his fellow-men along with him into nature; the other flies to nature from his fellow-men. In chastity of diction, however, and the harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him; yet still I feel the latter to have been the born poet. * [Poet. Works, p. 83.-Ed.] f [Poet. Works, p. 327.-Ed.] t [Not meaning of course the exquisite reflections on having left a place of Retirement, to which Coleridge himself affixed the motto from Horace. Poet. Works, p. 149. —Ed.] 162 BIOGR.APHIA LITERARIA. phrases, with the double defect of being at once trite and licentious; —the second was on low creeping language and thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. The reader will find them in the note* below, and will I trust regard them SONNET I. Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused, And my poor heart was sad; so at the Moon I gazed, and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused With tearful vacancy the dampy grass That wept and glittered in the paly ray: And I did pause me on may lonely way And mused me on the wretched ones that pass O'er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas 1 Most of myself I thought! when it befell, That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood Breathed in mine ear: " All this is very well, But much of one thing, is for nothing good." Oh my poor heart's inexplicable swell! SONNET II. Oh I do love thee, meek Simplicity! For of thy lays the lulling simpleness Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress, Distress though small, yet haply great to me.'Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad I amble on; and yet I know not why So sad I am! but should a friend and I Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad. And then with sonnets and with sympathy My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall; Now of my false friend plaining plaintively, Now raving at mankind in general; But whether sad or fierce,'tis simple all, All very simple, meek Simplicity! SONNET III. And this reft house is that, the which he built, Lamented Jack! and here his malt he piled, Cautious in vain! these rats, that squeak so wild, Squeak not unconscious of their father's guilt. Did he not see her gleaming through the glade 1 Belike'twas she, the maiden all forlorn. What though she milk no cow with crumpled horn, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 168 as reprinted for biographical purposes alone, and not for their poetic merits. So general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness to a gentleman, who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not, however, resist giving him a hint not to mention The House that facck built in my presence, for " that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet;" he not knowing that I was myself the author of it. Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she strayed: And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight i Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn, And through those brogues, still tattered and betorn, His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white. Ah! thus through broken clouds at night's high noon Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orbed harvest-moon! The following anecdote will not be wholly out of place here, and may perhaps amuse the reader. An amateur performer in verse expressed to a common friend a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in accepting my friend's immediate offer, on the score that' he was, he must acknowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on my Ancient 2Jariner, which had given me great pain." I assured my friend that, if the epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire to become acquainted with the author, and begged to hear it recited: when, to my no less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which I had myself some time before written and inserted in the Morning Post, to witTo the Author of the Ancient Mariner. Your poem must eternal be, Dear sir! it can not fail, For'tis incomprehensible, And without head or tail. CHAPTER II. SUPPOSED IRRITABILITY OF MEN OF GENIUS BROUGHT TO THE TEST OF FACTS-CAUSES AND OCCASIONS OF THE CI-IARGE-ITS INJUSTICE. I HAVE often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness, that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against the author, in favor of the critic; and the readiness with which they apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of his time: genus irritabile vaturn. A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do we know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class seek in the crowd circumn fana for a warmth in common, which they do not possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism (such at least was its original import) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely, schwzdrmeczn, schLcwrinerey. The passion being in an inverse proportion to the insight, —that the more vivid, as this the less distinct-anger is the inevitable consequence. The absence of all foundation within their own minds for that, which they yet believe both true and- indispensable to their safety and happiness, can not but produce an uneasy state of feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from which nature has no means of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 165 There's no philosopher but sees, That rage and fear are one disease; Though that may burn, and this may freeze, They're both alike the ague. But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things; and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who possess more than mere talent (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the knowledge of others),-yet still want something of the creative, and self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason therefore, they are men of commnanzdizg genius. While the former rest content between thought and reality, as it' were in an inztermundiumn of which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the ever-varying form; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. These in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace, or temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that join sea with sea, or in walks of rock, which, shouldering back the billows, imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to sheltered navies; or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale from mountain to mountain, give a Palmyra to the desert. But alas! in times of tumult they are the men destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin, to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a day, and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds.* Of old things all are over old, Of good things none are good enough:We'll show that we can help to frame A world of other stuff. 166 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. The records of biography seem to confirm this theory. The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge form their own works or from the accounts of' their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity, which makes it almnost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself'* Shakspeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to Pope,t when he asserted, that our great bardI too will have my kings, that take From me the sign of life and death: Kingdoms shall shift about, like clouds, Obedient to my breath. WVordstorth's Rob Roy.* * [I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakspeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. Table Talk, IV. p. 504. t Pope was under the common error of his age, an error far from being sufficiently exploded even at the present day. It consists (as I explained at large, and proved in detail in my public lectures),t in mistaking for the essentials of the Greek stage certain rules, which the wise poets imposed upon themselves, in order to render all the remaining parts of the drama consistent with those, that had been forced upon them by circumstances independent of their will; out of which circumstances the drama itself arose. The circumstances in the time of Shakspeare, which it was equally out of his power to alter, were different, and such as, in my opinion, allowed a far wider sphere, and a deeper and mole human interest. Critics are too apt to forget, that rules are but means to an end; consequently, where the ends are different, the rules must be likewise so. We must have ascertained what the end is, before we can determine what the rules ought to be. * Poetical Works, vol iii. p. 127. f [See the Author's Lectures on Shakspeare, IV. p. 35, and generally the fragments of his lectures and notes on Shakspeare collected in that volume. -Ed.l BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 167 -grew immortal in his own despite.* Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration of his works with that of his personal existence, Shakspeare adds: Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Tho' I once gone to all the world must die; The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read; And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead: You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen, Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men. SONNET LXXXI.f I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakspeare's readiness to praise his rivals, ore ipe"lo, and the confidence of his own equality with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike manifested in another Sonnet. Judging under this impression, I did not hesitate to declare my full conviction, that the consummate judgment of Shakspeare, not only in the general construction, but in all the details, of his dramas, impressed me with greater wonder, than even the might of his genius, or the depth of his philosophy.' The substance of these lectures I hope soon to publish; and it is but a debt of justice to myself and my firiends to notice, that the first course of lectures, which differed from the following courses only, by occasionally varying the illustrations of the same thoughts, was addressed to very numerous, and I need not add, respectable audiences at the Royal Institution, before Mr. Schlegel gave his lectures on the same subjects at Vienna. * Epist. to Augustus. t [These extraordinary sonnets form, in fact, a poem of so many stanzas of fourteen lines each; and, like the passion which inspired them, the sonnets are always the same, with a variety of expression,-continuous, if you regard the lover's soul,-distinct, if you listen to him, as he heaves them sigh after sigh. These sonnets, like The Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, are characterized by boundless fertility, and labored condensation of thought, with perfection of sweetness in rhythm and metre. These are the essentials in the budding of a great poet. Afterwards habit and consciousness of power teach more ease-prcecipitandtum liberuem poiritunz. Table Talk, VI. p..453.-Ed. 1 See t note on preceding page. 168 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you, That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse, Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew? Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead? No, neither he, nor his compeers by night Giving him aid, my verse astonished. He, nor that affable familiar ghost, Which nightly gulls him with intelligence, As victors of my silence can not boast; I was not sick of any fear from thence! But when your countenance ifill'd up his line, Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine. S. LXXXVI. In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate, and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said, efieminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter days. These causes have diffused over all his compositions " a melancholy grace," and have drawn forth occasional strains, the more pathetic from their gentleness. But nowhere do we find the least trace of irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected contempt of' his censurers. The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be affirmed of Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are concerned. He reserved his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his country. MSy mind is not capable of forming a more august conception, than arises from the contemplation of this great man in his latter days; —poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted,-*-`: Darkness before, and danger's voice behind, — in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for * [In illustration of Milton's magnanimity of patience I can not refrain fiom quoting the conclusion of his letter to Leonard Philaras, the Atthenian: "At present every species of illumination being, as it were, extinguished, there is diffused around me nothing but darkness, or darkness mingled and streaked with an ashy brown. Yet the darkness in which I am perpetually immersed, seems always, both by night and day, to approach nearer to white than black, and when the eye is rolling in its socket, it admits a little particle of light as through a chink. And though this may perhaps offer to your physician a like ray of hope, yet I make up my mind to the malady as quite incurable; and I often reflect, that as the wise man admonishes, .BIOGRAPHIA:ITERARIA. 169 whomrl, as by that against whom, he had contended: and among men before whonm he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening to the music of his own thoughts, or if additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did neverthelees cairgue 1ot Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd Right onwardc:roin others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his latter day, had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of youth and hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not been likewise the enemies of his conlltry.*: dsavs of darkness are destin;ed to eachll of us, the darkness which I experience, less oppressive than that of the tomb, is oiwing to the singular goodness of tihe Deity, passed amid the pursuits of literature and the cheering -ialutations of fi'riendship. But it, as is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every wcord that proceeedeth froin the mouth of God, w.hy may lnot any one acquiesce in the priivation of his sight, when God has so amply furnished his mind and his conscience with eyes? While Ile so tenderly provides for me, while He so graciously leads me by the hand and conducts me on the way, I will, since it is his pleasure, rtather rejoiee than repine at being blind. And, my dear Philaras, whatever may be the event, I wish you adieu with no less courage and composure than if I had the eves of a lynx." Westminster, Septemlber 28, 1654. What a proof is it of the firmness of 2Miltotn's mind to the last that, when d:rivea into a late marriagoe by the ill treatment of his daughters, who, inheriting, as appears, their mnother's unworthy temper, —without either devotion of spirit or even the commoner sense of duty,-tyrannized over him in his days of darkness; though blind and infirm and in all the dependence which blindness brings, he could yet resist the entreaties of a wife whom he loved, and who was properly indulgent to him, that he should accept the royal offer of the restitution of his place,- because he must " live and die e.n 7on07?est messM!" See Symmons's Life of Milton, confirmed on these points by Todd, in his edition of the great man's Poetical Works of 1826. —S. C.] * [" In Milton's mind there were purity and piety absolute,-an imnagination to which neither the past nor the present were interesting, except as faSr as they called forth and enlivened the great ideal in which and for which he lived; a keen love of truth, which, after many weary pursuits, found a harbor in a sublime listening to the still voice in his own spirit, and as keen VOL. IT. H 140 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there exist many and excellent models, a high degree of talent conmbined with taste and judgment, and employed in works of imaiiination, \wil' acquire for a mlan the name of a great genius; 4thoug'h even that anazlogon of genius, which, in certain states of society, may even render his writings more popular than the absolute rea.lity could have done, would be sought for in vain in the Rnind and temper of the author himself: Yet even in instances of this kind, a close examination will often detect, that the irritalbility, -which has been attributed to the author's genius as its cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain, or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. What is charged to the author, belongs to the ian, who would probably have been still more impatient, but ior the hunianizing influences of the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame of his irritability. How then are -we to explain the easy credence generally given to this charge, if the charge itself' be not, as I have endeavored to show, supported by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult solution. In whatever country literature is widely diffused, there will be many who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation of poetic genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which constitute it. But men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects wholly out of their own power, become in all cases more or less impatient and prone to anger. Besides, though it may be paradoxical to assert, that a man can know one thing and believe the opposite, yet assuredly a vain person may have so habitually indulged the wish, and persevered in the attempt, to appear what he is not, as to become himself a love of his country, which, after a disappointment still more depressive, expanded and soared into a love of man as a probationer of immortality. These were, these alone could be, the conditions under which such a work as the Paradise Lost could be conceived and accotmplished. By a life-long study, Milton had known— what was of use to know, What best to say could say, to do had done. His actions to his words agreed, his words To his large heart gave utterance due, his heart Contain'd of good, wise, fair the perfect shape: and he left the imperishable total, as a bequest to the ages coming, in the Paradise Lost." Lectures on Shakspeare, IV. pp.300. —_cl.J BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 17'1 one of his own proselytes. Still, as this counterfeit and artificial persuasion must differ, even ill the person's own feelings, from a real sense of inward power, what can be more natural, than that this difference should betray itself in suspicious and jealous irritability? Even as the flowery sod, which covers a hollow, may be often detected by its shaking and trembling. But, alas! the multitude of books, and the general diffusion of literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the world of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no means to justify, the contempt with which the best grounded complaints of' injured genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter of merriment. In the days of Chaucer and Gower, our language might (with due allowance for the imperfections of a sinlile) be compared to a wilderness of vocal reeds, from which the favorites only of Pan or Apollo could construct even the rude syr9inx; and from this the constructors alone could elicit strains of music. But now, partly by the labors of successive poets, and inl part by the more artificial state of society and social intercourse, lanqua-e, mechanlize, l as it were into a barrelorgan, supplies at once both instrument and tune. Thus even the deaf may play, so as to delight the many. Sometimes (for it is with similes, as it is with jests at a wile table, one is sure to suggest another) I have attempted to illustrate the present state of our language, in relation to literature, by a press-room of larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which, in the present Anglo-Gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely, and yet still produce something, which, if not sense, will be so like it as to do as'well. Perhaps better' for it spares the reader the trouble of thinking; prevents vacancy, while it indulges indolence; and secures the memory finom all danger of'an intellectual pilethora. Hence, of all trades, literature at present demands the least talent or information; and, of all modes of' literature, the manlufacturing of poems. The difference indeed between these and the works of genlius is not less than between an egg and an eggshell; yet at a distance they both look alilke. Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little examination works of polite literature are commonly perused, not only by the mass of readers, but by men of first-rate ability, till 172 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. some accidtent or chancee discussion have roused their attention, and put;hern on their guard. And hence individuals below mediocrity, not less in natural power than in acquired klnowledge; nay, bunglers who have failed in the lowest mechanic crafts, and whose presumption is in due proportion to their want of sense and * In the course of one of my Lectures, I had occasion to point out the aflmost faultless position and choice of words, in Pope's original compositions, partimilarly in his Satires and moral Essays, for the purpose of comparing therl with his translation of Homer, which, I do not stand alone in regarding rs the main source of our pseudo-poetic diction. And this, bythe-bye, is an additional confirmation of a remark made, I believe, by Sir Joshua Re-nolds, that next to the man -who forms and elevates the taste of the public, he that corrupts it, is commonly the greatest genius. Among other passt;ges, I analyzed sentence by sentence, and almost word by word, the popula;' lines, As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, &c. (Iliad, B. viii.) much in the same way as has been since done, in an excellent article on Chalmers's British Poets in the Quarterly Review.' The impression on the audience in general was sudden and evident: and a number of enlightened and highly educated persons, who at different times afterwards addressed me on the subject, exprlessed their -wonder, that truth so obvious should not have struck them before; but at the same time acknowledged-(so much had they been accus-tomed, in reading poetry, to receive pleasure from the separate i-mnages and phrases successively, without asking themselves whether the collective meaning was sense or nonsense)-that they might in all probability have read the same passage again twenty times with undiminished adnmiration, and without once reflecting, that (ctrpa OaeLv7v ('i#~o oeMA7v/7Vv Oaiver' idp-,rpe;rea(that is, the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre-eminently bright) -conveys a just and happy image of a inoonlight sky: while it is difficult to determine whether, in the lines, Around her throne the vivid planets?'oll, And stars untu.umtber'd gild the glowing pole, the sense or the diction be the more absurd. 3My answer was; that, though I had derived peculiar advantages from my school discipline, and though my general theory of poetry was the same then as now, I had yet experienced the same sensations myself, and felt almost as if I had been [The article to which the Author refers was written by Mr. Southey, and may be found in vol. xi. of the Quarterly Review, p. 480. But it contains nothing corresponding to Mr. Coleridge's remark, whose reference is evidently mistaken.-Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 178 sensibility; men, who being first scribblers from idleness and ignorance, next become libellers from envy and malevolence,have been able to drive a successful trade in the employment of the booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that most powerful newly couched, when, by MBr. Wordsworth's conversation, I had been induced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray's celebrated Elegy. I had long before detected the defects in The Bard; but the Elegy I had considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this day I can not reac either without delighlt, and a portion of enthusiasm. At all events, whatever pleasure I may have lost byt the clearer perception of the faults in certain passages, has been more than repaid to me by the additional delight with which I read the remainder. Another instance in confirmation of these remarks occurs to me in the Faithful Shepherdess. Seward first traces Fletcher's lines; Miore foul diseases than e'er yet the hot Sun bred thro' his burnings, while the dog Pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog And deadly vapor from his angry breath, Filling the lower wvorld with plague and death, to Spenser's S-lepherd's Calendar, The rampant lion hunts he fast With dogs of noisome breath; Whose baleful barking brings, in haste, Pines, plagues, and dreary death! He then takes occasion to introduce Homer's simile of the appearance of Achilles' mail to Priam compared with the Dog Star; literally thus"For this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an evil sign, and brings many a consuming disease to wretched mortals."' Nothing can be more simple as a description, or more accurate as a simile; which (says Seward) is thus finely translated by Mr. Pope: Terrific Glory! for his burning breath Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death! Now here-(not to mention the tremendous bombast)-the Dog Star, so called, is turned into a real dog, a v.ery odd dog, a fire, fever, plague, and death-breathing, red-air-tainting dog: and the whole visual likeness is lost, while the lileness in the effects is rendered absurd by the exaggeration. In Spenser and Fletcher the thought is justifiable: for the images are at least consistent, and it was the intention of the writers to mark the seasons by this allegory of visualized puns. 1 [Xatrwrp6raro c /lV 06' ETr, cea.bv dsF re gTula rrEcrat,.'ati rE O'?et Tro'V rrrVpETOV 6Set2XOZat PpoTo7.Cav. Iliad xxii. 30.-S. 0.] 174. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and mnalignant passions of mankinld.* But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and all inalignant propensities, to reqnire a quicckr change of objects, such writers are sure, soonier or later, to aace fi'olil their dream of vanity to disappointment and neglect, wxith embittered and envenomed feelings. Even diuring th.eir short-lived success, sensible in spite of themselves o i what a sh Aif'bilg fobundation it rests, they resent thle mere refusal of' praise as a robbery, and at the justest cenrsures lindle at once ilto violelnt and undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease cla'lllilng into chr-onical, the more deadly as the less violent, they become the fit instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. They are then no longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant to ridicule, because, fbrsooth, they are anonymous critics, and authorized, in Andrew Marvell's phrase, as " synodical individuals," to speak of themselves plztcrali mcajestatico!' As if literature formed a caste, like that of the Paras in Hindostan, Nwho, however maltreated, must not dare to deem themselves wronged' As if that, which in all other cases adds a deeper dye to slander, the circumstance of its being anonymous, here acted only to make the slanderer inviolable! — Thus, in part, frorn the accidental tempers of individuals-(men of undoubted talent, but not men of * Especially in this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshiped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail; —when the most vapid satires have become the objects of a keen public interest, purely from the number of contemporary characters named in the patch-work notes (which possess, however, the comparative ilerit of being more poetical than the text), and because, to increase the stiimlulus, the author has sagaciously left his own name for whispers and corljectures. [From The Friend, Essay V. Ont the Errors of Party fSpirit, II. p. 192.-S. C.] { If it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients, half the anecdotes w~hich I either myself know to be true, or which I have received from nen incapable of intentional falsehood, concerning the characters, qualifications, and motives of our anonymous critics, whose decisions are orlaces for our reading public; I might safely borrow the words of the apocryphal Darliel; " Give ne leave, 0 SOVEREIGN PUBLIC, anzd I shall slay this dragon without sword or stagf." For the compound would be as the "pitch, and./at, and hair, which Dantiel took-, and did seethe them togeth.ir, and made lumps thereof; this he put in, the dragons mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder; and Danizel said, Lo, THESE ARE THE GODS yE WORSHMIP BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 175 genius)-tempers rendered yet more irritable by their desire to appear men of genius; but still more eflectively by the excesses of the mere counterfeits both of talent and genius; the number too being so incomparably greater of those who are thought to be, than of those who really are men of genius; and in part from the natural, but not therefore the less partial and unjust distinction, made by the public itself between literary and all ot-ier propertv;-t believe the prejudice to have arisen, Nwhich considers an unusual irascibility concerning the reception of its produCt:s as characteristic of genius. it might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of readers, to suppose a Review set on foot, the object of which should be to criticize all the chief works presented to the public by our ribbon-weavers, calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and chinamanufacturers; which should be conducted in the same spirit, and take the same freedom with personal character, as our literary journals. They would scarcely, Ithink, denv their belief; not only that the geezzus irritcabile wo:ild be found to include many other species besides that of bards; but t'hat the irritability of trade voiuld oon reduce the res elntments of poets into mere shadow-fights in the comparisoni. Or is wealth the only rational object of human. interest? Or even if this Were admitted., has the poet no property in his works? Or is it a rare, or culpable case, that he who serves at; the altar of the \iiuses, should be compelled to derive his maintenance from the altar, when too he has perhaps deliberately abandoned the fkirest prospects of' rank and opulence in order to devole himself, an entire and undistracted man, to the instruction or refinement of his fellow-citizens? Or, should we pass by all higher objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence, and even that ambition of lasting praise -which is at once the crutch and ornament, which at once supports and betrays, the infirmity of human virtue,-is the character and property of the man, who labors fobr our intellectual pleasure, less entitled to a share of our fellow-feeling, than that; of the wine-merchant or milliner? Sensibility indeed, both quick and deep, is not only a characteristic feature, but may be deemned a component part, of genius. But it is not less an essential mark of true genius, that its sensibility is excited by any other cause more powerfully than by its ownr personal intexests; for this plain reason, that the man of genius lives most in the ideal world, 176 ~ ~ BIOGRAPHItA LITERARIA. iln which the present is still constituted by the fut ure or the past; Land because his feelings have been habitually associated with thoul hts anld imsages, to the number, clearness, and vivacity of wbhic-h the sensat;ion of self' is alwavs in an inverse proportion, And yet, should l.e perchance have occasion to r pel soere faise chiarre~ or to recttiy some errolneous censure, nothing' is more comn mon than for the many to mistake the general liveliness of his Ianner al!d lanng uage, wnhatever is the subject, fbr the effects of pecnliar irritataion fromn its accidental relation to himself.~:~ For mysel; if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious test of the observations of others, I had been made aware of any literary testinless or jealousy; I trust, that I should have been, however, neither silly nor arrogant enoaugh to have burthened the imperfection on genius. But an experience-(and I should not need documents in- abundance to prove my wMords, if' I added)-a tried experience of twenty years, has taught me, that the original sin of my character conlsists in a careless indifelrenee to public opinion, and to the a-tacks of those who influence it; that praise and admiLration have becomle yearly less and less desirable, except as marks of Svr1patjhy' ay tlhrat it is cdifficult and distressing to me t-o t, hink with any interest even about Lhe -sale and profit of my works, important mas, in my present circumstanccs, such considerations irnst needs be. Yet it never occurred to me to believe or fancy, that the cqa/mtitnb of intellec.tual power bestcowed onl me by nature or education was inl any way connected -with this habit of my feelings; or that it needed any other parents or fbsterers~ This is one insta'nce atmong many of deeestion, by tlhe telling the half of a fact, and omitfting the other half, wvhen it is frion their mutual counteraction and neutralization, that the whole truth arises, as a tertiu'mi aliquid different; from either. Thus in Dryden's famous line Great wit:(meaning genius) to m'tdness sure is near allied. iNow if the profound sensibility, whlich is doultless one of the coniponents of genius, were dalone considered, single and unbalanced, it might be fairly described as exposing the individuacl to a greater chance of mental deraugesment; but then a molLe -tlhtan usual rapidity of association, a more than usual power of passin- from thought to thought, and imLage to image, is a cOnponent equally essential; and in the due modification of each by the other the genius itself consists; so that it woui be just as faiir to describe the earth, uas in imminent dcanger of exolritating, or of falling into the sun, acoldi;ng as the assertor of the absurldity <confined his attention either to the projectile or to tbhe. att.ractive o rce exclusively, BIOGRAPHIA LITEiARIA. 177 than constitutional indolence, aggravated into langunr by illhealth; the accumulating embarrassments of procra:;tination.; the mental cowardice, which is the inseparable companion of procrastination, and which makes us anxious to think and converse o anlly thing rather than on what concerns ourselves; in fine, all those close vexations, whether chargeable on my faults or my fortunes, which leave me but little grief to spare for evils comparatively distant anid alien. Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I can not afiord it. But so far fiorn condemning those who can, I deem it a writer's duty, and think it creditable to his heart, to feel and express a resentment proportioned to the grossness of the provocation, and the importance of the object. There is no profession on earth, which requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of poetry; and indeed as that of literary composition in general, if it be such as at all satisfies the demands both of taste and of sound logic. How difficult and delicate a task even the mere mechanism of verse:is, may be conjectured from the failure of those, who have attempted poetry late in life. Where then a man has, from his earliest youth, devoted his whole being to an object, which by the admission of all civilized nations in all ages is honorable as a pursuit, and glorious as an attainment; what of all that relates to himself and his family, if' only we except his moral character, call have fairer claims to his protection, or more authorize acts of self-defence, than the elaborate products of his intellect and intellectual industry? Prudence itself' would command us to show, even if defect or diversion of natural sensibility had prevented us from feeling, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the offspring and representatives of our nobler being. I know it, alas! by woful experience. I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness,- the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion. The greater part indeed have been trod under foot, and are forgotten; but yet no small number have crept forth into life, some to furnish feathers for the caps of others, and still more to plume the shafts in the quivers of' my enemies, of them that unprovoked have lain in wait against my soul. Sic vos, non vobis,,nellificatis, apes!' * [" He was one of those who with long and large arm still collected precious armfuls, in whatever direction he pressed forward, yet still took up: so CHAPTER III. THE AUTHOR S OBLIGATIONS TO CIZITICS, AND THE PROBABLE OCCASION - PRINCIPLES OF MODERN. CRITICISI - MR. SOUTHEY S WORKS AND CHARACTER. To anlonymous c!ritiecs in revieiws, magazines, and news-jounrinls of' various name and rank, and to satirists with or without a name, in verse or prose, or in verse-text aided by prose-comment, I do seriously believe and profess, thatla- efia LtxyoRThirds of whatever reputation and publicity I happen to possess. For -when the name of an individual has occurred so frequently, in so many works, for so great a. length of time, the readers of these works(which with ra shelf or two of Beauties, elegant Extracts and Anas, form nine tenths of the reading of the reading Public-,) — much more than he could keep together, that those who followed him gleaned more friom his continual droppings than he himself brought home; -nay, made stately corn-ricks therewith, while the reaper himself was still seen only with his armful of newly-cut sheaves." Works, IV. p. 12.-Ed.] * For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole nmateriel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing-office, which pro terapore fixes, reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one man's delirium, so as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose. We should therefore transfer this species of amusement, -(if indeed those can be said to retire a musis, who were never in their company, or relaxation be.attributable to those, whose bows are never bent)-from the Yenus, reading, to that comprehensive class characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet co-existing propensities of human nature, namely, indulgence of sloth, and hatred of vacancy. In addition to novels and tales of chivalry in prose or rhyme (by which last I mneaa1 neither rhythm nor metre) this gerns comprises as its species, gainm BIOGRAPIIIA LITERA:RIA. 179 can not but be familiar with the name, without distinctly remembering whether it was introduced for eulogy or for censure. And this becomes the more likely, if (as I believe) the habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added to Averroes'* catalogue of Anti-,Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory.t But where this has not been the case, yet the reader will'be apt to suspect, that there must be something more than usually strong and extensive in a reputation, that could either require or stand so rnerciless and long-continued a cannonading. Without any feeling of anger therefbre-(for which indeed, on my own account, I have no pretext) — may yet be allowed to express some degree of surprise, that, after having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of' faults which I had, nothing having come before the judgment-seat in the interim, I should, year after year, quarter after quarter, month after mnonth-(not to mention sundry pettyr periodicals of still quicker revolution, " or weekly or diurnal")have been, for at least seventeen years consecutively, dragged. forth by them into the foremost ranks of the proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults directly opposite, and which I certainly had not. How shall I explain this? Whatever may have been the case with others, I certainly can not attribute this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy, or to feelirngs of vindictive animosity. Not to the former, for, with the exception of a very few who are my intimate friends, and were so ing, swinging, or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tMte-d-tMte quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of a daily newspaper in a public house on a rainy day, &e. &e. &e. -* [The true polyonomous appellative of Averroes was Abul Walid Mohammed Ebn Achmed Ebn Mohammed Ebn Raschid. He was born at Cor. dova about 1150, and died in Morocco in 1206 or 1201.-Ed.] f Ex. gr. Pedicztlos e ccapillis excerptos int arenamg jacere incontztsos; eating of unripe fruit; gazing on the clouds, and (iw. genere) on movable things suspended in the air; riding among a multitude of camels; firequent laughter; listening to a series of jests and humorous anecdotes,-as when (so to modernize the learned Saracen's meaning) one man's droll story of an Irishman inevitably occasions another's droll story of a Scotchman, which again, by the same sort of conjunction disjunctive, leads to some 6toutrderie of a Welshman, and that again to some sly hit of a Yorkshireman;-the habit of reading tombstones in church-yards, &c. By-the-bye, this catalogue, strange as it may appear, is not insusceptible of a sound psychological commentary. 1.80 BiO)GRAPHIA LITERARItA before they were known as authors, I have had little other acquaintance with literary characters, than what may be implied in an accidental introduction, or casual meeting ill a mixed cornmpany. And as far as words and looks can be trusted, I must beiieve that, even in these instances, I had excited no unfriendly disposition. Neither by letter, nor in conversation, have I ever had dispute or controversy beyond the common social interchange of opinions. NLay, where I had reason to suppose my convictions fundamentally different, it has been my habit, and I may add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief, rather than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till I could establish some points of complete sympathy, some grounds comrmon to both sides, from which to commence its explanation. Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few pages which I have published, are of too distant a date, and the extent of Atheir sale a proof too conclusive against their having been popular at any time, to render probable, I had almost said possible, the excitenlent of envy on their account; and -the man who should envy me on any other,-verily he must be envy-mad' Lastly, with as little semnblance of reason, could I suspect any animosity towards me from vindictive, feelings as the cause. I have before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been limited and distant; and that I have had neither dispute nor controversy. From my first entrance into life, I have, with few and short intervals, lived either abroad or in retirement. My different essays on subjects of national interest, published at diflferent times, first in the Morning Post and then in the Courier, with my courses of Lectures on the principles of criticism as applied to Shakspeare and Milton,* constitute my whole publicity; * [' Mr. Coleridge's courses of Lectures on literary and other subjects between 1800 and 1819 were numerous, but the Editor is unable to record them accurately. They were delivered at the Royal Institution, the Crown and Anchor, the Surrey Institution, the London Philosophical Society, Willis's Rooms, and, it is believed, in several other places in London. The subjects were Shakspeare and the Drama generally, particularly plays of Shakspeare, the history of English and Italian Literature, the history of Philosophy, Education of Women, connection of the Fine Arts Nwith education and improvement of the mind, and many others of which the Editor can lealn nothing certain. The most remarkable of his contributions to the newpapers mentioned in the tmxt, were the character of Mr BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 181 the only occasions on which I could offend any member of the republic of letters. With one solitary exception in which my words were first misstated and then wantonly applied to an individual, I could never learn that I had excited the displeasure of any arnonrg my literary contemporaries. Having announced my intention to give a course of Lectures on the characteristic merits and defects of English poetry in its different Eras;* first, from Chaucer to ]Milton; second, from Dryden inclusively to Thomson; and third. fromn Cowper to the present day; I changed my plan, and confined my disquisition to the former two periods, that I might furnish no possible pretext for the unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant to misapply my words, and having stamped their own meaning on them, to pass them as current coin in the marts of garrulity or detraction. Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deservirng,_; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon, Iarlington, Machiavel, and Spinoza,,are not read, because Hume, Condiiifc, and Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company no Yu dtent man will oppugn the merits of a contemporary in his own supposed department; contenting himself with praising in his turn those whom he deems excellent. If I should ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the pretensions of individuals, I would oppose them in books which could be weighed and answered, in which I could evolve the whole of my reasons and feelings, with their requisite limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable conversation, where however strong the reasons might be, the feelings that prompted them would assuredly be attributed by some one or other to envy and discontent. Besides I well know, and, I trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must be the ignorant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment are the natural reward of Pitt in the Morning Post in 1800, and the Series of Letters on the Spanish War in the Courier in 1809. What the Author says as to these exertions constituting his whole publicity, must not be taken too strictly; for besides The Friend, the Remorse, Christabel and his other Poems published before the date of this work, Mr. Coleridge had made his name well known long before by his courses of Lectures at Bristol on the French Revolution, Christianity, Slavery, and other subjects, some of xwhich were printed. -Ed.] ~ [This alludes to the Lectures at the London Philosophical Society, which began on the 18th of November, 1811.-Ed.] :182 BIOGRAPILIA LITERARIA. authors without feeling or genius. Sint unicuique sua pr-' How then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to account for attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require all three to explain? The solution seems to be this:-I was in habits of intimacy with ~Mr. TVbrdsworth and Mr. Souwthey! This, however, transfers rather than removes the difficulty. Be it, that, by an unconscionable extension of the old adage, 9noscit'tir a socio, my literary fiiends are never under the water-fall of criticism, but I must be wet through with the spray; yet how came the torrent to descend upon them? First, then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general reception of his earlier publications; namely, the poems published with Mr. Lovell under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two volumes of poems under his own name, and the Joan of Arc.* The censures of the critics by profession are extant, and may be easily referred to:-careless lines, inequality in the merit of the different poems, and (in the lighter works) a predilection for the strange and whimsical; in short, such faults as might have been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was there at that time wanting a party spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who, with all the courage of uncorrupted youth, had avowed his zeal for a cause, which he deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression by whatever name consecrated..But it was as little objected by others, as dreamed of by the poet himself, that he prefbrred careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or indeed that he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction, except that which we may all learn from Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable dialogue, De O'ratoribus, generally attributed to Tacitus, or Strada's Prolusions; if indeed natural good sense and the early study of the best models in his own language had not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may venture the expression, more vitally. All that could have been fairly deduced was, that in his taste and estimation of writers, Mr. Southey agreed far more with Thomas Warton than with * [The joint volume appeared in 1795. Bion was Southey, Moschus, Lov. ell. It contained "the Retrospect," in its original form. Joan of Are appeared in 1196 —the " two volumes" in 11797-both published by Mr. Cottle, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 183 Dr. Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny, that at all times Mr. Southey was of.tih. xa.i. dwith Sir Philip.Sidneyji.pteflwi aon exeelleut btilfd in the humble t style*Qf pry to twenty indifferent poems that struAtted in the;.higigest. And by -Xh'at- have' h'is works, published since then, been characterized, each more strikingly than the preceding, but by greater splendor, a deeper pathos, profounder reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of metre? Distant may the period be, but whenever the time shall come, when all his works shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his biographer, I trust that an appendix of excerlpta of all the passages, in which his writings, name, and character have'been attacked, from the pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be an accompaniment. Yet that it would prove medicinal in aftertimes I dare not hope for as long as there are readers to be delighted with calum ny, thre..il. hef. und. reviewers to calumnlate. Aind such readers will become in all probability more numerous, in proportion as a still greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase of sciolists, and sciolism bring with it petulance and presumption. In times of old, books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of instructive friends; and, as their number increased, they sank still lower to that of entertaining companions; and at present they seem degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write from humor or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the decision "of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after dinner." The same retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation which the authors themselves have assumed towards their readers. From the lofty address of Bacon: "these are the meditations of Francis of Verularn, which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their' interest:"i or from dedication to * [" I never heard the old song of Percie and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." RDefence of Poesie.Ed.] f [~ Franciscus de Ferulaio sic coyjitavit; talemque apiud se rationem instituit, quadn viventibus et posteris notam. fieri, ipsorumn interesse putavit Nov. Org.-Ed.] 184 BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. Monarch or Pontiff; in which the honor given was asserted in equipoise to the patronage acknowledged: from Pindar's -art 6' X2ot y eyciot: rO 6' Exarov tcopv-b9ratc /aacltUvc' MntI'7r rdZ7rratve 7ropatov. eZ~) a, 7e _rOv ~~g Xp6vov'areMv, -Ye tre roaidO6 vtca6Opotf 6,uareiv, trp6obavrov cooipv cKa' "EX-nava~ Eovta ravrc. OLYrIP. OD. 1. there was a gradual sinking in the etiquette or allowed style of pretension. Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident by their very numbers, addressed themselves to " learned readers;" then aimed to conciliate the graces of the "candid reader;" till, the crjiticq sti.l "isingf as the author sank, the amateurs of literature collectively were erected into a municipality of' judges, and addressed as the Town! And now, finally, all men being supposed able to read, and all readers able to judge, the multitudinous Public, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism. But, alas! as in other despotisms, it but echoes the decisions of' its invisible ministers, whose intellectual claims to the guardianship of the Muses seem, for the greater part, analogous to the physical qualifications which adapt their oriental brethren for the superintendence of the Harem. Thus it is said, that St. Nepomuc was installed the guardian of bridges, because he had fallen over one, and sunk out of sight; thus too St. Cecilia is said to have been first propitiated by musicians, because, having failed in her own attempts, she had taken a dislike to the art and all its successful professors. But I shall probably have occasion hereafter to deliver my convictions more at large concerning this state of things, and the influence on taste, genius, and morality. In the Thalaba, the Mladoc, and still more evidently in the unique* Cid, in the Kehama, and, as last, so best, the Roderick; X I have ventured to call it unique; not only because I know no work of the kind in our language (if we except a few chapters of the old translation of Froissart)-none, which uniting the charms of romance and history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing, and yet leaves so much for aftr BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.I 185 Southey has given abundant proof, se cogitare quagn sit mng'num dlare aliqizd i sn zanus hominunm:?znec persua(ere sibi posse, nonz scepe tractcnduzln quocd placere et sem]yer et oninibzs ca,~p.iat.* But on the other hand, I conceive, that AMr. Southey was quite unable to comprehend. wherein could consist the crime or mischief of printing half' a dozen or more playful poems; or to speak more generally, compositions which would be enjoyed or passed over, according as the taste and humor of the reader might chance to be; provided they contained nothing immoral. In the present age peritruc e pa(rcere chartce is emphatically an unreasonable demand. The merest trifle le ever sent abroad had tenfold better claims to its ink and paper than all the silily criticismis on it, which proved no more than that the critic was not one of those, for whom the trifle was written; and than all the grave exhortations to a greater reverence for the public-as if the passive page of a book, by having an epigram or doggrel tale impressed on it, instantly assilmed at once locomotive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buzz in the ear. of the public to the sore annoyance of the said mysterious personage. But what gives an additional and more ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations is the curious fact, that if in a volume of poetry the critic should find poem or passage -which he deems more especially worthless, he is sure to select and reprint it in the review; by which, on his own grounds, he vwastes as much more paper than the author, as the copies of a fashionable review are more numerous than those of the original book; in some, and those the most promrinent instances, as ten thousand to five hundred. I know nothing that surpasses the vileness of deciding on the merits of a poet or painter-(not by characteristic defects; for where there is genius, these always point to his characteristic beauties; but)-by accidental failtures or faulty passages; except th'e impudence of defenduing it, as the proper duty, and most instructive part, of criticism. Omit or pass slightly over the expression, grace, and grouping of Raffael'ss figures; but ridicule in detail the knittingneedles and broom-twigs, that are to represent trees in his backreflection; but likewise, and chiefly, because it is a compilation, which, in the various excellencies of translation. selection, and arrangement, required and proves grleater genius in the compiler, as living in the present state of society, than in the original composers. [Acconunodated from Pliny the younger. L. vii. Ep. 17. —Ed.] 186 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. grounds; and never let him hear the last of his gallipots! Admuitthat the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton are not without merit; but repay yourself for this concession, by reprinting at length the two poems on the University Carrier! As a fair specimen of his Sonnets, quote " A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon;" and as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal translation of the first and second Psalm! In order to justify yourself; you need only assert, that had you dwelt chiefly on the beauties and excellencies of the poet, the admiration of these might seduce the attention of future writers from the objects of their love and wonder, to an imitation of the few poems and passages in which the poet was most unlike himself. But till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature of man.; reflecting minds will pronounce it arrog~ance in them thus to announce themselves to men of letters, as the guides of their taste and judgment. To the purchaser and mere reader it is, at all events, an injustice. He who tells me that there are defects in a new work, tells me nothing which I should not have taken for granted without his information. But he, who points out and elucidates the beauties of an original work, does indeed give me interesting information, such as experience would not have authorized me in anticipating, And as to compositions which the authors themselves announce with Je~c ipsi novinm's esse nihil,* why should we judge by a different rule two printed works, only because the one author is alive, and the other in his grave? What literary man has not regretted the prudery of Spratt in refusing to let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing gown? I am not perhaps the only one who has derived an innocent amusement from the riddles, conundrums, tri-syllable lines, and the like, of Swift and his correspondents, in hours of' languor, when to have read his more finished works would have been useless to myself, and in some sort an act of injustice to the e [The motto prefixed by Mr. Southey to his Minor Poems.-Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 187 author. But I am at a loss to conceive by what perversity of judgment, these relaxations of his genius could be employed to diminish his fame as the writer of' Gulliver, or the Tale of a Tub. Had MIr. Southey written twice as many poems of inferior merit, or partial interest, as have enlivened the journals of the day, they would have added to his honor with good and wise men, not Imerely or principally as. proving the versatility of his talents, but as evidences of the purity of that mind, which even in its levities never dictated a line which it ineed regret on any moral account. I have in imagination transferred to the future biographer the: duty of contrasting Southey's fixed and well-earned fame, with the abuse and indefatigable hostility of his anonymous critics from his early youth to his ripest manhood. But I can not think so ill of human nature as not to believe, that these critics have already taken shame to themselves, whether they consider the object of their abuse in his moral or his literary character. For reflect but on the variety and extent of his acquirements! He stands; second to no man, either as an historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular essayist —(for the articles: of his compositions in the reviews are, for the greater part, essays on subjects of deep or curious interest rather than criticisms on particular works)-I look in vain fbr any writer, who has conveyed so much infbrmation, from so many and such recondite sources, with so many just and original reflections, in a style so lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom with so much wit; so much truth and knowledge with so much life and fancy. His prose is always intelligible and always entertaining. _In poetry he has attempted almost every species of composition known before, and he has added new ones; and if we except the highest lyric-(in which how few, how very few even of the greatest minds have been fortunate) —he has attempted every species successfully;-from the political song of the day, thrown off in the playful overflow of honest joy and patriotic exultation, to the wild ballad; from epistolary ease and graceful narrative, to austere and impetuous moral declamation; from the pastoral charms and wild streaming lights of the Thalaba, in which sentiment and imagery have given permanence even to the excitement of curiosity; and fiom the full blaze of the Kehama-(a gallery of finished pictures in one splendid fancy piece, in which, notwith 188 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. standing, the moral grandeur rises gradually above the brilliance of the coloring and the boldness and novelty of the machinery)to the more sober beauties of the Madoc; and lastly, from the Madoc to his Roderick, in which, retaining all his former excellencies of a poet eminently inventive and picturesque, he has surpassed himself in language and metre, in the construction of the whole, and in the splendor of' particular passages. Here then shall I conclude? No! The characters of the deceased, like the encomzia on tombstones, as they are described with religious tenderness, so are they read, with allowing sympathy indeed, but yet with rational deduction. There are men, who deserve a higher record; men with whose characters it is the interest of their contemporaries, no less than that of posterity, to be made acquainted; while it is yet possible for impartial censure, and even for quick-sighted envy, to cross-examine the tale without offence to the courtesies of humanity; and while the eulogist, detected in exaggeration or falsehood, must pay the full penalty of his baseness in the contempt which brands the convicted flatterer. Publicly has Mr. Southey been reviled by men, who, as I would fain hope for the honor of human nature, hurled fire-brands against a figure of their own imagination; publicly have his talents been depreciated, his principles denounced; as publicly do I therefore, who have known him intimately, deem it my duty to leave recorded, that it is Southey's almost unexampled felicity, to possess the best gifts of talent and genius free from all their characteristic defects. To those who remember the state of our public schools andi universities some twenty years past, it will appear no ordinary praise in any man to have passed from innocence into virtue, not only free from all vicious habit, but unstained by one act of intemperance, or the degradations akin to intemperance. That scheme of head, heart, and habitual demeanor, which in his early manhood, and first controversial writings, Milton, claiming the privilege of self-defence, asserts of himself, and challenges his calumrniators to disprove;" this will his school-mates, his fellow* [Ad me quod attinet, te testor, Deus, mentis intimte cogitationumngqe omniurm indagator, sme nullius rei (qetanzqam hoc apud me sapibls et, queam mnaxime paotti, serio qucasivi, et recessus vitae omnes excussi,) nullius vel recens vel olim commisrsi mihimet conseiun esse, cujis atrocitas hane mihi prce cceteris calamnitatem creare, aut accersisse merito potuerit.-Def. Sec. Tu senties eam esse vitce myec et apud me conscientiam, et apud bonos ex BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 189 collegians, and his maturer friends, with a confidence proportioned to the intimacy of their knowledge, bear witness to, as again realized in the life of Robert Southey. But still more striking to those, who by biography or by their own experience are familiar with the general habits of genius, will appear the poet's matchless industry and perseverance in his pursuits the worthiness and dignity of those pursuits; his generous submission to tasks of transitory interest, or such as his genius alone could make otherwise; and that having thus more than satisfied the claims of affection or prudence, he should yet have made for himself time and power, to achieve more, and in more various departments, than almost any other writer has done, though employed wholly on subjects of his own choice and ambition. But as Southey possesses, and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is he master even of his virtues. The regular and methodical tenor of his daily labors, which would be deemed rare in the most mechanical pursuits, and might be envied by the mere man of business, loses all semblance of formality in the dignified simplicity of his mnanners, in the spring and healthful cheerfulness of his spirits. Always employed, his fiiends find him always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles, than steadfast in the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of those small pains and discomforts which irregular men scatter about them, and which in the aggregate so often become formidable obstacles both to happiness and utility; while on the contrary he bestows all the pleasures, and inspires all that ease of mind on those around him or connected with him, which perfect consistency, and (if such a word might be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small as in great concerns, can not but inspire and bestow; when this too is softened without being weakened by kindness and gentleness. I know few men who so well deserve the character which an ancient attributes to Marcus Cato, namely, that he was likest virtue, in as much as he seemed to act aright, not in obedience to any law' or outward motive, but by the necessity of a happy nature, which could not act otherwise.* As son, brother, husband, father, mnasistimationem, earn esse et praete'rite fidlciamn et relique,pens bonace, ut nihit impedire me, at4 absterrere poseit. quo minus flagitia tuea, si pergis lacessere, etiam liberias adh.ue et diliqetntius persequar.-Def. cont. Alex. Morum. —lEd.] [ —-homo virtuti sinziliminus. et par omnia ingenio D)iis quam hominiib4ts propior, qui nunqucam rectefecit. utfacere videretur, sed quia aliterfacere non. oterat. —Vell. Patere. II. 85.-Ed.] 190 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ter, friend, he moves with firm, yet light steps, alike unostentatious, and alike exemplary. As a writer, he has uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been the cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national independence and of national illumination. When future critics shall weigh out his guerdon of praise and censure, it will be Southey the poet only, that will supply them with the scanty materials for the latter. They will likewise not fall to record, that as no man was ever a more constant friend, never had poet more friends and honorers among the good of all parties; and that quacks in education, quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism were his only enemies.* * It is not easy to estimate the effects which the example of a young man as highly distinguished for strict purity of disposition and conduct, as for intellectual power and literary acquirements, may produce on those of the same age with himself, especially on those of similar pursuits and congenial minds. For many years, my opportunities of intercourse with Ir. Southey have been rare, and at long intervals; but I dwell with unabated pleasure on the strong and sudden, yet I trust not fleeting, influence, which my moral being underwent on my acquaintance with him at Ox-ford, -whither I had gone at the commencement of our Cambridge vacation on a visit to an old school-fellow.* Not indeed on iny moral or religious principles, for they had never been contaminated; but in awakening( the sense of the duty and dignity of making my actions accord with those principles, both in word and deed. The irregularities only not universal among the young men of my standing, which I always knew to be wrong, I then learned to feel as degrading; learned to know that an opposite conduct, which was at that time considered by us as the easy virtue of cold and selfish prudence, might originate in the noblest emotions, in views the most disinterested and imaginative. It is not, however, from grateful recollections only, that I have been impelled thus to leave these my deliberate sentiments on record; but in some sense as a debt of justice to the man, whose name has been so often connected with mine for evil to which he is a stranger. As a specimen I subjoin part of a note, from The Beauties of the Anti-jacobin, in which having previously informed the public that I had been dishonored at Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a time when, for my youthful ardor in defence of Christianity, I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of French phi-(or to speak more truly, psi-)-losophy, the writer concludes with these words: "since this time he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his oeife destitsete. Ex his * [ Mr. Coleridge first became acquainted with Mr. Southey, then an under graduate at Baliol College, in June, 1794.-Ed.] CHAPTER IV. THE LYRICAL BALLADS WITH THE PREFACE-MR. WORDSWORTH S EARLIER POEMS —ON FANCY AND IMAGINATION-THE INVESTIGATION OF THE DISTINCTION IMPORTANT TO THE FINE ARTS. I HAVE wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied to myself readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me fiorr the main road; so I dare calculate on not a few, who will warmly sympathize with thern. At present it will be sufficient for my purpose, if I have proved, that Mr. Southey's wridisce his friends, LAMB and SOUTHEY."* With severest truth it may be asserted, that it would not be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections than those whose names were thus printed at full length as in the same rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his children fatherless, and his wife destitute! Is it surprising, that many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done adverse to a party, which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious calumnies? Qualis es, nzescio; sed per qScales agis, scio et doleo.' [Of this now harmless injustice Mr. Talfourd speaks as follows, in his interesting sketch of the life, accompanying the delightful Letters of Charles Lamb. "It was surely rather too much, even for partisans, when denoun. cing their political opponents,"-(in the poem of the'New Morality' published in the'Anti-Jacobin,')-" as men who'dirt on private 1W~orth and virtue threw,' thus to slander two young men of the most exemplary character-one of an almost puritanical exactness of demeanor and conductand the other persevering in a life of noble self-sacrifice, chequered only by the frailties of a sweet nature, which endeared him even to those who were not admitted to the intimacy necessary to appreciate the touching example of his severer virtues." Vol. i p. 120. This passage I quote not, of course, for the sake of refuting The AntiJacobin of 1798, but for its warm testimony to the virtues of my father's friend, Mr. Lamb. Having quoted it, I can not but observe, as regards the terms in which it speaks of Mr. Southey (my revered uncle), that his purity,-a pureness of heart and spirit far beyond any that mere exactitude of demeanor and conduct could evidence or express,-was utterly unmixed, as to me it seems, with puritanism, either in opinion or in spirit. 7192 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. tings no more than my own furnished the original occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, and to the clamors against its supposed founders and proselytes. As little do I believe that~'r. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads were in themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so entitled.* A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have precluded nine tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it up, as he would any other collection of poems purporting to derive their subjects or interests froml the incidents of domestic or ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso, that these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference to, the author's peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his attention previously directed to those peculiarities. In that case, as actually happened with iXir. Southey's earlier works, the lines and passages which mright have offended the general taste, would have been considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to perversity of judgment. The men of business who had passed their lives chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners conveyed in easy, yet correct and pointed language; and all those who, reading but little poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it, which seems most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the volumes altogether.. [See ante, note, p. 144. —Ed.] May we not say that the deepest and most pervading purity is preclusive of puritanism? On this point he might be favorably contrasted with Cowper, as well as honorably compared to him in moral strictness, and perhaps raised above him on the score of that deeper purity which is a,ature rather than a principle. Of Mr. Lamb's character in this respect Mr. Coleridge gave a brief description which has been preserved in the specimens of his Table Talk. It was of Charles Lamb that he said, " Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which shines and takes no pollution. All things are shadows to him, except those which move his affections." Some further account of Mr. Lamb will be found in the biographical supplement at the end of the volume.-S. C. BiOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 198 Others more catholic in their taste, and yet habituated to be nmost pleased when Ymost excited, would have contented themselves with deciding, that the author had been successfhl in proportion to the elevation- of his style andl subject. INTot a few, perhaps, might, by their admiration of the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the \Wye, those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old Cumlberland Beggar, and Ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with kindred feeling The Brothers, the Hart-leap Well, and whatever other poems is that ecollection may be described a holding a middle place bnetwreen those written in the highest and those in the humblest style; as for instance betweel the Tintern Abbey, and The Thorn, or Simon Lee.* Should their taste submit to no further change, and still remain unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them, that are, more or less, scattered tlirough tbhe class last mentioned; yet even from the smnall number of' the latter, they would have deemed therm but an inconsiderable subtsracetion firom the mlerit of the whole w-ork or, what is sometiles.not unpleasing in the publication of a new writer, as serving to ascertain the natural tendency, an.d conseouently the proper lirectionl of the author's genius.. In. the critical remarks, therefore, prefied. and alnnexed to the Lyrical Ballads,t I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origill of the unexarupled opposition which M)Yr. Wordsworth's writings -have been since doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in the poerms themselves iwere dwelt on anqd cited. to justify the rejection of the theory. WVhat in and for thermselves would have been either forgotten or fbr iven as ilmpeflctions, or' at least comparative f{iilures, provoked direct hostilitv vy when antlounced as intentional, as the result ofi choice afer iihi deliberation. Thus the poems, admitted by all as excellent, joined with those which had pleased the far greater number, though they formed two thirds of the whole work, instead of' being deemed (as in all right they should have been, even if we take for granted that the reader judged aright) an atonement for the few exceptions. gave wind and fuel to the animosity against both tlhe poems and. the * [The poems here mentioned are now found in the collected edition of {Mr Wordsworth's Works as follows: II. p. 161. V. p. 7-p. 282. II. p. 106. I. p. 109. II. p. 141-p. 124. V. p. 17.-Ed.] t [This Preface, published in 1800, is now printed II. p. 303.-Ed.] VOL. uIT I 194 BIOGRAPHTA:,ITERAARIA. _poet. In all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger. Not able to deny that the author posse.sed both genius and a powerfill in-ieiieelt, they felt very positive, -but yet were not qiziwe certcaib t-hat he mi-lght not be in the right, ad -they tlleilIselcve inu thel wrori; arln un-lquiet state of miud, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of it, and by wonderinrg at the perverseness of the man, who had writ;ien a long and a.lgutmentati-ve essay -to persuade therrl, that lir is foul, and foul is fait'r; in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without judgment, and were now aIbou-t to censure without reasons.*. Iu opinions of long continuance, and in which we -have never before been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced of an error, is al:most like being convinced of a fallt. There is a state of mind, -which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes plce when we inale a bull. The bull nmainly consists in the brilnging together t\ao incompatibtle thoughts, with the sensation; but wihout the sense, of their connection. The psychological condition, or that which constitutes the possibility, of this state, being such disproportionate vividness of two distant thoughts, as extinguishes or obscures the consciousness of the intermediate imnges or conceptions, or wholly abstracts the attention firolm tenem. Tlhus in the wellknown bull, " I was a.fihe ehild but thery chantged me;' the first conception expressed in the word "1I" is that of personal identity — Eyo contemplans: the second expressed in the word "me,"' is the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, orrather, its per. serial identity under the form iu which it imagined itself previously to have existed, —Ejo contemplatus. Now the change of one visual image for another involves in itself no absurdity, and. becomes absulrd only by its immediate juxtaposition w ith the first thought, whichs is rendered possible by the whole attention beiog successively abseorbed in eachi singly, so as not to notice the inteijacernt notion, changed, which by its incongruisty with the first thought,;, constitutes tihe bull. Add only, tilat this Irocess is facilitated by the circuistance of the words _;, anld ine, being sonletimles equivalent, and sometimles haying a distinct neaniung; somuietimres, namnely, signifying the act of self-consciousness, soimetimes the external imaure in and by which the mind represents that act; to itsele the resuit and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose the direct contrary state, and you will have a distinct sense of the connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such connection vwhich is supplied by habit. The man feels as if he were standing on his head, though he can not but see that lie is truly standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have- a tendency to associate itself with him who occasions it; even as persons, who' have been by painful means restored from derangemaent, are known to feel an involuntarv dislike towards their physician. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 195 That this coinjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to believe from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own knowledge, that the same general censure has been grounded by almost every different person onl some different poem. Among those, whose candor and judgmelt I estimate highly, I distinctly remember six who expressed their objections to the Lyrical Ballads almost in the same words, and altogfether to the same purport, at the same time admitting, that several of the poems had given them great pleasure; arid, strange as it might seem, the composition which one cited as execrable, another quoted as his favorite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind, that could the same experiment have been tried with these volumes, as was made in the -well-known story of the picture, the result would have been the same: the parts which had been covered by black spots on the one day, would be found equally albo lapiclde notatce on the succeeding. However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion_, as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of passing themin over in silelnce, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend whose talentls I hold in the highest respect, but; whose judgment and strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to revere, making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and subjects of Mr. Vordsworth's mior poems; I admitted that there were some few of the tales and inicidents, in which I could not nmyself find a sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre. I mentioned Alice Fell*` as an instance;' Nay," replied my fiiend with more than usual quickness of manner, " I can not agree with you there!-that, I own, does seem to me a remarkably pleasing poem." In the Lyrical Ballads (for my experience does not enable me to extend the remark equally unqualified to the two subsequent volumes), I have heard at different times, and from different individuals, every single poem extolled and reprobated, with the exception of those of loftier kind, which, as was' [Poet. Works, P. 1_3. —Ed.] 196 BIOG)R,APHIA LITERARIA. before ob:,erved, seem to have won universal praise. This fact of itself Nvould have made me diffident in my censures, had not a still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of the f:aults stated as justifying it. The seductive faults, the dulc a vitia of Cowley, Marini,* or Darwin might reasonably be thought capable oi corruptirng the public judgment for half a century, and require a twenty years' war, campaign after campaign, in order to dethrone the usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste. But that a dow-nright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity, prosaic w:rds in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and a pre::rence of mean, degrrading, or at best trivial associations and characters, should succeed in fbrming a school of imitators, a company of almost religious admirers, and this too among young men of aldent minds, liberal education, and not with academic laurels unbestowed; and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is characterized( as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only. britt of review, magazile, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph;-this is illndeed matter of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest should still continue ast undecided as that between Bacchus and * [John Baptist Marini or MIaino, a celebrated poet, known by the name of II Cavarier Marino, was born at Naples, Oct. 18, 1569, died in the same city, March 21, 1625. He wrote a poem called Adonice, -which was dedicated to Louis XIII. and first published at Paris in folio, 1651. He left many other' poems, among them, La AStrantge de gl'I-nnocenti, Ven. 1633, 4to. and La Li.ra, R]ime Anmorose, 2dceritime, Boscherecce, &c. 16to. Ven. 1629.s. C.] { Without however the apprehensions attributed to the Pagan reformer of the poetic republic. If we may judge friom the preface to the recent collection of his poems, Mr. W. would have answered with Xanthias6) 6' K E6detaac r 701) 60o'v rt3v P7(/drv, ciaZ ra7 u rteeCts; yAN. 6 ycd At,,6' E6'p6vrtla. R1 tane, 492-3. [" And if, bearing in mind the many Poets distinguished by this prime quality, whose names I omit to mention; yet justified by recollection of the insults which the ignorant, the incapable, and the presumptuous, have heaped upon these and my other writings, I may be permitted to anticipate the judgment of posterity upon myself, I shall declare (censurable, I grant, if BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 197 the frogs in Aristophanes; when the former descended to the realms of the departed to bring back the spirit of old and genuine poesy;A. dPPu' EC 62.ow' dvvr5,IC oZ. b6iv yap fg' di[Z', ~ ~iod. oi:t1r'7- 8 -7p po ot tzet. X. d2),%( tzcv ce;lcpa tpeeaoc; y', 7-6cov Ij 4dpvyS fiv kpxv xavdyv di' 91,&uf1p, I3prlctraeKa-, Io0, coef! A. Tr7 yaG)p I t)L/KOi5ECT. X. idel /v;judg Uv Tdivr-w. A. 8l' FPv,/lEi:e 7y r 1i6' oC8Efore. It lcptco UCe yep, tcav /teC 6C?, t,' {q~{paC,,f'oa tvipv,'rt/pap Co 7-oV aoCid I X. [3pteatst, KO'A, KOA'`!E During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I And here let me hint to the authors of the numerous parodies, and pretended imitations of MrI. Wordsworth's style, that at once.to conceal and convey wit and wisdom in the semblance of folly and dulness, a3 is done in the Clowns and Fools, nay even in the Dogberry, of our Shakspeare, is doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events of satiric talent; blut that the attempt to ridicule a silly and childish poem, by writing another still sillier and still more childish, can only prove (if it prove any thing at all) that the parodist is a still greater blockhead than the original writer, and, what is far worse, a malignant coxcomb to boot. The talent for mimicry seems strongest where the human race are most degraded. The poor, naked halfhuman savages of New Holland were found excellent mimics: a'ld, in civilized society, minds of the very lowest stamp alone satirize by coj?ying. At least the difference which must blend wNgith and balance the likene 3S, in order to constitute a just imitation, existing here merely in caricatu:e, detracts from the libeller's heart, without adding an ioto to the credit of his understanding. [Rance, 225-7, 257-66. —Ed.] the notoriety of the fact above stated does not justify me) that, I have given in these unfavorable times, evidence of exertions of this faculty upon its worthiest objects, the external universe, the moral and religious sentiments of iMan, his natural affections, and his acquired passions; wbhich have the same ennobling tendency as the productions of men, in this kind worthy to be holden in undying remembrance." —Preface to Wordsworth's Poems, 1815.-Ed.] 198 BIOGRAPIIA LITERARIA. became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled Descriptive Sketches;* and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the form, sttyle, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of the particular lines and periods, there is a liarshness and aeerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-o-low, wiichl io'hit recall those products of the vegetable -world, where orgeo'eus blossoms rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell, nwoithin which the rich fruit is elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with the difficulties of' the style, demands always a greater closeness of attention, than poetry-at all events, than descriptive poetry-has a right to claim. It not seldom therefore justified the complaint of obscurity. In the following extract I have sometimes fkncied, that I saw an emblem of the poem itself, and of the author's genius as it was then displayed.-'Tis storm; and hid in mist friom hour to hour, All day the floods a deepening murmur pour; The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight: Dark is the region as witlh coming night; Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light I Triumphant on the bosom of the storm, Glances the fire-clad eagile's wheeling folm; Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline; Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold, At once to pillars turned that flame with gold; Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun The west, that burns like one dilated sun, Where in a mighty crucible expire The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire." -The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, underrges as many changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly.t * [Publish ed in 1793.-E-d.] t The Butterfly the ancient Grecians made The soul's fair emblem, and its only nameBut of the soul, escaped the slagvish trade Of mortal life! For in this earthly firame Ours is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame, Manifold motions making little speed, And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 199 And it is remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are the more obtrusive and confluent, because as heterogeneous elements, which had only a temporary use, they constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are carried off. Or we may compare them to some diseases, which must work on the humors, and be thrown out on the surface, il order to secure the patient from their future recurrence. I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I had the happiness of knowing' Mr. Wordsworth personally, and while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced onl my mind, by his recitation of a manuscript poem, which still remains unpublished, but of which the stanza and tone of style were the same as those of The Female Vagrant, as originally printed in the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads.* There was here no mark of strained thought, or fbrced diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery; arind, as the poet hath himrrself wvell described in his Lines on revisiting the Wye, manly reflection and human associations ha(d given both variety, and an additional interest to natural objects, which, in. the passion and appetite of the first lQve, they had seemed to him neither to need nor permit.-t The occasional obh* [The poem to which referlence is here made was intit;uied "An Advefiture on Salisbury Plain." AMr. Wiordsworth afterwiards broke it up, and' The Female Vagrant" is composed out of it. —Ed] [For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad anifmal movements all gone by) To Fmc, was all in all.-I can not paint What then I was. T'he soundinog cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wcood, Their colors and their forms, were then to me An appetite, a feeling, and a love, That had no need of a remoter challrm, By thought. supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed fromt th-e eye. —That time is past, And all its aehing joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor niourn nor nmurnur; other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To took on nature, not as ia the hour 200:BIOGRAPHIA LITEiRARiL.A scurities, which had risen from an imnperi'e co-ntrol over tbe resources of his' ative language, hade almnost vwholly disappesred, together with that worse defoet of arbitrary and illogical pfhrases, at onee lha.ckneyed and fantastic, which hold so distil!guished a place i-n the tecc/nsiz e of ordinary poetry, and will, more or less, alloy the eiarlier poems of the truest gelinl, unrless the attention has been speciincaliy c'directed to their worthlessneress and incongruity.? I did. not perceive any tihing particular in the mere Of t houlhtiess, youth, lut hacring oftentimes TPhe sffil, sad lnusic o nhumianity, iOl har sh nor girating., twhough of anmple powe.''o has-ten and subdue.. und I have felt A presence th-at disturbs mue 7"with the joy 0~ e!evated thou-its; a sense sublime Of so'netihi-g far nosnoe,'ulpy interfused, XWhose dwelling is t4 le 1-p.ght of settLLng sUtsn. \-nd the round ocean and the niv!ivng a;', And the blue s;lky, and in. thle miud of man' miotion Ind'a splrit, that impels kll th;lnlks tLlf.e l s, a-L, objects of all thought, Ani rolls throu.'h o all things, I I. pp, 164-i —Ed J i ih. ~Word8wortt h,; - even in I.3s tv'o evrilest poems, The Evening XVaik and the Dese-ipt-.ive,Skete lh, pi'more free fc om i tn-is latt-er defeet than most of the young pooets his eontemporaries. It may, hsowever, bexempiified, together withh the hnash and obscunle constuction, i.z which he more ften offended, in tlhe foliowig mnes:,N"eid stoirmy valors ever driving; by,. SVhere ospreys, colorn1orant, aucd herons cry; s'Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer, Denied the bread of life the foodful ear, Dwindles the pear on autumn's latest spray, And tipple sickens piale in summnlerl's ray;,v'? c here ~contte'mt has fix;ed her sotzilitny reig*n 7ithi intdepeace:'e, chU!d o.' "high disdain." I hope, I need not say, that I have quoted these lines for no other purpose than to make mly meaning fulLy under.stood. It is to be regre'tted that Mr Wordsworth has not republished these two poems entire.l [The passage stands thus in the last and corrected edition:Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry,'Mid stormy vapors ever driving'by. Or hovering over wastes too bleak to rear Tha.t conammon growth of earth the foodful ar; BIOGtRAPHIA LITERARIA, 201 style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed such difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's mind Spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary lifb, than could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet. It was not, however, the freedom fiom false taste, whether as to co-immon defects, or to those more properly his own, which imade so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgmnent. It wfas the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance' of truth iii observing, with the imaginative faculty in miiodifying, the objects observed; and above all the original gift'of spreadilng the tone, the atmospheie, and with it the iepth and height of the ideal world around foirms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmneditll the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew-drops. This excellence, which in all AMr. Wordsworth's writings is more or less predomrinant, and vwhich constitutes the character of' his mind, I no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated m1-editations led me first to suspect —(and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture into full conviction)-that Fancy and Imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, eitherf two' names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and ~higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I own, easy to conceive a more opposite translation of the Greek Ctvluxi,than the Latin inaogiuzatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize* - This is effected either by giving to the one word a general, and to the other an exclusive use: as " to put on the back" and " to indorse;" or by an actual distinction of meanings, as "naturalist," and "physician;:' or by difference of r'elation, as " I" and " Me" (each of which the rustics of our different provinces still use in all the cases singular of the first personal proWhere the green apple shrivels on the spray, And pines the unripened pear in summer's kindliest ray; Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign With Independence, child of high Disdain, I. p. O.-EdJ] 202 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, those words originally of the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as the Greek and German: and which the same cause, joined with accidents of translation from original works of different countries, occasion in mixed languages like our own. The first and most important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under one and the same word, and-this done-to appropriate that word exclusively to the one meaning, and the synonynle, should there be one, to the other. But if(as will be often the case in the arts and sciences)-no synonyme exists, we must either invent or borrow a word. In the present instance the appropriation has already begun, and been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley 3a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally difierent, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the term'imagination;' while the other would be con tra-distinguished as'fancy.' iNow were it once filly ascertained, that this division is no less grounded in nature than that of deliriunr from zmauzia,, or Otwyav's noun). Even the mlere difiference,,or corruption, in the pronunciation of the samle -word, if it have become general, x-ill piroduce a new word with a distinct signification: thus "p(roperty"' and "propriety;" the latter of which, even to the time of Charles II. was the written word for all the senses of both. There is a sort of mini. immortal among the aninmalcula iv8fusoria, which has not naturally either birth, or death, absolute beginning, or absolute end: for at a certain perliod a small point appears on its back, which deepens and lengthens till the cr eature divides into two, and the same process recommences in each of'dle halves now become integral. This may be a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad emblem of the formation of words, and may facilitate the conception, how immense a nomenclature may be organized from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a social state. For each new application, or excitement of the same sound, will call forth a different sensation, which can not but affect the pronunciation. The after recollection of the sound, without the same vivid sensation, will modify it still further; till at length all trace of the original likeness is worn away. * ["- You may conceive the difference in kind between the Fancy and the Imagination in this way;-that, if the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first would become delirium and the last mania.. The fancy brings together images which have no connection natural or moral, BIOGRSAPHIA LITERARIA. 203 Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,* firom Shakspeare's What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?f or firom the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of the fine arts, and of poetry in particular, could not but derive some additional and important light. It would in its immediate effects furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic; and ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence; as in the well-kniowni passage in Hudibras;The Sun had long since in the lap Of Thetis taken out his nap, And like a lobster boil'd, the morn From black to red began to turn. The Imngination modifies imnages, and gives unity to variety: it sees.,all. things in one, ilpiit nele' uno. There is the epic imagination, the perfection of'4vfiich is in Milton; and the dramatic, of which Shakspeare is the absolute master. The first gives unity by throwing back into the distance; as after the magnificent approach of the Messiah to battle, the poet, by one touch from himself, Far off their coming shone makes the whole one image. And so at the conclusion of the description of the entranced Angels, in which every sort of image fiom all the regions of earth and air is introduced to diversify and illustrate, the reader is brought back to the simple image byHe called so loud, that all the hollow deep Of Hell resounded. The dramatic imagination does not throw back but brings close; it stamps all nature with one, and that its own, meaning, as in Lear throughout." Table Talk, VI.p. 517. There is more of imagination in it-that power which draws all things to one,-which makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects and their accessories, take one color and serve to one effect I Lamb's Essay on the Genius of Hogarth. Prose Works, i. pp. 189.-Ed.] [See also Mr. Wordsworth's Preface, pp. 29-30.-S. C.] * [Venice Preserved. Act v.-Ed.] X [Lear. Act iii. se. 4. —1. —E 204 BIOGRAPHIJA LITERtARIA. It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it, are so comtmonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I trust, therefore, that there will be more good-humor than contempt, in the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction fiom the perception of a truth new to myself lmay not have been rendered more poignant by the conceit, that it would be equilly so to the public. There was a time, certainly, in which I took some little credit to mnyself, in the belief that I had been the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out the diverse meaning of which the two ternms were capable, and analyzed the faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor's recent volume of synonymes* I have not yet seen;t but his specification of the terms in question has been - [" British Synonymes discriminated, by W. Taylor-." Ed.] t I ought to have added, with the exception of a single sheet wFhich I accidentally met with at the printer's. Even from this seanty specimen. I found it impossible to doubet the talent, or not to admire the ingenuity, of the author. That his distinctions were for the greater part unsatisfiactory to my mind, proves nothing against their accuracy; but it may possibly be serviceable to him, in case of a second edition, if I take this opportunity of suggesting the query, whether he may not have been occasionally mlisled, by having assumed, as to me he appears to have done, the non-existence of any absolute synonymnes in our language? Now I can not but think, that there are many which remi-ain for our posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and which I regtard as so much reversionary -wealth in our mother tongue. When two distinct imeanings are confounded under one or more words-(and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progressive and of course imperfect)-erroneous consequences will be drawn, and what is true in one sense of the word will be affirmed as true inr toto. Men of research, startled by the consequences, seek in the things themselves(whether in or out of the mind)-for a knowledge of the fact, and having discovered the difference, remove the equivocation either by the substitution of a new -word, or by the appropriation of one of the two or more words, which had before been used promiscuously. When this distinction has been so naturalized and of such general currency that the language does as it were think for us-(like the sliding rule which is the mechanic's safe substitute for arithmetical knowledge) —we then say, that it is evident to common sense. Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages. What was born and christened in the Schools passes by degrees into the world at large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table. At least I can discover no other meaning of the term, common sense, if it is to convey any specific difference from sense and judgment i, gene-re, and where it BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 205 clearly shown to be both insufficient and erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth in the Preface added to the late collection of his Poems. The explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given, will be found to differ from mine, chiefly, perhaps, as our objects are different. It could scarcely indeed happen otherwise, from the is not used scholastically for the universal reason. Thus in the reign of Charles II. the philosophic wo rld was called to armls by the moral sophisms of Hobbes, and the ablest writers exerted themselves in the detection of an error, which a school-boy would now be able to conflute by the mere recollection, that coipulsion and obligation conveyed two ideas perfectly disparate, and that what appertained to the one, had been falsely transferred to the other by a mere confusion of terms? L- [See Hobbes's Treatise on Liberty and Necessity. (Eng. Works. IV. Sir W.:Molesworth's edit.) The teram obligation. is not used by HIobbes. His position is thlat some actions are not compelled, but that all are necessitated. (pp. 261-2.) " Natural efficacy of objects," he says, "does determine voluntary agents, and necessitates the Will and consequently the Action; but for moral efficacy, I understand not what he means. (p. 24-7.) -" When first a mlan hath an appetite or will to something, to which im.mediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his will is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing. So that whereas it is out of controversy that of voluntary actions the will is the necessary cause, and by this which is said, the will is also caused by other things whereof it disposeth not, it followeth that voluntary actions have all of theim necessary causes, and therefore ale necessitated." (p. 274.) A voluntary action, therefore, with Hobbes, is an action necessarily consequent on or identical with, the last opinion, judgiment, or dictate of the understanding,-whieh last opinion, judgment, or dictate of the understanding is necessarily determined by the presentation of certain " extelrnal objects to a man of such or such a temperature." (p. 267.) Of course Obligation, or a law of Duty grounded on conviction of a universal Right and Wrong, True and False, has no place in Hobbes's system; nor can that system be consistently defended against the charge that it destroys the very foundations of all morality properly understood. It is true that Hobbes himself in this Treatise denies the imputed consequence; but his reasoning in this respect is so weak,-depending upon a covert use of the terms "will" and "willingly" in a sense inconsistent with that necessarily attached to them in the previous positions,-that it can not but be suspected that Hobbes himself felt the legitimacy of the charge that upon his principles Morality, in any: shape but that of positive Law, was an empty name. Practically, what other conclusion can be drawn? This Trleatise is one of the least agreeable of all Hobbes's Works. It contains in all its naked terrors that firightful dogma, which, strange to say, has with scarcely any modification but in form been reproduced and advoaetd with zealous reiteration in the sermons and other wrl'itings of tho.em 206 BIOGRAPHIA LITEREARIA. advantage I have enjoyed of fiequent conversation with him on a subject to which a poerm of his own first directed my attention, and my conclusions concerning which he had made more lucid to myself by many happy instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the mind. But it was M3Ir. Wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different eflects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has- -drawn- a —masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness. Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged to draw more largely on the reader's attention, than so immethodical a miscellany as this can authorize; when in such a work (the Ecclesiastical Policy) of such a mind as Hooker's, the judicious author, though no less admirable for the perspicuity than for the port and dignity of his language,-and though he wrote for men of learning in a learned age,-saw nevertheless occasion to anticipate and guard against "complaints of obscurity," as often as he was to trace his subject "to the highest well-spring and fountain." Which (continues he), " because men are not accustomed to, the pains we take aremore needful a great deal, than acceptable; and the matters we handle, seem by reason of newness (till the mind grow better acquainted with them) dark and intricate."* I would gladly therefore spare both myself and others this labor, if I knew how without it to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed,-not as my opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established premises popular divines who have so largely influenced the public mind for the last seven or eight years. " I say," says Hobbes, " that the power of God alone, without other helps, is sufficient justification of any action he doth." (p. 249.) " Power irresistible justifies all actions, really and properly, in -whomsoever it be found." —" This I know; —God can not sin, because his doing a thing makes it just, and consequently no sin-and therefore it is blasphemy to say, God can sin: but to say God can so or-der the world, as a sin may be necessarily caused thereby in a man, I do not see how it is any dishonor to Him." (pp. 250-1.) If this is true, God-the Good —diffrs from Moloch in nothing but power. — Ed.] [ hl. h.i. s. 2. —Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 20? conveyed in such a form as is calculated either to effect a fundamental conviction or to receive a fundamental confutation. If I may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker, "They unto whom we shall seem. tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in their own hands to spare that labor, which they are not willing to endure."' Those at least, let ine be permitted to add, who have taken so much pains to render me ridiculous fbr a perversion of taste, and have supported the charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other authority than their own conjectures; owe it to themselves as well as to me not to refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory which I do acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining the ground on which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its justification. CHAPTER V. ON THE LAW OF ASSOCIATION-ITS HISTORY TRACED FROM ARISTOTLE TO HARTLEY. THERE have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as by an instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their attempts to its solution. The first step was to construct a table of distinctions, which they seem to have formed on the principle of the absence or presence of the Will. Our various sensations, perceptions, and movements, were classed as active or passive, or as zedia partaking of both. A still finer distinction was soon'established between the voluntary and the spontaneous. In our perception we seem to ourselves merely passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or as a blank canvas on which some unknown hand paints it. For it is worthy of notice, that the latter, or the system of Idealism, may be traced to sources equally remote with the former, or Materialismn; and Berkeley can boast an ancestry * B. i. ch. S. 2.-E —d.] 208 ~~oGktasBIOGHRAP{ iA LITERARIA. at least as venerable as Gassendi* or Hobbes.t These conjece tures, however, concerning the mode in which our perceptions originated, could not alter the natural difference of Things alnd Thoughts. In the former, the cause appeared wholly external, while in the latter, sometimes our will interfered as the producing or determining cause, and sometimes our nature seemed to act by a mechanism of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or even against it, Our inward experiences were thus arranged in three separate classes, the passive sense, or what the School-men call the merely receptive quality of the mind; the yoluntary; and the spontaneous, which holds the middle place bet:w;eeln both. But it is not in human nature to meditate on any mode of action, without inquiring after the law that governs it; and in the explanation of the spontaneous movements of our being, the metaphysician took the lead of the anatomist and natural philosopher. In Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and India the analysis of the mind had reached its noon anti manhood, while experimental research was still in its dawn and iniancy. For many, very many centuries, it has been difficult to advance a new truth, or even a new error, in the philosophy of the intellect or morals. With regard, however, to the laws that direct the spontaneous movements of thought and the principle of their intellectual mechanism there exists, it has been asserted, an important exception most honorable to the moderns, and in the merit of which our own country claims the largest share. Sir James * [Pierre Gassendi, a philosopher whose aim it was to revive, reform, and improve the system of Epicurus, and who wrote against Des Cartes, was born in 1592, at Chantersier in Provence, and died at Paris in 1656.s. C.] ~ [Thomas iobbes was born at Malmnesbury, in 1588, died 1679, aged ninety-one. His works, which are philosophical and political, moral and mathematical, and translations, are now first collected and edited by Sir Win. Molesworth-the Latin works in five vols. Svo.; of the English, nine vols. 8vo., have appeared. Cousin observes that the speculative philosophy of Hobbes, who was a materialist in doctrine, has not attracted as much attention as the practical. His style is very excellent, condensed, yet with all the ease and freedom of diffuse writing. It is sharp and sparkling as a diamond. Sir James M3ackintosh praises it highly in his well-known Dis sertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy. He says of it: "Short, clear, precise, pithy, his language never has more than one meaning, which never requires a second thought to find." See his whole character of it at p. 40. —S. C3 BIOGRAPRHA LITERARIA. 209 Mackintosh —(who, amid the variety of his talents and attain — ments, is not of less repute for the depth and accuracy of his philosophical inquiries than for the eloquence with which hle is said to render their most difficult results perspicuous, and the driest attractivre) -afiirnmed in the LecttLres delivered by him in the Lincoln's Inn Hall, tha't the law of associiation as established in the contemporaleitv of'tthe original impressions, formed the basis of all true psy chology and that any ontological or metaphysical;science;, not contaained in such (that is, an empirical) psychology, -was but a web of abstractions and generalizations. Of this prolific truth, of this great ftldamental law, he declared Hobbes to have been the original discoverer, -while its full application to the whole intellectual system we owed to Hartley; wrho stood in the same relation to Hobbes as Newton to Kepler; the law of association being that to the mind which gravitation is to matter. Of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the comparative merits of the ancient metaphysicians, including their commentators, the School-men, and of the modern British and French philosophers from Hobbes to Hulme, Hartley, and Condillac, this is not the place to speak. So wide indeed is the chasm between Sir James Mackintosh's philosophical creed and mine, that so far from being able to join hands, we could scarcelyr make our voices intelligible to each other: and to bridge it over would require more time, skill, and power than I believe myself to possess. But the latter clause involves for the greater part a mere question of fact and history, and the accur-acy of the statement is to be tried by documents rather than reasoning. First then, I deny Hobbes's claim i~n toto; for he had been anticipated by bDes Cartes, whose work De l1et/hodo, preceded Hobbes's De lVatur'a Hitmnana, by more than a year.* But * Iilobbes's rreatise, " Human Nature," -vtwritten by him in English, was published in 1650, although his dedication of it to the Earl of Newcastle is dated in 1640. Des Cartes (born at La Haye, in Touranine, in 1596) died in Sweden, to which country he had been called by Queen Christina, in 1650. His treatise, -De lMethoclo, was originally uwritten in French, and published in 1637; the Latin version, revised and augmented by Des Cartes himself, appeared in 1644. But neither the one nor the other contains any thing upon the subject mentioned in the text. The incident, to which Mr. Coleridge afterwards refers, as told in the -De Metbhodo, is to be found in the Principia Pahilosophi.z, Part iv. s. 196. Thlis latter work was published 210 BIOGRAPHIA LITER:ARIAo what is of much more importance, Hobbes builds nothing on the principle which he had announced. He does not even announce it, as differing in any respect from the general laws of material motion and impact: nor was it. indeed, possible for him so to do, compatibly with his system, which was exclusively material and mechanical. Far otherwise is it with Des Cartes; greatly as he too in his after-writings (and still more egregiously his followers De la Forge, and others) obscured the truth by their attempts to explain it on the theory of nervous fluids, and material configurain 1644. But neither in the Pri'ecipiac is the law of the contemporaneity of impressions stated. In another and posthumous work, however, T7ractatus de eloiniae, Part v. s. 73, Des Cartes certainly does, in a short incidental paragraph, mention the fact and the ground of it:Qalietiaml? notandcm est, quodl si tandtue aliqeua ejusmodi forninat recluderentur, ut A. et B., ho)c'tsue it causa esse posset, ut etianc alia. plzta C. et D. eodera tenipore recludantur; prcecipue si snpius oniesia sibml recluse fuissent, nec solita sinzt una sine aliis secrsumo aperiri. Quod ostendit, quo pacto recordatio rei?lo.idats excitari possit per recordetionesa alterjis, quei aliquando'unaz?es ea c 2nesori(c iqmprev.,ca jfit. Ut si videcam (ltos OculOS Cur? siaso, continuo frontezs, et os, oGnesque alices faciei pcartes izaginor, qtuia assuetus non sumn. unas sieze ali/s vide-re. Et caue video ignemn, recordor colorerm fejLs, guen, viso igne percepi aliquando. That Hobbes -wNas not the discoverer or first propounder of this law of association is, indeed, clear enough; but it does not appear that he was indebted to Des Cartes for his knowledge of it; and it must be admitted that he states the rule with distinctness. "The cause of the coherence or consequence of one conception to another, is their first coherence or consequence at that time when they are produced by sense." HI. N. c. iv. 2. See also Leviathan, Pt. i. c. iii. Neither is it, perhaps, quite.correct to say that Hobbes builds nothing on this law. He at least clearly saw its connection with speech. "It is the nature almost of every corporal thing, being often moved in one and the same manner, to receive continually a greater and greater easiness and aptitude to the same motion, insomuch as in time the same be eometh so habitual, that to beget it there needs no more than to begin it. The passions of man, as they are the beginning of voluntary motions, so are they the beginning of speech, which is the motion of the tongue. And men desiring to show others the knowledge, opinions,.conceptions, and passions, which are in themselves, and to that end having invented language, have by that means transferred all that discursion of their mind mentioned in the former chapter, by the motion of their tongues, into discourse of words: and ratio now is but oratio, for the most part, wherein custom hath so great a power, that the mind suggesteth only the first word; the rest follow habitually, and are not followed by the mind," &c. H. N. c. v. 14. -Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 211 tions.* But, in his interesting work, De llethodo, Des Cartes relates the circumstance which first led him to meditate on this subject, and which since then has been often noticed and employed as an instance and illustration of the law. A child who with its eyes -bandaged had lost sever al of his fingers by amputation, continued to coruplain for many days successively of pains, now in this joint and now in that, of the very fingers which had been cut off.t Des Cartes was led by this incident to reflect on the uncertainty with which we attribute any particular place to any inward pain or uneasiness, and proceeded after long consideration to establish it as a general law; that contemporaneous imnpressions, whether images or sensations, recall each other mechanically. On this principle, as a ground-Nrork, he built up the iifl61e system of human language, as one continued process of association. He showed in what sense not only general terms, * [It may well be doubted whether Mr. Coleridge is not more indulgent here to Des Cartes than the truth of the case wvarrants. The t'rcctatus de Hominee is. no doubt, a part of the great Work of which he gives an account in his De Methodo, as being then written; and in it the nervous fluids and material configurations are displayed as precisely, if not as copiously, as by his commentator De 1l Forge himself. The " animal spirits" move mind and body. See De Horn. P. iv. s. 55, &c. See even in the De ifIethlodo itself. Denique id quod hlic super omania observari meretur, generatio est spiritueun animalissm, quce act instar venti subtilissimi, aut potiusjfamnmce purissimua; que conZtinue e corde manna copia in cerebrum ascendens, inde per nerveos in muscuelos penetrat, et omnibus nembris motum det, &c. P. 30. edit. 1664. See Spectator, No. 4-17. And indeed their agency is distinctly recognized in the same part of the Principia, in which the story of the child is related.-Ed.] f This story is told by Des Cartes in these words as one of many proofs that anitasem, son q7uatenus est in singa1is memsbris, sed tantsurn quatenus est in? cerebro, ea quce corpori occidunt in singsulis membris, nervorum ope sentire.Culm pueilce cuidan, manunm graevi nmorbo qaectanm habentti, velarentuar oculi, quoties chirurqus accedebat, ne curationis apparatu turbaretur, eiqe, post aliquot dies brachilon ad cuzbitum usque, ab gaenfrenam in eo serpentem, faisset amputatam, et panni isn ejsus IOCm1 ita substituti, aut eo se privatam esse plane ignoraret, ipsa interim varios dolores, nunc in uno ejus mdanus qule abscissa erat digito, nunc in alio se sentire querebatur. Quod sane aliunde contigrIere non poterat, quam ex eo, quod nerovi, qui prius ex cerebro ad manron descendebant, tuneque in brachio juxta cubitasn terminabautur, eodem modo ibi movererntur, ac prizs moveri debuissent in mnan7, ad senssum i lujus vel illius, digiti dolentis animcea in cerebro residenti imprimendum. Prine. -v. 196. —Ed.] 212 IBIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. but generic inzages, —under the name of abstract ideas,-actually existed, and in what consist their nature and power. As one word may become the general exponent of many, so by association a simple image may represent a whole class.* But in truth Hobbes himself makes no claimrs to any discovery, and introduces this law of' association, or (in his o-,wn language) discursion of mind, as anr admitted fact, in the solution'alone of which, and this by causes purely physiological, he arrogates any originality.'His system is briefly this;t whenever the senses are impinged on by external objects, whether by the rays'of light reflected fiom them, or by effluxes of their finer particles, there results a correspondent motion of the innermost and subtlest organs. This motion. constitutes a?'epresentcation, and there remains an impression of the same, or a certain disposition to repeat the same motion. WVhenever we feel several objects at the same time, the imnpressions that are left (or in the language of 3Mr. Hume, the ideas) are linked together. Whenever therefore any one of the movements, which constitute a complex impression, is renewed through the serises, the others succeed mechanically. It follows of necessity, therefore, that Hobbes, as well as Hartley and all others who derive association from the connection and interdependelce of the supposed matter, the movements of which constitute our thoughts, must have reduced all its forms to the one law of Time. But even the merit of announcing this law with philosophic precision can not be fairly conceded to him. For the objects of any two ideas41 need not have co-existed in the same sensation in order * [The Editor has never been able to find in the writings of Des Cartes any thing coming up to the statement in the text. Certainly nothing of the sort follows the paragraph containing the story of the amputated hand. That Des Cartes was a Nominalist is clear from the following passage:Et optirne comnprehendimnus, qua pacto a va ria magnitudine,/igura et nzotu particularurn units corporis, variTi otus locales in alio corpore excitentur; nullo auteram mvodo possumus intelligere, quo pacto ab iisdem (magnitudine scilicet, figura, et nmotu), aliquid aliud producatur, owmnino diversce ab ipsis a/turar, quales sunt ille forme substantiales et qualitates reales, quas in rebus esse multi sulpponuInt; n.ec etiam quo pacto postea istce qualitates ant form2ae vitm labeanit in aliis coaporibus motuzs locales excitandi. Princip. iv. 198. —Ed.] tSee Human Nrature. C. ii. 111. Leviathan ubi supra.-Ed.] t I here use the word idea in Mr. Hume's sense on account.of its general currency amongst the English inetaphysicians; though against my ownl judgment, for I believe that the vague use of this word has been the cause BIOGRAPIIIA LITERARIA. 213 to become!nutually associable. The same result will follow when one only of the two ideas has been represented by the senses, and the other by the memory. of much error and -more confusion. The word, idea, in its original sense as used by Pindar, Aristophanes, and in the Gospel of St. Matthew, represented the visual abstraction of a distant object, when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts.' Plato adopted it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to eZdSwov, or sensuous image; the transient and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the idea. Ideas themselves he considered as rivsterius powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time.2 In this sense the word Idea became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to Plato, or as Plato says. Oure English writers to the end of the reign of Charles II. or somewhat later, employed it either in the original sense, or Platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent to our present use of the substantive, Ideal; always however opposing it, more or less to image, whether of present or absent objects. The reader will not be displeased with the following interesting exemplification friom Bishop Jeremy Taylor. " St. Lewis the King sent Ivo Bishop of Chartres on an embassy, and he told, that he met a grave and stately matron on the way with a cellser of fire in one hanld, and a vessel of water in the other; and observing her to have a melancholy, religious, and phantastic deportment and look, 1 [ - T i-OyV 1l6 VO Kpariovra Xepb dqi/Ta, /3tudov a-cp''O2,,uirtov Icetvv KaICi XPOVOv y' ic8ca re KaIC3OV:pga T~E KeKCpae/vov.-Olymp. XI. (X.) 121. oU ytv6o7Kcov, Ort 7i07 Hn2od-rov erap'uw 13eriovaC (alvpae, ecai w7v ywvynv, cKa rijv ldeav. —Aristoph. Plut. 558-9. v 6ti lde' Ida avoD iCv dcirpairw7, Kae i iT vdve/ta aV7ro0 ZEcVchbv ie2e Xtv..Miatt xxviii. 3. —Ed.] 2 [See the Timaeus. (Bekk. III. ii. 23.) i;-ov #2v OVv eav ci 6rtovpy6a irpoc ro Kari- e raevr (Xov Q 3Zircv dei, rooer9 tGviG 7irpoXpc(,tdevof 7reapadeciucart, r /v itSiav aeo e~ lcat dUvacttv dcirepydci-rat, tcaGlv de dvvciyKgf oVir-f dTroie-ec2cOatc rciv. But the word Ic&a is used by Plato in several senses, modified according to the natures, divine or human, in which he represents the ideas as placed. See the fine moral passage in the Republic (vii. 3.) —Ev r( yvWCrc reievra.ia rl rov~ dyao o ce6a eai. el6vyl (odpScoate, d0Eoca & ci2 avooyletrea etvniat f ipa 7irct 7racvrov aviTrl op0cv re cKa Kca2uCh alri-a, ev r-c 6pat Sc5 cai r7iv romrov [Cdptov reKovCaa, iv re VonrTc acvrt evptia dir/0etaiv Kca. vov ireapacyo1uvyt, cat OTr tei IarTv r Ieiv roi-v e',ov a /Z up6vao 7irpc4 t'lv V ldia The notes appended by the enthusiastic Thomas Taylor to his translation of the Metaphysics of Aristotle are full of learned illustration upon this subject.-P-}d.] 214 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Long* however before either Hobbes or Des Cartes the law of association had been deilned, and its important filnctions set fbrth he asked her what those symbols meant, and what she meant to do with her fire and water; she answered, lMy purpose is with the fire to burn paradise, and with nmy water to quench the flames of hell, that ilen may serve God purely for the love of God. But we rarely meet with such spirits which love virtue so metaphysically as to abstractfrom her all sensible comrpositions, and love the purity of the idect."' Des Cartes having introduced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis of material ideas,-or certain configurations of the brain, which were as so many moulds to the influxes of the external world,-Locke adopted the term, but extended its signification to whatever is the immediate object of the mind's attention or consciousness. Humne, distinguishing those representations which ale accompanied with a sense of a present object fiom those reproduced by the mind itself, designated the former by inmpressions, and confined the word idea to the latter.3 * [For the substance of the following paragraph, and in part for the remarks upon the doctrine of association of ideas as represented in the writings of Aristotle, Mr. Coleridge is indebted to the very interesting and excellent treatise of J. G. E. Maasz, On the Imagination, Versuch'iiber die Einbildsengskrcft, pp. 343-4-5-6. A copy of this work (1797), richlly annotated on the margins and blank spaces, was found amongst Mr. Coleridge's books; and in so' immethodical a miscellany of literary opinions" as this the insertion of these notes may not be out of place. " I Maasz's introductory chapters," says Mr. Coleridge, "my mind has been perplexed by the division of things into matter (sensatio ab extra) and form (i. e. per-et-con-ceptio ab intra). Now as Time and Space are evidently only the universals, or smodi conzcue.ies, of sensation and sensuous Form, and consequently appertain exclusively to the sensuous Eiubildoengshkraft (=Eisemplasy, 2~dzleTZv eil iv) which we call Imagination, Fancy, &c. all [The passage here ascribed to Bishop Taylor I can not find in his works, nor have I been able to light upon the expression, " him that reads in malice or him that reads after dinner," also attributed to him by Mr. Coleridge, in any of his writings.-S. C.] ["' It (Idea) being the term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding, when a man thinks; I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking." Human Understand. I. i. s. 8.-EEd.] 3 [" By the term, imnpressionl, then, I mean all our more lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will. And impressions are distinguished from Icleas, which are the less lively perceptions, of which we are conscious, when we reflect on any of those sensations or movements above-mentioned." Inquiry concerning the Humn. Under. s. 2. —Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 215 by Ludovicus Vives.* phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by Vives to express the mental power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind; and inmagitzcatio for the receptivity (vis repoor and inadequate terms, far inferior to the German EinbildtLnq, the Law of Association derived ab ertra friom the contemporaneity of the impressions, or indeed any other difference of the characterless Manifold (das Mieanqnichfaltige) except that of plus and mines of impingence, becomes incomprehensible, if not absurd. I see at one instant of time a Rose and a Lily. -Chemistry teaches me that they differ only in form, being both reducible to the same elements. If then form be not an external active power, if it be wholly transfused into the object by the esemplastic or imaginative faculty of the percipient, or rather creator, rwhere and wherein shall I find the ground of my perception, that this is the Rose and that the Lily. In order to render the creative activity of the imagination at all conceivable, we must necessarily have recourse to the Haramonia pracstabilita of Spinoza and Leibnitz: in which case the automatism of the Imagination and Judgnment would be perception in the same sense as a self-conscious watch would be a percipient of Time, and inclusively of the apparent motion of the sun and stars. But, as the whole is but a choice of ineomprehensibles, till the natural doctrine of physical influx, or modification of each by all, have been proved absurd, I shall still prefer it: and not doubt, that the pencil of rays forms pictures on the retina, because I can not comprehend how this picture can excite a mental fac-simile." Maasz, Introd. s. 1. Deanl die Jlierkmale, weodeurch ein Objekt anyestelit wird, miissen cnhtweder indivitdelle oder gen eilcnsae sezn. Coleridge. "Deceptive. The mark in itself is always individual. By an act of the reflex understanding it mnay be rendered a sign or general term. The word Vorstellung has been as often mischievous as useful in German philosophy."-Ed.] * [Originally thus-" by 3elanucthon, Ammerbach, and L. 5Vives; imore especially by the last;"-part of which statement appears to have been an imperfect recollection by Mr. C. of the words of Maasz, who, after observing that in the sixteenth century the spirlit of inquiry took a neawr turn, and that men then came forth who knew the value of empirical psychology, and took pains to enforce and elucidate its truths, proceeds as follows: " Among the first to whom this merit belongs were Melancthon, Ammerbach, and Lud. Vives, whose psychological writings were published all together by Getzner (Zurich, 1662). But far the most wNas done by Vives. He has brought together many important observations upon the human soul, and made striking remarks thereon. More especially in the theory of the association of representations, which Alelancthon and Alnmerbach do not bring forward at all, he displays no ordinary knowledge." Transl. p. 343. Philip Melancthon, a Reformer in Philosophy as well as in Religion, published, anmong other philosophical works, a book De Aninza, 1540, in 8vo. Vitus Ammerbach, a learned author and Professor of Philosophy at Ingolstadt,-was born at Wedinguen in Bavaria, and died in 1557 at the age g]16 BIOGRAPIHIA LITERARIA. celptiva) of impressions, or for the?assivte perception.* The power of combinationr he appropriates to the f'ormer " qu singqIua et sinqpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea conjiungit et cl sjungit phantasia.."ti And the law by which the thoughts are spontaneously presented follows thus: " quce simnzl snt a phantasia comrprehenzsa, si alterutruni occurrat, solet securn alterue n repreof seventy. He also published, amongst other works, one on the Soul.De Aniina, lib. iv. Lugd. Bat. 1555, 8vo. and one on Natural Philosophy — De Philosophia XNaturali, lib vi. 8vo. John Lewis Vives was born in 1492 at Valencia in Spain, died at Bruges, according to Thuanus, in 1541: was first patronized by Henry VIII. of England, who made him preceptor in Latin to the Princess Mary, and afterwards persecuted by him for opposing his divorce. He was a follower of Erasmus, and opponent of the Scholastic Philosophy. His works, which are of various kinds, theological, devotional, grammatical, critical, as -well as philosophical, were printed at Basle in 1555, in two vols. fol. The Treatise De Anirna et VTita is contained in vol. ii. pp. 497-593. —S. C.] [ l't queaznadiodm, in altrice facultate videre est ineese vinm qutadclam, que cibu recipit, a et, aliaan quoe contineat, alica qaa. coiifiat, queaque distribuat et di.spenset: ita inl animis et homivuniu et brutorum est fanctio, quao imagines sensibus impressas recipit, quze inde Imaginativa dicitur: est que continet hc, }Memoria; qua conficit, Phantasia: qu, distribuit ad assensumr aut dissensum, Extrfimat-rix. Su'rnt e~nimt.piuritalia oimcagines Dei, corporalia vero spirital/iun quxdcltnr veluti sirnulachra: ut miranduct nonz sit, eZ corporalibus spiritalia, colliqi, ceu ab omnbris ant picturis corpora expressa. Imaginativa actio est in animo, quae oculi in corpore, recipere imagines intuendo: estque velut ori;fcium quoddan vasis, quod e.t Iemozoria. Phantasia ver6 oronjungit et disjungit ea, qua singula et simplicia Imaginatio acceperat. Equidenm haud suan nescias, con f1ndi duto hcec a plerisqaLe, ut Lnlzatinatione' Phuantasianz, et vice versa hanc ]aaginationem nozrinaent, et eandem esse fezctionePi quideam arbitrentur. Sed nobis tzun ad rein aptits, tunt ad docendum( acconmodaxtius visur est ita partiri: propterea quod actiones videruns distinctas, zundeJcltatte s cense;atur. l'amzelsi nishil erit quandoque pe iceuli, si istis utamnr promliscue. Accedit his sensus, qui ab Aristotele colsMunis dicitur, quo judicantur sen.silia absentia.: et diseernuntur Lea, que variorumt asunt senszuum hie sub i;naginationen. et Phantasian venire potest. Phantasia est mirifice expedLita et libera' quicqaid colliiitsUmn est, fingit, renfingit, componit, dcivisncit, dissolbit, res di.junetissimas connectit, conjurctissima s a?.tesn longissimne separat. Itaque nisi regatzur, et cohibeat.r a ratilone, hatud seecus aninzun percellit ac perturbat. quam procella ma.re. Jo. Ludovici Vivis, De Anirac et Vita. Lib. i. Opera, tom. ii. p 509. Basil, 1555.-S. C.] f [Mnaasz, p. 344. Note. Vives De Anisl. i. s. d. cogn. intern. Phantasia conjungit et disjangit ea, quac singula et sisrplicitcr, acceperat imaginatio. Imnagination, according to Vives, says Maasz, is the capability of perceiving au impression.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 217 sentarc."* To time therefore he subordinates all the other exciting causes of association. The soul proceeds " a causa ad effectuzm, ab hoc ad instrumenntau, a pcarte ad tottun;"t then1ce to the place, from place to person, and firoml this to whatever preceded or followed, all as being parts of a total impression, each of which may recall the other. The apparent springxs "saltus vel tran.situs etiar longissimos,"t he explains by the same thoufght having been a component part of two or more total impressions. Thus "ex Scipione venio in cogitationem potentice Tr'cicvC, r'opter victorias ejus de Asia, inz qcua segnbat AntioCh?,s."S But from Vives I pass at once to the source of his doctrines, and (as far as we can judge from the remains vet extant of Greek philosophy) as to the first, so to the fullest and most perfect enunciation of the associative principle, naxmely, to the writings of Aristotle; and of these in particular to the treatises De Anima, and " De M11femoria," which last belongs to the series of Essays entitled in the old translations Parva XNatuaralia.ll In as much as later writers have either deviated from, or added to his doctrines, they appear to me to have introduced either error or groundless supposition. * [De Asninza i. sect. d. cited bv Maasz in a note ibid. Vives proceeds thus —unde sedes illCe existet in artifcio memaorice, quippe ad aspecturn loci de eo venit in iner.fem, qieod i? tloco scinmus eseirsse, ant sitlums esse: gquadlo etiam curm voce aut soto aliquso qlippina contingit Icturion, codert sono audito delectamur: si triste tris tal.zJ. Qod in hbrutis quo quce est a(ltnnotare: qu si quo sOO vocata g ratunm aliquid accipiua.t, rutst ad eundelz sonurn facile ac lilbenter accurru2?t: sirn ceda7tur soitumn eeuntem deinceps reformidant, ex plaqar'ln recordlatione. —Lib. ii. Opera, torn. ii. p. 519.-S. C.] f [.De Anima ii. sect. d. mere. et record.-Cited bry M1aasz in a note, Ibid. -S. C] t [Ibid.ibid. See Maasz, pp. 345-6. That the springs are only "apparent" is explained by Maasz, comnmenting on the words of Vives, Sunt (in phantazsia) transitus qduidain longissinzi, immno saltus.-S. C.] ~ [Cited by Maasz fi-om the same place, p. 346.-S. C.] I] [This collection, ri IleKPi( ca2oaueva uvatlui, which is connected with the treatise in three books, on the Soul (as Trendelenburg distinctly shows in the Preface to his elaborate commentary on that work of Aristotle), contains the books On Sense and Things Sensible, On Memory and Recollection Oa Sleep, On Dreams, On Divination in Sleep ( aO' v'7vov), On Length and Shortness of Life, On Youth and Old Age, On Respiration, and On Life and Death, —S.. vot. X. K 218 BIOGBAPHIA LITERARIA. In the first place it is to be observed, that Aristotle's positions on this subject are unmixed with fiction.: The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiardballs, as Hobbes;'[ nor of nervous or animal spirits, whe're inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain, as the followers of Des Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general; nor of an oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the nerves of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal spirits perform tor them under the notion of hollow tubes, as Hartley teaches -nor finally (with yet more recent dreamers), of chemical compositions by elective affinity, or of an electric light at once the immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there, disporting in various shapes,-as the balance of,lz'us and nminzus, or negative and positive, is destroyed or re-established,-images out both past and present. Aristotle delivers a just theory without pretending to an hypothesis; or in other words a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and of their relations to each other without supposition, that is, a fact placed under a number of facts, as their common support and explanation: though in the majority of instances these hypotheses or suppositions better de* [Maasz has also said (p. 345) speaking of Vives, that, though he set forth correctly the theory of association, he yet did not exhibit it with such entire purity as Aristotle. iMr. Coleridge, however, is comparing the wise Stagyrite with 1obbes, Des Cartes, Hartley and othcrs —a aasz is comparling him with Vives-observing that this author not only came after Aristotle in perceiving and expressing the general law-X cf imagination, but, rwhat is the principal thing, did not state the theory of associhation so consistently and purely as the former, because he made exceptions to the same, which are such in appearance only: though he thinks it may be assumed in his favor, that his languagftre is incorrect rather than his conception of the subject. >Mr. Coleridge, on the other hand, is objecting to the physical dreams, which modern metaphysicians introduced into the survey of psychological fadcts delivered by the sager ancient. He imputes to them an error in principle, while MiSaasz remarks upon a statement at varianece with a law correctly laid down.-S C.] t [See Human Nature, chaps. ii. and iii. Hobbes does not use the expressions in which Mr. C. describes his doctrine, but speaks much of motions produced in the brain by objects. —S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 219 serve the name of',5norotraf, or suffictions.* He uses indeed the word x,,e-?l;, to express what we call representations or ideas, but he carefully distinguishes thern from material motion, designating the latter always by annexing the words ~V T0fon eixTnr rzos.t On the contrary in his treatise De Azinza, he excludes place and motion from all the operations of thought, whether representations or volitions, as attributes utterly and absurdly heterogereous.$ The general law of association, or, more accurately, the common condition under which all exciting causes act, and in which they may be generalized, according to Aristotle is this.~ Ideas * [The discussion of Maasz on the part performed by Aristotle in explaining the general law of the Imagination extends from p. 319 to p. 335, from sect. 90 to 94 inclusively.-S. C.] t [See Maasz, p. 321. He refers generally to the treatise De Anzima, Lib. ii. cap. iii. and in particular to the words in s. 3,'Evioqt dS rrpib rotiroct V~rdpxet iat 7i6 tcara 7r6wov KtlVTrJtKiOv. " But some, beside these things, have also the faculty of motion according to place.' In the third and fourth chapters of the first book the subject of motion, tcar7 ri7rov, is discussed, and the opinions of other philosophers that it is properly attributable to the soul refuted. Sectionls 3 and 4 of Lib. i. cap. iii. speak distinctly on this point: and so do sections 8-11 of cap. iv. In the latter the philosopher says: " That the soul can not possibly be harmony,.neither can be turned about in a circle is manifest; from the aforesaid. But that it may be removed per accidens-contingently,-may so move itself, even as we have declared, is possible: inasmuch as that, is wlhich it is, is ealsable of being moved, and that (in which it is) may be moved by the soul: but in no other wvay is it possible for the soul to be moved according to place." Maasz discusses Aristotle's use of the term Kctjtc-r in sections 91-2, pp. 321-333. He observes that it; was not unusual with tlhe Greek philosophers to use the word for changes of the soul, and that Plato, foi' example, says expressly, civ71,oct.r,cairt re 1tC,I v xa Kac ar caua, in the The tetus, ~ 27. (Opera Bekker. Lond. Sunlpt. R. Priestley, 1826. Vol. iii. p. 412.)-S. C.] + [I. c. 3 in initio. tGu(f y(tp OU /lOl'OV 9iESi6f'St -7'a irv oecaiav ar'Sfg rotas-v eCvac, oitaVV v aacv o1 t iEyOVe9,bvg'Pv elvai aT KitVOVV cvuer,?1i (vta,-,pevov Kcceiv, d12t' &V Tie i-dV UV(Ji7-Vv - O VeprpetvJ air1l hxt',etv.-Cited by M.aasz, p. 322.-Ed. [For perhaps not only it is false that the being of the soul is such as they suppose, who affirm that it is a thing which moves or is able to move itself; but it may be that it is a thing' to which motion can not possibly belong. Translation. —S. C.] ~ [See Maasz, pp. 324-5-6. In proof that Aristotle had a right conception of the common law of Association, though he did not call it by that name, and had not discovered all its fruitfulness, he cites from the treatise 220 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. by having been together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every rartial representation awakes the total representation of which it l-ad been a part.* In the practical determination of this common principle to particular recollections, he admits five agents- or occasioning causes; 1st, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding, or successive; 2d, vicinity or connection in space; 3d, interdependence or necessary connection, as De Mernoria, cap. ii. the following sentences: —vc/3ai vovca 6' at dvativcaetc, hirect67 7ro~i'sev Icivrlatg Wde /yervOcat /terd rvde —thus translated or paraphrased by Maasz-" The Replesentations come after one another to the consciousn(ess, when the changes" (or movements) "of the soul thereto belonging are of such a nature that one arises after the other." (I believe the stricter rerdering to be —Recollections take place because it is the nature of the mini that its motions follow vone another.)-evta I6tvrTe airaf /ai2p ov bIzvn1uovet6O#isv, 7i &repa To22.VaKt9. -"But such a connection among the changes of the soul, whereby one slcceeds artother, arises, though it be not necessary, through a kind of custom. For the produiction of this, however, it is sufficient, if we have only once perceived the objects of the representation together." (This is a collection from the words of Aristotle rather than their direct sense, which seems to be as follows: "The seqqence of the mental motions is sometimes a necessary one, and this, as is evident, must always take place; sometimes it is one thlat arises from custom, and this takes place only for the most part. Sonle men, by once thinking of a thing, acquire a habit more than others by thinking ever so often. Therefore we remzember some thing's, that we have sesn but once, better than other things, that we have seen n acy a timne.") "Still pkainer, perhaps," says he, "speaks the place which follows the above; as thus: 6ray ovdv d(vaut/wlv7lCcaeOa, tuvo/zjewa rCv rpor7Epev rtlv nCtVwaeeov, &u hv IctcvlvlSuev, te4O' ~ijv iEKeinvrl l0e. —" A representation is called up (we remember it), as soon as changes of the soul arise, with which that" (chartge or movement) " belonging to the said representation has been associated." —S. C.] * [See lMaasz, p. 326. " Thus, representations which have been together, call forth each other, or: Every partial representation awakens its total representation." "This rule holds good for the succession of representations generally, as well when we reflect upon a thing and strive to remember it, as when that is not the case; it avails, as I have just now expressed, for the voluntary and involuntary selies of imaginations. This Aristotle expressly asserts, and hel-eby we see, in what universality le had conceived the law of association." He quotes in support of this the foillowing sentence flom the treatise De efemnoria, cap. ii. Z717ro0at ev Onv ov Tr, Kad /u flrrov7vre- 6' OVi-r7 (tiva/ ICVrteovra T, irav /zeO' ir'pe oVn KnVtv Keivn 7Yitrat. In this way men try to recollect, and, when not trying, it is thus they remember; some particular movement (of mind) arising after some other.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 221 cause and effect; 4th, likeness; and 5th, contrast.* As an additional solution of the occasional seeming chasms in the continuity of reproduction he proves, that movements or ideas possessing one or the other of these five characters had passed through the mind as intermediate links, sufficiently clear to recall other parts of the same total impressions with which they had co-existed, though not vivid enough to excite that degree of attention which is requisite fbr distinct recollection, or as we may aptly express it, after consciousness.t In association then consists the whole mechatnism of the repryocuction of impressions, in the Aristotelian Psychiology. It is the universal law of the passive fancy and me* [Maasz (at p. 327) shows that Aristotle gives " four distinct rules for Association"-that is to say, connection in time, in space, resemblance, and opposition or contrast-in proof of which he cites the following passagedeb Kac ro- iberFc OTypeoyiev vo7jaavre (dib 7roi0' v,, ciV tvaf, icat J'.eoiov, 7)'vavriov, Y toO acvYE7vC. Atai toiteO YviEat / ditpVt.vc lf. Therefore in trying to remember we search (our minds) in regular order, proceeding from the present or soime other time (to the time in which what wve want to recollect occurred); or froml something like, or directly opposite, or near in place.-De 11emz. cap. ii. At pp. 27-8, Maasz writes thus: " That B. should be really immediately associated with A. it is not necessary, that the whole representation B. should have been together with the whole representation A.; if only some mark of A., say M., has been associated with some mark of B., that is suffi. cient. If then A. being given, 7m. is consequently represented, n. is likewise associated therewith, because both have been already together; and then with n. are associated the remaining marks belonging to B. because these have been alleady together with m. in the representation B. Thus the whole representation B. is called up through A." " This setnms to me a proof," says Mr. Coleridge in a mar-ginal note on the passage, " that Likeness, as co-ordinate with, but not always subordinate to, Time. exerts an influence per se on the association. Thus too as to Cause and Effect;-they can not of course be separated from Contemporaneity, but yet they act distinctly from it. Thus too, Contrast, and even Order. In short, whatever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct will determine the mind to recall these rather than others. Contemporatcity seems to me the common condition under which all the determining powers act rather than itself the effective law. Maasz sometimes forgets, — s Hartle-y seems never to have remembered,-that all our images are atstractions and that in many cases of likeness the association is merely an a t of recognition." — MS. note.-S. C ] f [This is set forth at some length by Maasz, whose expositions of the present subject Mr. Coleridge seems to have mixed up in his mind with those of Aristotle. See Yerszuch itberdie Einbildungskraft, p. 27.-S. C.] 222 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. chanical memory; that uwhich supplies to all other faculties their objects, to all thought the elements of its materials. In consulting the excellent commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Par'va.Tvatzturalia of Aristotle, I was struck at once with its close resemblance to HT-ume's Essay on Association. The main thoughts were the eane in bo1n, ther order of' the thoughts was the same, and even the illustration did.red only by Hume's occasional substitution of more modern examrples. I mentioned th.e circumstance to several of'- mly literaiy acquaintances, who admitted the closeness of the resenmblance, and that it seemed too great to be explained by mere coinciden-ce; but they thought it improbable that Hume should have held the pages of the Angelic Doctor worth turning over. But some time after Mr. Payne showed Sir James Mackintosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, partly perhaps from having heard that he had in his Lectures passed a high encomium onl this canonized philosopher; but chiefly from the fact, that the volumes had belonged to Mr. Hume, and had here and there marginal marks and notes of reference in his own hand-writing. Among these volumes was that which contains the Par-va 1\7aturcaliac, in the old Latin version, swathed and swaddled in the commentary afore-mentioned!x* [This Commentary of Aquinas is contained in the third volume of the edition of his works, printed at Venice in 1593-4, and in the Antwerp edition of 1612, end of tom. iii. It surrounds two translations of the text, one of which is the Antiqua Translatio. When Mr. C. spoke of " Hume's Essay on Association," as closely resembling it, he must have had in his mind, not merely the short section on the Association of Ideas, but generally whatever relates to the subject in the Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, from sections ii. to vii. inelusively. The similar thoughts and ancient illustrations are to be found in that part of the commentary which belongs to the treatise De Aieiloria, et Remziniscentia (the second of the Parra lNaturalia), particularly in seetions v. and vi. pp. 25-6 of the Antwerp edit. There the principles of connection amongst ideas, and "the method and regularity" with which they present themselves to the mind, are set forth at some length, for the purpose of explaining the nature of memory and describing our mental processes in voluntary recollection and unintentional remembrance. I think, however, that the likeness to Hume's treatise, wherein Association of Ideas is subordinate and introductory to another speculation, which it was the author's principal aim to bring forward, may have beien somewhat magnified in Mr. C.'s mind from the circumstance, that the commentary, in addition to what it sets forth on connections of ideas, dwells much on certain other topics which are dwelt upon also in the In BIOGRBAPHIA LITERARIA. 223 It remains then for me, first to state wherein Hartley differs from Aristotle; then, to exhibit the grounds of my conviction, that he differed only to err; and next as the result, to show, by what influences of the choice and judgment the associative power becomes either memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to approquiry-as, the influence of custom in producing mental habits and becoming a sort of second nature; the liveliness and force of phantasnsata, or images impressed onr the mind by sensible things; and the distinctness and order. liness of mathematical theorems. These topics Hume handles somewhat differently fromi Aquinas, as his drift was different; but it is possible that the older disquisition may have suggested his thoughts on these points, tholgh it can not have exactly formed them. It is rather remarkable, if Hume had indeed read this commentary before composing his own work, that he should have expressed himself thus at p. 22:" Though it be too obvious to escape observation, that different ideas are connected together, I do not find t/at aaly philosoph:er hats atte-mpted to enumnleratle or class all the principles of Association, a subject, however, that seems worthy of curiosity." Aquinas, in the commentary, does certainly attempt to enumerate them, though he does not classify them exactly. as Hume and other modern philosophers have done. He does not make Cause and Effect a principle of Association over and above Contiguity in Time and Place; and he mentions, as a separate influence, direct Dissimilaritv or Contrast, which Hume refers to Causation and Resemblance, as a mixture of the two: in both which particulars he does but follow the leading of his text. I will just add that, in commenting on two sentences of Aristotle, quoted in a former note,-explaining why some men remember, and some things are remembered, better than others under similar circumstances of association,-Aquinas observes, that this may happen through closer attention and profounder knorwledge, because whatever we most earnestly attend to remains most firmly impressed on the memory; and again, in accounting for false and imperfect remembrance, he states the converse fact, that by distraction of the imagination the mental impression is weakened. Lects. v. a. and vi. h. These remarks tend the same way with those in the Biographia, toward the end of chap. vii. concerning the superior vividness of certain parts of a total impression, and the power of the will to give vivid ness to any object whatsoever by intensifying the attention. MIr. Coleridge's itim was to show that these agents or occasioning causes of particular thoughts which have been specified, are themselves subject to a deeper law,-to the determination of the will, reason, judgment, understanding.S. C.] [It was not till the new edition of this work was in the press that I became aware of a note, relating to chap. v. of the B. L. at the end of the Dissertation on the progress of Ethical Philosophy, by Sir J. Mackintosh, in which the author speaks as follows: "I have already acknowledged the striking resemblance of Mr. Hume's principles of Association to those of 224:BIRAPHtIA LITERARIAb priate the remaining offices of the mind to the reason, and the irnagination. With my best efforts to be as perspicuous as the nature of language will permit on such a subject, I earnestly solicit the good wishes and friendly patience of my readers, while I thus go " sounding on my dim and perilous way." Aristotle." After showing that the story of Mr, Hume wavs a mistake, and how the mistake arose, he proceeds to say: "It is certain that *'* * * Aristotle explains recollection as depending on a general law,-that the idea of an object will remind us of the objects. wiech immediately preceded or followed when originally perceived. But what AIr. Coleridge has not told us is, that the Stagyrite confines the application of this law exel'ssively to the phenonmena of recollection alone, without any glimpse of a more general operation extending to all connections of thought and feeling,-a wonderful proof, indeed, even so limited, of the sagaeity of the great philosopher, but which for many ages continued barren of further consequences." Perhaps Mrit. C. thought, as Miaasz appears to have done, that to discover the associative principle in respect of memotry was obviously to discover the general law of mental association, sinlce all connections of thought and feeling are dependent on nmeiaory. It is dificult to conceive a man writing a treatise on lMemory and Reeollection without hitting o01 this law of association, by observing the manner in which he,u-ants in his mind for any thing forgotten but perhaps this remairk savors of simplicity, for sinmple follks, when a truth is once clearly presented to them,'1 ecan nevel a"grain S abstract thlei minds from it as to eone.ive the possibility of its being unrecognized.' The illustrations of Aquinas," Sir Ja!nes adds, " throw light on the original doctrine, and show that it wNas unenlargeld in his time, &c." (Yet Aquinas almost touches the doetrinie of HI-bbes when he says reminiscentia habet siwilitizt.dinrem cujsdam syllogi.smi, qncare.si'ut in syllogismo pervenitur ad conel6lsionem ex aligqaibs. principiis, it eticam in reminiscendo align, is qcodamnnodo syllogizat, &c.) "Those of L. Vives, as quoted by Mr. C, extend no farther." " But if Mr. Coleridge will compare the parts of Hobbes on truman Nature, which relate to this subject, with those which explain general terms, he will perceive that the philosopher of Malriesbury builds on these two foundations a general theory of the human understanding, of which reasoning is only a particular case." This has been already adniitted in note 2. Sii James seems to refer to the whole of chap. v., which begins thus: "Seeing the succession of conceptions in the mind are ciaused * * by the succession they had one to another when they were produced by the senses," &c. He points out the forgetful statements of Mr. C. respecting the 1De Aletthodo, and expresses an opinion that Hobbes,i and Humie mlight The language of Hobbes has somewhat of a Peripatetical sound, and when he discourses of the motions of the mind reminds one of the Aristotelian commentator-Causa auteon renminiseendi e.st ordo moturn, qui relinquuntur in a nzinma ex primta impressione Ljus, quod primo apprehendimuis. CHAPTER VI. THAT HARTLEY S SYSTEM, AS FARI AS IT DIFFERS FROM TtHAT OF ARISTOTLE, IS NEITHER TENABLE IN THEORY, NOR FOUNDED IN FACTS. OF Hartley's hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating ether of the nerves,* which is the first and most obvious distinction between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This, with all other similar attempts to render that an object of the singht which has no relation to sight, has been already sufficiently exposed by the younger Reimarus,t IMvaasz, and others, as outraging the very axioms of mechanics in a scheme, the merit of which consists in its being mechanical.: Whether any other philosophy be possible, but the mechanical; and again, whether each have been unconscious that the doctrine of association was not originally his own. Either, I should think, had quite sagacity enough to discovey it for hinself; but the question is -whether Hobbes was more sagacious on this part of the subject than any preceding philosopher. Sir James makes an interesting reply to Mr. C.'s remark that he was unable to bridge over the chasm between their philosophical creeds, which I do not quote only from want of space. That Sir James was one of Mr. C's most intelligent readers is undeniable; yet I think it is not quite conclusive against the German doctrines,-either as to their internal character or the mode in which they have been enunciated,-that they found no entrance into his mind; or at least no welcome there, or entire approval; for are not all new doctrines, even such as are ultimately established, opposed, on their first promulgation, by some of the strongest-headed persons of the age — S. C ] * [Hartley, Observ. on Meran, c. 1. s. 1. props. 4 and 5.-Ed.] f [John Albert H. Reimarus.-Ed, See Note in the Appendix. —S. C.] $ [See Maasz, pp. 41-2. —Ed.] Sir James says "the term Tp'pevo is as significant as if it had been chosen by Hobbes." This terra may have led Hobbes to talk about "hunting," "t.racing," and "ranging," in the rnuman Nature. 226 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. the mechanical system can have any claim to be called philosophy; are questions for another place. It is, however, certain, that as long as we deny the former, and affirm the latter, we must bewilder ourselves, whenever we would pierce into the adcytac of causation; and all that laborious conjecture can do, is to fill up the gaps of fancy. Under that despotism of the eye (the emancipation from which Pythagoras by his numeral, and Plato by his musical, symbols, and both by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the first eo clrsvpua of the mind)-under this strong sersaopus influelnce, we are restless because invisible things are not the objects of vision; and mnietaphysical systems, for the most part, become popular, not for their truth, but in proportion as they attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen, if only our visual organs were sufficiently powerful. From a hundred possible confutations let one suffice. According to this system the idea or vibration a from the external object A becomes associable with the idea or vibration in from the external object M, because the oscillation a propagated itself so as to re-produce the oscillation Wn. But the original impression from MI was essentially diffirent from the impression A: unless therefore different causes may produace the same effect, the vibration a could never produce the vibration m2,: and this therefore could never be the means, by which a and izn are associated.-; To understand this, the attentive reader need only be reminded, that the ideas are themselves, in Hartley's system, nothing more than their appropriate configurative vibrations. It is a mere delusion of the fancy to conceive the pre-existence of the ideas, in any chain of association, as so many difierently colored billiard-balls in contact, so that when an object, the billiard-stick, strikes the first or white ball, the same motion propagates itself through the red, green, blue and black, and sets the whole in motion. No! we must suppose the very same force, which constitutes the white ball, to conzstitute the red or black; or the idea of a circle to constitute the idea of a triangle; which is impossible. But it may be said, that by the sensations from the objects A and MI, the nerves have acquired a disposition to the vibrations a and m, and therefore a need only be repeated in order to re-produce m.t Now we will grant, for a moment, the possibility of such a disposition in a material nerve, which yet seems scarcely * [Maasz, pp. 32-3.-.d]. + [Maasz, p. 33.-Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 227 less absurd than to say, that a weather-cock had acquired a habit of turning to the east, from the wind having been so long in that quarter: for if it be replied, that we must, take in the circumstance of life, what then becomes of the mechanical philosophy? And what is the nerve, but tilhe flint which the wag placed in the pot as the first ingredient of his stone-broth, requiring only salt, turnips, and mutton, for the remainder! *But if we waive this, and pre-suppose the actual existence of such a disposition; two eases are possible. Either, every idea has its own nerve and correspondent oscillation, or this is not the case. If the latter be the truth, we should gain nothing by these dispositions; for then, every nerve having several dispositions, when the motion of any other nerve is propagated into it, there will be no ground or cause present, why exactly the oscillation m should arise, rather than any other to which it was equally pre-disposed. But if we take the former, and let every idea have a nerve of its own, then every nerve must be capable of propagating its motion into many other nerves; and again, there is no reason assignable, why the vibration nt should arise, rather than any other ad libiturn. It is fashionable to smnile at Hartley's vibrations and vibratiuncles; and his work has been re-edited by Priestley, with the omission of the material hypothesis.t- But Hartley was too great a man, too coherent a thinker, for this to have been done, either consistently or to any wise purpose. For all other parts of his system, as far as they are peculiar to that system, once removed from their mechanical basis, not only lose their main support, but the very motive which led to their adoption. Thus the principle * [For the rest of this paraglaph see Maasz, pp. 33-4. —Ed.] t [Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Association of Ideas; with Essays relating to the subject of it. By Joseph Priest ley, LL D. F.R.S. London, 1775. Priestley explains and defends the doctrine of vibrations in his first Introductory Essay; the object of his publication, as he states in the Preface, is to exhibit Hartley's theory of the Human Mind, as far as it relates to the doctrine of associationl of ideas only, apart from the system of moral and religious knowledge, originally connected with it, which rendered the work too extensive,-and the material foundation of theory, which rendered it too difficult and intricate? —for general reading. "Haller has shown that the doctrine of vibrations attributes properties to the medullary substance of the brain and nerves, which are totally in-,compatible with their nature." Quoted from IRees's Enyc,. Art. Hartley..-. 228 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. of contemporaneity, which Aristotle had made the common condition of all the laws of association, Hartley was constrained to represent as being itself the sole law.' For to what law can the action of material atoms be subject, but that of proximity in place? And to what law can their motions be subjected, bet that of time? Again, from this results inevitably, that the will, the reason, the judgment, and the understanding, instead of being the determining causes of association, must needs be represenlted as its creatures, and among its mechanical effects. Conceive, for instance, a broad stream, winding through a mountainous country with an indefinite number of currents, varying and running into each other according as the, gusts chance to blow from the opening of the mountains. The temporary union of several currents in one, so as to form the main current of the moment, would present an accurate image of Hartley's theory of the will. Had this been really the case, the consequence would have been, that our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory. Take his law in its highest abstraction and most philosophical forn, namely, that every partial representation recalls the total representation of which it was a part;t' and the law becomes nugatory, were it only for its universality. In practice it would indeed be mere lawlessness. Consider, how immense must be the sphere of a total impression from the top of St. Paul's church; and how rapid and continuous the series of' such total impressions. If, therefore, we suppose the absence of all interference of the will, reason, and judgment, one or other of' two consequences must result. Either the ideas, or reliques of such impression, will exactly imitate the order of the impression itself, which would be absolute delilriumn: or any one part of that imnpression might recall any other part, and-(as from the law of continuity, there must exist in every total impression, some one or -* [Hartley, Observ. on Man, chap. i. s. ii. prop. 10.-Edl.] f [At p. 29,:Maasz thus expresses the common law of Association: " With a given representation all" (representations) " can be associated, which belong with it to a total representation, but those on/ly imnmediately; or, as is also said, Every representation calls back into the mind its total representation." " Rather," says Mr. Coleridge in the nmargin, "is capable, uncer given conditions, of recalling; or else our whole life would be divided be tween the despotism of outward impressions and that of senseless memory. a 03 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 229 more parts, which are components of some other following total impression, and so on ad ijfinitum) -any part of ally imnpression might recall any part of any other, without a cause present to determine what it should be. For to bring in the will, or reason, as causes of their own cause, that is, as at once causes and effects, can satisfyr those only who, in their pretended evidences of a God, having first demanded organization, as the sole cause and ground of intellect, will then coolly demand the pre-existence of intellect, as the cause and ground-work of organization. There is in truth but one state to which this theory applies at all, namely, that of complete light-headedness; and even to this it applies but partially, because the will and reason are perhaps never wholly suspended. A case of this kind occurred in a Roman Catholic town in Germany a year or two before my arrival at G6ttingen,* and had not then ceased to be a frequent subject of conversation. A young woman of four or five and twenty, who could neither read nor write, was seized with a nervous fever; during which, according to the asseverations of all the priests and monks of the neighborhood, she became possessed, and, as it appeared, by a very learned devil. She continued incessantly talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, in very pompous tones and with most distinct enunciation. This possession was rendered more probable by the known fact that she was or had been a heretic. Voltaire humorously advises the devil to decline all acquaintance with medical men; and it would have been more to his reputation, if he had taken this advice in the present instance. The case had attracted the particular attention of a young physician, and by his statement many eminent physiologists and psychologists visited the town, and cross-examined the case on the spot. Sheets full of her ravings were taken down from. her own mouth, and were found to consist of sentences, coherent and intelligible each for itself, but with little or no connection with each other. Of the Hebrew, a small portion only could be traced to the Bible; the remainder seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick or conspiracy was out of the question. Not only had the young woman ever been a harmless, simple creature; but she was evidently laboring under a nervous fever. In the town, in which she had been resident for many years as a servant in different families, no so* [In February, 1799.-E&] 280 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. lution presented itself. The young physician, however, determined to trace her past life step by step; for the patient herself was incapable of returning a rational answer. He at length succeeded in discovering the place, where her parents had lived: travelled thither, found them dead, but an uncle surviving; and from him learned, that the patient had been charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor at nine years old, and had remained with him some years, even till the old man's death. Of this pastor the uncle knew nothing, but that he was a very good man. With great difficulty, and after much search, our young medical philosopher discovered a niece of the pastor's, who had lived with him as his housekeeper, and had inherited his effects. She remembered the girl; related, that her venerable uncle had been too indulgent, and could not bear to hear the girl scolded; that she was willing to have kept her, but that, after her patron's death, the girl herself refused to stay. Anxious inquiries were then, of course, made concerning the pastor's habits; and the solution of the phenomenon was soon obtained. For it appeared, that it had been the old man's custom, for years, to walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen door opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice, out of his favorite books. A considerable number of these were still in the niece's possession. She added, that he was a very learned man and a great Hebraist. Among the books were found a collection of Rabbinical writings, together with several of the Greek and Latin Fathers; and the physician succeeded in identifying so many passages with those taken down at the young woman's bedside, that no doubt could remain in any rational mind concerning the true origin of the impressions made on her nervous system. This authenticated case furnishes both proof and instance, that reliques of sensation may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state, in the very same order in which they were originally impressed; and as we can not rationally suppose the feverish state of the brain to act in any other way than as a stimulus, this fact (and it would not be difficult to adduce several of the same kind) contributes to make it even probable, that all thoughts are in themselves imperishable; and, that if the intelligent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive, it would require only a different and apportioned organization,-the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial, —to bring before every human soul BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 231 the collective experience of its whole past existence. And this, this, perchance, is the dread book of judgment, in the mysterious hieroglyphics of which every idle word is recorded! Yea, in the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and earth should pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be loosened or lost from that living chain of causes, with all the links of which, conscious or unconscious, the free-will, our only absolute Self, is co-extensive and co-present. But not now dare I longer discourse of' this, waiting for a loftier mood, and a nobler subject, warned from within and from without, that it is profanation to speak of these mysteries iol;,s oro'(cO,8L(, alv, g cXR To S T T LoT hxatoaSj al ao" ulqsQoa&ul; QnoauwnoV, xal 8Te nEir oog Irs &'1oo 76 T'xhe&. T6 yr&q 6Jqv 7rS ~r od CeeCor avuyye7S Og 6Io10ov no6lbU&,.UBoV &t tuLSd. letL 7f l'&q. o0 7Y9 5d bo-rE yeSn oqfOYupgy; ),to,, I)LO-Ec; oi|l P E evYi6~YO' o d~TO nA60 q.6'a i un, v) fan 7EYO,UEvotv* — " to those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is the countenance of justice and wisdom; and that neither the morning nor the evening star are so fair. For in order to direct the view aright, it behooves that the beholder should have made himself congenerous and similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform," (i. e. pre-configyu-ed to light by a similarity of essence with that of light) " neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty." CHAPTER VII. OF THE NECESSARY CONSEQUENCES OF THE ItARTLEIAN THEORY -OF THE ORIGINAL MISTAKE OR EQUIVOCATION WHICH PROCURED ITS ADMISSION —MEMORIA TECHNICA. WE will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law-if law it may be called, which would itself be the slave of chances -with even that appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward pkhenontena of human conduct, abstracted from our own * [Plotia s, Eun. I. Lib. vi. s. 4 and 9. —E] 2382 IOGRAP1IA LITERARIA. consciousness. We will agree to forget this for the moment, in order to fix our attention on that subordination of final to efficienltcauses in the human being, which flows of necessity from the assumption, that the will and, with the will, all acts of thought and attention are parts and products of this blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, the function of which it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of association. The soul becomes a mere ens logicurn; for, as a real separable being, it would be more worthless and ludicrous than the Grimalkins in the cat-harpsichord, described in the Spectator. For these did form a part of the process; but, in Hartley's scheme, the soul is present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals or purring are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. It involves all the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be not indeed, ~ )u:otse Jdoz, the absurdity), of intercommunion between substances that have no one property in common, without any of the convenient consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of the Dualistic hypothesis. Accordingly, this cacut mzortuum of the Hartleian process has been rejected by his fbllowers, and the consciousness considered as a result, as a tune, the common product of the breeze and the harp: though this again is the mere remotion of one absurdity to make way for another, equally preposterous. For what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percip2i?-an ens rationale, which pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving creates it? The razor's edge becomes a saw to the armed vision; and the delicious melodies of Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of time should be a thousand times subtler than ours. But this obstacle too let us imagine ourselves to have surmounted, and " at one bound high overleap all bound." Yet according to this hypothesis the disquisition, to which I amn at present soliciting the reader's attention, may be as truly said to be written by St. Paul's church, as by me: for it is the mere motion of my muscles and nerves; and these again are set in motion from external causes equally passive, which external causes stand themselves in interdependent connection with every thing that exists or has existed. Thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the minutest stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone, have nothing, to do with it, but merely the BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 288 causeless and effectless beholding- of it when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be called a beholding: for it is neither an act nor an effcet; but an impossible creation of a something-nothing., out of its very contrary It is the mere quicksilver plating behind a looking-glass; and in this alone consists the poor wortlhless I The sum total of my moral and intellectual intercourse, dissolved into its elements, is reduced to extension, motion, degrees of velocity, and those diminished copies of configurative motion, which fbrrm vwhat we call notions, and notions of notions. Of such philosophy well might Butler sayThe metaphysic's but a puppet motion That goes with screws, the notion of a notion; The copy of a copy and lame draught Unnaturally taken from a thought: That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks, And turns the eyes, like an old crucifix; That counterchanges whatsoe'er it calls By another name, and makes it true or false; Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth, By virtue of the Babylonian's tooth.? The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, did not in reality invent it; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the only true artist, were unfolding themselves. So must it have been too with my friend Allston, when he sketched his picture of the dead man revived by the bones of the prophet Elijah.t * [Misellaneous Thoughts. —Ed.] f [This expression of,regard for the great painter of America may well justify the publication of the following beautiful sonnet, which Mr. Allston, a master of either pencil, did the Editor the honor to send to him: SONNET ON THE LATE SAMUEL TAYLOIR COLERIDGE. And thou art gone-most lov'd, most honor'd Friend I No —never more thy gentle voice shall blend With air of earth its pure, ideal tones,Binding in one, as with harmonious zones, The heart and intellect. And I no more Shall with Thee gaze on that unfathomn'd deep, The human soul;-as when, push'd off the shore, Thy mystic bark would thro' the darkness sieep, tsaelf the while so bright I For oft we seem'd 284 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. So must it have been with Mr. Southey and Lord Byron, when the one fancied himself composing his Roderick, and the other his Childe Harold. The same must hold good of all systems of philosophy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and by land; in short, of all things that ever have been or that ever will be produced. For, according to this system, it is not the affections and passions that are at work in as far as they are sensations or thoughts. We only fancy, that we act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or generosity. In all these cases the real agent is a sonzethinzgnothing-eve-cything, which does all of which we know, and knows nothing of all that itself does. The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will, must, on this system, be mere articulated motions of the air. For as the function of the human understanding is no other than merely to appear to itself to combine and to apply the phcenonzenct of the association; and as these derive all their reality fiooml the primary sensations; and the sensations again all their reality fiom the impressions ab extra; a God not visible, audible, or tangible, can exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and attributes. If in ourselves there be no such faculties as those of the will, and the scientific reason, we must either have an innate idea of them, which would overthrow the whole system; or we can have no idea at all. The process, by which Hume degraded the notion of cause and effect into a blind product of delusion and habit, into the mere sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis) associated with the images of the memory;* this same process must be repeated to the equal degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology. Far, very far am I from burthening with the odium of these consequences the moral characters of those who first formed, or have since adopted the system! It is most noticeable of the excellent and pious Hartley, that, in the proofs of the existence As on some starless sea-all dark above, All dark below-yet, onward as we drove, To plough up light that ever round us stream'd. But he who mourns is not as one bereft Of all he lov'd:-Thy living Truths are left. Cambridge Port, Massachusetts, America.-E'd.] * [See Inquiry concerning the tiuman Understanding. Sect. vii.B-d.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 285 and attributes of God, with which his second volume commences, he makes no reference to the principle or results of the first. Nay, he assumes, as his foundations, ideas which, if we embrace the doctrines of his first volume, can exist nowhere' but in the vibrations of the ethereal mneclium, common to the nerves and to the atmosphere. Indeed the whole of the second volume is, with the fewest possible exceptions, independent of his peculiar system. So true is it, that the faith, which saves and sanctifies, is a collective energy, a total act of the whole moral being; that its living senso'rilum2 is in the heart; and that no errors of the understanding can be morally arraigned unless they have proceeded from the heart. But whether they be such, no man can be certain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps even in his own. Hence it follows by inevitable consequence, that man may perchance determine what is a heresy; but God only can know who is a heretic. It does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not. Somle indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbor nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all its moral and religious consequences; somewho deem themselves most free, When they within this gross and visible sphere Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent, Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat With noisy emptiness of learned phrase, Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences, Self-working tools, uncaus'd effects, and all Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves, Untenanting creation of,its God!* Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men, before they can become wiser. The attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to discover and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a faith could find admission into minds framned for a nobler creed. These, it appears to me, may be all reduced to one sophism as their common genus; the mistaking the conditions of * [Destiny of Nations. Poet. Works, VII. p. 83.-Ed.] 236 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. a thing for its causes and essence; and the process, by which we arrive at the knowledge of a faculty, for the faculty itself: The air I breathe is the condition of my life, not its cause. We could never have learned that we had eyes but by the process of seeing; yet having seen, we know that the eyes must have pre-existed in order to render the process of sight possible. Let us cross-examine Hartley's scheme under the guidance of this distinction; and we shall discover that contemporaneity (Leibnitz's LeXe Constinui*) is the limit and condition of the laws of mind, itself being rather a law of' matter, at least of phzeznorzena considered as material. At the utmost, it is to thought the same, as the law of gravitation is to locomotion. In every voluntary movement we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. It must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is exerted to resist it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to light on the spot, which we had previously proposed to'ourselves. Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a narme; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most of' my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colors on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream by alternative pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcr'um for a further propul* [This principle of a continuum, cette belle loi de la continuiti, as Leibnitz calls it in his lively style, which is even gay for that of a deep philosopher, intent on discovering the composition of the Universe, was introduced by him and first announced, as he mentions himself, in the lVouvelles de la Bgipubliqne des Iettres de Mr. Bayle, which fornms Art. xxiv. of Erdmalnn's edition of his works, under the title of Extrait d'tune Lettre a 3Air. Bayle, &c. He dwells upon this law in many of his philosophical writings. " C'est une de nmes grandes maximes," says he, " et des plus vB6ifiBes, que la naetere ne.faitjaeais des sauts." (2Nctubra non agit salt(tio&m.) "J'appellois eela la loi de la continuit6, &c., et l'usage de cette lois est trbs consid6rable dans la Physique.",Nouveaux Essais. Avant propos, p. 198, of Erdmann's edit.-S.~ C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 287 sion, This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive.* In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION.t But, in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of' the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary control over it. Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of association, arnd a component element in the mrateria subject&, the parts of which are to be associated, must needs be co-present with all. Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an incautious mind this constant companion of each, for the essential substance of all. But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall find that even time itself; as the cause of a particular act of association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all association. Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately think of gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with gooseberries as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter word, being that which had co-existed with the image of the bird so called, I may then think of a goose. In the next moment the image of a swan may arise before me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In the first two instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in time was the circumstance, that enabled me to recollect them; and equally conscious am I that the latter was recalled to me by the joint operation of likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect; so too with order. So I am able to distinguish whether it was proximity in time, or continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall B. on the mention of A. They can not be indeed separa* [Schelling describes an activity and passivity which reciprocally presuppose, or are coniditioned through, one another. But he is endeavoring to solve the problem how the I beholds itself as perceptive. Treanmsc. Id. p. 136, etpassino.-S. C.] l- [Maasz thus defines the Imagination at p. 2: " But all representations and modifications of the sense" (receptivity of impressions), " which are not really in it, so far as it is affected by an object, must be produced through an active faculty of the samle, whicfh is distinguished from the Senses, and may be called the Imagination in the widest sense. Transl.S. 0.] 238 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARiA. ted from contemporaneity; for that would be to separate them from the mind itself. The act of consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in its essence. I mean time ]per se, as con.tra-distinguished from our notion of time; for this is always blended with the idea of space, which, as the opposite of time, is therefore its measure.* Nevertheless the accident of seeing two objects at the same moment, and the accident of seeing them in the same place are two distinct or distinguishable causes: and the true practical general law of association is this; that whatever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest, will determine the mind to recall these in preference to others equally linked together by the common condition of contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more appropriate and philosophical term) of continuity. But the will itself' by confining and intensifyingt the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever; and from hence we may deduce the uselessness, if not the absurdity, of certain recent schemes which promise an artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a confusion and debasement of.the fancy. Sound logic, as the habitual subordination of the individual to the species, and of the species to the genus; philosophical knowledge bf facts under the relation of cause and effect; a cheerfiul and communicative temper disposing us to notice the similarities atld contrasts of things, that we may be able to illustrate the one by the other; a quiet conscience; a condition free from anxieties; sound health, and above all (as far as relates to passive remembrance) a healthy digestion; these are the best, these are the only Arts of Memory. - [Schelling teaches that the most original measure of Time is Space, of Space Time; and that both are opposed to each other for this reason that they mutually limit one another. Transse. Id. Tiibingen, 1800, pp. 216-17. See also Idem, 325-6.-S. C.] f I amn aware, that this word occurs neither in Johnson's Dictionary nor in any classical writer. But the word, to intend, which Newton and others before him employ in this sense, is now so completely appropriated to another meaning, that I could not use it without ambiguity: while to paraphrase the sense, as by render intense, would often break up the sentence and destroy that harmony of the position of the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is a beauty in all composition, and more especially desirable in a close philosophical investigation. I have therefore hazarded the word intensify; though, I confess, it sounds uncouth to my own eoar, CHAPTER VIII. THE SYSTEM OF DUALISM INTRODUCED BY DES CARTES-REFINED FIRST BY SPINOZA AND AFTERWARDS BY LEIBNITZ INTO THE DOCTRINE OF HARMONIA PRIESTABILITA-HYLOZOISM — MATERLLISM-NONE OF THESE SYSTEMS, OR ANY POSSIBLE THEORY OF ASSOCIATION, SUPPLIES OR SUPERSEDES A THEORY OF PERCEPTION, OR EXPLAINS THE FORMATION OF THE ASSOCIABLE. To the best of my knowledge Des Cartes was the first philosopher, who introduced the absolute and essential heterogeneity of the soul as intelligence, and the body as matter.* The assumption, and the form of speaking have remained, though the denial of all other properties to matter but that of extension, on which denial the whole system of Dualism is grounded, has been long exploded. For since impenetrability is intelligible only as ~ mode of resistance; its admission places the essence of matter' in an act or power, which it possesses in common with spitrit;t and body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but may without any absurdity be supposed to be different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratnm. To this possibility, however, it was not the fashion to advert. The soul was a thinking substance, and body a space-filling substance. Yet the apparent action of each on the other pressed heavy on the philosopher on the one hand; and no less heavily on the other * [Principia Philosophicr, P. i. g~ 52-3, 63-4.-S.'C.] t [Compare with Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erldauter'ung des Idealismus der Wissensclihftslehre-Philosophische Schriften. Landshut, 1809. (See note ivfra) Compawre also with what Leibnitz lays down on this point in the last paragraph of his paper De Primae Philosophice Enendatione — which forms Art. xxxiv. of Erdmann's edition of his works, Berol. 1840, and with the NVouvueaux Essais (Liv. ii. c. xxi. ~ 2, Erdmann, p. 250), where he says that matter has not only mobility, which is the receptivity or capacity of movement, but also resistance, which comprehends impenetrability and inertia.-S. C.] 240 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. hand pressed the evident truth, that the law of causality holds only between homogeneous things, that is, things having some common property and can not extend from one world into another, its contrary.* A close analysis evinced it to be no less absurd than the question whether a man's affection for his wife lay North-east. or South-west of the love he bore towards his child. Leibnitz's doctrine of a pre-established harmony;!- which he certainly borrowed from Spinoza, who had himself taken the hint from Des Cartes's animal machines,$ was in its common in* [System des transseendentalen cIdealismues, pp. 112-113. See the next note but two.-S. C.] f [This theory Leibnitz unfolds in his Systeme nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances, 1695. Opp. ed. Erdmann, p. 124, in his Eclaircissemens du nouveau systelze. I. II. and III. Ibid. pp. 131-3, 4. ARplique aux R.flexions de Bayle, &c. 1702. Ibid. 183. He speaks of it also in his Afonadologie, 1714, ibid. 702, and many of his other writings. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz was born at Leipzig, June 21, 1746, died Nov. 14, 1716. This great man, whose intellectual powers and attainments were so various and considerable that he has been ranked among the universal geniuses of the world, appears to have been the principal founder of that modern school of philosophy which succeeded to the scholastic. He seems to have united the profundity of a German in the matter of his disquisitions, with something of the Frenchman's polish and lightness of touch in the manner of them; which may be accounted for, in some measure, by his Teutonic birth on the one hand, and his use of the French language on the other.-S. C.] f: [Specimina Phlilosoph/ica-Diss. de Meth. ~ v. pp. 30-3, edit. 1664. Des Cartes thought it a pious opinion to hold that brute creatures are mere automata, set in motion by animal spirits acting on the nerves and muscles -because such a view widens the interval betwixt man and the beasts that perish. Wesley thought it a pious opinion to suppose that they have souls capable of salvation. Leibnitz comments upon the Cartesian notion on this subject, in his essay De Aznirna Brutorum, wherein he distinguishes admirably between the intelligence of brutes and the reasonable souls of men. (~ 14. Opp. ed. Erdmann, pp. 464-5.) Mr. Coleridge remarks upon Wesley's opinion in a note printed in the new edition of Southey's Life of Wesley, chap. xx. Des Cartes compares the souls or quasi-souls of brutes to a wellmade watch, arguing from the uniformity, certainty, and limitedness of their actions. that nature acts in them according to the disposition of their organs. Leibnitz-(in his Troisimine Eclaircissementt, and elsewhere)-compares the body and soul of man to two well-made watches, which perfectly agree with one another. It is easy to see how the latter, while he was refulting his pred cessor's opinion as a whole, may have borrowed something from it. The likeness to Spinoza's doctrine is more recondite, but may be traced in Part ii. of the Ethics, on the nature and origin of the mind.-S. o.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARtIA. 241 terpretation too strange to survive the inventor-too repugnant to our commnon sense; which is not indeed entitled to a judicial voice in the courts of scientific philosophy but whose whispers still exert a stronlg secret influence. Even AWolf, the admirer and illustrious systematizer of the Leibnitzian doctrine, contents himself with defending the possibility of the idea, but does not adopt it as a part of the edifice. The hypothesis of Hylozoism, on the other side, is the' death of all rational physiology, and indeed of all physical science; for that requires a limitation of terms, arnd can not consist with the arbitrary power of nmultiplying attributes by occult qualities. Besides, it answers no purpose; unless, indeed, a difficulty can be solved by multiplyinlg it, or we can acquire a clearer notion of our soul by being told that we have a million of souls, and that every atom of our bodies has a soul of' its own. Far more prudent is it to admit the difficulty once for all, and then let it lie at rest. There is a sediment indeed at the bottom of the vessel, but all the water above it is clear and transparent. The Hylozoist only shakes it up, and rendlers the whole turbid. But it is not either the nature of man, or the duty of the philosopher to despair concerning any important problem until, as in the squaring of the circle, the impossibility of a solution has been dtemonstrated. How the esse assumed as originallyi distin:let frorn the scire, can ever ulnite itself with it;* how bein.g car ~ [A passage in the Transsc. Id. pp., 112-1tl 1,, contains many thonghts brought forward by ir. Coleridge in tlhis and the three ifll.owitng' pages. A translation of it is subjoined, with the borrowed passages marliCed in italics. The last sentence is borrowed in chapter ix. of B. L. "The act, through which the I limlits itself, is no other than that of the self-consciousness, at which, as the explanation-ground of all Limitedness (Beyrsrietztsegyzns) we come to a stand, and for this reason, that how any affection from without can transform itself into a representing or knowing is absolutely inconceivable. Supposing even that an object could work upon the I, as on an object, still such an affeclion could only bring forth something homogeneous, that is only an objective determninateness (Bestimmt.ynsc,) over again. Thus how an original Being can convert itself into a Knoz'iYng wvould only be conceivable in case it could be shown that even ReplresentationL itself (die Vorstellung selbst) is a lind of Being; which is indeed the explanation of Materialism, a system that souE'ld be a boonT to t/he phiTosopher, if it really pesfornmsed wuhat it promnses. But iefateriai.Fsm, such as it has itherto been, is wholly'nsLintelligible; nacke it intelligiblce, aca it is no longer distinguished in reality from transeendntal Ideal.smn. To explain thinking cs a VOL. I.. ULL 242 BXOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. transform itself into a knowing, becomes conceivable on one only condition; namely, if it can be shown that the vis'-ep}'esentativa, or ths Sentient, is itself a species of being: that is, either as a property or attribute, or as an hypostcsis or self subsistence. The former-that thinking is a property of matter under particular conditions, —is, indeed the assumption of materialism; a system which could not but be patronized by the philosopher, if only it actually performed what it promises. But how any affection from without can metamorphose itself into perception or will, the materialist has hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible as he found it, but has aggravated it into a comprehensible absurdity. For, grant that an object fiom without could act upon the conscious self, as on a consubstantial object; yet such an affection could only engender something homogeneous with itself. Motion could only propagate motion. Matter has no LZnwa6rd. We remove one surface, but to meet with another.* We can but divide a particle into particles; and each atom comprehends in itself material phcanomenon is only possible in this wtay, that we reduce matter itself to a spectre,-to the mere modification of an Intelliqence whose common functions are thinking and matter. Consequently Materialism itself is carried back to the Intelligent (das ntelligente) as the original And assuredly just as little can we succeed in an attempt to explain Being out of Knowing, so as to represent the former as the product of the latter; seeing that betwixt the two no casual relationship is possible, and they could never meet together, were they not originally one in the I. Being (Matter), considered as productive, is a Knowing; Knowing considered as product, a Being. If Kinowing is productive in general, it must be wholly and throughout productive, not in part only. Nothing can come from without into the Knowing, for all that is is identical with the Knowing, and without it is nothing at all. If the one Factor of Representation lies in the I, so must the other also; for in the object the two are inseparable. Let it be supposed, for example, that the stuf (or material) belongs to the things, it follows that this stu, be fore it arrives at the I, at least in the transition fromn the thing to the representation, mtust be formless, which sithout cdoubt is inconceivable."-S. C.] * zbhandlunge~n. Phil. Schrift. pp. 240-241. Translation. " What nzatter, that is the object of the external intuition, is, wee msay analyze foreverneay divide it gmechanically or chetmically: we ntever get further than to-the surfaces of bodies. That alone in matter which is indestructible is its indwelling power, which discovers itself to feeling through impenetrability. But this is a power which goes merely ad extra-only works contrary to the outward inmpact.; thus it is no power that returns into itself. Only a power that returns into itself snakes to itself an Inward..Thence to matter belongs no Inward. But the representing being beholds an inner world. This is not possible except through an activity which gives to itself its own sphere, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARTA. 248 the properties of the material universe.* Let any reflecting mind make the experiment of explaining to itself the evidence of our sensuous intuitions, from the hypothesis that in any given perception there is a something which has been communicated to it by an impact, or an impression cab extra.. In the first place, or, in other words, returns into itself. But no activity goes back into itself, which does not, on this very account and at the same time, also go outward. There is no sphere without limitation, but just as little is there limitation without space. which is limited." See also Sechelling's Ideen Xz7 einer Philosophie der N~Eatur. Introd. 2d edit. Landshut, 1803, p. 22.-S. C.]' [For great part of the remainder of this.paragraph see Schelling's Tra7,ssc. Id. pp. 149-50. Compare also with Jdeen, Introd. p. 22. Schellinug concludes the former passage in the Transsc. Id. as follows: Transl. " The most consistent proceeding of Dogmatism"-l(that is, the old method of determining upon supersensible objects without a plrevious inquiry into the nature and scope of the faculties by which the inquijry is to be carried on,-without "a pre-inquisition into the mlind") —"is to have recourse to the mysterious for the origin of representations of external things, and to speak thereof as of a revelation, rwhich renders all further explanation impossible; or to make the inconceivable origination of a thing so dissimilar in kind, as the representation fiom the impulse of an outward object, conceivable through a power, to which, as to the Deity (the only immediate object of our knowledge, according to that system), even the impossible is possible." Schelling seems to have had in his mind such doctrine as that which is thus stated by Professor Stewart: " It is now, I think, pretty generally acknowledged by physiologists, that the influence of the will over the body is a mystery, which has never yet been unfolded; but, singular as it may apD pear, Di. Reid was the first person ~who had courage to lay completely aside all the common hypothetical language concerning perception, and to exhibit the difficulty in all its magnitude, by a plain statement'of the fact. To what then, it may be asked, does this statement amount? Merely to this; that the mind is so formed, that certain impressions produced on our organs of sense by external objects, alre followed by correspondent sensations; and that these sensations (which have no more resemblance to the qualities of matter, than the words of a language. have to the things they denote), are followed by a perception of the existence and qualities of the bodies by which the inpressions are made; that all the steps of this process are equally incomprehensible; and that, for any thing we can prove to the contrary, the connection between the impression and the sensation may be both arbitrary: that ilk is therefore by no means impossible, that our sensations may be merely the occasions on which the correspondent perceptions are excited; and that, at any rate, the consideration of these sensations, which are attributes of mindl, can throw no light on the manner in which we acquire our knowledge of the existence and qualities of body 24L4 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. by the impact on the percipient, or ens'representans, not the object itsel;; but only its action or effect, will pass into the sanme. Not the -ron tongue, but its vibrations, pass into the metal of the bell. Now in our immediate perception, it is not the mere power or act of the object, but the object itself, which is immediately present. We might indeed attempt to explain this result by a chain of deductions and conclusions; but that, first, the very facuLty of deducing and concluding would equally demand an explanation; and secondly, that there exists in fact no such intermediations by logical notions, such as those of cause and effect. I; is the object itself, not the product of a syllogism, which is present to our consciousness. Or would we explain this supervention of the object to the sensation, by a productive faculty set in motion by an impulse; still the transition, into the percipient;, of the object itself, from which the impulse proceeded, assumes a power that carl permeate and wholly possess the soul, And like a God by spiritual art, Be all in all, and all in every part. And how came the percipient here? And what is become of the wonder-promising MIlatter, that waus to perform all these marvels by f&rce of mere figure, weight and motion? The most consistent proceeding of the dogmatic materialist is to fall back into From this view of the subject it follows, that it is external objects them selves, and not any species or images of these objects, that the mind per ceives; and that, although, by the constitution of our nature, certain sensations are rendered the constant antecedents of our perceptions, yet it is just as difficult to explain how our perceptions are obtained by their means, as it would be, upon the supposition, that the mind were all at once inspired with them, without any concomitant sensations whatever."-Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mlind, pp. 69-70. Such statements, in the view of the Transcendentalist, involve a contradiction-naimely, that the soul can penetrate, by perception, into that which is withot itself: or that the human soul, by divine power, has present to it, or takes in essential properties not of mind, but of something alien from mind and directly contrary to it; which is impossible. The exploded hypothesis of species and images was an attenmpt to do away the contradiction; the doctrine found wanting by Sehelling shows the futility of that at tempt; but in assuming the real outhness o' separateness of the objects ot perception-that they are, as things in themselves, apart from and extrinsic to our mind, appears to set up the contradiction again, or at least to keep it up.-S C.] * [Altered from Cowley's All over Love. II. —Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 246 the common rank of soul-and-bodyistss; to affect the rr ysterious, and declare the whole process a revelation given, and'lot to be understood, which it would be profane to examine to) closely. Datur non intelligitur. But -a revelation unconfirmed by miracles, and a faith not commanded by the conscience, a philosopher may venture to pass by, without suspecting himself of tany irreligious tendency. Thus, as materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligi1ble, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity so common amonog men, to mistake distinct images fbr clear conceptions;, and vice versca, to reject as inconceivable:V whatever fiom its own nature is u nimaginiable. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be rmaterialism. In order to explain thinking, as a material phenomenon, it is necessary to refine matter into a mere modiFication of intelligence, with the two-fold fullnction of appearing and perceiving. Even so did Priestley in his controversy with Price. Ile stripped matter of all its material properties; substituted spiritual powers; and when we expected to find a body, beholl! we had nothing but its ghost-the apparition of a defunct substance! I shall not dilate further on this subject; because it will (if God grant health and permission) be treated of at large and systematically in a work, which I have many years been preparing, on the Productive Logos human and divine; with, and as the introduction to, a full. commentary on the Gospel of St. John. To make myself intelligible as far as my present subject requires, it will be sufficient briefly to observe-i. That all association demands and presupposes the existence of the thoughts and images to6be associated.-2. That the hypothesis of an external world exactly correspondent to those images or modifications of our own beiiig,; which alone, according to this system, we actually behold, is as thorough idealism as Berleley's, inasmuch as it equally, perh-aps in a more perfect degree, removes all reality and imlmediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of ohantoms. and spectres,* the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own brains.-3. That this hypothes:s neither involves the explanation, nor precludes the necessity, of i-ri melihan* [See Abhaddliungen, Phil. Schrift. p. 217. "The Idealist in this sense is left lonely and forsaken in the midst of the world, surrounded on all sides by spectres. For him there is nothing inlmediate, and Intuition itself, in which spirit and object meet, is to hilm bl)- v. dead thought." Tramsl.-S. C.] 246 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ism and co-adequate forces in the percipient, which at the more than magic touch of the impulse from without is to create anew for itself- the corresponrdent object. The formation of a copy is not solved by the mere pre-existence of atn original; the copyist of Raffael's Transfiguration must repeat more or less perfectly the process of' Raffel. It would be easy to explain a thought from the image on the reti7cn, and that from the geometry of light, if this very light did not present the very same difficulty.* We might as rationally chant the Brahmin creed of the tortoise that supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the world, to the tune of " This is the house that Jack built." The sic Deo?placitzmn est we all admit as the sufficient cause, and the divine goodness as the sufficient reason; but an answer to the Whence and Why is no answer to the How, which alone is the physiologist's concern. It is a sophisma piga-,,rn, and (as Bacon hath said) the arrogance of pusillanimity, which lifts up the idol of a mortal's fancy and commands us to fall down and worship it, as a work of divine wisdom, an ancile or palladium.s fallen from heaven. By the very same argument the supporters of the Ptolemaic system might have rebuffed the Newtonian, and pointing to the sky with self-complacent grint have appealed to common sense, whether the sun did not move and the earth stand still. * [The reasoning here appears to be the same as in the Ideen. Introd pp. 22-3. Schelling says —" You curiously inquire how the light, radiated back from bodies, works on your optic nerves; also how the image inverted on the retina, appears in your soul not inverted but straight. But again, what is that in you which itself sees this image on the retina, and inquires how it can have come into the soul.'Evidently something which so far is wholly independent of the outward impression and to which, however, this impression is not unknown. How then came the impression to this region of your soul, in which you feel yourself entirely free and independent of impressions? If you interpose between the affection of your nerves, your brain and so forth, and the representation of an outward thing ever so many intervening links, you do but cheat yourself: for the passage over froim body to soul can not, according to your peculiar representations" (mode of perceiving), " take place continuously, but only through a leap, —which yet you propose to avoid." Transl. Compare this chapter with the remarks on the Philosophy of the Dualists in Ideen. 57. —Ed.] And Coxcombs vanquish Berkeley by a grin.' [D r. John Brown's Essay OL Satire (which was published in vol. ii. of Warburton's edit. of Pope, and in vol. iii. of Dodsley's Collection), Part ii. 1. 24.-S. c. I CHAPTER IX. iS PHILOSOPHIY POSSIBLE AS A SCIENCE, A;ND WIHAT ARE ITS CONDITIONS?-GIORDANO BRUNO-LITERIARY ARISTOCRACY, OR THE-I EXISTENCE OF A TACIT COMIPACT A1MONG THE LEARNED AS A PRIVILEGED ORDER-THE AUTHOR'S OBLIGATIONS TO THE MYSTICS-TO IMMANUEL KANT-THE DIFFERENCE BETrVEEN TH-DE LETTER AND TIiE SPIRIT OF KANT'S 3WRITINGS, AND A VINDICATION OF PRUDENCE IN TIHE TEACHING OF PHILOSOPHY —FICHTE S ATTEMPT TO COMPLETE TIHE CRITICAL SYSTEM —ITS PARTIAL SUCCESS AND ULTIMATE FAILURE-OBLIGATIONS TO SCHELLIN-;G AND AMONG ENGLISH VWRtITERS TO SAUMTAAREZ. AFTER I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in none of therm an abiding place for my reason, I began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy, as different from mere history and historic classification, possible? If possible, what are its necessary conditions? -I was for a while disposed to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole practicable emnployment for the human mind was to observe, to collect, and to classify. But I soon felt, that human nature itself fought up against this wilful resignation of intellect; and as soon did I find, that the scheme, taken with all its consequences and cleared of all inconsistencies, was not less impracticable than contra-natural. Assume in its full extent the position, nihil in intellectut quod non prius in senzsm, assume it without Leibnitz's qualifying prcter ipsum, intellectumz,* and in, the same sense, in which the position * [" On m'opposcra cet axiome, read parmi les Philosophes: que rien n'est dans l'Ame qui ne vienne des sens. Mais il faut excepter F'arle merne et ses affections. Naihil est inL intellectu, quod non fiterit in sensu, exc-pe: nisi ipse irntellectus. Or l'anie renferme l'ttre, la substance, Fun, le meme, la cause, la perception, le raisonneinent, et quantit6 d'autres notions que les seas ne sauroient donnmer. Ceh s'accorde assez avec votre Auteur de l'essai, 248 BIOGRAPHMA LITERARIA. wvas understood by Hartley and Condillac: and then what Hume had demonstratively deduced ftiom this concession concerninrg cause and effict, wiill apply with equal and crushing force to all the other eleven categorical forns,r ~ aind the logical ifunetiols corresponding to thern. How canl we mlake bricks without straw; — or build without cement?'Ve learn all things indeed by occasionz of e.xperience; but thle very facts so learned force us inwaru d o tlIhe antceedents, lthalt nmust be cpresLupposed in: order to render...ex ierie. te3mlf possiole -..... The first bhook of Locke's Essay (ifI the s'upposed error, %vwhich it labors to subvert, be not a mere qui c-eheih une bonuoe partie cdes Idles dians iL' r6fiexion de l'esprit sur sa propre nature." —' ouvecauz Esais,sr l'Ettelndcmen t o asstie, n, liv. ii. C. 1, jErdmann, p. 223. Leibnitz refutes Locke, as commonly understood, on his own showing, and he maintained tliat if ideas comile to us only by sensation or reflection, tiis is to be understood of their actual perception, but that they are in us before they are perceived. See also his Reftex'.ons sr' /'E.sai de Locke-Art. xli. and Aieditatitones de cognitione, veritate, et ideis, Art. ix. of Erdmuann's edition of his works.-S. C.]: Videlicet'; Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Mode, each consisting of three subdivisions. See KIritik der reinen Vernunft.l See too the judicious remarks on Locke and H:umee2 [Pp. 104 and l 110- 1, vol. ii. Works. Leipzig, 1838 — Ed.] 2 brl. pp. 125-6. "T ie celebrated Locke, fiom want oftlis consideration, and because he imet withl p oure coneeptions of the understanding in experience, has also derived themn afoil e xperience; lad moreover he proceeded so inconsequently, that Ize vet-luired the rewith upon attempts at cognitions, which far transcend all lirmits of expei ience. Iume acknowxledged that, in order to the last, these conceptions itmust necessarily have tleir eoigiin a priori. But, as he could not explitin how it is that the understanding should think conceptions, not in themnselves united in the understanding, yet as necessarily united in the object,-and not hitting upon this, that probably the under'standiug by means of these (ct priori) conceptions was itself the author of the experience, wherein its objects are found-he was forced to derive these conceptions fioom experience, that is to say, from subjective necessit;y arising friom firequent association in experience, errloneously considered to be obi'ective:-I mean from habit: although afterwards le acted very consistently in declaring it to be impossible witbh these conceptions annd the principles to which they give birlth to transcend the liiits of experience. However the efrpirical dlerivation, on which both Locke and HTume fell, is not reconei.ble -with the reralite of those scientifiec egn.itions C priori which we possess, nlimnely, pure Mathematics and General iPhysics, and is therefore refuted by the faet." —Ed. See also the whole Section entitled, Uebergancs zur transscceldentaaen D)eduction der Kategorien, pp. 123-6. -S. C.] BIOGRSAPHIA LITERARIA. 249 thing of straw, an absurdity which, no man ever did, )r indeed ever could, believe) is formed on a w(rlqatoux Ft l eoo'rr,#,;,* and involves the old mistake of CLntm hoc ~ ergo, propterti hc. The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectiona ze seeking after the truth, but Truth is the correlative of Bei.ig. This a-ain is no way conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, thiat boti4 are ab nitioo, identical and co-inherelnt that intelligence- an-d — boeir'e are' r-ciip'rocally each other's substratt. I presumed that"'this'as"a' possible conceptionl(i. e. that i;: involved no logical inconsonance), from the length of time durirn which the scholastic definition of the Seupregme Being, as ac2,us purissitzUs sine'zIda o.'entialitcate, was received il the schools of Thneology, both by the Pontifician and the Refbrmed divines. The early study of' Plato aind of' Plotinus, with the commentaries and the THEOLOGIA PLATONICA of the illustrious Florentine;t of Proclus,t and Gemistius Pletho;~ and at a later period of the De Imrmeneso et Inn.nmeracbii,II and the " De la causa,.principio et uno," of the philosopher of Nola, who could boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville amon-g his patrons, and whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in the year 1600; had all contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the Cogito quia Snnz, et Szumz quziUc Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood, but certainly the most ancient, and therefore presumptively the most natural. _Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be ashamed of the Teutonic theosophist, Jacob Behbmen?~T Many, indeed,' [See ilaasz,?tbi supra, p. 366.-Ed.] t [Marsilii Ficini T'heoloqia Platonica, seu de imnmortalitate aimlnorum ac oeternafelicitate. Ficinus was born at Florence, 1433, and died in 1499. $ [Proelus was born at Constantinople in 412, and died in 485. —Ed.] ~ [G. Gemnistius Pletho, a Constantinopolitan. He came to Florence in 1438. De Platonice a tqe Aristotelccae philosophiia dfferentia. —E'd.] 11 [De I.numerabilibus, immrenso et inigturabdli, setu de ZUniverso et MLun dis, libb. viii.-S. C. T. Giordano Bruno was burnt at Rome on the 17th of February, 15991600. See note in The Friend, II. p. 110, for some account o:f the titles of his works. He particularly mentions Sidney in that curious work, La Cenea dZe la Ceneri.-Ed.] S~ Boehm was born near Goerlitz in Upper Lusatia in 1575. The elements of his theology may be collected fiom his Aurora, and ias treatise "On the Three Principles of the Divine Easence." A little book about -t..* 2 130BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. and gross were his delusions; and such as furnish frequent and ample occasion for the triumph of the learned over the poor ig1norant shoemaker, who had dared think for himself. But while we remember that these delusions were such, as might be anticipated from his utter want of all intellectual discipline, and from his ignorance of rational psychology, let it not be forgotten that the latter defect he had in common with the most learned theologians of' his age. Neither with books nor with book-learned men was he conversant. A meek and shy quietist, his intellectual powers were never stimulated into feverous energy by crowds of proselytes, or by the ambition of proselyting. Jacob Bebmnen was an enthusiast, in the strictest sense, as not merely distinguished, but as contra-distinguished, froim a fanatic. While I in part translate the foliowing observations from a contemporary mriter of the Continent, let me be permitted to premise, that I rr lght have transcribed the substance from memoranda of my owt, which were written many years before his pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another's words to my own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was possible." mystic writers, Theologyiac lJlsticce Idea Generalior, mentions that the son of Gr. Richter, the minister of Goerlitz, who wrote and preached against Boehm and silenced him for seven years by procuring an order against him from the senate of the city, after the decease of both the persecutor and the persecuted, undertook to answer, for the honor of his father's memory, an effective reply of the theosophist to a violent publication against his doctrine from. the pen of his pastor. But that, contrary to all expectation, on reading and considering the books of our author, he not only abandoned his intention, but was constrained by conscience to take up the pen on his side, against his own father. Boehm was a Lutheran, and died in the communion of that church, in 1624. His most famous English follower was John Pordage, a physician, born in 1625, who tried to reduce his theosophy to a system, declaring himself to have recognized the truth of it by revelations made to himself. He published several works in favor of Behmen's opinions, which were read in Germany, and are said to have become the standard books of all enthusiasts.-S. C.] * [By "the following observations" Mr. Coleridge meant those contained in the two next paragraphs, as far as the words "William Law," part of which are freely translated from pages 154-56 of Schelling's Darlegung des wahren Verhdiltnisses der Natzur-philosophie zu, der verbessertern Jichte'scsL' Lehre, Tilbingen, 1806. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 251 5Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during the last two or three centuries, can not but admit that there appears to have existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. The privilege of free thought, so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in actual practice, except within this limit; and not a single stride beyond it has ever been ventured without bringing obloquy on the transgressor. The few men of genius among the learned class, who actually did overstep this boundary, anxiously avoided the appearance of having so done. Therefore the true depth of science, and the penetration to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate and the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebulliency of spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living ground of all things. These, then, because their names had never been enrolled in the guilds of the learned, were persecuted by the registered livery-men as interlopers on their rights and privileges. All without distinction were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those, whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered. only extravagant and grotesque phantasms, and whose productions were, for the most part, poor copies and gross caricatures of genuine inspiration; but the'truly inspired likewise, the originals themselves. And this fbr no other reason, but because they were the unlearned, men of humble and obscure occupations. When, and from whom among the literati by profession, have we ever heard the divine doxology reThe whole of the first paragraph is thus taken from Schelling, except the last sentence but one, and the third clause of the fourth. For parts at the beginning and at the end of the second, he was indebted to the following sentence of the Darlegung, pp. 155-6. "So now too may Herr Fichte speak of these enthusiasts with the most heartfelt scholar's pride, although it is not easy to see why he exalts himself so altogether above them, unless it is because lie can write orthographically, can. form periods, and has the fashions of authorship at command; while they, according to their simplicity, just as they found it, so gave it utterance. No one, thinks Herr Fichte, that is not already wiser than these men, could learn any thing from the perusal of their writings; and so he thinks himself much wiser than they: nevertheless Herr Fichte might give his whole rhetoric, if in all his books put together he had shown the spirit and heart-fulness, which often a single page of many.ocalled enthusiasts discovers." Tr anlation.-S. C.] 28l2 BIOGRAPIXIA LITERARIA. peated, I thank thee 0 Father! Lord of Heave9n and Earth! be. cause thou hcast hid these things f rom. the wise and prudlent, and hast r'evealed themnz unto babes.* iN o; the haughty priests of learning iot only banished fiom the schools a.nd marts of science all who had dared draw living waters from the fountain, but drove themi out of the very Temlple, which meantime the buzyers, and sellers, -and mwoney-changers were sufifeed to make a den of zheves. And yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground for this contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished themselves by their scorn of Behmen, Thaulerus,t * St. Luke x. 01. f [I have ventured to substitute "Thaulerus" for "De Thoyras" in the text, having reason to suppose that the latter name was a mistake or misprint for the former. John Thaulerus or Taulerus, sometimes called Dr. Thaulerus, was a celebrated mystic divine of the foulteenth centurly, the time and place of whose birth is uncertain. He becamne a monk of the Dominican order, and died at Strasbourg, accorlding to the epitaph on his tomb, on the 17th of May, 1361. He wrote several books of divinity in his own native language; the original edition is very rarely found, but they were translated into Latin by Surius, and published at Cologne in 1548. Among them are Exercises on the Life and Passion of Christ, Institutions and Sermons. The Theolog.ia Germacica, also entitled, in the English translation, a little Golden Mlanual, has been ascribed to him. Very different judgments have been formed of the character and value of his writings, as is commonly the ease with respect to mystical productions, the thoughts and language of which are in a state of glowing fusion, and therefore capable of assuming different appearances, according to the moulds of mind into which they are received. Some behold in ther-n heresy and fanaiicism; some hold them good in substance but too eapable of perversion; whilst on the other hand, many authors of weight and note, both Romanist and Protestant, especially the latter, as Arnd, Miiller, Melanethon, and others, have commended them higilly and unreservedly. Biosius the Abbot styled their author a sincere maintainer of the Catholic faith. By Luther this Mystic is spoken of in a spirit very similar to thalt manifested by Schelling and Coleridge respecting the illiterate enthusiasts, whom they uphold against the " literati by profession." " I know," says he, " that this.Doctor is unknown to the schools of Divines, and therefore perhaps much despised; but I have found inhinm, though his writings are all in the.German language, more solid and true divinity than is found in all the Doctors of all the Universities, or than can be found in their opinions." (Luther, tom. i. Latin. Jenens., page 86, 6, apud Heupelium, folio B verso.) Dr. HIenry More's opinion of him is thus given in, the Gen. Biog. Dictionary, whence this aocountb ith the quotation from Luther, is taken BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 263 George Fox, and others; unless it be, that they could write orthographically, make smooth periods, and had the fashions of authorship almost literally at their fingers' ends, while the latter, in simplicity of soul, made their words immediate echoes of their feelings. Hence the fiequency of these phrases among them, which have been mistaken for pretences to immediate inspiration; as for instance, I"It w'as delivered unto me;"-" I strove nzot lo speak;"-" I said, I will be silent;"-" B3ut the worald wcas itn my heart as a b'uning, fire;" —" and I could not forbear." Hence too the unwillingness to give offence; hence the foresight, and the dread of the clamors, which would be raised against them, so frequently avowed in the writings of these men, and expressed, as was natural, in the words of the only book, with which they were farniliar.* "W oe is me that I am become a man of strife, and a man of contention,-I love peace: the souls of men are dear unto me: yet because I seek for light every one of themn doth curse me!" O! it requires deeper feeling, and a stronger imagination, than belong to most of those, to whom reasoning and fluent expressions have been as a trade learnt in boyhood, to conceive with what might, with what inward strivings and commotion, the perception of a new and vital truth takes possession of an uneducated man of genius. His meditations are almost inlevitably employed on the eternal, or the everlasting; for " the world is not his friend, nor the world's law." "But amongst all the writings of this kind there was none which so affected him, as that little book, with which Luther was so prodigiously pleased, entitled,' Theoloqica Germarnica;' though he discovered in it, even at that time, several nlarks of a deep melancholy, and no small errors in matters of philosophy.'But that,' says our author,'which he doth so mightily inculcate, viz. that 7we should thoroughly put of and extinguish our own,. proper wcill, that being thius dead to ourselves, we mn2y live alonle to God, and do all things whatsoever by his instinct and plenary permissioln, was so cotnatural, as it were, and agreeable to my most intimate reason and conscience, that I could not of any thing whatsoever be more clearly and certainly convinced.' "-S. C.] ~* An American Indian with little variety of images, and a still scantier stock of language, is obliged to turn his few words to many purposes, by likenesses so clear and analogies so r-emote as to give his language the semblance and character of lyric poetry interspersed with grotesques. Something not unlike this was the case of such men as Behmen and Fox with regard to the Bible. It was their sole armory of expressions, their only organ of thought. 2564 BIOGR4PHIA LITERARIA. Need we then be surprised, that, under an excitement at once so strong and so unusual, the man's body should sympathize with the struggles of his mind; or that he should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake the tumultuous sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of his fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on him? It has indeed been plausibly observed, that in order to derive any advantage, or to collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings of these ignorant Mystics, the reader must bring with him a spirit and judgment superior to that of the writers themselves: And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?* -a sophism, which I fully agree with Warburton, is unworthy of Milton; how much more so of the awful Person, in whose mouth he has placed it? One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience, that there exist folios on the human understanding, and the nature of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found as much fulness of heart and intellect, as burst fobrth in many a simple page of George Fox, Jacob Behmen, and even of Behmen's commentator, the pious and fervid William Law.t * [Paradise Regained, B. iv. 1. 325.-S. C.] t [William Law was born at King's Cliffe, Northamptonshire, in 1688, died April 9, 1)761. A list of seventeen religious works written by him is given in the Gent. Mag. Nov. 1800. Toward the latter end of his life he adopted " the mystic enthusiasm of Jacob Behmen," which tinctured his later wr'itings; and of that author's works he, prepared an English edition. (Behmen's, Jacob, Works, to which is prefixed the Life of the Author, with figures illustrating his principles. Left by the Rev. William Law, M.A. London, 1764-81. 4 vols. 4to.) Mr. Southey has the following passage on Law in his Life of Wesley:' About this time Wesley becamee personally acquainted with William Law, a man whose writings completed what Jeremy Taylor, and the treatise De Imitatione Chhristi, had begun. When first he visited him, he was prepared to object to his views of Christian duty as too elevated to be attainable; but Law silenced and satisfied him by replying,' We shall do well to aim at the highest degrees of perfection, if we may thereby at least attain to mediocrity.' Law is a powerful writer: it is said that few books have ever made so many religious enthusiasts as his Christian Perfection and his Serious Call: indeed, the youth who should read them without being perilously affected, must have either a light mind or an unusually strong one. But Law himself, who has shaken so many intelleets, sacrificed his BIOGRAPHIA LITERtARIA. 256 The feeling of gratitude, which I cherish toward these men, has caused me to digress further than I had foreseen or proposed; but to have passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and opinions, would have seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the concealment of a boon. For the writings of these Mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind fiom being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had not penetrated, if they were to afibrd my soul either food or shelter. If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. That the system is capable of being converted into an irreligious Pantheism, I well know. The Ethics of Spinoza,* may, or may not, own at last to the reveries and rhapsodies of Jacob Behmen. Perhaps the art of engraving was never applied to a more extraordinary purpose, nor in a more extraordinary manner, than when the nonsense of the German shoemaker was elucidated in a series of prlints after Law's designs, representing the anatomy of the spiritual man. His own happiness, however, was certainly not diminished by the change: the system of the ascetic is dark and cheerless; but mysticism lives in a sunshine of its own, and dreams of the light of heaven; while the visions of the ascetic are such as the fear of the devil produces, rather than the love of God." Vol. i. pp. 57-8. The forthcoming new edition of the Life of Wesley contains numerous marginal notes by Mr. Coleridge. Among these are two, explaining and defending some of the German shoemaker's and his commentator's sense or'nonsense."-S. C.] [ [Ethica ordiae geometrico dernonstrata. Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza was born at Amsterdam, Nov. 24, 1632, was the son of a Portuguese Jew; died at the Hague, Feb. 21, 1677. Coutin positively denies the charge of atheism, in the form in which it was laid, against Spinoza, declaring it to have originated in personal animos ity, as did a similar one against Wolf. He affirms that Spinoza's is by no means, either in terms, or in the spirit of the author, an atheistic system, but rather a pantheism (formal and not material like that of the Eleatics) containing and unfolding a high and worthy notion of God " Ce n'est qu'A une 6poque r6cente," says he, " qu'on a commence a traiter avee plus dejustice la personne et la doctrine de ce grand hom-me, et en meme temps on a 266 fBIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. be an instance. But at no time could I believe, that in itself and essentially it is incompatible with religion, natural or revealed and now I am most thoroughly persuaded of the contrary. The writings of the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the founder of the Critical. Philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty anrd subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and I will venture to add-(paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen) —the clearness and evidecouvert, par la mn6thode critique (the method of Kant), le c6t6 foible du systeme." Spinoza must indeed have been a most elaborate hypocrite if he was consciously and intentionally an atheist. How strange it appears that Christians, who are commanded to hope and believe all things favorably of others, should have such an appetite for discovering unbelief and misbelief even in those who manifest no evil heart or godless temper! It would seem as if some men's faith could not be kept alive and properly exercised, unless, like the passionate Lord in the play, it were - -_ —~ allow'd a carcass to insult on,' the vile body, to wit, of some other man's infidelity and irreligion. " I have often thought," says Mr. Coleridge, in his Notes on Noble's Appeal, "of writing a work to be entitled VYidicie Beterodoxe. sirve celebritrm viroruem crapadoYllari6vrwv defenlsio; that is, Vindication of Great Men unjustly branded; and at such times the names prominent to my mind's eye have been Giordano Bruno, Jacob Behmen, Benedict Spinoza, and Emanuel Swedenhorg." Still it was Mr. Coleridge's ultimate opinion, that Spinoza's system excluded or wanted the true ground of faith in God as the Supreme Intelligence and Absolute Will, to whom man owes religious fealty. He speaks thus in The Friend, Essay xi. I. p. 470. " The inevitable result of all consequent reasoning, in which the intellect refuses to acknowledge a higher or deeper ground than it can itself supply, and weens to possess within itself the centre of its own system, is-and from Zeno the Eleatic to Spinoza, and from Spinoza to the Schellings, Okens, and their adherents of the present day, ever has been-pantheism under one or other of its modes, the least repulsive of which differs froml the rest, not in its consequences. which are one and the same in all, and in all alike are practically atheistic, but only as it may express the striving of the philosopher himself to hide these consequences firom his own mind."-S. C ] 1 This line, from The Nice Valor or The Passionate Madman of Beaumont and Fletcher, I first saw quoted by Mr. Southey in a letter to Mr. Murray. fSOGRAPHIA LITERARIA 257 dence, of the Critique of the Pure Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the MIetaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy; aild of his Religion within the bounds of Pure Reason, took possession of me as wlth a giant's hanrd.* Afber fifteert years' &familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other produc.tions with undimirn iihed delifght and increasing admiration. The few pissag es that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of thought (as the chapter on original capperceplionz), and the ap-' [The C~ritique of the pure Reason, Kritik der reinen T'ernunlft. occupies vol. ii. of the collec'ive edition of the works of Kant in ten vols. Leipzig, 1838. It first appeared in 1781. The Critique of thlle Judgnent, Klritik der Urltheilskroft, 1790, is contained in vol. vii. The Met. El. of N. Philosophy, [eteaphysisc/ie A nfeng.sqiinde der iNcaturwissenschirft, 1786, may be found in vol. viii. at p. 439. Religion within the bounds of pure Reason -Religion innerhailb der Grenrzen der blosen Vernueft, 1793, in vol. vi. p. 159. Imimanuel Kant was born at Koenigsberlg in 1724, was appointed Rector of the University there in 1786, after having declined repeated offiers from the Kilng of Prussia, of a Professorship in the Universities of Jena, Erlangen, Mittiu, and Halle, w ith the rank of prlivy counsellor; and died at his native place, nearly 80 years old, Feb. 12, 1804.-S. C. The following note is pencilied in MIr. C.'s copy of Schelling's Philosoplhische S(.hrSften, but the date does not appear. " I believe in imy depth of being1, that the three great works since the introduction of Christianity ar e,-Bacon's.ov1o7 Orgoa'nm, and his other works, as far as they are commentaries on it:-)Spinoza's Etthica, with his Letters and other pieces, as far as they are comments on his Ethics: and Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason, and his other works as commentaries on, and applications of the same." —Ed.];I [Jfiitik, der reinen, Vern-fAt. Transsc. Elementarlebre ii. Th. 1, Abthi. Buch. 2, Hauptst. 2, Abschn. Transsc. Deduction der reinen Verstandesbegrife. ~ 16 Von der urspriinglich- synthetischen Biinheit der Apl)erception. Works, Leipzig, 1838, vol. ii. p. 129. Apperception is treated of, or referred to generally, throughout the division of the work entitled, Transcendental Deduction of the pure conceptions of the Understanding, ending at p. 153. Apperception is thus defined ]by Dr. Willich, in his Elements of the Critical Philosophy, p. 143. "Apperception or Consciousness, or the faculty of becoming conscious, signifies 1. In general, the same as representation, or the faculty of representing: 2. In particular, the representation as distinct from the subject that represents, and from the object that is represented, 3. Self-consciousness, for which we have two faculties, a. The empirical, the internal sense, i. e. the consciousness of our state 258 BIOGRAPI!IA LITERARIA. parent contradictions which occur, I soon found were hints and insinuations referring to ideas, which KANT either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he considered as consistently left behind, in a pure analysis, not of human nature in tote, but of the speculative intellect alone. Here therefore he was constrained to commence at the point of'eJlection, or natural consciousness: while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as a postulate deducible from the unconditional command, or (in the technical language of his school) the categorical imperative, of the conscience. He had been in imminent danger of persecution during the reign of the late king of Prussia, that strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden superstition: and it is probable that he had little inclination, in his old age, to act over again the fortunes, and hair-breadth escapes of Wolf'i The expulsion of the first among Kant's disciples, who attempted to complete his system, from the University of Jena, with the confiscation and prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint efforts of the courts of Saxony and Hanover, supplied experimental proof, that the venerable old man's caution was not groundless. In spite therefore of his own declarations, I could never believe, that it was possible for him to have meant no more by his hNoutmzenon, or Thing in itself, than his mere words express; or that in his own conception he confined the whole p-lastic power to the forms of the intellect, leaving for the external cause, for the nzateriale of our sensations, at any time of our observations. This is as subject to change as the observations themselves; considered in itself, it is not confined to any one place, and does not relate to the identity of the subject. b. The transcenden.tal, pure, original, i. e. the consciousness of the identity of ourselves, with all the variety of empirical consciousness. It is that self-consciousness, which generates the bare idea'l,' or I think,' as being the simple correlative of all other ideas, and the condition of their unity and necessary connection." See also Nitsch's General and Introductory View of Professor Kant's Principles, a very clear summary, pp. 111-113.-S. C.] - [Christian Wolf, the most celebrated supporter of the school of Leibnitz, was born at Breslau in 1679. In 1701 he became Professor of Mathemnatics at Halle; was accused of atheism by his envious colleagues, was driven firom his employ by their cabals in 1723, and went to teach at Marburg, as Professor of Philosophy; he was afterwards honorably recalled to Halle in 1140, and died at that town, April 9, 17 54. From Victor Cousin's ilansuel de l'Histoire de la Philosophice, ii. 173-4.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 259 a matter without form, which is doubtless inconceivable.* I entertained doubts likewise, whether, in his own mind, he. even laid all the stress, which he appears to do, on the moral postulates.-t An idea, in the highest sense of that word, can not be conveyed but by a symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an apparent contradiction.:t kodsas uavsooat;: and for those who could not pierce through this symbolic husk, his writings were not intended. Questions which can not be fully answered without exposing the respondent to personal danger, are * [Iranssc. Id. p. 114. The reader may compare this passage with Schelling's remarks on the doctrine of Kant, in the third tract of the Phil. hrij. ppri. pp. 215-6, the title of which has already been given, and to which Mr. C. himself refers his readers in chap. xii. In the Introduction to the Ideen. Schelling says of the Kantian philosophy, on this particular point, that, as acute men have objected, "it makes all conceptions of cause and effect arise in our mind,-in our representations alone; and yet the representations themselves again, according to the law of causality, operate upon us through outward things." —ATote at p. 10. Thus the Idealism of Berkeley deprives us of Nature (or an objective world) altogether, giving us, instead of it, a seeming copy of such a world in each individual mind:-the Idealism of Kanlt-(too literally understood on one point)-leaves us Nature, but reduces her to a b!ank,-an unseen cause of all we see wvitho'ut us, although cause, by his own showing, exists only within us:-the system of Locke cuts Nature in two-lets her retain one half of her constituent properties, while it makes her but the unknown cause in us of the other half:-the Scotch system (in the opinion of the Transcendentalist), equally with the two last-mentioned, cuts us off from Nature while it brings Nature to bear upon us as closely as possible; it affirms an evident absurdity, and calls it a hidden mystery; it tries to be cautious, yet is incautious enough to assume the whole matter in debate, namely, that the objective and the subjective systems are distinct fronm, and extrinsic to, one another; it teaches us to escape from a difficulty by shutting our eyes: but eyes were made to be open and not to be shut,except for the sake of rest; when we unclose them again there is the same difficulty, staring us full in the face.-S. C.] ~ [Kant's doctrine on this head is fully explained in his Fobuisdation for the 3Metaphysique of' ilorals, first published in 1785, and Critique of the Practical Reason-1788. Works, vol. iv.-S. C.]; [" Now this supersensuous ground of all that is sensuous, Kant symbolized by the expression things in themnselves —which, like all other symbolic expressions, contains in itself a contradiction, because it seeks to represent the unconditioned through a conditioned, to make the infinite finite.".Abhandlungen. Phil. Schrift. pp. 276-7.-S. C.] 260 BIOGRAPRIA LITERARIA. inot entitled to a fair answer; and yet to say this openly, would in mnly cases furnish the very advantage, which the adversary is insidiously seeking after. Veracity does lnot consist in saying, but, in the intention of communicating, truth; and the philosopher who can not utter the whole truth without cornveying falsehood, and at the same time, perhaps, exciting the most malignant passions, is constrained to express himself either mythically, or equivocally. When Kant therefore was importuned to settle the disputes of his commentators himselfW by declaring what he meant, how could he decline the honors of martyrdom with less offence, than by simply replying, "I meant what I said, and at the age of near four-score, I have something else, and more important to do, than to write a commentary on my own works." FCHTE'S WVisen.schaftsleh, e,* or Lore of' Ultimate Science, was to add the key-stone of the arch: and by commencing with an. act, instead of a thing or suebstance, Fichte assuredly gave the first mortal blow to Spinozism, as taught by Spinoza himself; and supplied the idea of a system truly metaphysical, and of a 7zetaphysique truly systematic (i. e. having its spring and principle within itself). But this funtdamental idea he overbuilt with a heavy mass of mere notiozs, aind psychological acts of arbitrary reflection. Thus his theory degenerated into a crudet " [J. Gottlieb Fichte was born on the 19th of May, 1762, at Rammenan, in Upper Lusatia, and died at Berlin, where he had occupied a Professor's chair in the recently founded University, Jan. 29, 1814. The IfVissesc~haftsleh re was first published at Weimar in 1196; afterwards in an enlarged edition at Jena, 1798. V. Cousin's.Manuel,. ii. 272, 289. -S. C.] + The following burlesque on the Ficbtean E'goismus may, perhaps, be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to those who are unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness of Fichte's idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature. The Categorical Imperative, or the annunciation of the new Teutonic God,'Er2ENKAIhIAN: a dithyrambic Ode, by QUEnxKOrF VON KLUBST1CK, Grammarian, and Sebrector in G ymnasic.* *e En! Dei vices gerens, ipse D)ivus, (Speak English, Friend!) the God Imnperativus, Here on this market-cross aloud I cry: I, I, I! I itself I! The form and the substance, the what and the why, The when and the where, and the low and the high, The inside and outside, the earth and the sky, BIOGRAPHIA'LITERARIA. 261 egMismnus, a. boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy; while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere Ordo ordinats, which we were permitted exoterice to call GOD; and his ethics in an ascetic, and almost monkish, mortification of the natural passions and desires.-* I, you and he, and he, you and I, All souls and all bodies are I itself I! All I itself I! (Fools! a truce with this starting!) All my I! all my I! He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin I Thus cried the God with high imperial tone; In robe of stiffest state, that scoffed at beauty, A pronoun-verb imperative he shoneThen substantive and plural-singular grown He thus spake on! Behold in I alone (For ethics boast a syntax of their own) Or if in ye, yet'as I doth depute ye, In O! I, you, the vocative of duty! I of the world's whole Lexicon the root! Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight The genitive and ablative to boot: The accusative of wrong, the nom'native of right, And in all cases the case absolute! Self-construed, I all other moods decline: Imperative, fr om nothing we derive us; Yet as a super-postulate of mine, Unconstrued antecedence I assign To X, Y, Z, the God Infinitivus! * [This account of Fichte's theory, however just, may convey to some readers a very unjust notion of the man and of his teaching in general. It may lead them to imagine him cold, hard, and dry, and, in his turn of mind, rather of the earth earthy, than heavenward tending; whereas he seems to have been an ardent spiritualist, "a clear, calm enthusiast;" and whatever his system may have been, as mere metaphysics, yet in his thoughts on the Divine Idea, to have arrived at the same point, as far as feeling is concerned, and all that under God's grace inspires the heart and moulds the plan and course of action, with those who talk, in orthodox phraseology, of the Life qf God in the soul of man. Mr. Carlyle has spoken of Fiehte in the " Hero Woslship," and some of his striking Essays, with his usual force and felicity and power of casting an interest, either in the way of creation or of represenrtation, around certain characters-investing, as it were, with a royal robe of glowing langulage and high attributions, wh-omsoever it delights hilul to honor. But the best illustration of Fichte's teaching is to be founLd in his life. " No man of his time,"-says Mr. Smith, who has lately published 262 BIOGRAPHIA LITEiRARIA. In Schelling's NaVttr-Philosophie,* and the System des tretns a trlanslation of his work On the Nature of the Scholar, with a memoir of the author-" few perhaps of any time, exercised a more powerful spiritstirring influence over the minds of his fellow-countrymen. The ceaseless effort of his life was to rouse men to a sense of the divinity of their own nature-to fix their thoughts upon a spiritual life as the only true and real life-to teach them to look upon all else as mere show and unreality, and thus to lead them to constant effort after the highest Ideal of purity, virtue, independence, and self-denial. To this ennobling enterprise he consecrated his being, &c. Truly indeed has he been described by one of our own country's brightest ornament's, as a'colossal, adamantine spirit,, standing erect and clear, like a Cato Major among degenerate men; fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discoursed of beauty and virtue in the groves of Academe.' But the sublimity of his intellect casts no shade on the soft current of his affections, which flows, pure and unbroken, through the whole course of his life, to enrich, fertilize, and adorn it. We prize his philosophy deeply; it is to us an invaluable possession, for it seem-ls the noblest exposition to which we have yet listened, of human nature and divine truth; but with reverent thankfulness we acknowledge a still higher debt, for he has left behind him the best gift which mail can bequeath to man-a brave, heroic, human life." "In the first churchyard from the Oranienburg gate of Berlin stands a tall obelisk with this inscription:The teachers shall shine As the brightness of the firmament; And they that turn many to righteousness As the stars forever and ever. It marks the grave of Fichte. The faithful partner of his life sleeps at his feet." Fichte married a niece of Klopstock, a high-minded woman, by whom he had an only son, the author of writings on religious philosophy of some interest. Cousin speaks of the great influence which the Idealism of Fichte exercised over his contemporaries, and its serious direction toward antisensualistic doctrines, impressed on many minds by the masculine eloquence, which was one of the attributes of the author's talent. But he affirms that Fichte's theory finally shared the common destiny of all systems, and proved unable to acquire a general authority in philosophy. Pp. 113-115. -S. C.] -* [On this title of Schelling's, Mr. C. makes the following remarks-in a marginal note in the Phzil. Sch-rift. I can not approve Schelling's choice of the proper name, lVatur-Philosophie; because, in the first place. it is a useless paradox; in the second place, selected to make the difference between his own system and that of his old master Fichte greater than it is; and lastly, because the phrase has been long anld universally appropriated to the knowledge which does not include the peculia of Man; that is, to Physiology. The identity of the BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 263 scendentalen Idealismus,* I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do. I have introduced this statement, as appropriate to the narrative nature of this sketch; yet rather in reference to the work which I have announced in a preceding page, than to my present subject. It would be but a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my future readers, that an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase, will not be at all times a certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from Scheiling, or that the conceptions were originally learnt from him. In this instance, as in the dramatic lectures of Schlegel to which I have before alluded, from the same motive of self-defence against the charge of plagiarism, many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I one with the other is made to appear as the result of the system; but for its title, that is, its proper or appropriated name, qui bene dlsingyuit, bene docet.-S. T. C. Fichte speaks thus of the NVatut-Philosophie in the second of his series of Lectures on the Nature of the Scholar, containing the definition of the Divine Idea. " Hence.we should not be blinded nor led astray by a philosophy assuming the name of natural, which pretends to excel all former philosophy by striving to elevate Nature into absolute being and into the place of God. In all ages the theoretical errors, as well as the moral corruptions of humanity, have arisen from falsely bestowing the name of life on that which in itself possesses neither absolute nor even finite being, and seeking for life and its enjoyments in that which in itself is dead. Very far therefore from being a step towards truth, that philosophy is only a return to old and already most widely spread error." Translation by Mr. Smith.S. C.] * [Friedr. Wilh. Joseph Schelling was born at Leonberg in Wurtemberg on the 27th of January, 1775. He was Professor at Erlangen in 1829; since that time he has moved about. During the last two years he has been lecturing at Berlin, where he holds a Professorship, and has been endeavoring to show the consistency of his philosophical views with a religious Theism: how far successfully or otherwise, I can not say, but I believe, not so as to silence the great body of objectors. Schelling's Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (catur-Philosophie), was first published at Leipzig in 197; a second edition entirely recast, appeared at Landshut, in 1803. The System des Transseendenteten Ildealismnus was published at Tilbingen in 1800. The early age at which Schellinl put forth his profound speculations, displaying so deep an insight into former philosophies, and so much general knowledge, renders them one of the intellectual wonders of the world.-S. C.] .264 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. had ever seen a single page of the German Philosopher; and I might indeed affirm with truth, before the more important works of Schelling had been written, or at least made public. Nor is this coincidence at all to be wondered at. We had studied in the same school; been disciplined by the same preparatory philosophy, namely, the writings of Kant; we had both equal obligations to the polar logic and dynamic philosophy of Giordano Bruno; and Schelling has lately, and, as of recent acquisition, avowed that same affectionate reverence for the labors of Behmen, and other mystics, which I had formed at a much earlier period.* The coincidence of Schelling's system with certain general ideas of Behmen, he declares to have been mnere coincidence; while my obligations have been more direct. He needs give to BehmerL only thelings of sympathy; while I owe him a debt of gratitude. God forbid! that I should be suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with Schelling for the honors so uniequivocally his right, not only as a great and original genius, but as the fouzeder of the Philosophy of Nature, and as the most suecessfil. im?'rover of the Dynamict System which, begun by * [Archdeacon Hare says in regard to this statement: "Sehelling's pamnphlet" (in which this avowal is contained), " had appeared eleven years before; but, perhaps, it did not find its way to England till the peace; and Coleridge, having read it but recently, inferred that it was a recent publication."-S. C ] + It would be an act of high and almost criminal injustice to pass over in silence the name of Mr. Richard Saumarez,l a gentleman equally well known as a medical man and as a philanthropist, but who demands notice on the present occasion as the author of " A new System of Physiology" in two volumes octavo, published 179'i; and in 1812 of " An Examination of the natural and artificial Systems of Philosophy w'hich now prevail" in one volume, entitled, "The Principles of physiological and physical Science." [Richard Saumarez was a native of TGuernsey, and became Surgeon to the Magdalen Hospital, London. He published A D)issertation on the Ufniverse in general, anid on the procession of the Eleslets in, particular, Lond. 1796, 8vo.-A new System of Physiology, comprehending the Laws by which animated beings in general, and the human species in particular, are governed in their several states of health and disease. Loud. 1798, 2 vols. 8vo.-Principles and Ends of Philosophy. 1811, 8vo.-Principles of Physiological and Physical Science, comprehending the ends for which animated beings were creatcd. Lond. 1812, 8vo.-Oriations delivered before the Medical Society of London. 1813, 8vo.-Observations on Generation and the Principles of Life. Med. and Phys. Journ. II. p. 242. 1799.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIi A LITERARIA. 265 Bruno, was re-introduced (in a more philosophical form, and freed frcm all its impurities and visionary accompaniment;s) by Kant; in whom it Aras the native and necessary growth of his own system. Kaint's f:ollowers, however, on whom (for the greater part) their master's cl,:,'k had fillesn without, or with a very scanty portion of, his spi'itt, had adopted his dynamic ideas, only as a more refined species of mechanics. With exception of one or t-wo fundamental ideas, which can not be withheld from Fichte, to Schelling we owe the completion, and the most important victories, of this revolution in philosophy. To me it will be happiness and honor enough, should I succeed in rendering the system itself intelligible to my countlrymen, and in the application of it to the most awful of subjects for the most. important of purposes. Whether a worlk is the offspring of a man's own spirit, The latter work is not quite equal to the former in style or arrangement; and there is a greater necessity of distinguishiug t.he principles of the author's philosophy froim- his conjectures concerning color, the atmospheric matter, comets, &c. -rwhich, whlether just or erroneous, are by no means necessary consequences of that philosophy. Yet even in this department of this volume, which I regard as comparlatively the inferior worwk, the reasonings by wvhich Mr. Saumlarez invalidates the inmmanence of an infinite power in any finite substance are the offspr'iug of no common mind; and the experinent on the expansibility of the air is at least plausible and highly ingenious. But the merit, hllich xwill secure both to the book -aud to the Avwriter a high and honoralble name with posterity, consists in the masterly force of reasoning, and the copiousness of induction, with wvhilch he has assailed, and (in umy opinion) subverted the tyiranny,f the mechanic system in physiology; established not or-iy the existenrce of final causes, but their nec-essitv aind esicienev in every sistemi thal- merits the name of philosophlica!; and, substituting liie and progressiv —e power fr tIhe contradictory i, ert fo'cc, has a right to be known- aid rememboered as tlhe first instaurator of the dynamic philosophy in England. The author's views, as far as conlcoins himself, ase unborrowed and completely his xown. as he neither posoessed, nor do his writings discover. the least acqcuaintance wit h the w olks of Kant, in which the germs of the philosophy exist: and his volumes were published mnany years befor e the full development of these germs by Schelling. Mir. Sauma.rez's detection of the Braunonian system was no light or ordinary service at the time; and I scarcely remiember in anTy work on any subject a confutation so thoroughly satisfactory. It is sufficient at this time to have stated the fact; as in the preface to the n-ork, which I i-have already announced on the Logos, I have exhibited in detail the merits of this writer, and genuine philosopher, who needed only have taken his foundations somewhat deeper and wider to have superseded a. considerable part of my labors. voL. ITT, Ni 266 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. and the product of original thinking, will be discovered by those who are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests than the mere reference to dates. For readers in general, let whatever shall be found in this or any future work of mine, that resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to hzinm: provided, that the absence of distinct references to his books, which I could not at all times make with truth as designating citations or thoughts actually derived from him; and which, I trust, would, after this general acknowledgment, be superfluous; be not charged on me as an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism. I have not indeed (ehe!.' res angousta domi.') been hitherto able to procure nore than two of his books, viz. the 1st volume of his collected Tracts,* and his System of Transcendental Idealism; to which, however, I must add a small pamphlet against Fichte,t the spirit of which was to my feelings painfihlly incongruous with the principles, and which (with the usual allowance afforded to an antithesis) displayed the love of wisdom rather than the wisdom of love. I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible. "Albeit, I must confess to be half in doubt, whether I should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to the eye of the world, and the world so potent in most men's hearts, that I shall endanger either not to be regarded or not to be understood."I And to conclude the subject of citation, with a cluster of citations, which as taken from books, not in common use, may con* [F. W. J. Schelling's Philosophische Schrften, Erster Band. (First volume.) Landshut, 1809.-S. C.] f [This is the Darlegung referred to in a previous note. The mutual censures of Fichte and Schelling, and their quarrels about Nature and the nature of Nature, are harsh breaks in the bright current of their writings. There is to my mind a great metaphysical sublimity in the first part of Fichte's Bestirmn#r6ng des Mienschen, especially the passage beginning In jedem Momente ihrer D)auer ist Natur ein zusamsnenhidngendes Gauze, and the preceding paragraphs, from the words Das Princip der Thatigheit, p. 11. Very imaginative is the grand glimpse these passages give of the interconnected movements of the universe, presenting to the mind universality in unity, and a seeming infilitude of the finite. —S. C.] t [Milton's Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty. Book ii. chap. i.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 267 tribute to the reader's amusemnent, as a voluntary before a sermon: —" Dolet mrihi quidemz deliciis literarunm inescatos subito jam homintes adeo esse, prcesertimn qui Christianos se profitentu^r, et legere nisi quod ad delectationemfacit, sustineant nihizl: unde et disciplince severiores et philosophia ipsa jamn fete prorsus etiamn a doctis neglig'untur. Quod quiden propositum studiorum, nisi nature corrigitutr, tam n magnum rebus incommnodum dabit, quam dedit barbacries olim. Pertinaxz es barbaries est, faleor. sed minus potest tamen, quam illa mnollities et persuasa prudentia literarunm, si ratione car~et, sapientice virtutisque specie mnortales mvisere circuzmducens. Succedet igitur, ut arbitror, haud itcanmulto post, pro rusticana sectli nostri rcuditate captatrix illa communi-loquentia robuzr anigmi vizrilis omwne, omnnemeW virtutelm masculamn, proJfligatura, nisi cavetur."' A too prophetic remark, which has been in fulfilment from the year 1680, to the present, 1815. By persuasa pruclderotia, Grynteus means self-complacent common sense as opposed to science and philosophic reason. Est mzedius ordo, et velut equestr'is, ingeniorumn guidem, sagacium, et comnzodoruLn rebus humanis, non t[amen i}n p1 rimnam mnagyvzitudinem pcatentium. EPorum honzminuz, tit sic dicanz, mnzajor anzona est. Sedulum esse, nihil temnere loqui, assuesceire labori, et imnagine prudentlie et modestia tegere angzustiores gpa?'tes captus, dugn exe'rcitationemn ac usuqn, quo isti in civizibus'ebus po _lent, pro natura et magnitudinze ingenii plerique accipiunt.ti " As therefore physicians are many times forced to leave such methods of curinog as themselves know to be the fittest, and being overruled by the patient's impatienly, are fain to try the best they can: in like sort, considering how the case doth stand with - [From " Syinon Grynaeus's premonition to the candid reader, prefixed to Ficinus's translation of Plato, published at Leyden, 1557." See The Friend, Essay iii. II. p. 33, where also the same passage is quoted. In the original, as I learn from the Editor's note in that place, gulan stands for delectationem.-S. C.] t [Barclay's Argenis, lib. i. Leyden, 1630, 12mo. pp. 63-4, with some omissions. The original, after assuescere labori, runs thus: et inagini Sapientiac parere, tegere angustiores partes ingenii. HtIc neque szonezumz leomzinem desidereat, et sola iaterdcom sunt qua, in lauclatis Proceribus suspicias. Ut vel abesse vitia pro virtute sit; vel n.on invidiosus prudentix rivus in Oceani faaman se diflundat, dclim exercitationzem, &c.-S. C.] 268 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. this present age, full of tongue and weak of brain, behold we -would (ifJ' ou subject;pervnittecl it) yield to the stream thereof. That wa'y we would be contented to prove our thesis, which being the worse in itself, is notwithstanding now by reason of conmion imbecility the fitter and likelier to be brooked."* If this fear could be rationally entertained in tile controversial age of' Hooker, under the then robust discipline of the scholastic logic, pardonably may a writer of the present times anticipate a scanty audience fbr abstrusest themes, and truths that can neither be communicated nor received without effort of thought, as well as patience of attention. "Che s'io non erro al calcolar de' punti, Par ch' Asin.ina Stella a noi predomini, E'I Somnaro e'l Castron si sian congiunti. 11 temipo d'Apuleio piu non si nomini: Che se allora un sol huoin sellbrava un Asino, Mlille Asini a' miei di rassembran huomini!"t NOTE TO CHAPTER IX. IN the preceding chapter Mr. C. speaks of Schelling's philosophy as if it had his entire approbation, and had been adopted by him in its whole extent. Yet it is celrtain that, soon after the composition of the B. L., he becamle dissatisfied.with the systemn, considered as a fundamlental and cotiiprehensive scele, intended to exhibit the relations of God to the World and MIan. He objected to) it as esse ntilly pantheistic, though the author has positively disclaimed this rCepi;oach, and made great efforts to firee his systei firotll the appearallce of deserving' it. To MrI. C. however, it appeared, as originlmly set forth, to labor under deep deficiencies-to be radicalily inconsistenrt with a belief in God, as Ifimself Moral and Inteliigent-as" beyofnd and i(bove the' ortid-as thie Supl emie'Mind to which the hunian mind owes hotmroege and fealty-inconsistent with any just view and deep senuse of the moral Lmld spiritual being of mnan. The imnposing grandeur of this phi. losophy, bd-!eld from a distance, the nai-rowriess iiito which it shriuks on a nearer view., are thus set forth by Cousin in his clear trlenchant style. " La pliilosophi.e de Schelliug se reconimlande par l'origiunalit6 de son point de vue, la p'( fondeur du travail, la consequence des pa-rties, et l'iuieense portee des ap iications. Elle rallie i une seule idle tonts les ultres de la natur'e. * [Slightly altered, wi:h omissions, fromn Hooiker's Ecoles. Polity, B. i. c. viii. s. 2. —S. C ] t Satire di Salvator Rosa, [tom. i. p. 34. La iAfuica, Sat. i. 1. 10.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 269 Par Ui elle 6carte les barri6res qu'on avoit donn6es A la conna'ssance humaine, souterinant la possibiiite pour l'homme non plus seulement d'une repr6sentation subjective, mais d'une connaissance objective et scientifique, d'une science d6termin6e de Dieu et des choses divines, a ce tire,tue l'esprit humain et la substance de l'etre sont primitivement identiques. Cette philosophic elnbrasse ie cercle entier des connaissances spaculatives," &c. Then lhe states the difficulties which beset the scheme, and after sug;ll',sting seweral root objections, he exclaims: " Quel homme enfin peut awv ir la ten-m raire pr6tention (le renfermer la nature de la Divinit6 dans l'idee de l'identit6 absolue?" He had previously observed, " La forme de cc ystelme est mtoins scientifique en r6atite qu'en apparence. Son probl6me tt,.)it de dduire, pal- une demonstration r6elle (par construction), le-fini cd l'infini et de l'absolu, le palticulier de l'univ;ersel. Or ce probleame a'e.t oist r'fsolu ct ne peut l'etre." And he concludes". En un mot, le syst3 me tout entier nest, a proprement parler, qu'une pocsie de l'esprit humnin, s6d lisante par son appalente facilit6 pour tout expliquer, et pal sa mnanie e de construire la natul'e." I think as far as I am a able to judge, that A1r. Coleridge's view of the system, after long reflection upon it, coincided, as to its general chari ater and re suitl, with that of Victor Cousin, deeply as loe must have felt obliged to the author for much that it contains. During the latter part of his life he wAas ever applying his thoughts to the developmlent of a philosophy which should more satisfactorily perform what Schelling's splendid scheme of nmoderii Platonism had seemed to promise, a soluttion of the most important problems, which a;;'e'presented to humqn contemplation, or at least an answAer to them sufficient to set the human mmind -t rest. I-Ie sought to construct a system really and rationally religious; and since, in his philosophicale inquiries, he "neither could nor dared throw off a strong and awful prepossession in ftvor'l of that great main outline of doctrine v7hich came to us from the first, in company with the highest and purest moral teachings which the world has yet seen; which was felt after, if not found, by the best and greatest minds before the preaching of the Gospel; which has been received in substance, with whatever variations of form and language, by a large portion of the civilized world ever since, and had actually been to himself the vehicle of all the light and life of the higher and deeper kind, -which had been vouchsafed to him in his earthly career;-he therefore set out with the desire to construct a philosophical system in which Ch,-istianity, -based on the Tri-une being of God, and embracing a Primal Fall and Universal Redemption,-Christianity ideal, spiritual, eternal, but likewise and necessaiily -historieacl,-realized and manifested in time,-should be shown fortlh as accordant, or rather as one with ideas of -reason, and the demands of the spiritual and of the speculative mind, of the heart, conscience, reason, should all be satisfied and r-econciled in one bontd of peace. See what has been saicd —f the labors of Mr. C.'s latter years in the Preface. This is said in regard to the Bible in the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. Works, V. p. 579. 270. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. I am not aware, however, that he, at any time, altered or set aside the doctrine of Schelling put forth in the present work on Nature and. the Mind of Man, with their mutual relations; or indeed that he discovered any positive error or incompatibility with higher truth in such parts of his system as are adopted in the Biographia Literaria, and which he believed himself in the main to have anticipated.' [It is difficult to reconcile the statement contained in this paragraph with the preceding remark, that Coleridge finally regarded the system of Schelling as "essentially pantheistic." The doctrine of Schelling put forth in the Biographia Literaria on the " mutual relations of Nature and the Mind of Man" is, that there is aboriginaily an identity of substance between them, and that both'are nimier ely different modifications of one and the same Essenee-or Being. According to this system-commonlycalled the System of ITditity-:i-thiat which in one of its aspects is Nature, in the other aspect is Spirit, and it is the peculiar pcwer and prerogative of the philosophic, as distinguished from the spontaneous or common, consciousness, to see this identity, and thus to reduce back all the manifoldness both in the spheres of Nature and Spirit to the absolute and primary unity whence it all emanated and which it all is-to the One Substance, in the phraseology of Spinoza; to the Absolute Sutject-Object, in the phraseology of Schellinag; to the Absolute Conception, in the phraseology of Hegel. Now we see not on0 what possible ground Schelling can be charged with Pantheism, if not on that of this doctrine of the original Identity of Subject and Object. It certainly is the ground on which both his and Hegel's systems are now generally -regarded as pantheistic, and is the doctrine by which the later German philosophy differs from the earlier toto genere. Kant left the Subject and Object apart from each other, [contemplating them back of 6consciousness i. e.,] and it is the standing objection of the system of Identity to the Critical philosophy, that it does not reduce all things to that unity which Reason and Science are constantly seeking for, while it is the constant reply of the latter that there can. be no reduction of all things. to the merely speculative and wholly abstract unity of a unit, for the good reason that there is no such unit. In other words, the Dogmatism of the pantheist affirming a single substance of which both God and the World (so-called) are alike modifications, is met by the Dogmatism of the theist affirming a supra-mundane and spiritual Being, who creates the world out of nothing-thus affirming a primary and a secondary substance, the latter imnmanent in the former it is true, but neither emanent from it, nor identical with it. -It nay be said that the system of Identity admits distinction in the one universal substance, and only denies division or literal duality. But a mere distinction in one and the same Essence does not constitute- another Being. To illustrate by reference to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity-the distinctions that exist in the one single Essence of the Godhead do not constitute three Beings. The distinctions are consubstantial, and are in one substance only. If therefore the distinction between God and the World is BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 271 In the Table Talk he is reported to have said, "The metaphysical disquisition at the end of the volume c; the Biographia Literaria is unforimcd and irmature; —-it contains the f.:aginents of the truth, but it is not fully thought out. It is wonderful to l.yself to think how infinitely more profound mny views now are, and yet hiow nl::,h clearer they are withal. Tihe circle is conmpleting; the idea is comino, round to, and to he, the common sense." VI. p. 520. Some little insight into the progress of his reflections on philosophical subjects, and on the treatment of those subjects by Shelin, wlling, will perhaps be derived from his remarks on several tracts in that author's Philosophlische SchrZften, which I have thought it best to place at the end of the volume. — s. C.] not metaphysically real and grounded in a duality of Essence-if the distinction is not aX2uo KaL aXto and not merely a2ogS scta ac0oc-it is no such distinction as Theism affirms, and Religion must affirm, between the Creator and Creation. It would be impossible that the self-consciousness of God and that of man should be totally diverse from each other (and they must be in order to the existence of the relations and affections of Religion) if the spiritual essence which underlies each, when traced to its lowest metaphysical ground, is one and identically the same. We are aware of the alleged difficulty of accounting for a lknowledge of the objective, on the hypothesis that there is no identity of substance between it and the subjective intelligence, and of the confidence with which it is assumed that the mystery of knowing vanishes as soon as it is shown that all consciousness is in reality self-consciousness. How the problem will ultimately be solved, and how much Coleridge and Schelling have contributed towards the true solution, remains to be seen. But it seems to us very plain that neither of these minds ultimately rested in the doctrine of Identity as the means of arriving at the true theory of percepticn. At any rate, all such teaching of Coleridge as that the ioral Reason is the highest form of Reason, and that no merely speculative decisions can set aside those of Con.,;ience, are in the very vein and spirit of the Critical philosophy, and a protest against a theory which obliterates all the fixed lines and immutable distinctions of Theism. Such teaching could not have come from a mind included in the slowly-evolving and blindly-groping processes of the philosophy of Identity.-Am. Ed.] CHA PTER X. A CHAPTERt OF DIGRESSI'ON AND ANECDOTES. AS AN INTERLUDE PRECEDING TI-TAT ON THEi' NATHUIE AND GENESIS OF THE IMAGINATION OR PLASTIC POWVER —ON PEDANTRY AND PEDEDNTIC EXPRESSIONS -ADVICE TO YOUNG AUTHORS RESPECTING PUBLICATION —VAIMIOUS ANECDOTES OF THIE AUTHOR'S LITERARY LIFE, AND TIHE PROGRESS OF IHS OPINIO S IN RELIGiONX AN'D POLITICS.'EsE XPLASTIC. The -word is not in Johnson, nor have I met with it elsewhere." Neither have I! I constructed it myself from the (-Greek w vorls, c; ~C' nU.trF.,Ac,, to shape into one;* because, havl.-.n to conVey a nevw, sense, I thought that a new term viould both aid +he recollectioon Co mny nleaning, and prevent its beintl o1 1o1nclue d',ith tnhe usual import of the word, imagination. " But!his~ is pedat l;a'7 i ot o-necessarily so, I hope. Ii' I am not io'nioiamore, Uematvr consists inl the use of words unsuitable -to the time, place, ard compary. The language of the market wNould be in the schools as pedantic, though it might not be reprobated by that name, as the language of' the schools in the market. The mere man of the world, who insists that no other terms but such as occur inl commonl conversation should be em. ployed in a scientific disquisition, and with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant as the man of letters, who either over-rating the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by his own familiarity with technical or scholastic ternls, converses at the Nwine-table with his mind fixed on his museum or laboratory; even thougoh the latter pedant instead of' desiring his Aife to make the tea shovuld bid her add to 1'the /.anzz. sa. uf. of t1hea Si.nee zsis the oxyd. C -"' [~st (dC Ban1d (lie d,'eid;ge in - ius-Bild-uC UDs 11i.,Ei 7ii2t ldeil rielen. If the bond is tihe livin-./rtic..i-i.Z.t-one of thie one with tile nmany. Damley/ung, pp. 1-2. Seh. ellbImng lsno taxls of the absolute, perfect Ft-/iEhn.'-Bi - dlng of the Real and Ideal, towaLcrd the end of his VEorle's.nqeel iiber die Methode des Adcamischen Studium-p. 313.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 273 of hydrogen saturated with caloric. To use the colloc uial (and in truth somewhat vulgar) metaphor, if the pedant of ths cloister, and the pedant of the lobby, both smell equally of the shop, yet the odor from the Russian binding of good old authen-tic-looking foblios and. quartos is less annoying than the steams from the tavern or bagnio. Nay, though the pedantry of th- scholar should betray a little ostentation, yet a well-conditioned mind would more easily, methinks, tolerate the fox brush cf learned vanity, than the sanzs culotterie of a contemptuous i xnorance, that assumes a merit from mutilation in the self:conso-ing sneer at the pompous incumbrance of tails. The first lesson of philosophic discipline is to wean the student's attention from the degrees of things, which alone for.-:n the vocabulary of' commonr life, and to direct it to the kind XLbstracted from -de-gree. Thus the chemical student is taught not to be startled at the disquisitions on the heat in ice, or on latent and fixible light. In such discourse the instructor has no o;her alternative than either to use old words with new meanings (the plan adopted by Darwin in his Zoonomia;):" o-r to introl(uce new terms, after the example of Lillnneus, and the fiamers of the present chemical nomenclature. The latter mode is evidently preferable, were it only that the former demands a twofold e:xertion of thought in one and the same act. For the reader, or hearer, is required not only to learn and bear in mind the new dlefinition; but to unlearn, and keep out of his view, the old anll. habitual meaning; a far more difficult and perplexing task, and fobr which the mere semblance of eschewincg pedantry seems to me an inadequate compensation. Where, indeed, it is iln our power to recall an appropriate term that had without sufficient reason become obsolete, it is doubtless a less evil to restore than to coin anew. Thus to express in one word all that appertains to the perception, considered as passive and merely recipient, I have adopted from our elder classics the word sefnsuous; because se~nsuCal is not at present used, except in a bad sense, or at least as a moral distinction; while sen.sitive and sensible would each convey a dif ferent meaning. Thus too I have fol.lowed Hooker, Sanderson, Milton and others, in designating the immediateness of any act * [Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia, or Lawvs of Organic Life was published Lond. 1794-6, 2 vols. 4to. There was another edition in 4 vols, 8vOe in xs8is-. 0.] 274 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. or object of knowledge by the word intuition, used sometimes subjectively, sometimes objectively, even as we use the word, thought; now as the thought, or act of thinking, and now as a thought, or the object of our reflection; and we do this without confusion or obscurity. The very words, objective and subjective, of such constant recurrence in the schools of yore, I have ventured to re-introduce, because I could not so briefly or conveniently by any more familiar terms distinguish the perciopere from the percipi. Lastly, I have cautiously discriminated the terms, the reason, and the understanding, encouraged and confirmed by the authority of our genuine divines and philosophers, before the Revolution. - both life, and sense, Fancy and understanding; whence the soul Reason receives, and reason is her being, Discursive or intuitive: discourse* Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours, Differing but in degree, in kind the same.t I say, that I was confirmed by authority so venerable: for I had previous and higher motives in my own conviction of the importance, nay, of the necessity of the distinction, as both an indispensable condition and a vital part of all sound speculation in metaphysics, ethical or theological. To establish this distinction was one main object of The Friend;4 if even in a biography of my own literary life I can with propriety refer to a work, which was printed rather than published, or so published that it had been well for the unfortunate author, if it had remained in manuscript. I have even at this time bitter cause for remembering that, which a number of my subscribers have but a trifling motive for forgetting. This effusion might have been spared; but I would fain flatter myself, that the reader will be less austere * But for sundry notes on Shakspeare, and other pieces which have fallen in my way, I should have deemed it unnecessary to observe, that discourse here, or elsewhere does not mean what we now call discoursing; but the discursion of the mind, the processes of generalization and subsumption, of deduction and conclusion. Thus, Philosophy has hitherto been discursive; while Geometry is always and essentially intuitive. f [Paradise Lost. Book v. 1. 485.-S. C.] 4: [Mr. Coleridge here refers to The Friend as it first came out in the North of England, in 1809-10. See the Biog. Supplement at the end of this volume. —S, C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 275 than an oriental professor of the bastinado, who during an attempt to extort per arguznentvuz bacuzliznuzn a full confession from a culprit, interrupted his outcry of pain by reminding him, that it was " a mere digression!" " All this noise, Sir! is nothing to the point, and no sort of answer to my questions!" " Ah! but," replied the sufferer, " it is the most pertinent reply in nature to your blows." An imprudent man of common goodness of heart can not but wish to turn even his imprudences to the benefit of others, as far as this is possible. If therefore any one of the readers of this semi-narrative should be preparing or intending a periodical work, I warn him, in the first place, against trusting in the number of names on his subscription-list. For he can not be certain that the names were put down by sufficient authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains to be known, whether they were not extorted by some over-zealous friend's importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name, merely from want of courage to answer, no; and with the intention of dropping the work as soon as possible. One gentleman procured me nearly a hundred names for THE FRIEND, and not only took frequent opportunities to remind me of his success in his canvass, but labored to impress my mind with the sense of the obligation, I was under to the subscribers; for (as he very pertinently admonished me), " fifty-two shillings a year was a large sum to be bestowed on one individual, where there were so many objects of charity with strong claims to the assistance of the benevolent." Of these hundred patrons ninety threw up the publication before the fourth number, without any notice; though it was well known to them, that in consequence of the distance, and the slowness and irregularity of the conveyance, I was compelled to lay in a stock of stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand; each sheet of which stood me in five-pence previously to its arrival at my printer's; though the subscription money was not to be received till the twenty-first week after the commencement of the work; and lastly, though it was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive the money for two or three numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage. In confirmation of my first caveat, I will select one fact among many. On my list of subscribers, among a considerable number of names equally flattering, was that of an Earl of Cork,. with 270 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. his address. He might as well have been an Earl of Bottle, fobr aught I knew of him, who had been content to reverence the peerage iit abstracto, rather than i.n concretis. Of' course TEi FRIEND was regularly sent as far, if I remember right, as the eighteenth number' that is, till a fortnight before the subscription was to be paid. And lo! just at this time I received a, letter from his Lordship, reproving me in language far more lordly than courteous for my impudence in directing my pamphlets to hinm, who knew nothing of' me or my work! Seventeen or eighteen numbers of which, however, his Lordship was pleased to pretain, robably for the culinary or post-culinary conveniences of his servants. SecondLV, I warn all others firom the attempt to deviate from the ordinary mode of publishingl a work by the trade. I thought, indeed, that to the purchaser it was indifferent, whether thirty per cent. of the purchase-mloney vient to the booksellers or to the government; and that the convenience of receiving the work by the post at his own door, would give the preference to the latter. It is hard, I own, to have been laboring for years, in collecting and arranging the materials; to have spent every shilling that could be spared after the necessaries of life had been furnished, in buying books, or in journeys tbr the purpose of consulting them or of acquiring facts at the fountain-head; then to buy the paper, pay for the printing, and the like, all at least fifteen per cent. beyond what the trade would have paidl; arnd then after all to give thirty bper cent. not of the -net profits, but of the gross results of the sale, to a man who has merely to give the books shelf or warehouse-room, and permit his apprentice to hand them over the counter to those who may ask fobr them; and this too copy by copy, although, if the work be on any philosophical or scientiuic subject, it may be years before the edition is sold ofF. All this, I confess, must seem a hardship, and one, to which the products of' industry in no other mode of exertion are subject. Yet even this is better, far better, than to attempt in any way to unite the functions of author and publisher. But the most prudent mode is to sell the copyright, at least of one or more editions, for the most that the trade will oflfr. By few only can a large remuneration be expected; but fifty pounds and ease of mind are of more real advantage to a literary man, than the chance of five hundred with the certainty of insult and degrading BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 277 anxieties. I shall have been grievously misunderstood, if this statement should be interpreted as written with the desire of detracting from the character of booksellers or publishers. The individuals did not make the laws and customs of their trade, but, as in every other trade, take them as they find them. Till the evil can be proved to be removable, and without the substitution of' an equal or greater inconvenience, it were neither wise nor mlanly even to complain of it. But to use it as a pretext for spealing, or even for thinking, or feeling, unkindly or opprobriously of the tradesmen, as individuals, would be something worse than unwise or even than unmanly; it would be immoral and calumnious. My motives point in a far different direction, and to far other objects, as will be seen in the conclusion of the chapter. A learned and exemplary ol(l clergyman, who many years ago went to his reward, followed by the regrets and blessings of his flock, published at his own expense two volumes octavo, entitled, A NEwv THEORY OF IREDEnIPTIONI. The work was most severely handled in THE MONTHLY or CRITICAL REVIEVW, I forget which; and this unprovoked hostility became the good old man's favorite topic of conversation among his friends. Well (he used to exclaim) in the second edition, I shall have an opportunity of exposing both the ignorance and the malignity of the anonymous critic. Two or three years, however, passed by without any tidings from the bookseller, who had undertaken the printing and publication of' the work, and who was perfectly at his ease, as the author was known to be a man of large property. At length the accounts were written for; and in the course of a few weeks they were presented by the rider for the house, in person. My old friend put on his spectacles, and holding the scroll with no very firm hand, began-" Paper, so mluch: 0 moderate enough-not at all beyond my expectation i Printing, so much: vwell! moderate enough! Stitchingg', covers, aidvertisemectis, cacrr'iage, and so foarth, so much-."-Still nothing amiss. Selleridge (for orthography is no necessary part of a bookseller's literary acquiremrents) ~3 3s. "Bless me only three guineas for the what d'ye call it-the selleridge? N "ZNo more, Sir!" replied the rider. " Nay, but that is too moderate!" rejoined my old friend. "Only three guineas for selling a thousand copies of a work in two volumes? ". 0, Sir!" (cries the young traveller) " you 278 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. have mistaken the word. There have been none of them sold; they have been sent back from London long ago; and this;3 3s. is for the cellaridge, or warehouse-room in our book-cellar." The work was in consequence preferred from the ominous cellar of the publisher's to the author's garret; and, on presenting a copy to an acquaintance, the old gentleman used to tell the anecdote with great humor and still greater good-nature. With equal lack of worldly knowledge, I was a far more than equal sufferer for it, at the very outset of my authorship.* Toward the close of the first year from the time, that in an inauspicious hour I left the friendly cloisters, and the happy grove of quiet, ever honored Jesus College, Cambridge, I was persuaded by sundry philanthropists and Anti-polemists to set on foot a periodical work, entitled TIE WATCHMAN, that, according to the general motto of the work, all might know the truth, and that the truth mzight make us free!t In order to exempt it from the stamp-tax, and likewise to contribute as little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom, it was to be published on every eighth day, thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, and price only four-pence. -Accordingly with a flaming prospectus,-" Knowledge is Power," "'To cry the state of the political atmosphere,"-and so forth, I set off on a tour to the North, from Bristol to Sheffield, for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching by the way in most of the great towns, as an hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might be seen on me. For I was at that time and long after, though a Trinitarian (that is ad nornnam Platonis) in philosophy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion; more accurately, I was a Psilanthropist, one of those who believe our Lord to have been the real son of Joseph, and who lay the main stress on the resurrection rather than on the crucifixion. O! never can I remember those days with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most disinterested. My opinions were indeed in many and most important points erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself then seemed cheap to me, compared with the interests of what I believed to be the truth, and the will of my Maker. I can not even accuse myself * [See the last chapter but one of the Biographical Supplement.-S. C.] j [Michaelmas Term, 1794, was the last he kept at Cambridge. The first number of The Watchman appeared March 1, 1796. See Biog. Sup. —S. C. BIOGRAPH:IA LITERARIA. 279 of having been actuated by vanity; for in the expansion of my enthusiasm I did not think of myself at all. My campaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundery poker. O that face! a face xar';,qamutp! I have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair, pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison; both of color and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck,-the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,-slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a used gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! But he was one of the thorough-bred, a true lover of liberty, and, as I was informed, had proved to the satisfaction of many, that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second beast in THE REVELATIONS, that spalce as a dcragon. A person, to whom one of my letters of recommendation had been addressed, was my introducer. It was a new event in my life, my first stroke in the new business I had undertaken of an author, yea, and of an author trading on his own account. My companion after some imperfect sentences and a multitude of hums and has abandoned the cause to his client; and I cornmenced an harangue of half an hour to Phileleutheros, the tallowchandler, varying my notes, through the whole gamut of eloquence, from the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and in the latter from the pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described, I promised, I prophesied; and beginning with the captivity of nations I ended with the near approach of the millennium, finishing the whole with some of my own verses describing that glorious state out of the Religious Musings: Such delights As float to earth, permitted visitants i When in some hour of solemn jubilee * [This tour was made in January, 11,96. See Biog. Sup.-S. O.] 280:BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. The massive gates of Paradise are thrown Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies, And odors snatched fiom beds of amaranth, And they; that from the crystal river of life Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales!* My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy patience, though, as I was afterwards told, on complaining of certain gales that were not altogether ambrosial, it was a melting day with him. "And what, Sir," he said, after a short pause, "migrht the cost be?" " Only four-pence," -(O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four-pence!)"only fbur-pence, Sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day." —" That comes to a deal of money at the end of a year. And how much, did you say, there was to be for the money?"-" Thirty-two pages, Sir! large octavo, closely printed."-" Thirty and two pages? Bless me! why except what I does in a family way on the Sabbath, that's more than I ever reads, Sir! all the year round. I amrn as great a one, as any man in Brummagem, Sir! fbr liberty and truth and all them sort of things, but as to this,-no offence, I hope, Sir,-I must beg to be excused.' So ended my first canvass: from causes that I shall presently mention, I made but one other application in person. This took place at Manchester to a stately anrd opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. He took my letter of introduction, and, having perused it, measured me from head to fbot and again from foot to head, and then asked if I had any bill or invoice of the thing. I presented my prospectus to him. He rapidly skimmed and hummed over the first side, and still more rapidly the second and concluding page; crushed it within his fingers and the palm of his hand; then most deliberately and significantly rubbed and smoothed one part against the other; and lastly putting it into his pocket turned his back on me with ani "over-rzun with these articles!" and so without another syllable retired into his counting-house. And, I can truly say, to my unspeakable amusement. This, I have said, was my second and last attempt. On returning baffled from the first, in which I had vainly essayed to repeat the miracle of Orpheus with the Brumrnagem patriot, I X [Religious: Musings. Poet. Works, VII. pp. 80,.8I.-S. 0,J BIOGRAPIHIA LITERARIA. 281 dined with the tradesman who had introduced me to him. After dinner he importuned me to smoke a pipe with him, and two or three other illeinacti of the samne rank. I objected, both because I was enfgaraged to spend the evening wnvith a minister and his friends, and becauste had never smoked except once or twice in rrmy life-time, and thein it was herb tobacco mixed wit'h Oroioo0ko. On the assurance, however, that the tobacco was equally mild, and seeing too that it was of' a yellow color, —not forgetting the lamentable difficulty I have always experienced in saying, " No," and in abstainingc fiom what the people about me were doing,-I took half a pipe, filling the lower half' of' the bole with salt. I was soon however compelled to resign it, in consequence of a giddiness and distressful feelilng in my eyes, which, as I had drunk but a single glass of ale, must, I knew, have been the effect of the tobacco. Soon after, deeming myself' recovered, I sallied forth to my engagement; but the walk and the fresh air brought on all the symptoms again, and, I had searcely entered the minister's drawing-room, atlnd opened a small pacquet of letters, which he had received froin Bristol for me, ere I sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather than sleep. Fortunately I had found just time enough to inform him of tlle confused state of my fhelings, and of' the occasion. For here and thus I lay, my face like a wall that is white-washing, deathy pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration runninlg (lown1t it fiom my forehead, Awhile one after another there dropped in the differentl: gentlemen, who had been invited to meet, and spend the evening with me, to the number of' from fifteen to twenty. As the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at lenoth awoke from insensibility, and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the candles which had been lighted in the' interim. By way of relieving my embarrassment one of the gentlemen began the conversation, with "Have you seen a paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?" " Sir!"' I replied, rubbing my eyes, " I am far fiom convinced, that a Clristian is permitted to read either ne-wspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary interest."' This re.ma-lrk, so ludicrously inapposite to, or ra ther, ilnconlgruouls with, the purpose for which I was knownv. to n.ave viJited -Birmin;gham, and to assist me in which they wMere all then met, produced an involuntary and general burst of laulghter; and seldom indeed have I passed so many delightful hours, 282 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. as I enjoyed in that room from the moment of that laugh till an ealiy hour the next morning. Never, perhaus, in so mixed and numerous a party, have I since heard conversation sustailned with such animation, enriched Fwith such variety of information, anG enlivened with such a flow of anecdote. Both then anid afterwards they all joined in dissuading me from proceeding with my scheme; assured me in the most fiiendly and yet most flattering expressions, that neither was the employment fit for me, nor I fit for the employment. Yet, if I determined on persevering in it, they promised to exert themselves to the utmost to procure subscribers, and insisted that I should make no more applications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy. The same hospitable reception, the same dissuasion, and, that failing, the same kind exertions in my behalf, I met with at Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield,-indeed, at every place in which I took up my sojourn. I often recall with affectionate pleasure the many respectable men who interested themselves for me, a perfect stranger to them, not a few of whom I can still name among my friends. They will bear witness for me how opposite even then my principles were to those of Jacobinism or even of democracy, and can attest the strict accuracy of the statement which I have left on record in the 10th and 1 th numbers of THE FRIEND.* From this remarkable tour I returned with nearly a thousand names on the subscription list of THE WATCIIMAN; yet more than half convinced, that prudence dictated the abandonment of the scheme. But for this very reason I persevered in it; for I was at that period of my life so completely hag-ridden by the fear of being influenced by selfish motives, that to know a mode of conduct to be the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive proof to my feelings, that the contrary was the dictate of duty. Accordingly, I commenced the work, which was announced in London by long bills in letters larger than had ever been seen before, and which, I have been informed, for I did not see them myself, eclipsed the glories even of the lottery puffs. But alas the publication of the very first number was delayed beyond the day announced for its appearance. In the second number an essay against fast-days, with a most censurable application of a text from Isaiah for its motto, lost me near five hundred of my * [Essays V. and VI., II. pp. 187-207. See also Essay XVI., II. pp. 300iol.-S. C.1 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 283 subscribers at one blow. In the two following numbers I made enemies of all my Jacobinr and democratic pations; for, disgusted by their I-Cidelity, and their ad option of French morals with -French p)silosolphy and perhaps thinking, n;ilat charity ought to bein nearest home; instead of abusing the goreiLnment and the Aristocrats chiefly or entirely, as had been expected of me, I levelled my attacks at "modern patriotism," and even ventured to declare my belief, that whatever the motives of ministers mnight have been for the sedition, or as it was then the fashion to call them, the gagging bills, yet the bills themselves would produce an effiect to be desired by all the true friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to deter men from openly declaiming on subjects, the principles of which they had never bottomed, and from " pleading to the poor and ignorant, instead of pleading for them." At the same time I avowed my conviction, that national education and a concurring spread of the Gospel were the indispensable condition of any true political melioration. Thus by the time the seventh number was published, I had the mortification-(but why should I say this, when in truth I cared too little obr any thing that concerned my worldly interests to be at all mortified about it?)-of seeing the preceding numbers exposed in sundry old iron shops for a penny a piece. At the ninth number I dropt the work. But from the London publisher I could not obtain a shilling; he was a and set me at defiance. From other places I procured but little, and after such delays as rendered that little worth nothing; and I should have been inevitably.thrown into jail by my Bristol printer, who refused to wait even for a month, for a sum between eighty and ninety pounds, if the money had not been paid for me by a man by no means affluent, a dear friend,* who attached himself to me from my first arrival at Bristol, who has continued my friend with a fidelity unconquered by time or even by my own apparent neglect; a friend from whom I never received an advice that was not wise, nor a remonstrance that was not gentle and affectionate. Conscientiously an opponent of the first revolutionary war, yet with my eyes thoroughly opened to the true character and impotence of the favorers of revolutionary principles in England, prin[ [Josiah Wade. See the Biographical Supplement, where this gentleman is again spoken of.-S. C.] 28S3;rZ~rr~BIORAPHIA LITiAsARIA. ciples which I held in abhorrence-(for it was part of my political creed, that whoever ceased to act as an individual by making himself a member of any society not: sanctioned by his Government, forfeited the rights of a citizen)-a vehement AntiMinisterialist, but after the invasion of Switzerland, a more vehement Anti-Gallican, and still more intensely an Anti-Jacobin, I retired to a cottage at Stowey,* and provided for my scanty maintenance by writing verses fobr a London Miorning Paper.t I saw plainly, that literature was not a profession, by which I could expect to live; for I could not disguise from myself, that, whatover my talents might or might not be in other respects, yet they were not of the sort that could enable me to become a popular writer; and that whatever my opinions might be in themselves, they rwere almost equi-distant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites, the Foxites, and the Democrats. Of the unsalable nature of my writings I had an amusing memento one morning from our oArn servant girl. For happening to rise at an earlier hour than usual, I observed her putting an extravagant quantity of paper into the grate in order to light the fire, and mildly checked her for her wastefulness; " La, Sir!" (replied poor \Lanny) " why, it is only Watchmen." I now devoted myself to poetry and to the study of ethics and psychology; and so profound was my admiration at this time of Hartley's EssAY ON MAIN., that I gave his name to my first-born. In addition to the gentleman, my neighbor, whose garden joined on to my little orchard, and the cultivation of whose friendship had been my sole motive in choosing Stowey for my residence,~ * [In January, 1797.-S. C.] 1 [The Morning Post. See the last chapter but one of the Biographical Supplerreut.-S. C.] [OBSERVATIONS ON MAN, HIS FRAME, HIS DUTY; AND HIS EXPECTATIONS, in two parts, 8vo. published in 1748. Dr. Hartley, son of the Vicar of Armley, near Leeds, was born on the 30th of August, 1705, died at Bath in 1757.S C.] ~ [The late Thomas Poole —" a man whom I have seen now in his harvest field, or the market, now in a committee-room with the Rickmans and Ricairdos of the age; at another time with Davy, Wollaston, and the Wedgwoods'; now with Wordsworth, Southey, and other friends not unheard of in the republic of letters; now in the drawing-rooms of the rich and the noble, and now presiding at the annual dinner of a village benefit society; and in each seeming to be in the very place he was intended for, and taking BIOGRAPHIA LITERARI4A. 285 I was so fortunate as to acquire, shortly after my settlement there, an invaluable blessing in the society and neighborhood of one, to whom I could look up with equal reverence, whether I regarded him as a poet, a philosopher, or a man.a His conversation exthe part to which his tastes. talents, and attainments gave him an admitted right. And yet this is not the most remarkable, not the individualizing, trait of my fi iend's character. It is almost overlooked in the originality and raciness of his intellect; in the life, fieshness, and practical value of his remarks and notices, truths plucked as they are growing, and delivered to you wenith the dew on them, the fair earnings of an observing eye, armed and kept on the watch by thought and meditation; and above all., in the integrity or entireness of his being (integrutm et sine cera vas), the steadiness of his attachments, and the activity and persistency of a benevolence, which so graciously presses a warm temper into the service of a yet warmer heart, and so lights up the little flaws and imperfections incident to humanity in its choicest specimens, that were their removal at the option of his friends (and few have or deserve to have so many), not a man among them but would vote for leaving him as he is." Note to the Church and State, VI. p. 88.-S. C. - [The reader will recognize at once in this revered philosopher and poet, that Friend of the wise and teacher of the good whose great name has been so frequently joined with the name of Coleridge, ever since their association with each other in the lovely region of Quantock. It was in those days that after hearing his Song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chanted, my father thus addressed him: O great bard, Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air, With steadfast eye I viewed thee in the choir Of ever-endur'ing men. The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence! They both in power and act Are permanent. and Timhe is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it. Nor less a sacred roll, than those of old, And to be placed, as they, with gradual fame Among the archives of mankind. thy work Makes audible a linked lay of Truth, Of Truth profound a sweet. continuous lay, Not learnt but native, her own natural notes. Froim the lines Lo WILLIAM WORDSWOtLtTH, collposed after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an Individual Mind.-Poet. Works, VIi. pp. 159, 160.-S. C.] 286 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. tended to almost all subjects, except physics and politics; with the latter he never troubled himself. Yet neither my retirement nor my utter abstraction from all the disputes of the day could secure me in those jealous times from suspicion and obloquy, which did not stop at me, but extended to my excellent friend, whose perfect innocence was even adduced as a proof of his guilt. One of the many busy sycophants of that day,-(I here use the word sycophant in its original sense, as a wretch. who flatter's the prevailing party by informing against his neighbors, under pretence that they are exporters of prohibited figs or fancies,-for the moral application of the term it matters not which)-one of these sycophantic law-mongrels, discoursing on the politics of the neighborhood, uttered the following deep remark: " As to Coleridge, there is not so much harm in him, for he is a whirl-brain that talks whatever comes uppermost; but that -! he is the da7rk traitor. You never hear HII say a syllable onz the subject." Now that the hand of Providence has disciplined all Europe into sobriety, as men tame wild elephants, by alternate blows and caresses; now that Englishmen of all classes are restored to their old English notions and feelings; it will with difficulty be credited, how great an influence was at that time possessed and exerted by the spirit of secret defatnation-(the too constant attendant on party zeal)-during the restless interim from 1793 to the commencement of the Addington administration, or the year before the truce of Amiens. For by the latter period the minds of the partisans, exhausted by excess of stimulation and humbled by mutual disappointment, had become languid. The same causes, that inclined the nation to peace, disposed the individuals to reconciliation. Both parties had found themselves in the wrong. The one had confessedly mistaken the moral character of the revolution, and the other had miscalculated both its moral and its physical resources. The experiment was made at the price of great, almost, we may say, of humiliating sacrifices; and wise men foresaw that it would fail, at least in its direct and ostensible object. Yet it was purchased cheaply, and realized an object of equal value, and, if possible, of still more vital importance. For it brought about a national unanimity unexalmpled in our history since the reign of Elizabeth; and Providence, never wanting to a good work when men have done their parts, soon provided a common focus in the cause of Spain, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 287 which made us all once more Englishmen by at once gratifying and correcting the predilections of both parties. The sincere reverers of the throne felt the cause of loyalty ennobled by its alliance with that of freedom; while the honest zealots of the people could not but admit, that freedom itself assumed a more winning form, humanized by loyalty and consecrated by religious principle. The youthful enthusiasts who, flattered by the morning rainbow of the French revolution, had made a boast of expatriating their hopes and fears, now, disciplined by the succeeding storms and sobered by increase of years, had been taught to prize and honor the spirit of nationality as the best safeguard of national independence, and this again as the absolute pre-requisite and necessary basis of popular rights. If in Spain too disappointment has nipped our too forward expectations, yet all is not destroyed that is checked. The crop was perhaps springing up too rank in the stalk to kern well; and there were, doubtless, symptoms of the Gallican blight on it. If superstition and despotism have been suffered to let in their wolvish sheep to trample and eat it down even to the surface, yet the roots remain alive, and the second growth may prove the stronger and the healthier for the temporary interruption. At all events, to us heaven has been just and gracious. The people of England did their best, and have received their rewards. Long may we continue to deserve it' Causes, which it had been too generally the habit of former statesmen to regard as belonging to another world, are now admitted by all ranks to have been the main agents of our success. "i e fought fron heaven; the stairs in their coursesfought against Sisera." If then unanirmity grounded on moral feelings has been among the least equivocal sources of our national glory, that man deserves the esteem of his countrymen, even as patriots, who devotes his life and the utmost efforts of his intellect to the preservation and continuance of that unanimity by the disclosure and establishment of principles. For by these all opinion must be ultimately tried; and (as the feelings of men are worthy of regard only as far as they are the representatives of their fixed opinions) on the liiowled-e of:these all unanimity, not accidental and fleeting, must be grounded. Let the scholar, who doubts this assertion, refer only to the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke at the commencement of the American war, and compare them with 288 BIOGRAPHIA LILTERARIA. his speeches and writings at the commencement of the French revolution. He will find the principles exactly the same and the deductions the same; but the practical inifrences almost opposite in the one case from those drawn in the other; yet in both equally legitimate, and in both equally confirmed by the results. Whence gained he this superiority of foresight? Whence arose the striking difference, and, in most instances, even the discrepancy between the grounds assigned by him and by those who voted with him, on the same questions? How are we to explain the notorious fact, that the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke are more interesting at the present day than they were found at the time of their first publication.; while those of his illustrious confederates are either forgotten, or exist only to furnish proofs, that the same conclusion, which one man had deduced scientifically, may be brought out by another in consequence of errors that luckily chanced to neutralize each other? It would be unhandsome as a conjecture, even were it not, as it actually is, false in point of fact, to attribute this difference to deficiency of talent on the part of Burke's friends, or of experience, or of historical knowledge. The satisfactory solution is, that Edmund Burlke possessed and had sedulously sharpened that eye, which sees all things, actions, and events, in relation to the laws that determine their existence and circumscribe their possibility. Ile referred habitually to principles. He was a scientific statesman; and therefore a seer. For every principle contains in itself the germs of a prophecy; and, as the prophetic power is the essential privilege of science, so the fulfilment of its oracles supplies the outward, alnd (to men in general) the only test of its claim to the title. Wearisome as Burke's refinlements appeared to his parliamentary auditors, yet the cultivated classes throughout Europe have reason to be thankful, that he went on refining, And thought of convincing, while they thought of diining. Our very sign-boards (said an illustrious fiiend to me) give evidence, that there has been a Titian in the world. In like manner, not only the debates in parliament, not only our proelanlations and state papers, but the essays and leading paragraphs of. our journals, are so many remnembrancers of Edmund Burke.. * [Goldsmith's Retaliation.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHITA LITERARIPA. 289 Of this the reader may easily convince himself, if either by recollection or reference he will compare the opposition newspapers at the commencement and during the five or six following years of the French revolution with the sentiments, and grounds of argument assumed in the same class of journals at present, and for some years past. Whether the spirit of Jacobinism, which the writings of Burke exorcised from the higher and from the literary classes, may not, like the ghost in Hamlet, be heard moving and mining in the underground chambers with an activity the more dangerous because less noisy, may admit of a question. I have given my opinions on this point, and the grounds of them, in my letters to Judge Fletcher, occasioned by his charge to the Wexford grand jury, and published in the Courier.* Be this as it may, the evil spirit of jealousy, and with it the Cerberean whelps of feud and slander, no longer walk their rounds, in cultivated society. Far different were the days to which these anecdotes have carried me back. The dark guesses of some zealous Quidcnunc m-net with so congenial a soil in the grave alarm of a titled Dogberry of our neighborhood, that a spy was actually sent down fiom the government pour' surveillance of myself' and friend. There must have been not only abundance, but variety of these "honorable men" at the disposal of Ministers: for this proved a very honest fellow, After three weeks' truly Indian perseverance ill tracking us (for we were commnonly together), during all which tivme seldom were we out of doors, but he contrived to be within hearing, —(and all the while utterly unsuspected.; how indeed could such a suspicion enter our fancies?)-he not only rejected Sir Dogberry's request that he would try yet a little longer, but declared to him his belief, that both my friend and myself were as good subjects, for aught he could discover to the contrary, as any in His Majesty's doininions. He had repeatedly hid himself; he said, for hours together behind a bank at the sea-side (our favorite seat), and overheard our conversation. At first he fancied, that we were aware of our danger; for he often heard me talk of one Spjy,Nozy, which he was inclined to interpret of himself, and of a remarkable feature belonging to him; but he was speedily convinced that it was -the name of a man who had made a book and lived long ago. Our [* They appeared in November and December of 1814.-S. C,] VOL. III. 290 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. talk ran most upon books, and we were perpetually desiring each other to look at this, and to listen to that; but he could not catch a word about politics. Once he had joined me on the road; (this occurred, as I was returning home alone from my friend's house, which was about three miles fiom my owuL cottage,) and, passing himself off as a traveller, he had entered into conversation with me, and talked of purpose in a democrat way in order to draw me out. The result, it appears, not only convinced him that I was no friend of jacobinism; but (he added), I had " plainly made it out to be such a silly as well as wicked thing, that he felt ashamed though he had only pcut it on." I distinctly remembered the occurrence, and had mentioned it immediately on my return, repeating what the traveller with his Bardolph nose had said, with my own answer; and so little did I suspect the true object of my " tempter ere accuser," that I expressed with no small pleasure my hope and belief, that the conversa.tion had been of some service to the poor misled malcontent. This incident therefbre prevented all doubt as to the truth of the report, which through a friendly medium came to me from the master of the village inn, who had been ordered to entertain the Government gentleman in his best manner, but above all to be silent concerning such a person being in his house. At length he received Sir Dogberry's commands to accompany his guest at the final interview; and, after the absolving suffrage of the gentlenzan honored with, the conJidence of l1riinisters, answered, as follows, to the following queries? D. Well, landlord! and what do you know of the person in question? L. I see him often pass by with maister --—, my landlord (that is, the owner of the house), and sometimes with the new-comers at Holford;* but I never said a word to him or he to me. D. But do you not know, that lie has distributed papers and hand-bills of a seditious nature among the common people? L. No, your Honor! I never heard of such a thing. D. Have you not seen this Mr. Coleridge, or heard of, his haranguing and talking to knots and clusters of the inhabitants?-What are you grinning at, Sir? L. Beg your Honor's pardon! but I was only thinking, how they'd have stared at him. If what I have heard be true, your Honor! they would not have understood a word he said. When our * [Holford is the village near Alfoxton, where Mr. Wordsworth and Miss Wordsworth residedl-S, C.] BIOGRAPIIIA LITERARIA. 291 Vicar was here, Dr. L.- the mnaster of the great school and Canon of Windsor, there was a great dinner party at maister's; and one of the farmers, that was there, told us that he and the Doctor talked real Hebrew Greek at each other fobr an hour together after dinner. D. Answer the question, Sir! does he ever harangue the people? L. I hope, your Honor an't angry with me. I can say no more than I know. I never saw him talking with any one, but my landlord, and our curate, and the strange gentleman. D. Has he not been seen wandering on the hills towards the Channel, and along the shore, with books and papers in his hand, taking charts and maps of the country? L. Why, as to that, your Honor'! I own, I have heard; I am sure, I would not wish to say ill of any body; but it is certain, that I have heard-D. Speak out, man! don't be afraid, you are doing your duty to your King and Government. What have you heard? L. Why, folks do say, your Honor! as how that he is a Poet, and that he is going to put QOuantock and all about here in print; and as they be so much together, I suppose that the strange gentleman has some consarn2 in the business."-So ended this formidable inquisition, the latter part of which alone requires explanation, and at the same time entitles the anecdote to a place in my literary life. I had considered it as a defect in the admirable poem of THE TASK, that the subject, which gives the title to the work, was not, and indeed could not be, carried on beyond the three or four first pages, and that, throughout the poem, the connections are fiequently awkward, and the transitions abrupt and arbitrary. 1 sought for a subject, that should give equal room and freedom for description, incident, and impassioned reflections on men, nature, and society, yet supply in itself a natural connection to the parts, and unity to the whole. Such a subject I conceived myself' to have found in a stream, traced from its source in the hills among the yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first break or fall, where its drops become audible, and it begins to form a channel; thence to the peat and turf barn, itself' built of the same dark squares as it sheltered; to the sheepfbold; to the first cultivated plot of ground; to the lonely cottage and its bleak garlerd won from the heath; to the hamlet, the villages, the market-town, the manufactories, and the sea-port. My walks therefore were almost daily on the top * [Dr. Langford.-S. C.] 292 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. of Qbuantock, and among its sloping coomrbes. With my pencil and memorandumn-book in my hand, I was zmakinizg studies, as the artists call them, and often moulding my thoughts into verse, with the objects and imagery immediately before my senses. Many circumstances, evil and good, intervened to prevent the completion of the poem, which was to have been entitled THE BRooK. Had I finished the work, it was my purpose in the heat of 4he moment to have dedicated it to our then committee of public safety as containing the charts and maps, with which I was to have supplied the French Government in aid of their plans of invasion. And these too for a tract of coast that, from Clevedon to Minehead, scarcely permits the approach of a fishing-boat! All my experience from my first entrance into life to the present hour is in favor of the warning maxim, that the man, who opposes in, toto the political or religious zealots of his age, is safer from their obloquy than he who differs from them but in one or two points, or perhaps only in degree. By that transfer of the feelings of private life into the discussion of public questions, which is the queen bee in the hive of party fanaticism, the partisan has more sympathy with an intemperate opposite than with a nmoderate friend. We now enjoy an intermission, and long may it continue! In addition to far higher and more important merits, our present Bible societies and other numerous associations for national or charitable objects, may serve perhaps to carry off the superfluous activity and fervor of stirring minds in innocent hyperboles and the bustle of management. But the poison-tree is not dead, though the sap may for a season have subsided to its roots. At least let us not be lulled into such a notion of our entire security, as not to keep watch and ward, even Son our best feelings. I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of toleration; sectarian antipathy most obtrusively displayed in the promotion of' an undistinguishing comprehension of sects; and acts of' cruelty, (I had almost said) of treachery, committed in furtherance of an object vitally important to the cause of humanity; and all this by men too of' naturally kind dispositions and exemplary conduct. The magic rod of fanaticism is preserved in the very adcyta of human nature; and needs only the re-exciting warmth of a master hand to bud forth afresh and produce the old fruits. The BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 293 horror of the Peasants' war in Germany, and the direful effects of the Anabaptists' tenets (which differed only from those of jacobinism by the substitution of theological for philosophical jafigon), struck all Europe; for a time with affright. Yet little more than a century was sufficient to obliterate all effective memory of these events. The same principles with similar though less dreadful consequences were again at work from the imprisonment of the first Charles to the restoration of his son. The fanatic maxim of extirpating fanaticism by persecution produced a civil war. The war ended in the victory of the insurgents; but the temper survived, and Milton had abundant grounds for asserting, that " Presbyter was but OLD PRIEST writ large!"* One good result, thank heaven! of this zealotry was the re-establishment of the church. And now it might have been hoped, that the mischievous spirit would have been bound for a season, " and a seal set upon him, that he should deceive the natioy no more."t But no! The ball of' persecution was taken up with undiminished vigor by the persecuted. The same fanatic principle that, under the solemn oath and covenant, had turned cathedrals into stables, destroyed the rarest trophies of art and ancestral piety, and hunted the brightest ornaments of learning and religion into holes and corners, now marched under episcopal banners, and, having first crowded the prisons of England, emptied its whole vial of wrath on the miserable Covenanters of Scotland.. A. merciful providence at length constrained both parties to join against a common enemy. A wise government followed; and the established church became, and now is, not only the brightest example, but our best and only sure bulwark, of toleration! —the true and indispensable bank against a new inundation of persecuting zeal —Esto perpetua.' A long interval of quiet succeeded; or rather, the exhaustion had produced a cold fit of the ague which was symptomatized by indifference among the many, and a tendency to infidelity or skepticism in the educated classes. At length those feelings of disgust and hatred, which for a brief while the multitude had attached to the crimes and absurdities'of sectarian and democratic * [Line 20 of the irregular sonnet On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament. Todd's Milton, vol. vi. pp. 92-7. —S. C.] f Revelation xx. 3. $ See Lainy's History of Scotland.- Walter Scott's bards, ballads, &c. 294 BIOGRAPIHIA LITERARIA. fanaticisms, were transferred to the oppressive privileges of the no6lesse, and the luxury, intrigues and favoritismns of the continental courts. The same principles, dressed in the ostentatious garb of a fashionable philosophy, once more rose triumphant and efibcted the French Revolution. And have we not within the last three or four years had reason to apprehend, that the detestable maxims and correspondent measures of the late French despotism had already bedimmed the public recollections of democratic phrenzy; had drawn off to other objects the electric force of the feelings which had massed and upheld those recollections; and that a favorable occurrence of occasions was alone wanting to waken the thunder and precipitate the lightning from the opposite quarter of the political heaven?* In part from constitutional indolence, which in the very heyday of hope had kept my enthusiasm in check, but still more fiom the habits and influences of a classical education and academic pursuits, scarcely had a year elapsed from the commencement of my literary and political adventures before my mind sank into a state of thorough disgust and despondency, both with regard to the disputes and the parties disputant. With more than poetic feeling I exclaimed: The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion 1 In mad game They break their manacles, to wear the name Of freedom, graven on a heavier chain. O Liberty I with profitless endeavor I-ave I pursued thee many a weary hour; But thou nor swell'st the victor's pomp, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power! Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (Nor prayer nor boastful name delays thee) From Superstition's harpy millions And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy cherub pinions, The guide of homeless winds and playmate of the waves l. I retired to a cottage in Somersetshire at the fobot of Quantock, and devoted my thoughts and studies to the foundations of re* [See The Friend, sect. 1, On the Principles of Political Knowledge. Essay iii. II. pp. 166-171. —S. C.] t [Poet. Works, VII. p. 106. Mr. C. here substitutes " Superstition" for Priestclraft," and "cherub" for "subtle" in the last line but one.-S. C.] BIOGR{APHIA LITERARIA. 295 ligion and morals. Here I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in; broke upon mre "fi-'ou the fouzntaizns of the greab deep," and fell " frotn the wvindoVs of heaven." The fontal truths of natural religion and the books of Revelationz alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark touched on an Ararat, and rested. The idea of the Supreme Being appeared -to me to be as necessarily implied in all particular modes of being as-the idea of infinite space in all the geometrical figures by which- space is limited. I was pleased with the Cartesian opinion, that the idea of God is distinguished from all other ideas by involving its reality; but I was not wholly satisfied. I began. then to ask myself, what proof I had of the outward existence of any thing? Of this sheet of paper for instance, as a thing in itself, separate from the phceznomenon or image in my perception. I saw, that in the nature of things such proof is impossible; and that of all modes of being, that are not objects of the senses, the existence is assumed by a logical necessity arising from the con. stitution of the mind itself,-by the absence of all motive to doubt it, not from any absolute contradiction in the supposition of the contrary. Still the existence of a Being, the ground of all existence, was not yet the existence of a moral creator, and governor. " In the position, that all reality is either contained in the necessary being as an attribute, exists thr'motugh him, as its ground, it remains undecided whether the properties of intelligence and will are to be referred to the Supreme Being in the former or only in the latter sense; as inherent attributes, or only as conseguences that have existence in other things throungh him.* Were the latter the truth, then notwithstanding all the pre-eminence which must be assigned to the Eternal First from the sufficiency, unity, ad ind independence of his being, as the dread ground of the universe. his nature would yet fall ftr short of that, which we are bound to comprehend in the idea of GoD. For, without any knowledge or determining resolve of its own, it would only be a blind necessary ground of other things and other spirits; and thus would be distinguished from the FATE of certain ancie-nt; philosophers in no respect, but that of being more definitely an-:d intelligibly described."t * Thus organization, and motion, are regarded as from God, not in God. t [From Immanuel Kant's treatise entitled Der einzig mingliche Beweisgruwnd azl einer Demonstratiotn fibr das Dasein G'ittes. 1. Abth. 4, Betr. 3, 296 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. For a very long time, indeed, I could not reconcile personality:with infinity; and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John. Yet there had dawned upon me, even before I had met with the CRITIQUTE OF THE PrUr REASON, a certain guiding light. If the mere intellect could make no certain discovery of a holy and intelligent first cause, it might yet supply a demonstration, that no legitimate argunment could be drawLn fiom the intellect acgainst its truth. And what is this more than St. Paul's assertion, tha; by wisdom-(more properly translated by the powers of reasoning) —no man ever arrived at the knowledge of God? What more than the sublimest, and probably the oldest, book on earth has taught us, Silver and gold mnan searcheth out: Bringeth the ore out of the earth, and darkness into light, But where findeth he wisdom? Where is the place of understanding? The abyss crieth; it is not in nme! Ocean echoeth back; not in me i Whence then cometh iisdomn? Where dwelleth understanding? Hidden from the eyes of the living: Kept secret from the fo-wls of heaven 1 Hell and death answer; We have heard the rumor thereof from afar I GoD marketh out the road to it; GOD knoweth its abiding place! le behol.deth the ends of the earth; He surveyeth what is beneath the heavens! And as he weighed out the winds, and measured the sea, And appointed laws to the rain, And a path to the thunder, A path to the flashes of the lightning! Then did he see it, And he counted it; He searched into tile depth thereof, And with a line did he compass it round! Anamerkcung, first published in 1763. Works, vol. vi. p. 42. Mr. C. gave the abbreviated name of this treatise, and referred it to the Vermi schte Schrift.a. cZveilter lBanci. 102 and 103.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 297 But to man he said, The fear of the Lord is wisdom for thee! And to avoid evil, That is thy understanding.* I became convinced, that religion, as both the corner-stone and the key-stone of morality, must have a moral origin so far at least, that the evidence of -its doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will. It were therefore to be expected, that its fundamental truth would be such as might be denied; though only, by the fool, and even by the fool from the madness of the heay't alone! The question then corncerning our faith in the existence of a God, not only as the ground of the universe by his essence, but as its maker and judge by his wisdom and holy will, appeared to stand thus. The sciential reason, the objects of which are purely, theoretical, remains neutral, as long as its name and semblance are not usurped by the opponents of the doctrine. But it then becomes an effective ally by exposing the false show of demonstration, or by evincing the equal demonstrability of the contrary from premises equally logical.t The understanding meantime sug'gests, the analogy of experience facilitates, the belief. Nature excites and recalls it, as by a perpetual revelation. Our feelings almost necessitate it; and the law of conscience peremptorily commands it. The arguments, that at all apply to it, are in its favor; and there is nothing against it, but its own sublimity. It could. not be intellectually more evident without becoming mnorally less effective; without counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worthless because compulsory assent. The belief of a God and a future X Job, chap. xxviii. f Wherever A= B, and A is not_ B, are equally demonstrable, the premise in each undeniable, the induction evident, and the conclusion legitimate-the result must be, either that contraries can both be true (which is absurd), or that the faculty and forms of reasoning employed are inapplica ble to the subject-i. e. that there is a uer7i-atcr el i' d2ao yEvor. Thus, the attributes of Space and Time applied to Spirit are heterogeneous-and the proof of this is, that by admitting them explicite or implicite contraries may be demonstrated true-i. e. that the same, taken in the same sense, is true and not true.-That the world had a beginning in Time and a bound in Space; and That the world had not a beginning and has no limit; —That, self-originating act is, and is not possible, are instauees. Nk 298 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. state (if a passive acquiescence may be flattered with the name of belief), does not indeed always beget a good heart; but a good heart so naturally begets the belief, that the very few exceptions must be regarded as strange anomalies from strange and unfortunate circumstances.* From these premises I proceeded to draw the following conclusions. First, that having once fully admitted the existence of an infinite yet self-conscious Creator, we are not allowed to ground the irrationality of any other article of faith on arguments which would equally prove that to be irrational, which we had allowed to be real. Secondly, that whatever is deducible fiom the admission of a self-comprehending and creative spirit may be legitimately used in proof of the possibility of any further mystery concerning the divine nature. Possibilitatevn mysteriorum, ( Trinitatis, 4-c.) contra insultus Infidelium,3 et HcereticoruMz a contradictionibuls vindico; hand quidemn veritatem, quce revelatione sola stacbili'i possit; says Leibnitz in a letter to his Duke. * [" I believe that the notion of God is essential to the human mind; that it is called forth into distinct consciousness principally by the conscience, and auxiliarly by the manifest adaptation of means to ends in the outward creation. It is, therefore, evident to my reason, that the existence of God is absolutely and necessarily insusceptible of a scientific demonstration, and that Scripture has so represented it. For it commands us to believe in one God. Jam the Lord thy God: thou shalt have none other gods but me. Now all commandment necessarily relates to the will; whereas all scientific demonstration is independent of the will, and is apodictic or demonstrative only as far as it is compulsory on the mind, volenteml, nolentem." Lit. Rem. V. pp. 15, 16. " The Trinity of persons in the Unity of the Godhead would have been a necessary idea of my speculative reason, deduced from the necessary postulate of an intelligent creator, whose ideas, being anterior to the things, must be more actual than those things, even as those things are more actual than our images derived from them; and who, as intelligent, must have had co-eternally an adequate idea of himself, in and through which he created all things both in heaven and earth. But this would only have been a speculative idea, like those of circles and other mathematical figures, to which we are not authorized by the practical reason to attribute reality. Solely in consequence of our Redemption does the Trinity become a doctrine, the belief of which as real is commanded by our conscience." V. p. 17. The same distinction bstween the belief of mere intellectual positions or logical notions in religion and the reception of living substantive ideas correspondent to them, is set forth, and that religious faith consists in the latter alone is argued in the Aids to Reflection. Comment on Aphorism II. Oil that vwhich is indeed Spiriituial IZeligion, I. pp. 207-228.-S. 0.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 299 He then adds the following just and important remark. " In vain will tradition or texts of scripture be adduced in support of a doctrine, donee clava intpoSsibilitatis et con17-radictionis e nanibus horuns Iferculuvn extorta fuerit. For the heretic will still reply, that texts, the literal sense of which is not so much above as directly against all reason, must be understood figuratively, as Herod is a fox, and so forth."* These principles I held, philosophically, while in respect of revealed religion I remained a zealous IUnitarian. I considered the idea of the Trinity a fair scholastic inference firom the being of' God, as a creative intelligence; and that it was therefore entitled to the rank of an esoteric doctrine of natural religion. But seeing in the same no practical or moral bearing, I confined it to the schools of philosophy. The admission of the Logos, as hypostasized (that is, neither a mere attribute, nor a personification) in no respect removed my doubts concerning the Incarnation and the Redemption by the cross; which I could neither reconcile in reason with the impassiveness of the Divine Being, nor in my moral feelings with the sacred distinction between things and persolns, the vicarious payment of a debt and the vicarious expiation of guilt. A more thorough revolution in my philosophic principles, and a deeper insight into my own heart, were yet wanting. Nevertheless, I can not doubt, that the difference of my metaphysical notions from those of Unitarians in general contributed to my final re-conversion to the whole truth in Christ; even as according to his own confession the books of certain Platonic philosophers (libri quorundam2 Platonicoru~n) commenced the rescue of St. Augustine's faith from the same error aggravated by the far darker accompaniment of the Manichmean heresy.t * [I have looked through several collections of letters and other writings of Leibnitz, besides the collection of his works by Dutens, and that of all his philosophical works by Erdmann, but have not met with this letter. The editioi, of the philosophical works by Raspe, with a preface by Mr. KEistner, Amst. et Leips. 1765, I have never seen.-S. C.] [Ilt prinzo volens, &c. Confess. vii. 13. And thou willing first to show me, how Thou resistest the proud, but givest grace unto the humble, and by how great an act of Thy mercy Thou hadst traced out to men the way of humility, in that Thy Word was made flesh, and dwelt among men: —Thou procuredst for me by means of one puffed up with most unnatural pride, certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin. And therein I read, not indeed in the very word,. but to the very same purpose, 300 BIOGRAPPHIA LITERARIA. While my mind was thus perplexed, by a gracious providence for which I can never be sufficiently grateful, the generous and munificent patronage of Mr. Josiah, and Mr. Thomas Wedgwood enabled me to finish my education in Germany.* Instead of troubling others with my own crude notions and juvenile compositions, I was thenceforward better employed in attemptilng to store my own head with the wisdom of' others. I made the best use of my time and means; and there is therefore no period of' my life on which I can look back with such unmingled satisfaction. After acquiring a tolerable sufficiency in the German languaget at PLatzeburg, which with my voyage and jourenforced by many and divers reasons, that In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, &c. (A former translation revised by the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D.) Perrexi ergo ad Sih~pliciacntru, &c. Confess. viii. 3. To Simplicianus then I went, the father of Ambrose (a Bishop now) in receiving thy grace, and whom Ambrose truly loved as a father. To him I related the mazes of my wanderings. But when I mentioned that I had read certain books of the Platonists, wthich Viictorinus, sometime Rhetoric Professor of Rome (who had died a Christian, as I had heard), had trauslated into Latin, he testified his joy that I had not fallen upon the writings of other philosophers, full of fallacies and deceist, (.fter thie rudiLenits of t]is world, whereas the Platonists many ways led to the belief in God and his Word. (Ut sepra.)-E-fd.] * [Mr. C. left England on the 16th of September, 1798, when he sailed from Great Yarmouth to Hamburgh, in company with Mr. Wordsworth and his sister.-S. C.] + To those who design to acquire the language of a country in the country itself, it may be useful, if I mention the incalculable advantage which I derived from learning all the words, that could possibly be so learned, with the objects before me, and without the intermediation of the English terms. It was a regular part of my morning studies for the first six weeks of my residence at Ratzeburg, to accompany the good and kind old pastor, with whom I lived, from the cellar to the roof, through gardens, farm-lyard, &c. and to call every, the minutest, thing by its German name. Advertisemnents, farces, jest-books, and the conversation of children while I was at play with them, contributed their share to a more home-like aqunaintance with the language, than I could have acquired firom works of polite literature alone, or even from polite society. There is a passage of hearty sound sense in Luther's German Letter on interpretation, to the translation of which I shall prefix, for the sake of those who read the German, yet are not likely to have dipped often in the massive folios of the heroic reformer, the simple, sinewy, idiomatic words of the original. "ADenn man mstss nicht die B]uclstaben' int der L.atetaischesn Sprache frSaJen wie maan soll e',sc.sc?.yrede~r.lr; soa,ude. ss.ta 1?',t,;sss dOie,t.cctter i;.t~ Hea-ue dlie iznder acJf oden, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 301 ney thither I have described in The Friend,* I proceeded through Hanover to G6ttingen. Here I regularly attended the lectures on physiology in the morning, and on natural history in the evening, under Blumenbach, a name as dear to every Englishman who has studied at that university, as it is venerable to men of science throughout Europe! Eichhorn's lectures on the New Testament were repeated to me from notes by a student from Ratzeburg, a young man of sound learning and indefatigable industry, who is now, I believe, a professor of the oriental languages at Heidelberg. But my chief efforts were directed towards a grounded knowledge of the German language and literature. From Professor Tychsen I received as many lessons in the Gothic of Ulphilast as sufficed to make me acquainted with its grammar, and the radical words of most frequent occurrence; and with the occasional assistance of the same philosophical linguist, I read through$ Ottfried's Gassen, den gemneinen Afannt auf demn Marlkte, darum n fragen: und denselbigen auf das 1Maul sehen wie sie reden, und darnac] dolenetsch en. So verstehen sie es den,, und merken dass man Deutsch mit ihnen redet." TRANSLATION. For one must not ask the letters in the Latin tongue, iow one ought to speak German; but one must ask the mother in the house, the children in the lanes and alleys, the common man in the market, concerning this; yea, and look at the moves of their mouths while they are talking, and thereafter interpret. They understand you then, and mark that one talks German with them.l * [See the Second Landing-place. Essay iii. p. 333.-S. C.]' [See note D. in the Appendix.-S. C.] $ This paraphrase, written about the time of Charlemagne, is by no means deficient in occasional passages of considerable poetic merit. There is a flow, and a tender enthusiasm in the following lines (at the conclusion of Chapter XI.) which, even in the translation. will not, I flatter myself, fail to interest the reader. Ottfriied is describing the circumstances immediately following the birth of our Lord. She gave with joy her virgin-breast; She hid it not, she bared the breast, [Archdeacon Hare has kindly communicated to me that this passage occurs in a Sendbrief vorn Dnolmetschen der heiligen S chrift, written to Wencesslaus Link, when Luther was in the Castle of Coburg, during the Diet of Augsburg, 1530: that it is to be found in vol. xxi. of Waleh's edit. of Luther's vworks, p. 318. The words wie die Esel thun, after Deutsch reden, >werle doubtless om-itted intentiit.nally.. S- 0C. 302 BIOGtrAPHIA LITERARIA. metrical paraphrase of the gospel, and the most important remains of the Theotiscan, or the transitional state of the Teutonic language from the Gothic to the old German of the Swabiari Which suckled that divinest babe! Blessed, blessed were the breasts Which the Saviour infant kiss'd; And blessed, blessed was the mother Who wrapp'd his limbs in swaddling-clothes, Singing placed him on her lap, Hung o'er him with her looks of love, And sooth'd him with a lulling motion. Blessed I for she shelter'd him From the damp and chilling air; Blessed, blessed! for she lay With such a babe in one blest bed, Close as babes and mothers lie i Blessed, blessed evermore, With her virgin-lips she kiss'd, With her arms, and to her breast She embraced the babe divine, Her babe divine the virgin-mother! There lives not on this ring of earth A mortal, that can sing her praise. Mighty mother, virgin pure, In the darkness and the night For us she bore the heavenly Lord!' Most interesting is it to consider the effect, when the feelings are wrought above the natural pitch by the belief of something mysterious, while all the images are purely natural. Then it is, that religion and poetry strike deepest. [Otfridi Evang. Lib. i. cap. xi. 1. 73-108, contained in Schilter's Thesaurus Anti quitatum Teutonicaruin, pp. 50-51. The translation is a little condensed but faithful in sense. I shall give a few couplets of the original to show the rhyme and metre. Tho bot si mit gilusti thio kindisgun brusti, Er n'ist in erdringe ther ira lob irsinge. Dag man ni rinit, ouh sunna ni biscinit, Ther iz io bibringe, tho er es biginne.-S. 0.1 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 308 period.* Of this period-(the polished dialect of which is analogous to that of our Chaucer, and which leaves the philosophic student in doubt, whether the language has not since then lost more in sweetness and flexibility, than it has gained in condensation and copiousness)-I read with sedulous accuracy the Minnesinger (or singers of love, the Provenqal poets of the Swabian court) and the metrical romances; and then labored through sufficient specimens of the Imaster singers, their degenerate successors; not however without occasional pleasure from the rude, yet interesting strains of Hans Sachs, the cobbler of Nuremberg.t Of this man's genius five folio volumes with double columns are extant in print, and nearly an equal number in manuscript; yet the indefatigable bard takes care to inform his readers, that he never nadce a shoe the less, but had virtuously reared a large family by the labor of his hands. In Pindar, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, and many more, we have instances of the close connection of poetic genius with the love of liberty and of genuine reformation. The moral sense at least will not be outraged, if I add to the list the name of this honest shoemaker (a trade by-the-bye remarkable for the production of philosophers and poets). His poem entitled THE MORNING STAR, was the very first publication that appeared in praise and support of Luther; and an excellent hymn of Hans Sachs, which has been deservedly translated into almost all the European languages, was commonly sung in the Protestant churches, whenever the heroic reformer visited them. In Luther's own German writings, and eminently in his translation of the Bible, the Germanza language commenced. I mean the language as it is at present written; that which is called the High German as contra-distinguished from the Platt-Teutsch, the dialect of the flat or northern countries, and from the OberTeutsch, the language of the middle and Southern Germany. The High-German is indeed a lingua communis, not actually the native language of any province, but the choice and fragrancy of all the dialects. From this cause it is at once the most copious and the most grammatical of all the European tongues. Within less than a century after Luther's death the German was inundated with pedantic barbarisms. A few volumes of * [See note E in the Appendix.-S. C.] [ [See note F in the Appendix.-S. C.] 304 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. this period I read through from motives of curiosity; for it is not easy to imagine any thing more fantastic, than the very appearance of their pages. Almost every third word is a Latin word with a Germanized ending, the Latin portion being always printed in Roman letters, while in the last syllable the German character is retained. At length, about the year 1620, Opitz arose, whose genius more nearly resembled that of Dryden than any other poet, who at present occurs to my recollection.* In the opinion of Lessing, the most acute of critics, and of Adelung, the first of Lexicographers, Opitz, and the Silesian poets, his followers, not only restored the language, but still remain the models of pure diction. A stranger has no vote on such a question; but after repeated perusal of the works of Opitz my feelings justified the verdict, and I seemed to have acquired from them a sort of tact for what is genuine in the style of later writers. Of the splendid mEra, which commenced with Gellert, Klopstock, Rainler, Lessing, and their compeers, I need not speak.t With the opportunities which I enjoyed, it would have been disgraceful not to have been familiar wvith their writings; and I have already said as much as the present biographical sketch requires concerning the German philosophers, whose works, fobr the greater part, I became acquainted with at a far later period.4 Soon after my return from Germany{ I was solicited to undertake the literary and political department in the Morning Post;11 and I acceded to the proposal on the condition that the paper should thenceforwards be conducted on certain fixed and announced principles, and that I should neither be obliged nor requested to deviate from them in favor of any party or any event. In consequence, that Journal became and for many years contilnued anti-ministerial indeed, yet with a very qualified approbation of the opposition, and with far greater earnestness and zeal both * [See note G. in the Appendix.-S. C.] + [See note H. ib.-S. C.] $ [See note I. in the Appendix.-S. C.] ~ [Mr. Coleridge arrived in London from Germany on the 27th of November, 1799.-S. C.] 1l [The reader is referred to the end of the Biographical Supplement for remarks of Mr. Stuart, who edited the Mlorning Post from August 1795 to August 1803, on this part of the B. L. from the present paragraph to that endicg in page 311, inclusively.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 305 anti-Jacobin and anti-Gallican. To this hour I can not find reason to approve of the first war either in its commencement or its conduct. Nor can I understand, with what reason either Mr. Percival (whom I am singular enough to regard as the best and wisest minister of this reign), nor the present Administration, can be said to have pursued the plans of Mr. Pitt. The love of their country, and perseverant hostility to French principles and French ambition, are indeed honorable qualities common to them and to their predecessor. But it appears to me as clear as the evidence of facts call render any question of history, that the successes of the Percival and of the existing mlinistry have been owing to their having pursued measures the direct contrary to Mr. Pitt's. Such for instance are the concentration of the national force to one object; the abandonment of the subsidizing policy, so far at least as neither to goad nor bribe the continental courts into war, till the convictions of their subjects had rendered it.a war of their own seeking; and above all, in their manly and generous reliance on the good sense of the English people, and on that loyalty which is linked to the veryt heart of the nation by the system of credit and the interdependence of property. * Lord Grenville has lately reasserted (in the House of Lords) the imninent danger of a revolution in the earlier part of the war against France. I doubt not, that his Lordship is sincere: and it must be flattering to his feelings to believe it. But where are the evidences of the danger, to which a future historian can appeal? Or must he rest on an assertion? Let me be permitted to extract a passage on the subject from The Friend. "I have said that to withstand the arguments of the lawless, the anti-Jacobins proposed to suspend the law, and by the interposition of a particular statute to eclipse the blessed light of the universal sun, that spies and informers might tyrannize and escape in the ominous darkness. Oh! if these mistaken men, intoxicated with alarm and bewildered by that panic of property, which they themnselves were the chief agents in exciting, had ever lived in a country where there really existed a general disposition to change and rebellion! Had they ever travelled through Sicily; or through France at the first coming on of the revolution; or even alas! through too many of the provinces of a sister island; they could not but have shrunk from their own declarations concerning the state of feeling and opinion at that time predominant throughout Great Britain. There was a time(Heaven grant that that time may have passed by!) —when by crossing a narrow strait, they might have learned the true symptoms of approaching danger, and have secured themselves from mistaking the meetings and idle rant of such sedition, as shrank appalled from the sight of a constable, for the dire murmuring and strange consternation which precedes the storm or 306 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Be this as it may, I am persuaded that the Morning Post proved a far moAre useful ally to the Government in its most ixnportant objects, in consequence of its being generally considered as moderately anti-ministerial, than if it had been the avowed eulogist of Mir. Pitt. The few, whose curiosity or fancy should lead them to turn over the journals of that date, may find a small proof of this in the frequent charges made by the Morning Chronicle, that such and such essays or leading paragraphs had been sent front the Treasury. The rapid and unusual increase in the sale of the Morning Post is a sufficient pledge, that genuine earthquake of national discord. Not only in coffee-houses and public theatres, but even at the tables of the wealthy, they would have heard the advocates of existing Government defend their cause in the language and with the tone of men, who are conscious that they are in a minority. But in England, when the alarm was at its highest there was not a city, no, not a town or village, in which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could move abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people; and the only instances of popular excess and indignation were on the side of the government and the established church. But why need I appeal to these invidious facts? Turn over the pages of history and seek for a single instance of a revolution having been effected without the concurrence of either the nobles, or the ecclesiastics, or the moneyed classes, in any country, in which the influences of property had ever been predominant, and where the interests of the proprietors were interlinked! Examine the revolution of the Belgic provinces under Philip II.; the civil wars of France in the preceding generation; the history of the American revolution, or the yet more recent events in Sweden and in Spain; and it will be scarcely possible not to perceive that in England from 1791 to the peace of Amiens there were neither tendencies to confederacy nor actual confederacies, against which the existing laws had not provided both sufficient safeguards and an ample punishment. But alas! the panic of property had been struck in the first instance for party purposes; and when it became general, its propagators caught it themselves and ended in believing their own lie; even as our bulls in Borrowdale sometimes run mad with the echo of their own bellowing. The consequences were most injurious. Our attention was concentrated on a monster, which could not survive the convulsions, in which it had been brought forth,-even the enlightened Burke himself too often talking and reasoning, as if a perpetual and organized anarchy had been a possible thing! Thus while we were warring against French doctrines, we took little heed whether the means by which we attempted to overthrow them, were not likely to aid and augment the far more forlmidable evil of French ambition. Like children we ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at the heels of a vicious war-horse." Works, II. pp. 199-200. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 80T impartiality, with a respectable portion of literary talent, will secure the success of a newspaper without the aid of party or mrinisterial patronage. But by impartiality I mean an honest and enlig. tened adherence to a code of'intelligible principles previously annrounced, and faithfiully referred to in support of every judgment on men and events; not indiscriminate abuse, not the indulgence of an editor's own malignant passions, and still less, if that be possible, a determination to make money by flattering the envy and cupidity, the vindictive restlessness and self-conceit of the half-witted vulgar; a determination almost fiendish, but which, I have been informed, has been boastfully avowied by one man, the most notorious of these mob-sycophants! From the commencement of the Addington administration to the present day, whatever I have written in TIIE MORNING POST, or (after that paper was transferred to other proprietors) in THE COURIEuR, has been in defence or furtherance of the measures of Government. Things of this nature scarce survive that night That gives them birth; they perish in the sight; Cast by so far from after-life, that there Can scarcely aught be said, but that tnhey were!f Yet in these labors I employed, and, in the belief of partial friends, wasted, the prime and manhood of my intellect. Most assuredly, they added nothing to my fortune or my reputation. The industry of the week supplied the necessities of the week. From government or the friends of government I not only never received remuneration, nor ever expected it; but I was never honored with a single acknowledgment, or expression of satisfaction. Yet the retrospect is far fiom painful or matter of regret I am not indeed silly enough to take as any thing more than a * [Mr. Coleridge began to write for The Courier in 1811. One series of Essays, mentioned in a subsequent page, he had published in that Paper in 1809. He wrote for the Morning Post in 1800 and 1802, but not regularly or throughout each of those years. See the Biog. Supplement.-S. C.]' [From the prologue to " The Royal Slave," a Tragi-comedy by William Cartwright. The author of this play flourished in the reign of James I. and his successor, and died of the camp disease, in 1643, according to Wood's Athen. Ox. in the thirty-third year of his age. He wrote, beside The Royal Slave, The Ordinary, a Comedy; The Lady Errant, a Tragi-comedy; The Siege, or Love's Convert, a Tragi-comedy; and Poems, all which were printed together in 1651. —S. C.] 308 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. Fox's assertion that the late war (I trust that the epithet is not prematurely applied) was a war produced by the Morning Post; or I should be proud to have the words inscribed on my tomb.* As little do I regard the circumstance, that I was a specified object of Bonaparte's resentment during my residence in Italy in consequence of those essays in the Morning Post during the peace of Amiens. Of this I was warned, directly, by Baron Von Humboldt, the - [Inr the autumn of 1802 Mr. Coleridge published in the Morning Post two long letters to Mr. Fox, the first of which appeared on the fourth, and the second on the ninth, of November. These Letters are not only Anti-Gallican and Anti-Jacobin, but strongly Anti-Napoleon. They breathe the same uncompromising hostility to the then master of France, the same disdain of the " upstart Corsican," not simply or chiefly as an invader of hereditary rights, but as an unprincipled despot and oppressor of liberty, whom force of circumstance more than inherent power had raised on high,-disdain unmitigated by a shade either of admiriation or fear,-which continued to be his line of sentiment on that subject for the rest of his life. But the friends and admirers of Fox were displeased with the letters on hiAs account, because they reflected on hint for a departure from sound Anglicanism in his later policy, and expressed the deeper regret on this head, because his character, as previously manifested, had seemed to be that of a " genuine Englishman." The writer was reproached with inconsistency, because he had once been the satirist of Pitt and the eulogist of Fox. Whether or no these censures were deserved, whether the language of the Letters was indeed, as even his friend Lamb pronounced it, " a gentlemanly ushering in of most arrogant charges," or only such plain, bold speaking as becomes an English subject,-an erection of strong blame upon a groundwork of real earnest praise; —whether or no its tone and import argue any essential inconsistency in a former eulogist of Fox, whom it declares to have " a just claim on the gratitude and admiration of his country for his counsels and exertions during the whole continuance of the ominous" revolutionary war; or a satirist of Pitt, when it affirms that the Jacobinical party in England had never been truly formsidable "unless it were during the Jacobinical career of Mr. Pitt's partisans" at the close of the contest -with America; —these are questions, which will be answered more justly and dispassionately hereafter, by many even now, than they were in the year 1802. "Upon the whole," says Mr. Dequincey, in reference to my father's change of sides in politics, "I am of opinion, that few events of Mr. Coleridge's life were better calculated to place his disinterested pursuit of truth in a luminous point of view." An extract from Mr. Delquincey's defence of Mr. Coleridge's political consistency, and an opinion expressed by him of his political writings, in allusion to what is said of " Bonaparte's resentment" in this paragraph of the B. L. will appear in the Appendix, note J. —S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 809 Prussian Plenipotentiary, who at that time was the minister of the Prussian court at Rome; and indirectly, through his secretary, by Cardinal Fesch himself. Nor do I lay any greater weight on the confirming fact, that an order fbr my arrest was sent from Paris, from which danger I was rescued by the kindness of a noble Benedictine, and the gracious connivance of that good old man, the present Pope.* For the late tyrant's vindictive appetite was omnivorous, and preyed equally on a Duc d'Enghien,t and the writer of a newspaper paragraph. Like a true vulture,t Napoleon, with an eye not less telescopic, and with a taste equally coarse in his ravin, could descend from the most dazzling heights to pounce on the leveret in the brake, or even on the field mouse amid the grass. But I do derive a gratification from the knowledge, that my essays contributed to introduce the practice of placing the questions and events of the day in a moral point of view; in giving a dignity to particular measures by tracing their policy or impolicy to permanent principles, and an interest to principles by the application of them to individual measures. In Mr. Burke's writings indeed the germs of almost all political truths may be found. But I dare assume to myself the merit of having first explicitly defined and analyzed the nature of Jacobinism; and that in distinguishing the Jacobin from the republican, the democrat, and the mere demagogue, I both rescued the word from remaining a mere term of abuse, and put on their guard many honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against Jacobinism, * [" Rather unexpectedly he had a visit early one morning from a noble Benedictine with a passport signed by the Pope in order to facilitate his departure. He left him a carriage, and an admonition for instant flight, which was promptly obeyed by Coleridge. Hastening to Leghorn, he discovered an American vessel ready to sail for England, on board of which he embarked." Life of Coleridge, by James Gillman, pp. 180-1.-S. C.] + I seldom think of the murder of this illustrious Prince without recollecting the lines of Valerius Flaccus: super ipsius ingens Instat fara viri, virtusque baud leta tyranno; Ergo anteire metus, juvenemque exstinguere pergit. Argonaut, i. 29. Onpd 6 icaci rbOv Xiva cac r'iv dopiidea, Kai r7v?,ayodv, Ica 70b r7v racpwv yTvo~. Manuel Phile, De Animal. Proprietat. sect. i. 1. 12. 810 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. admitted or supported principles from which the worst parts of that system may be legitimately deduced. That these are not necessary practical results of such principles, we owe to that fortunate inconsequence of our nature, which permits the heart to rectify the errors of the understanding. The detailed examination of the consular Government and its pretended constitution, and the proof given by me that it was a consummate despotism in masquerade, extorted a recantation even from the Morning Chronicle, which had previously extolled this constitution as the perfection of a wise and regulated liberty. On every great occurrence I endeavored to discover in past history the event that most nearly resembled it. I procured, wherever it was possible, the contemporary historians, memorialists, and pamphleteers. Then fairly subtracting the points of difference from those of likeness, as the balance favored the former or the latter, I conjectured that the result would be the same or different. In the series of essays entitled "A comparison of France under Napoleon with Rome under the first Cmsars,"# and in those which followed " On the probable final restoration of the Bourbons,"t I feel myself authorized to affirm, by the effect produced on many intelligent men, that, were the dates wanting, it might have been suspected that the essays had been written within the last twelve months. The same plan I pursued at the commencement of the Spanish revolution, and with the same success, taking the war of the United Provinces with Philip II. as the ground-work of the comparison.? I have mentioned this from no motives of vanity, nor even from motives of self-defence, which would justify a certain degree of' egotism, especially if' it be considered, how often and grossly I have been attacked for * [Comparison of the present state of France, with that of Rome under Julius and Augustus Cwesar. Morning Post, Sep. 21, continued on Sep. 25, and on Oct. 2, 1802.-S. C.] j [Morning Post, 1802.-E-d. This article On the circumstances that appear especially to favor the return of the Bourbons at this present time, was published on the 12th of October. It came after two by Mr. Coleridge on the affairs of France, the first of which appeared Oct. 5, and was followed on the 21st by an essay of his, entitled, Once a Jacobin always a Jacolbin: an extract firom which was inserted in The Friend.-S. C.1 d [Eight letters on the Spaniards, which appeared in The Courier on the 7th, 8th, 9th, 15th, 20th, 21st, and 22d days of December, 1809, and on the 20th of January, 1810.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 311 sentiments which I had exerted my best powers to confute and expose, and how grievously these charges acted to my disadvantage -while I was in Malta. Or rather they would have done so, if my own feelings had not precluded the wish of a settled establishment in that island. But I have mentioned it from the full persuasion that, armed with the two-fold knowledge of history and the human mind, a man will scarcely err in his judgment concerning the sum total of any future national event, if' he have been able to procure the original documents of the past, together with the authentic accounts of the present, and if he have a philosophic tact for what is truly important in facts, and in most instances therefore for such facts as the dignity of history has excluded from the volumes of our modern compilers, by the courtesy of the age entitled historians. To have lived in vain must be a painful thought to any man, and especially so to him who has made literature his profession. I should therefore rather condole than be angry with the mind, which could attribute to no worthier feelings than those of vanity or self-love, the satisfaction which I acknowledge myself to have enjoyed from the republication of my political essays (either whole or as extracts) not only in many of our own provincial papers, but in the federal journals throughout America. I regarded it as some proof of my not having labored altogether in vain, that from the articles written by me shortly before and at the commencement of the late unhappy war with America, not only the sentiments were adopted, but in some instances the very language, in several of the Massachusetts state papers. But no one of these motives nor all conjointly would have imnpelled me to a statement so uncomfortable to my own feelings, had not my character been repeatedly attacked, by an unjustifiable intrusion on private life, as of a man incorrigibly idle, and who intrusted not only with ample talents, but favored with unusual opportunities of improving them, had nevertheless suffered them to rust away without any efficient exertion, either for his own good or that of his fellow-creatures. Even if the compositions, which I have made public, and that too in a form the most certain of an extensive circulation, though the least flattering to an author's self-love, had been published in books, they would have filled a respectable number of volumes, though every passage of merely temporary interest were omitted. My prose wri 312. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. tings have been charged with a disproportionate demand on the attention; with an excess of refinement in the mode of arriving at truths; with beating the ground for that which might have been run down by the eye; with the length and laborious construction of my periods; in short, with obscurity and the love of paradox. But my severest critics have not pretended to have found in my compositions triviality, or traces of a mind that shrunk from the toil of thinking. No one has charged me with tricking out in other words the thoughts of others, or with hashing up anew the cl'amnben jam decies coctam of English literature or philosophy. Seldom have I written that in a day, the acquisition or investigation of which had not cost me the previous labor of a month. But are books the only channel through which the stream of intellectual usefulness can flow? Is the diflusion of truth to be estimated by publications; or publications by the truth, which they diffuse or at least contain? I speak it in the excusable warmth of a mind stung by an accusation, which has not only been advanced in reviews of the widest circulation, not only registered in the bulkiest works of periodical literature, but by frequency of repetition has become an admitted fact in private literary circles, and thoughtlessly repeated by too many who call themselves my friends, and whose own recollections ought to have suggested a contrary testimony. Wduld 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 honorable acquit, tal. I should dare appeal to the numerous and respectable audiences, which at different times and in different places honored my lecture-rooms with their attendance, whether the points of view from which the subjects treated of were surveyed, whether the grounds of my reasoning were such, as they had heard or read. elsewhere, or have since found in previous publications. I can conscientiously declare, that the complete success of the REvIMonsE on the first night of its representation did not give me as great or as heart-felt a pleasure, as the observation that the BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 313 pit and boxes were crowded with faces familiar to me, though of individuals whose names I did not know, and of whom I knew nothing, but that they had attended one or other of my courses of lectures. It is an excellent though perhaps somewhat vulgar proverb, that there are cases where a man may be as well "inl for' a pouond as for' a penny." To those, who fiom ignorance of the serious injury I have received from this rumor of having dreamed away my life to no purpose, injuries which I unwillingly remember at all, much less am disposed to record in a sketch of my literary life; or to those, who from their own feelings, or the gratification they derive from thinking contemptuously of others, would like Job's comforters attribute these complaints, extorted from me by the sense of wrong, to self-conceit or presumptuous vanity, I have already furnished such ample materials, that I shall gain nothing by withholding the remainder. I will not therefore hesitate to ask the consciences of those, who from their long acquaintance with me and with the circumstances are best qualified to decide or be my judges, whether the restitution of the siCum cuique would increase or detract from my literary reputation. In this exculpation I hope to be understood as speaking of myself comparatively, and in proportion to the claims, which others are entitled to make on my time or my talents. By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellowmen; what I cozuld have done, is a question for my own conscience. On my own account I may perhaps have had sufficient reason to lament my deficiency in self-control, and the neglect of concentering my powers to the realization of some permanent ~work. But to verse rather than to prose, if to either, belongs the voice of mourning fbr Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; And fears self-willed that shunned the eye of hope; And hope that scarce would know itself from fear; Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given and knowledge won in vain; And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, And all which patient toil had reared, and all, Commune with thee had opened out-but flowers Strewed on my corpse, and borne upon my bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave 1* * [Poet. Works, VII. p. 160. —Ed.] VOL. III. 0 314 BIOG-RAPHIA LITERARIA. These will exist, for the future, I trust, only in the poetic strains, which the feelings at the time called forth. In those only, gentle reader, Affectus animi varios, bellumque sequacis Perlegis invidiEe, curasque revolvis inanes, Quas humilis tenero stylus olim effudit in sevo. Perlegis et lacrymas, et quod pharetratus acuta Ille puer puero fecit mihi cuspide vulnus. Omnia paulatim consumit longior setas, Vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo. Ipse nmihi collatus enim non ille videbor; Frons alia est, moresque alii, nova mentis imago, Vox aliudque sonat —Jamque observatio vitse Multa dedit —lugere nihil, ferre omnia; jamque Paulattin lacrymas rerum experientia tersit.* CHAPTER XI. AN AFFECTIONATE EXHORTATION TO THIOSE WHO IN EARLY LIFE FEEL THEMSELVES DISPOSED TO BECOME AUTHORS. IT was a favorite remark of the ]-ate Mr. Whitbread's, that no man does any thing from a single motive. The separate motives, or rather moods of mind, which produced the preceding reflections and anecdotes have been laid open to the reader in each separate instance. But an interest in the welfare of those, who at the present time may be in circumstances not dissimilar to my own at my first entrance into life, has been the constant accompaniment, and (as it were) the under-song of all my feelings. Whiteheadt exerting the prerogative of his laureateship addressed to youthful poets a poetic Charge, which is perhaps the best, and certainly the most interesting, of his works.t With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would adress an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the * [Epist. Fr. Petrarchse Lib. i. Barbato Salmonensi, Opp. Basil, 1554, vol ii. p. 76.-S. C.] [ [See Appendix, note J.-S. C.] t [See Appendix, note K.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 315 beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: never pursue literature cas a trade. -With the exception of one extraordinary man, I have never known an individual, least of all an individual of genius, healthy or happy without a profession, that is, some regular employment, which does not depend on the will of the moment, and which can be carried on so far mnechanically that an average quant um only of health, spirits, and intellectual exertion are requisite to its faithful discharge. Three hours of leisure, unannoyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to with delight as a change and recreation, will suffice to realize in literature a larger product of what is truly genial, than weeks of compulsion. Money, and immediate reputation form only an arbitrary and accidental end of literary labor. The hope of increasing them by any given exertion will often prove a stimulant to industry; but the necessity of acquiring them will in all works of genius convert the stimulant into a narcotic. Motives by excess reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind. For it is one contradistinction of genius from talent, that its predominant end is always comprised in the means; and this is one of the many points, which establish an analogy, between genius and virtue. Now though talents may exist without genius, yet as genius can not exist, certainly not manifest itself, without talents, I would advise every scholar, who feels the genial power working within him, so far to make a division between the two, as that he should devote his talents to the acquirement of competence in some known trade or profession, and his genius to objects of his tranquil and unbiassed choice; while the consciousness of being actuated in both alike by the sincere desire to perform his duty, will alike ennoble both. "My dear young friend" (I would say), "suppose yourself' established in any honorable occupation. From the manufactory or counting-house, from the law-court, or fiom having visited your last patient, you return at evening, Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home Is sweetest to your family, prepared for its social enjoyments, with the very countenances of your wife and children brightened, and their * [From the poem to Williamn Wordsworth. Poet. Works, VII. p. 161 s. C.] 316 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. voice of welcome made doubly welcome, by the knowledge that, as far as they are concerned, you have satisfied the demands of the day by the labor of the day. Then, when you retire into your study, in the books on your shelves you revisit so many venerable friends with whom you can converse. Your own spirit scarcely less free from personal anxieties than the great minds, that in those books are still living for you! Even your writingdesk with its blank paper and all its other implements will appear as a chain of flowers, capable of linking your feelings as well as thoughts to events and characters past or to come; not a chain of iron, which binds you down to think of the future and the remote oy recalling the claims and feelings of the peremptory present. But why should I say 9reti~re? The habits of active life and daily intercourse with the study of the world will tend to give you such self-command, that the presence of your famnily will be no interruption. iN'ay, the social silence, or undisturbing voices of a wife or sister will be like a restorative atmosphere, or soft music which moulds a dream without becoming its object. If facts are required to prove the possibility of combining weighty performances in literature with full and independent employment, the works of Cicero and Xenophon among the ancients; of Sir Thomas Moore, Bacon, Baxter, or to refer at once to later and contemporary instances, Darwin and Roscoe, are at once decisive of the question. But all men may not dare promise themselves a sufficiency of self-control for the imitation of those examples; though strict scrutiny should always be made, whether indolence, restlessness, or a vanity impatient for immediate gratification, have not tampered with the judgment and assumed the vizard of humility for the purposes of self-delusion. Still the Church presents to every man of learning and genius a profession, in which he may cherish a rational hope of being able to unite the widest schemes of literary utility with the strictest performance of professional duties.* Among the numerous blessings of Christianity, the introduction of an established Church makes an especial claim on the gratitude of scholars and philosophers; in England, at least, where the principles of Protestantism have conspired with the freedom * [All that follows, as far as "expected to withhold five" in the following paragraph, with but very little difference, is to be found in the Church and State, VI. 70-72. —S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 317 of the government to double all its salutary powers by the removal of its abuses. That not only the maxims, but the grounds of a pure morality, the mere fragments of which - the lofty grave tragedians taught In chorus or iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight received In brief sententious precepts; and that the sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a Plato found most hard to learn and deemed it still more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as common place, is a phcenonenon which must withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading desk. Yet those, who confine the efficiency of an established Church to its public offices, can hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. That to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleu2s, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate imitation; this, the unobtrusive, continuous agency of a protestant church establishment, this it is, which the patribt, and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with the faith in the progressive melioration of mankind, can not estimate at too high a price. It can not be valued with the gold of Ophir', with the precious onyx, or the sapphir'e. No mentioln shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdonz is above'rubies.t The clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbor and a familyman, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the farm-house and the cottage. He is, or he may become, conneceted with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. And among the instances of the blindness, or at best of the shortsightedness, which it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, i know " Paradise Regained. Book iv. 1. 261. J [Job xxviii. 16, 18.-S. C.] 318 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. few more striking than the clamors of the farmers against Church property. Whatever was not paid to the clergyman would inevitably at the next lease be paid to the landholder, while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of the Church are in some sort the reversionary property of every family, that may have a member educated for the Church, or a daughter that may marry a clergyman. Instead of being foreclosed and immovable, it is in fact the only species of landed property, that is essentially moving and circulative. That there exist no inconveniences, who will pretend to assert? But I have yet to expect the proof, that the inconveniences are greater in this than in any other species; or that either the farmers or the clergy would be benefited by forcing the latter to become either Trullibers or salaried placemen.'Nay, I do not hesitate to declare my firm persuasion, that whatever reason of discontent the farmers may assign, the true cause is this: that they may cheat the parson, but can not cheat the steward; and that they are disappointed, if they should have been able to withhold only two pounds less than the legal claim, having expected to withhold five. At all events, considered relatively to the encouragement of learning and genius, the establishment presents a patronage at once so effective and unburdensome, that it would be impossible to afford the like or equal in any but a Christian and Protestant country. There is scarce a department of human knowledge without some bearing on the various critical, historical, philosophical and moral truths, in which the scholar must be interested as a clergyman; no one pursuit worthy of a man of genius, which may not be followed without incongruity. To give the history of the Bible as a book, would be little less than to relate the origin or first excitement of all the literature and science, that we now possess. The very decorum which the profession imposes, is favorable to the best purposes of genius, and tends to counteract its most frequent defects. Finally, that man must be deficient in sensibility, who would not find an incentive to emulation in the great and burning lights, which in a long series have illustrated the church of England; who would not hear from within an echo to the voice from their sacred shrines, Et Pater 2Eneas et avunculus excitat Hector.* * [iEneid iii. 343.-S. 0.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 319 But, whatever be the profession or trade chosen, the advantages are many and important, compared with the state of a mere literary man, who in any degree depends on the sale of his works for the necessaries and comforts of life. In the former, a marl lives in sympathy with the world, in which he lives. At least he acquires a better and quicker tact for the knowledge of that, with which men in general can sympathize. He learns to manage his genius more prudently and efficaciously. His powers and acquirements gain him likewise more real admiration; for they surpass the legitimate expectations of others. He is something besides an author, and is not therefore considered merely as an author. The hearts of men are open to him, as to one of' their own class; and whether he exerts himself or not in the conversational circles of his acquaintance, his silence is not attributed to pride, nor his communicativeness to vanity.* To these advantages I will venture to add a superior chance of happiness in domestic life, were it only that it is as natural for the man to be out of the circle of his household during the day, as it is meritorious for the woman to remain for the most part within it. But this subject involves points of consideration so numerous and so delicate, and would not only permit, but require such ample documents from the biography of literary men, that I now merely allude to it in tr'ansitu. When the same circumstance has occurred at very different times to very different persons, all of whom have some one thing in common; there is reason to sup* [These lines in The Dcanger of uwriting Verse, by Whitehead, describe the trials of the professed and noted author from the intensity with which the gaze of others is fixed upon him: " His acts, his words, his thoughts no more his own, Each folly blazoned and each frailty known. Is he reserv'd -his sense is so refin'd It ne'er descends to trifle with mankind. Open and free?-they find the secret cause Is vanity; he courts the world's applause. Nay, though he speak not, something still is seen, Each change of face betrays a fault within. If grace,'tis spleen; he smiles but to deride; And downright awkwardness in him is pride. Thus must he steer through fame's uncertain seas, Now sunk by censure, and now puff'd by praise; Contempt with envy strangely mix'd endure, Fear'd where caress'd, and jealous though secure."-S. C.] 820 BIOGRAPtIA LITERARIA. pose that such circumstance is not merely attributable to the per'sons concerned, but is in some measure occasioned by the one point in common to them all. Instead of the vehement and almost slanderous dehortation from marriage, which the ll]-isogyne, Boccaccio* addresses to literary men, I would substitute the simple advice: be not merely a man of letters Let literature be an honorable augmentation to your armis; but not constitute the coat, or fill the escutcheon' To objections from conscience I can of course answer in no other way, than by requesting the youthful objector (as I have already done on a former occasion) to ascertain with strict selfexamination, whether other influences may not be at work; whether spirits, " nlot of health," and with whispers " not fronm heaven," may not be walking in the twilight of his consciousness. Let him catalogue his scruples, and reduce them to a distinct, intelligible form; let him be certain, that he has read with a docile mind and favorable dispositions the best and most fundamental works on the subject; that he has had both mind and heart opened to the great and illustrious qualities of the many renowned characters, who had doubted like himself, and whose researches had ended in the clear conviction, tha-t their doubts had been groundless, or at least in no proportion to the counterweight. Happy will it be for such a man, if among his contemporaries elder than himself he should meet with one, who, with similar powers, and feelings as acute as his own, had entertained the same scruples; had acted upon themn; and who by afterresearch (when the step was, alas! irretrievable, but for that very reason his research undeniably disinterested) had discovered himself to have quarrelled with received opinions only to embrace errors, to have left the direction tracked out for him on the high road of' honorable exertion, only to deviate into a labyrinth, where when he had wandered till his head was giddy, his best good fortune was finally to have Ibund his way out a.gain, too late for prudence, though not too late for conscience or for truth I Tirmle spent in such delay is time won: for manhood in the mean time is advancing, and with it increase of kano ledge, strength of judgment, and above all, temperance of feelings. And even. if these should efiect no change, yet the delay will at least prevent the final approval of the decision from being alloyed by the inVi e e CSt..'t2mi di.Dat-e. [See Appendix, note M.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 321 ward censure of the rashness and vanity, by which it had been precipitated. It would be a sort of irreligion, and scarcely less than a libel on human nature to believe, that there is any established and reputable profession or employment, in which a man may not continue to act with honesty and honor; and doubtless there is likewise none, which may not at times present temptations to the contrary. But wofully will that man find himself mistaken, who imagines that the profession.of literature, or (to speak more plainly) the trade of authorship, besets its members with fewer or with less insidious temptations, than the Church, the law, or the different branches of commerce. But I have treated sufficiently on this unpleasant subject in an early chapter of this volume. I will conclude the present, therefore, with a short extract from Herder, whose name I might have added to the illustrious list of those, who have combined the successful pursuit of the Muses, not only with the faithful discharge, but with the highest honors and honorable emoluments of an established profession. The translation the reader will find in a note below.* " Agn sorgfdltigsten, gneiden sic die Azutorschaft. Zuz friih oder unrndssig geb'rauccht, mnacht sie den KLo2f wviste sand das Herz leer; wenun sie auch sonst keine dible Folgen gdbe. Ei Aiklensch, der znzr lieset zurn zu drucken, lieset wahr'scheinlich fbdel: zund wer jeden Gedanken, der i/m auzfstosst, dur'Ch Feder und Presse ve}rsendet, hat sie in ku~rzer Zeit alle ver'sandt, und wird bald ein blosser Diener der Drutckerey, ein Buchstabensetzer werden.t TRANSLATION.* "With the greatest possible solicitude avoid authorship. Too early or immoderately employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty; even -were there no other worse consequences. A person, who reads only to print, in all probability reads amiss; and he, who sends away through the pen and the press every thought, the moment it occurs to him, will in a short time have sent all aw-ay, and will become a mere journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor." To which I may add from myself, that what medical physiologists affirm of certain secretions applies equally to our thoughts; they too must be taken up again into the circulation, and be again and again re-secreted in order to insure a healthful vigor, both to the mind and to its intellectual offspring.l f See Appendix. (Note N.) See Appendix. (Note 0.) CHAPTER XII. A CHAPTER OF REQUESTS AND PREMONITIONS CONCERNING THE PERUSAL OR OMISSION OF THE CHAPTER THAT FOLLOWVS. IN the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by a resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with the allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus u znztil you zunderstanzd a oritel-'s ignzor'ance, presume yougrself ignzow-anzt of his under'standing. This golden rule of mine does, I own, resemble those of Pythagoras in its obscurity rather than in its depth. If, however, the reader will permit me to be my own Hierocles,*- I trust that he will find its meaning fully explained by the following instances. I have now before me a treatise of a religious fanatic, full of dreams and supernatural experiences. I see clearly the writer's grounds, and their hollowness. I have a complete insight into the causes, which through the medium of his body had acted on his mind; and by application of received and ascertained laws I can satisfactorily explain to my own reason all the strange incidents, which the writer records of himnself. And this I can do without suspecting him of any intentional falsehood. As when in broad daylight a man tracks the steps of a traveller, who had lost his way in a fog or by treacherous moonshine, even so, and with the same tranquil sense of certainty, can I follow the traces of this bewildered visionary. I understand his ignor'ance. On the other hand, I have been re-perusing with the best energies of my mind the Timrous of Plato. Whatever I comprehend, impresses me with a reverential sense of the author's genius; but there is a considerable portion of the work, to which I can attach no consistent mleaning. In other treatises of the same phi[A Neo-Platonist of the fifth century, who left a Comm.entary on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, as well as other works.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 323 losopher, intended for the average comprehensions of men, I have been delighted with the masterly good sense, with the perspicuity of the language, and the aptness of the inductions. I recollect, likewise, that numerous passages in this author, which I thoroughly comprehend, were formerly no less unintelligible to me, than the passages now in question. It would, I am aware, be quite fashionable to dismiss them at once as Platonic jargon. But this I can not do with satisfaction to my own mind, because I have sought in vain for causes adequate to the solution of the assumed inconsistency. I have no insight into the possibility of a man so eminently wise, using words with such half-meanings to himself, as must perforce pass into no-meanings to his readers. When in addition to the motives thus suggested by my own reason, I bring into distinct remembrance the number and the series of great men, who after long and zealous study of these works had joined in honoring the name of Plato with epithets, that almost transcend humanity, I feel, that a contemptuous verdict on my part might argue want of modesty, but would hardly be received by the judicious, as evidence of superior penetration. Therefore, utterly baffled in all my attempts to understand the ignorance of Plato, I conclude mnyself -ignorant of his understanding. In lieu of the various requests which the anxiety of authorship addresses to the unknowni reader, I advance but this one; that he will either pass over the following chapter altogether, or read the whole connectedly. The fairest part of the most beautiful body will appear deformed and monstrous, if dissevered from its place in the organic whole. Nay, on delicate subjects, where a seemingly trifling difference of more or less may constitute a difference in kind, even a faithful display of the main and supporting ideas, if yet they are separated from the forms by which they are at once clothed and modified, may perchance present a skeleton indeed; but a skeleton to alarm and deter. Though I might find numerous precedents, I shall not desire the reader to strip his mind of all prejudices, nor to keep all prior systems out of view during his examination of the present. For in truth, such requests appear to me not much unlike the advice given to hypochondriacal patients in Dr. Buchan's domestic medicine: videlicet, to preserve themselves uniformly tranquil and in good spirits. Till I had discovered the art of destroying the memory 324 BIOGRAP-HIA LITERARIA. a psaq'te aczte, without injury to its future operations, and without detriment to the judgment, I should suppress the request as premature; and therefore, however much I may wish to be read with an unprejudiced mind, I do not presume to state it as a necessary condition. The extent of my daring is to suggest one criterion, by which it may be rationally conjectured before-hand, whether or no a reader would lose his time, and perhaps his temper, in the perusal of this, or any other treatise constructed on similar principles. But it would be cruelly misinterpreted, as implying the least disrespect either for the moral or intellectual qualities of the individuals thereby precluded. The criterion is this: if a man receives as fiundamental facts, and therefore of course indemonstrable and incapable of further analysis, the general notions of matter, spirit, soul, body, action, passiveness, time, space, cause and effect, consciousness, perception, memory and habit; if he feels his mind completely at rest concerning all these, and is satisfied, if only he can analyze all other notions into some one or more of these supposed elements with plausible subordination and apt arrangement: to such a mind I would as courteously as possible convey the hint, that for him the chapter was not written. Vir bonus es, doctus, prudens; ast baud tibi spiro. For these terms do in truth include all the difficulties, which the human mind can propose for solution. Taking them therefore in mass, and unexamined, it requires only a decent apprenticeship in logic, to draw forth their contents in all forms and colors, as the professors of legerdemain at our village fairs pull out ribbon after ribbon from their mouths. And not more difficult is it to reduce them back again to their different gene'ra. But though this analysis is highly useful in rendering our knowledge more distinct, it does not really add to it. It does not increase, though it gives us a greater mastery over, the wealth which we before possessed. For forensic purposes, for all the established professions of society, this is sufficient. But for philosophy in its highest sense, as the science of ultimate truths, and therefore scientia scientiarnum, this mere analysis of terms is preparative only, though as a preparative discipline indispensable. Still less dare a favorable perusal be anticipated from the proselytes of that compendious philosophy, which talking of mind BIOGRAPH:IIA LITERARIA. 325 but thinking of brick and mortar, or other images equally abstracted from body, contrives a theory of spirit by nicknaming matter, and in a few hours can qualify its dullest disciples to explain the omne scibile by reducing all things to impressions, ideas, and sensations. But it is time to tell the truth; though it requires some courage to avow it in an age and country, in which disquisitions on all subjects, not privileged to adopt technical terms or scientific symbols, must be addressed to the Public. I say then, that it is neither possible nor necessary for all men, nor for many, to be philosophers. There is a philosophic (and inasmuch as it is actualized by an effort of freedom, an artificial) consciousness, which lies beneath or (as it were) behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings. As the elder Romans distinguished their northern provinces into Cis-Alpine and TransAlpine, so may we divide all the objects of human knowledge into those on this side, and those on the other side of the spontaneous consciousness; citra et trans conscienztiaan comszuzem. The latter is exclusively the domain of pure philosophy, which is therefore properly entitled tr'anscendental, in order to discriminate it at once, both from mere reflection and re-presentation on the one hand, and on the other from those flights of lawless speculation which, abandoned by all distinct consciousness, because transgressing the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties, are justly condemned, as tr'anscendent.* The first range of hills, * This distinction between transcendental and transcendent is observed by our elder divines and philosophers, whenever they express themselves scholastically. Dr. Johnson ildeed has confounded the two words; but his own authorities do not bear him out. Of this celebrated dictionary I will venture to remark once for all, that I should suspect the man of a morose disposition who should speak of it without respect and gratitude as a most instructive and entertaining book, an d hitherto, unfortunately, an indispensable book; but I confess, that I should be surprised at hearing from a philosophic and thorough scholar any but very qualified praises of it, as a dictionary. I am not now alluding to the number of genuine words omitted; for this is (and perhaps to a greater extent) true, as Mr. Wakefield has noticed, of our best Greek Lexicons, and this too after the successive labors of so many giants in learning. I refer at present both to omissions and commissions of a more important nature. What these are, me saltens jeudice, will be stated at full in The Friend, republished and completed.l 1 FThis is one of the many literary projects and promises of Mr. Coleridge that were never filfilled.-S. C.] 826 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. that encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sunis born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To the multitude below these vapors appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude with impunity; and now all a-glow, with colors not their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few, who measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls have learned, that the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few, who even in the level streams have detected elements, which I had never heard of the correspondence between Wakefield and Fox till I saw the account of it this morning (16th September, 1815) in the Monthly Review. I was not a little gratified at finding, that Mr. Wakefield had proposed to himself nearly the same plan for a Greek and English Dictionary, which I had formed, and began to execute, now ten years ago. But far, far more grieved am I, that he did not live to complete it. I can not but think it a subject of most serious regret, that the same heavy expenditure, which is now employing in the republication of STEPHANUS augmented, had not been applied to a new Lexicon on a more philosophical plan, with the English, German, and French synonymes as well as the Latin. In almost every instance the precise individual meaning might be given in an English or German word; whereas in Latin we mlust too often be contented with a mere general and inclusive term. How indeed can it be otherwise, when we attempt to render the most copious language of the world, the most admirable for the fineness of its distinctions, into one of the poorest and most vague languages? Especially, when we reflect on the comparative number of the works, still extant, written while the Greek and Latin were living languages. Were I asked what I deemed the greatest and most unmixed benefit, which a wealthy individual, or an association of wealthy individuals could bestow on their country and on mankind, I should not hesitate to answer, "a philosophical English dictionary; with the Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish and Italian synonymes, and with correspondent indexes." That the learned languages might thereby be acquired, better, in half the time, is but a part, and not the most important part, of the advantages which would accrue from such a work. O! if it should be permitted by Providence, that without detriment to freedom and independence our government might be enabled to become more than a committee for war and revenue! There was a time, when every thing was to be done by Government. Have we not flown off to the contrary extreme? BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 327 neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or could supply.' How and whence to these thoughts, these strong probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge may finally supervene, can be learnt only by the fact. I might oppose to the question the words with whicht Plotinus supposes Nature to answer a similar difficulty. " Should any one interrogate her, how she works, if graciously she vouchsafe to listen and speak, she will reply, it behooves thee not to disquiet me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as I am silent, and work without words."t Likewise in the fifth book of the fifth Ennead, speaking of the highest and intuitive,ko. ledge as distinguished from the discursive, or in the language of Wordsworth, "The vision and the faculty divine;"~ he says: "It is not lawful to inquire from whence it sprang, as * April, 1825. If I did not see it with my own eyes, I should not believe that I had been guilty of so many hydrostatic Bulls as bellow in this unhappy allegory or string of metaphors! How a river was to travel up hill from a vale far inwuard, over the intervening mountains, Morpheus, the Dreamweaver, can alone unriddle. I am ashamed and humbled.-S. T. Coleridge. ] Ennead, iii. 8. 3. The force of the Greek avvtivat is imperfectly expressed by " understand;" our own idiomatic phrase " to go along 2mith me" comes nearest to it. The passage, that follows, full of profound sense, appears to me evidently corrupt; and in fact no writer more wants, better deserves, or is less likely to obtain, a new and more correct edition —ri ovV cvvtivat; Ort rO yevo/evov artt ONaya i/obv, tnLz'rnCt (mallere, fOa/ea, ijoi atorroaOIC,) Cat' oVaeL 7yvopEvov Oedpqta, sal / pot y7evo/ev? st Oerpiac r7f d6&, -T2V zatlv a Ystv e Lt oOredova VTrdptcet. (mallem., scal Foe j yevoeivy ile Oeopifaf dvrTi Whis.) "What then are we to understand? That whatever is produced is an intuition, I silent; and that, which is thus generated, is by its nature a theorem, or form of contemplation; and the birth, which results to me from this contemplation, attains to have a contemplative nature." So Synesius:'2dlC cepS,'AppTra yovL 1 The after-comparison of the process of the natura naturans with that of the geometrician is drawn from the very heart of philosophy. f [Kal eti rTg d aVrjiv poirO riTVOg Mvera Troei, It 7Too tporTSTVOf E0020o tra'etiv sal dEyeitv, EiCrol 5vG' tplPv #ev /js tpnr.v, adXa avrvtvaE scai avrov ato7ir, oSrep ey CowrrS, scat otC ei0OtcCat tyeLv. Ennead. iii. 8. 3, in initio, p. 634 of Creuzer's edition.-S. C.] ~ [Poet. Works, vi. p. 6. The Excursion, book i.-S. C.] 1 [Hyrmn. Tert. v. 226.-S. C.] 328 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. if it were a thing subject to place and motion, for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place; but it either appears to us or it does not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it with a view of detecting its secret source, but to watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us; preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle as the eye waits patiently for the rising sun."- They, and they only, can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its inzvolucrumn for antennce yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased, will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and respect? "Poor man! he is not made for this world." Oh! herein' they utter a prophecy of universal fulfilment; for man must either rise or sink. It is the essential mark of the true philosopher to rest satisfied with no imperfect light, as long as the impossibility of attaining a fuller knowledge has not been demonstrated. - That the common consciousness itself will furnish proofs by its own dii'ection, that it is connected with master-currents below the surface, I shall merely assume as a postulate pro temrpogre. This having been granted, though but in expectation of the argument, I can safely deduce from it the equal truth of my former assertion, that philosophy can not be intelligible to all, even of the most learned * [k27rve 5dvropeZv O6ev;abv5, fO&v f ev~ov, aa'ev dwe206v0o7 CVboev, f, vdov ipa /v, Kat oVcK ev8ov av3' / (o de!i TreTv, iT60ev, o) yap Eai-l T w60ev' oTe yap pXeOi-tan, oE TRTSrta' tv ov6a/tov, 2a ovErai Te Ica of Oaveiat-' (&aO o' XP;6 dtvceiv, Gdus' ]vxe, /yEfvtv, eowf OV )avi, 7rapacocevicavra Eavrav evar-v elvat, 6Tairep of OaoXtg dva-roS2a ux2tov Erepyleve,) O df VberEoavei 7-ov O6pi[ov-rof, e: ceavof baouCv Gt roii-tTra, EOKEcev Eav7vT OceaacOatc ToG o/tactv. Enn v. 5. S. —Ed.] P.'375 of Creuzer's edit. The parentheses note the part of the passage quoted in the text. —. C.] BIOGRAPIIA LITERARIA. 829 and cultivated classes. A system, the first principle of which it is to render the mind intuitive of the spiritual in man (i. e. of that which lies on the other side of our natural consciousness) must needs have a great obscurity for those, who have never disciplined and strengthened this ulterior consciousness. It must in truth be a land of darkness, a perfect Anti- Goshen, for men to whom the noblest treasures of their own being are reported only through the imperfect translation of lifeless and sightless motions. Perhaps, in great part, through words which are but the shadows of notions; even as the notional understanding itself' is but the shadowy abstraction of living and actual truth. On the IrIMEDIATE, which dwells in every man, and on the original intuition, or absolute affirmation of it, (which is likewise in every man, but does not in every man rise into consciousness), all the certaizty of our knowledge depends; and this becomes intelligible to no man by the ministry of mere words from without. The medium, by which spirits understand each other, is not the surrounding air; but the freedomn which they possess in common, as the common ethereal element of their being, the tremulous reciprocations of which propagate themselves even to the inmost of the soul. Where the spirit of man is not filled with the consciousness of freedom (were it only from its restlessness, as one struggling in bondage) all spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with others, but even with himself. No wonder then, that he remains incomprehensible to himself as well as to others. No wonder, that, in the fearful desert of his consciousness, he wearies himself out with empty words, to which no friendly echo answers, either from his own heart, or the heart of a fellow-being; or beAwilders himself in the pursuit of' nzotio1nal phantoms, the mere refractions from unseen and distant truths through the distorting mlledium of his own. unenlivened and stagnant understanding! To remain unintelligible to- such a mind, exclaims Schellino on a like occasion, is honor and a good name before God and man. The history of philosophy (the same writer observes) contaisis instances of systems, which for successive generations have remained enigmatic. Such he deems the system of Leibnitz, whom another writer (rashly I tihinlk, and invidiously) extols as the only, philosopher, who was himself deeply convinced of his own doe 380 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. trines.* As hitherto interpreted, however, they have not produced the effect, which Leibnitz himself, in a most instructive passage, describes as the criterion of a true philosophy; namely, that it would at once explain and collect the fragments of truth scattered through systems apparently the most incongruous. The truth, says he, is diffused more widely than is commonly believed; but it is often painted, yet oftener masked, and is sometimes mutilated and sometimes, alas! in close alliance with mischievous errors. The deeper, however, we penetrate into the ground of things, the more truth we discover in the doctrines of the greater number of the philosophical sects. The want of su6zstantial reality in the objects of the senses, according to the skeptics; the harmonies or numbers, the prototypes and ideas, to which * [The observations of Schelling referred to here and in the previous paragraph are as follows: "A philosophy the first principle of which is to call forth to consciousness the spiritual in man, namely that which lies on the other side the consciousness, must needs have a great unintelligibility for those who have not exercised and strengthened this spiritual consciousness, or to whom even that in themselves, which is most excellent, is wont to appear only through dead intuitionless conceptions. The Immediate, which is in every one, and on the original intuition whereof (which" [original intuition] " likewise is in every one, but comes not in every one to consciousness), all certainty of our knowledge depends, is intelligible to no one through words, that pass into him from without. The medium, through which spirits understand one another, is not the surrounding air, but the common freedom, the vibrations whereof(deren Erschiitterungen) propagate themselves even to the innermost part of the soul. When the spirit of a man is not filled with the consciousness of freedom, all spiritual connection is broken off, not only with others, but even with himself; no wonder that he remains unintelligible to himself as well as to others, and in his femrful solitude only wearies himself with empty words, to which no friendly echo —-out of his own or another's breast-replies. " To remain unintelligible to such a one is glory and honor before God and maian. " The history of philosophy contains examples of systems, which, for several centuries, have remained enigmatical. A philosopher whose principles are to solve all these riddles, declares lately of Leibnitz, that he is probably the only rnan, in the history of philosophy, who has attained conviction, the only man therefore who is right at bottom. This declaration is remarkable, because it shows that the time is come for understanding Leibnitz. For, as he has been hitherto understood, he is unintelligible, however right he may be at bottom." Transl. (Abhandlungen zur Erlaiiter. des Id. der Wiss.Phil. Schrift. pp. 327-8.)-S. C.] BIOGRAPI-IIA LITERARIA. 331 the Pythagoreans and Platonists reduced all things; the ONE and ALL of Parmenides and Plotinus, without" Spinozisml; the necessary connection of things according to the Stoics, reconcilable with the spontaneity of the other schools; the vital-philosophy of the Cabalists and Hermetists, who assumed the universality of sensation; the substantial forms and entelechies of Aristotle and the schoolmen, together with the mechanical solution of all particular phenomnena according to Democritus and the recent philosophers —all these we shall filnd united in one perspective central point, which shows regularity and a coincidence of all * This is happily effected in three lines by Synesius, in his TnInD HTYMN I'Ev Kai THav'ra-(taken by itself) is Spinfozxism.'Ev 6''Arav'rrv-a mere Anina kArundi.'Ev re 7rp6 7rdavr)v —is mechanical Theism.l But unite all three, and the result is the Theism of St. Paul and Christianity. Synesius was censured for his doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul; but never, that I can find, arraigned or deemed heretical for his Pantheism, though neither Giordano Bruno, nor Jacob Behmen ever avowed it more broadly. Migag d6' N6og, Td re icsal Tr Fyet, Bv0ov dljiJrov AuptXopeVo6v. Z9 rb v6riCsov fbvg, 2V) Vr ort sr6yevov' Z9i rb hrorf~ov, Z V ro auTzr6,tevov' Z) vrb ~atv6# evov, VI ro s0pvcrvrevov Iialc dvyacr. "Ev at ircivra, "Ev lcaO' eavrO, Kac 6dt( wrdvr7v.2 Pantheism is therefore not necessarily irreligious or heretical; though it may be i;aught atheistically. Thus Spinoza would agree with Synesius in calling God v'aLt'v Noepoif, the Nature in Intelligences; but he could not subscribe to the preceding Nbv~c al voepbf, i. e. Himself Intelligence and intelligent. In this biographical sketch of my literary life I may be excused, if I mention here, that I had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius fronm the Greelk into English Anacreontics before my fifteenth year. [Hymn. Tert. v. 180.-S. C.] 2 [Ibid. v. 187.-S. C.] 332 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. the parts in the very object, which from every other point of view must appear confused and distorted. The spirit of sectarianism has been hitherto our fault, and the cause of our failures. We have imprisoned our own conceptions by the lines, which we have drawn, in order to exclude the conceptions of others.'ai trouv6 que la plupaq't des Sectes ont raison dans une bonnec pa)'tie de ce qu'elles avan7cent, mais nonz ps tCant en ce qu'elles nient.* A system, which aims to deduce the memory with all the other functions of intelligence, must of course place its first position from beyond the memory, and anterior to it, otherwise the principle of solution would be itself a part of the problem to be solved. Such a position therefore must, in the first instance, be demanded, and the first question will be, by what right is it demanded? On this account I think it expedient to make some preliminary remarks on the introduction of Postulates in philosophy.t The word postulate is borrowed from the science of mathematics.* In geometry the primary construction is not demonstrated, but postulated. The first and most simple construction in space is the point in motion, or the line. Whether the point is moved in one and the same direction, or whether its direction is continually changed, remains as yet undetermined. But if the direction of the point have been determined, it is either by a point without it, and then there arises the straight line which incloses no space; or the direction of the point is not determined by a point without it, and then it must flow back again on itself, that is, there arises a cyclical line, which does inclose a space. If the straight line be assumed as the positive, the cyclical is then the negation of the straight. It is a line, which at no point strikes out into the * [See Appendix P.-S. C.] 1 [The following remarks, contained in this and the next two paragraphs, as far as the reference to Plotinus, are borrowed from Schelling, only a few words here and there being added or altered by Mr. Coleridge. See Abhancdlungen zur Erlaiiter. &ec. Phil. Schrift. pp. 329-30-31-32. Mr. C. has expanded the conclusion of the passage which in the German author stands thus: " Philosophy is to him a fabric of air, even as to one born deaf the most excellent theory of music if he knew not, or (lid not believe, that other men have a sense more than he, must seern a vain play with conceptions, which may have connection in itself indeed, but at bottom has absolutely no reality." Transl.-S. C.]:. See Schell. Ab6lindl. zur E rlaiiter. des 1d. der WIissenschaftslehre. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 333 straight, but changes its direction continuously. But if the primary line be col:ceived as unldetermnined, and the straight line as determined throughout, then the cyclical is the third compound of both. It is at once undetermined and determined; undetermined through any point without, and determined through itself. Geometry therefore supplies philosophy with the example of a primary intuition, from which every science that lays claim to evidence must take its commencement. The mathematician does not begin with a demonstrable proposition, but with an intuition, a practical idea. But here an important distinction presents itself. Philosophy is employed on objects of the innier SENSE, and can not, like geometry, appropriate to every construction a correspondent ozutvwacrd intuition. Nevertheless philosophy, if it is to arrive at evidence, must proceed from the most original construction, and the question then is, what is the most original construction or first productive act for the inner sense. The answer to this question depends on the direction which is given to the inner sense. But in philosophy the inner sense can not have its direction determined by any outward object. To the original construction of the line I can be compelled by a line drawn before me on the slate or on sand. The stroke thus drawn is indeed not the line itself, but only the image or picture of the line. It is not from it, that we first learn to know the line; but, on the contrary, we bring this stroke to the original line generated by the act of the imagination; otherwise we could not define it as without breadth or thickness. Still, however, this stroke is the sensuous image of the original or ideal line, and an efficient mean to excite eve'ry imagination to the intuition of it. It is demanded then, whether there be found any means in philosophy to determine the direction of the inner sense, as in mathematics it is determinable by its specific image or outward picture. Now the inner sense has its direction determined for the greater part only by an act of freedom. One man's consciousness extends only to the pleasant or unpleasant sensations caused in him by external impressions; another enlarges his inner sense to a consciousness of forms and quantity; a third in addition to the image is conscious of the conception or notion of the thing; a fourth attains to a notion of his notions —he reflects on his own reflections; and thus we may say without impropri. 834 BIOGRAPIHIA LITERARIA. ety, that the one possesses more or less inner sense, than the other.. This more or less betrays already, that philosophy in its first principles must have a practical or moral, as well as a theoretical or speculative side. This difference in degree does not exist in the mathematics. Socrates in Plato shows, that anl ignorant slave may be brought to understand and of himself to solve the most difficult geometrical problem. Socrates drew the figures for the slave in the sand. The disciples of the critical philosophy could likewise (as was indeed actually done by La Forge and some other followers of Des Cartes) represent the origin of our representations in copper-plates; but no one has yet attempted it, and it would be utterly useless. To an Esquimaux or New Zealander our most popular philosophy would be wholly unintelligible. The sense, the inward organ, for it is not yet born in him. So is there many a one among us, yes, and some who think themselves philosophers too, to whom the philosophic organ is entirbly wanting. To such a man philosophy is.a mere play of words and notions, like a theory of music to'the deaf, or like the geometry of light to the blind. The connection of the parts and their logical dependencies may be seen and remembered: but the whole is groundless and hollow, unsustained by living contact, unaccompanied with any realizing intuition which exists by and in the act that affirms its existence, which is known, because it is, and is, because it is known. The words of Plotinus, in the assumed person of Nature, hold true of the philosophic energy. TV OswVso?sv, OeWo0,UU 770otl, a7[,QS of yEU),Igqeat O6w@*BT8g ygbd9e5l>* G1i EUH Am ^[ 0&0 8aqc7u li8, t+G(X5TCI a.cv aiwUdwYV 7yqaua(l. With me the act of contemplation makes the thing contemplated, as the geornetricians contemplating describe lines correspondent; but I not describing lines, but simply contemplating, the representative forms of things rise up into existence. * [Kac.e At~ 6e& avir)v fpotro TrVOC evetKa Trotde, El too ipwreSvro7 iOxot Eratetv eKa? 2yetv, eirrot'v &xpiv uav F Eporyv, dcp6) 2 2 vuva2 Uai a)vt ir v Gttenr,, SsaTrep iyi) cOrtr6, Kica o.nc EiOt/xat 2.iyetv. Ti oiv'avvtvat; 6rt rT yev6#ev6v ETat QOeaua ebv, atr vG atc, tlci ~8aet yevvouevov OeSpyca, Kai /tot'yevouev. Eic Oepicat rqif -J rt'v v'atv exev OtloOedEO ova r(mipxet, Ica'i T Oewpoav,ov, Oer6pqyTa iroeei, ra'rep Oi 7ye/ETipat OeopoivreC ypapOVatv- ca';,' iFuo~i /s ypa~ovaTc, OseopoCTaf Ce', Vi~iGravrat at rTCv acdairovT ypa itaG, CaCrep Ecri-rriovaatl Kai ot rco' T rO oi tpbi /pci 7ia V yetvatevcW V OwdpXle wr0or. Enn. iii. 8. 3.-E-d. P. 634, of Crcuzer's edit.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 835 The postulate of philosophy and at the same time the test of philosophic capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF! (E cclo descendlit, 1i'O auaveauov.) And this at once practically and speculatively. For as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of BEING altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative nor. merely practical, but both in one. All knowledge' rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject.* (My readers have been warned in a former chapter that, for their convenience as well as the writer's, the.term, subject, is used by me in its scholastic sense as equivalent to mind or sentient being, and as the necessary correlative of object or quicquid objicitur menti.) For we can know that only which is true: and the truth is universally placed in the coincidence of the thought with the thing, of the representation with the object represented. Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE, we will henceforth call TArKE,F confining the term to its passive and material sense, as comprising all the phcenomena by which its existence is made kno-wn to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is suBJEcTrVE, we may comprehend in the name of the SELF or INTELLIGENCE. Both conceptions are in necessary antithesis. Intelligence is conceived of as exclusively representative, nature as exclusively represented; the one as conscious, the other as without consciousness. Now in all. acts of positive knowledge there is required a reciprocal concurrence of both, namely, of the conscious being, and of that which is in itself unconscious. Our problem is to explain this concurrence, its possibility and its necessity...'During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and the sub jective are so instantly united, that we can not determine to which of the two the priority belongs. There is here no first, and no second; both are coinstantaneous and one. While I am attempting to explain this intimate coalition, I must suppose it dissolved. I must necessarily set out friom the one, to which therefore I give * [This sentence and, with the exception of the parenthesis immediately succeeding it, all that follows, as far as the words "mechanism of the heavenly motions," is to be found in Schelling's Transsc. Id. pp. 1-4: but a few explanatory expressions are added, and some sentences are a little altered and differently arranged.-S. C.] 336 BIOGRAPHIA LITERALRIA. hypothetical antecedence, in order to arrive at the other. But as there are but two factors or elements in the problem, subject and object, and as it is left indeterminate from which of them I should commence, there are two cases equally possible. 1. EITHER THE OBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THEN WE ItAVE TO ACCOUNT FOR THE SUPERVENTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE, WHICH COALESCES WITH IT. The notion of the subjective is not contained in the notion of the objective. On the contrary they mutually exclude each other. The subjective therefore must supervene to the objective. The conception of nature does not apparently involve the co-presence of an intelligence making an ideal duplicate of it, that is, representing it. This desk fobr instance would (according to our natural notions) be, though there should exist no sentient being to look at it. This then is the problem of natural philosophy. It assumes the objective or unconscious nature as the first, and has therefore to explain how intelligence can supervene to it, or how itself can grow into intelligence.. If it should appear, that all enlightened naturalists, without having distinctly proposed the problem to themselves, have yet constantly moved in the liie of its solution, it must afford a strong presumption that the problem itself is founded in nature.* For if all knowledge has, as it were, two poles reciprocally required and presupposed, all sciences must proceed from the one or the other, and must tend toward the opposite as far as the equatorial point in which both are reconciled and become identical. The necessary tendence therefore of all natural philosophy is from nature to intelligence; and this, and no other is the true ground and occasion of the instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural zphcenomena. The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect. The phcenomnena (the mater'ial) must wholly disappear, and the laws alone (the fo'rmal) must remain. Thence it comes, that in nature itself the more the principle of law breaks forth, the more does the husk drop off, the phcenomena themselves become more spiritual and at length cease alto* [Schelling's words correspondent to this last sentence are these: " That the science of Nature at least approximates to the solution of the problem really-and without knowing it-can be only briefly shown here." X&'ansl. lb. p. 3. —S. C.] BIOGRAPI'IA LITERARIA. 837 gether in our consciousness. The optical phzenomnenza are but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn by light, and the materiality of this light itself has already become matter of doubt. In the appearances of magnetism all trace of matter is lost, and of the phcenomena of gravitation, which not a few among the most illustrious Newtonians* have declared no otherwise comprehensible than as an immediate spiritual influence, there remains nothing but its law, the execution of which on a vast scale is the mechanism of the heavenly motions.t The theory [" Which searchers of Nature themselves thought it only possible to conceive," &c. Schelling, Ib. p. 4.-S. C.] f [After " the mechanism of the heavenly motions," Schelling proceeds thus-" The perfected theory of nature would be that, in virtue of which all nature should resolve itself into an intelligence. The dead and unconscious products of NYCature are only abortive attempts of Nature to reflect herself; but the so nzamed DEAD nature in general is an unripe intelligence; thence through her PHstNOMIENA, even while yet unconscious, the intelligent character discovers itself." The sentence in italics is omitted by Mr. C., who says of it, in a note: "True or false this position is too early. Nothing precedent has explained, much less proved, it true." "The highest aim, to become completely an object to self, Nature first attains through the highest and last reflection, which is no other than man, or that which we coml1monly call reason, through which Nature first returns completely into herself, and whereby it becomes evident, that Nature originally is identical with that which is known in us as intelligence and consciousness." "This may suffice to show that the knowledge of Nature necessarily tends to represent Nature as intelligent; it is precisely through this tendency that it becomes Nature-Philosophy, which is the one necessary groundknowledge of philosophy." The substance of the foregoing paragraphs is contained in pp. 337-9 of the Biographia, with some additions. Then after the second statement of the problem, which is given verbatinm from Schelling by Mr. C., and, after six paragraphs which he omits, the.7;'anssc. Id. proceeds as follows: "As thle natural philosopher, whose attention is directed solely to the objective, seeks to prevent nothing so much as the blending of the subjective in his knowledge, so, conversely, the Transcendental philosopher (objects to nothing so much) as any admixture of the objective in the pure subjective plrinciple of knowledge. The means of separation is absolute skepticism-not the half sort, directed only against the common prejudices of men, which yet never sees into the ground; but the comprehensive skepticism, which is aimed not against single prejudices, but against the fundamenortal prejudice, with which all others must fall of themselves. For beside the artificial prejudices, introduced into man, there are others, far more original, planted in him not by instruction or art, but by Nature herself; which, with all but the philosopher, stand for the principles of all knowledge, and VOL. ITI. P 338 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARTA. of natural philosophy would then be completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as intelligence and selfi consciousness; when the heavens and the earth shall declare not only the power of their Maker, but the glory and the presence of their God, even as lie appeared to the great Prophet during the vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity. This may suffice to show, that even natural science, which commences with the material phcenomenonz as the reality and substance of things existing, does yet by the necessity of theorizing unconsciously, and as it were instinctively, end in nature as an intelligence; and by this tendency the science of nature becomes finally natural philosophy, the one of the two poles of findamental science. 2. OR THE SUBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND'THE PROBLEM THEN IS, HOW THERE SUPERVENES TO IT A COINCIDENT OBJECTIVE. In the pursuit of these sciences, our success in each, depends on an austere and faithful adherence to its own principles with a careful separation and exclusion of those, which appertain to the opposite science. As the natural philosopher, who directs his views to the objective, avoids above all things the intermixture of the subjective in his knowledge, as for instance, arbitrary suppositions or rather suffictions, occult qualities, spiritual agents, and the substitution of final for efficient causes; so on the other hand, the transcendental or intelligential philosopher is equally anxious to preclude all interpolation of the objective into the subjective principles of his science, as for instance the assumption of impresses or configurations in the brain, correspondent to miniature pictures on the retina painted by rays of light from supposed originals, which are not the immediate and real objects of vision, but deductions from it fbr the purposes of explanation. This purification of the mind is effected by an absolute and scientific skepticism, to which the mind voluntarily determines itself foir the specific purpose of future certainty. Des Cartes who (in his meditations) himself first, at least of the moderns, gave a by the mere self-thinker are even considered the touchstone of all truth." l) anssc. Id. p. 8. Transl. The substance of this passage the reader will find in the paragraph of the' B. L. beginning with the words: " In the pursuit of these sciences," pp. 338-9.-S. 0.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 339 beautiful example of this voluntary doubt, this self-determined indetermination, happily expresses its utter difference from the skepticism of vanity or irreligion: Nec tamen in eo Scepticos, imitabale, qui dubitant tantuzn ut dubitent, et prceter incertitudinem ripsai n ihil qzuerunt. Namn contra totus in eo erlam ut aliquid; certi e'epe-rirem.* Nor is it less distinct in its motives and final aim, than in its proper objects, which are not as in ordinary skepticism the prejudices of education and circumstance, but those original and innate prejudices which nature herself has planted in all men, and which to all but the philosopher are the first principles of knowledge, and the final test of truth. t Now these essential prejudices are all reducible to the one fundamental presumption, THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT US. As this on the one hand originates, neither iil grounds nor arguments, and yet on the other hand remains proof against all attempts to remove it by grounds or arguments (natutratn faureca expellas tamnen usque q'edibit;) on the one hand lays claim to IMMUEDIATE certainty as a position at once indemonstrable and irresistible, and yet on the other hand, inasmuch as it refers to something essentially different from ourselves, nay even in opposition to ourselves, leaves it inconceivable how it could possibly become a part of our immediate consciousness (in other words how that, which ex hypothesi is and continues to be extrinsic and alien to our being, should become a modification of our being); the philosopher therefore compels himself to treat this faith as nothing more than a prejudice, innate indeed and connatural, but still a prejudice. $ The other position, which not only claims but necessitates * Des Cartes, )Diss. de Methodo. [Sect. iii. Amstel. 1664, p. 16.-S. C.]. [The contents of this paragraph are to be found in the TYranssc. Id. -pp. 8, 9, only the second sentence in brackets "in other words, &c." being interpolated.-S. C.] t [The passages from which this paragraph is taken stand thus in Schelling: ib. pp. 9, 10. "The contradiction, that a position, wvhich, by its own nature, can not be immediately certain, is nevertheless so blindly, and groundlessly received as such, the Transcendental philosopher can only solve by presuming that the aforesaid position, hiddenly and hitherto unperceivedly, does not (merely) cohere, but is identical-one and the same-with an immediate consciousness; and to demonstrate this identity will be the peculiar business of Transcendental philosophy." " Now for the common use of reason there is nothing immediately certain 340 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. the admission of its immediate certainty, equally for the scientific reason of the philosopher as for the common sense of mankind at large, namely, I AMH, call not so properly be entitled a prejudice. It is groundless indeed; but then in the very idea it precludes all ground, and separated from the immediate consciousness loses its whole sense and import. It is groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other certainty. Now the apparent contradiction, that the former position, namely, the existence of things without us, which from its nature call not be immediately certain, should be received as blindly and as independently of all grounds as the existence of our own being, the Transcendental philosopher can solve only by the supposition, that the former is unconsciously involved in the latter; that it is not only coherent but identical, and one and the same thing with our own immediate self consciousness. To demonstrate this identity is the office and object of his philosophy. x If it be said, that this is idealism, let it be remembered that it is only so far idealism, as it is at the same time, and on that. very account, the truest and most binding realism. For wherein does the realism of mankind properly consist? In the assertion but the position I aem, which, because out of immediate consciousness it even loses its meaning, is the most individual of all truths, and the absolute prejudice, which must be assumed in the first place if' any thing else is to have certainty. Consequently the position, Tlhere are tlings withiout Zus, for the Transcendental philosopher will only be certain through its identity with the position I am, and its certainty will only be equal to the certainty of the position from which it borrows its own." Transl.-S. C.] * [For the contents of this paragraph as far as the words "mechanical philosophy," see Abhtazdluagen, Phil. Schrift. pp. 273, 274. Compare also the first sentence with the Transsc. Id. pp. 148, 149. " Thence the improper Idealism, that is, a system which converts all knowledge into mere appearance, must be that which takes away all immediateness in our perceptions by placing originals out of us independent of our representations; whereas a system, -hich seeks the origin of things in the activity of the spirit, even because it is the most perfect Idealism, must at the same time be the most perfect Realism. That is to say, if the most perfect Realism is that which knows the things in themselves and immediately, this is possible only in a Nature, which beholds in the things only her own, through her own activity limited, Reality. For such a Nature, as the indwelling soul of the things, would penetrate them as her own immediate organism: and, even as the artificer most perfectly knows his own work, would look through their inner mechanism." Trausl.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 341 that there exists a something without them, what, or how, or where they know not, which occasions the objects of their perception? Oh no! This is neither connatural nor universal. It is what a few have taught and learned in the schools, and which the many repeat without asking themselves concerning their own meaning. The realism common to all mankind is far elder and lies infinitely deeper than this hypothetical explanation of the origin of our perceptions, an explanation skimmed from the mere surface of mechanical philosophy. It is the table itself, which the man of common sense believes himself to see, not the phantom of a table, from which he may argumnentatively deduce the reality of a table, which he does not see. If to destroy the reality of all, that we actually behold, be idealism, what can be more egregiously. so, than the system of modern metaphysics, which banishes us to a land of shadows, surrounds us with apparitions, and distinguishes truth from illusion only by the majority of those who dream the same dream? "I asserted that the world was mad," exclaimed poor Lee, " and the world said, that I was mad, and confound them, they outvoted me." v It is to the true and original realism, that I would direct the attention. This believes and requires neither more nor less, than that the object which it beholds and presents to itself, is the real and very object. In this sense, however much we may strive against it, we are all collectively born idealists, and therefore and only therefore are we at the same time realists. But of this the philosophers of the schools know nothing, or despise the faith as the prejudice of the ignorant vulgar, because they live and move in a crowd of phrases and notions from which human nature has long ago vanished. Oh, ye that reverence yourselves, and walk humbly with the divinity in your own hearts, ye are worthy of a better philosophy Let the dead bury the dead, but do you preserve your human, nature, the depth of which was never yet fathomed by a philosophy made up of notions and mere logical entities In the third treatise of my Logosop2hia, announced at the end a* [This paragraph is contained in Abtandlzengen, Phil. Schrift. pp. 2745. Compare also with Ideen, pp. 63-4. In the latter (p. 64), Schelling affirms-" Nature must be visible spirit, spirit invisible nature. Here then in the absolute identity of the spirit in us, and of nature out of us, must the problem, how a nature without us is possible, be solved."-S. C.] 842 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. of this volume, I shall give (Deo volente) the demonstrations and constructions of' the Dynamic Philosophy scientifically arranged. It is, according to my conviction, no other than the system of Pythagoras and of Plato revived and purified from impure mixtures. Doctrina per tot manus tradita tandem in vappan desiit!"* The science of arithmetic furnishes instances, that a rule may be useful in practical application, and for the particular purpose may be sufficiently authenticated by the result, before it has itself been fully demonstrated. It is enough, if only it be rendered intelligible. This will, I trust, have been effected in the following Theses for those of my readers, who are willing to accompany me through the following chapter, in which the results will be applied to the deduction of the Imagination, and with it the principles of production and of' genial criticism in the fine arts. THESIS I.1 Truth is correlative to being. Knowledge without a correspondent reality is no knowledge; if we know, there must be somewhat known by us. To know is in its very essence a verb active. THESIS II. All truth is either mediate, that is, derived from some other truth or truths; or immediate and original. The latter is absolute, and its formula A. A.; the former is of dependent or conditional certainty, and represented in the formula B. A. The certainty, which inheres in A, is attributable to B. SCHOLIUM. A chain without a staple, from which all the links derived their stability, or a series without a first, has been * [This quotation is applied by Schelling to Leibnitz in the same treatise. Phil. Schrift. p. 212.-S. C.] f [It has been said that these first six Theses are "mainly taken from Schelling." I can give no references to the works of that philosopher for any of the sentences as they stand.' The reader, however, may compare the beginning of Thesis IV. with the Tr'anssc. Id. p. 48; and the beginning of Thesis V. with the same, p. 49.-S. C.] 1 [They are a condensation and re-composition of the first part of the YTom ich als Princip. &c. &c. Phil. Schrift. For a full and rigorous development of this theory of consciousness see Gabler's Kritik des Bewusztseyns and Ilegel's PhItnomenologie.-Am. Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 848 not inaptly allegorized, as a string of blind men, each holding the skirt of the man before him, reaching far out of sight, but all moving without the least deviation in one straight line. It would be naturally taken for granted, that there was a guide at the head of the file: what if it were answered, No! Sir, the men are without number, and infinite blindness supplies the place of sight? Equally inconceivable is a cycle of equal truths without a common and central principle, which prescribes to each its proper sphere in the system of science. That the absurdity does not so immediately strike us, that it does not seem equally ttnimzaginable, is owing to a surreptitious act of the imagination, which, instinctively and without our noticing the same, not only fills up the intervening spaces, and contemplates the cycle (of B. C. D. E. F. &c.) as a continuous circle (A.) giving to all collectively the unity of their common orbit; but likewise supplies, by a sort of subintellig'itur, the one central power, which renders the movement harmonious and cyclical. THESIS III. We are to seek therefore for some absolute truth capable of communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself borrowed; a truth self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own light. In short, we have to find a somewhat which is, simply because it is. In order to be such, it must be one which its own predicate, so far at least that all other nominal predicates must be modes and repetitions of itself. Its existence too must be such, as to preclude the possibility of requiring a cause or antecedent without an absurdity. THESIS IV. That there can be but one such principle,' may be proved ct priori; for were there two or more, each must refer to some other, by which its equality is affirmed; consequently neither would be self-established, as the hypothesis demands. And ca posteriori, it will be proved by the principle itself when it is discovered, as involving universal antecedence in its very conception. SCioLIuM. If we affima of' a board that it is blue, the predi* [See Note, ip. 347. —S..] X,,.h 344 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. cate (blue) is accidental, and not implied in the subject, board. If we affirm of a circle that it is equi-radial, the predicate indeed is implied in the definition of the subject; but the existence of the subject itself is contingent, and supposes both a cause and a percipient. The same reasoning will apply to the indefinite number of supposed indemonstrable truths exempted firom the profane approach of philosophic investigation by the amiable Beattie, and other less eloquent and not more profound inaugurators of common sense on the throne of philosophy; a ftuitless attempt, were it only that it is the two-fold function of philosophy to reconcile reason with commron sense, and to elevate common sense into reason. THESIS V. Such a principle can not be any THIING or osJEcx'. Each thing is iwhat it is in consequence of some other thing. An infinite, independent*,' thing, is no less a conrtradiction, than an infinite circle or a sideless triangle. Besides a thing is that, which is capable of being an object of which itself is not the sole percipient. But an object is inconceivable without a subject as its antithesis. Omne _perceptnrn percipienteln suvponzit. But neither can the principle be found in a subject as a subject, contra-distinguished from an object: for unicuiquee percipienti aliquid objiciztur pe'rceptum. It is to be found, therefore, neither in object nor subject taken separately, and consequently, as no other third is conceivable, it must be found in that which is neither subject nor object exclusively, but which is the identity of both. TIIESIS VI. This principle, and so characterized, lsanifbsts itself in the SorUM or I AM; which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words spirit, self, and self-consciousness. In this, amnd in this alone, object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, ~ The impossibility of an absolute thing (substanztia -tzica) as neither gemns, species, nor sidivi dulc,m: as well as its ovtter unfitness for the fundamental positior of a phlilosophic system, will be demonstirated in the critique on Spinozism in the fifth treatise of my Logosophia. [T'ios is the great philosophical work, to preparations for *which Mr. C. devoted so much time and thought during his latter years.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 845 each involving and supposing the other.* In other words, it is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject. It may be described, therefore, as a perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and subject, which pre-suppose each other, and can exist only as antitheses. SCHOLIUrM. If a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only answer, sumz quia sunm. But if (the absoluteness of this certainty having been admitted) he be again asked, how he, the individual person, came to be, then in relation to the ground of his existence, not to the ground of his knzowledge of that existence, he might reply, sumz quia Dens est, or still more philosophically, sum qutia in Deo sutm. But if' we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal I AM, then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea, and of reality; the ground of existence, and the ground of the knowledge of existence, are absolutely identical, Sum quict sumn;t I am, because! affirm myself to be; I affirm myself to be, because I am. * [" The I is nothing separate from its thinking;-the thinking of the I and the I itself are absolutely one; the I, therefore, in general, is nothing out of thinking, consequently no thing, no matter, but to all infinity the non-objective. The I is certainly an object, but only for itself; it is not therefore originally in the world of objects. It first becomes an object by making itself an object, and it becomes an object not for something without, but ever for itself alone."'7Tanssc. Id. Transl. pp. 47-8.-S. C.] f It is most worthy of notice, that in the first revelation of himself, not confined to individuals; indeed in the very first revelation of his absolute being, Jehovah at the same time revealed the fundamental truth of all philosophy, which must either commence with the absolute, or have no fixed commencement; that is, cease to be philosophy. I can not but express my regret, that in the equivocal use of the word that, for ixn that, or because, our admirable version has rendered the passage susceptible of a degraded interpretation in the mind of common leaders or hearers, as if it were a mere reproof to an impertinent question, I am whlat I am, which might be equally affirmed of himself by any existent being. The Cartesian Cogito ergo smn'l is objectionable, because either the Cogito is used extra graduim, and then it is involved in the sutm and is tautological; or it is taken as a particular mode or dignity, and then it is subordinated [Principia Philosophice. Pars Prima, ppgh. vi. and x. See also De 3~ethodo, iv. pp. 18-19, edit. 1664.-S. C.] P* 846 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. THESIS VII.* If then I know myself only through myself, it is contradictory to require any other predicate of self, but that of self-consciousness. Only in the self-consciousness of a spirit is there the required identity of object and of representation; for herein consists the essence of a spirit, that it is self-representative. If, therefore, this be the one only immediate truth, in the certainty of which the reality of our collective knowledge is grounded, it must follow that the spirit in all the objects which it views, views only itself. If this could be proved, the immediate reality of all intuitive knowledge would be assured. It has been shown, that a spirit is that, which is its own object, yet not originally an object, but an absolute subject for which all, itself included, may to the sum as the species to the genus, or rather as a particular modification to the subject modified; and not pre-ordinated as the arguments seem to require. For Cogito is Sumn Cogitans. This is clear by the inevidence of the converse. Cogitat, ergo est is true, because it is a mere application of the logical rule: Quicquid in genere est, est et in specie. Est (cogitans), ergo est. It is a cherry-tree; therefore it is a tree. But, est ergo cogitat, is illogical: for quod est in specie, 0non ucEsssARo in gennere est. It may be true. I hold it to be true, that quicquid vere est, est per verane sui a qirmationem; but it is a derivative, not an immediate truth. Here then we have, by anticipation, the distinction between the conditional finite I (which, as known in distinct consciousness by occasion of experience, is called by Kant's followers the empirical I) and the absolute I AM, and likewise the dependence or rather the inherence of the former in the latter; in whom'w we live, and move, and have our being," as St. Paul divinely asserts, differing widely from the Theists of the mechanic school (as Sir I. Newton, Locke, and others) who must say from whom we had our being, and with it life and the powers of life. * [The contents of Theses VII. VIII. may be found scattered about in Schelling's Abhlandlunngen, Phil. Schrift. 223-4-5. Only the sentences at the end of Thesis VII. from " Again, the spirit," to the end, I do not find formally expressed in Schelling's treatise, with the exception of the words, " identity of object and subject." At pp. 223-4 Schelling says, " In regard to every other object I am obliged to ask how the being of the same is brought into connection (vermittelt) with my representation. But originally I am not any thing that exists for a knowing subject, out of myself, as matter does, but I exist for myself; in me is the original identity of subject and object, of knowing and of being." See also how this doctrine is applied in the TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM, p. 63. The last sentence of Thesis VIII. I have not met with in Schelling.S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 347 become an object. It must, therefore, be an ACT; for every object is, as an object, dead, fixed, incapable-in itself of any action, and necessarily finite. Again the spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this identity, in order to be conscious of it; fit alter et idem. But this implies an act, and it follows, therefore, that intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will. The self-conscious spirit, therefore, is a will; and freedom must be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it. THESIS VIII. Whatever in its origin is objective, is likewise as such necessarily finite. Therefore, since the spirit is not originally an object, and as the subject exists in antithesis to an object, the spirit can not originally be finite. But neither can it be a subject without becoming an object, and, as it is originally the identity of both, it can be conceived neither as infinite nor finite exclusively, but as the most original union of both. In the existence, in the reconciling, and the recurrence of this contradiction consists the process and mystery of production and life. TIIHESIS IX. This principium comemrune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a WILL, or primary ACT of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect principle of every science; but it is the immediate and direct principle of the ultimate science alone, i. e. of transcendental philosophy alone. For it must be remembered, that all these Theses refer solely to one of the two Polar Sciences, namely, to that which commences with, and rigidly confines itself within, the subjective, leaving the objective (as far as it is exclusively objective) to natural philosophy, which is its opposite pole. In its very idea therefore as a systemratic knowledge of our collective KNOWING (scientia scientice) it involves the necessity of some one highest principle of knowing, as at once the source and the accompanying form in all particular acts of intellect and perception.* This, it has been shown, can be found only in the act * [Schelling says in the Transsc. Id. pp. 25-6 that, "if there is a system of knowledge the principle of the same must lie within the knowing itself;" that " this principle can be the only one" and that it is the " mediate or in 348 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. and evolution of self-consciousness. We are not investigating an absolute principiu2~, essendi; ibr then, I admit, many valid objections might be started against our theory; but an absolute principiuznz cognzosceezdi.* The result of both the sciences, or their equatorial point, would be the principle of a total and undivided philosophy, as, for prudential reasons, I have chosen to anticipate in the Sch.olium~ to Thesis VI. and the note subjoined. In other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and religion become inclusive of philosophy. We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I Ar.M. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GoD. THESIS X.f The transcendental philosopher does not inquire, what ultimate ground of our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the last in our knowing itself, beyond which we can not pass. The principle of our knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. It must be something, therefore, which can itself be known. It is asserted only, that the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of all ouzr possible knowledge. Whether abstracted from us there exists any thing higher direct principle of the science of knowing or transcendental philosophy."s. C.' * [This sentence " We are not investigating," &c., is in the Tranissc. Id. p. 27.-S. C.] f [Thesis X. as far as the words " farthest that exist for us" is taken from pp. 27-28 of the Transcendental Idealism; —the remainder of the second paragraph, as far as the words "will or intelligence" from p. 29, with the exception of some explanatory sentences. Schelling's words in the last passage from which Mr. Coleridge has borrowed, are as follows: "To go yet further, it may be shown, and has already been shown in part (Introd. ~ 1) that even when the objective is arbitrarily placed as the first, still we never go beyond self-consciousness. We are then in our explanations either driven back into the infinite, from the grounded to the ground; or we must arbitrarily break off the series by setting up an Absolute, which of itself is cause and effect-subject and object; and since this originally is possible only through self-consciousness-by again putting a self-consciousness as a First; this takes place in natural philosophy, for which Being is not more original than it is for transcendental philosophy, and which places the Reality in an Absolute, which is of itself cause and effect-in the absolute identity of the subjective and objective which we name Nature, and which again in its highest power is no other than self-consciousness." Transl.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 349 and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us the form of all our knowing, must be decided by the result. That the self-consciousness is the fixed point, to which for us all is mortised and annexed, needs no further proof. But that the self-consciousness may be the modification of a higher form of being, perhaps of a highei'rconscioi'sness, and this again of a yet higher, and so on in an infinite regiressus; in short, that self: consciousness may be itself something explicable into something, which must lie beyond the possibility of our knowledge, because the whole synthesis of our intelligence is first formed in and through the self-consciousness, does not at all concern us as transcendental philosophers. For to us the self-consciousness is not a kind of being, but a kind of knowing, and that too the highest and farthest that exists for zus. It may however be shown, and has in part already been shown in page 335, that even when the Objective is assumed as the first, we yet can never pass beyond the principle of self-consciousness. Should we attempt it, we must be driven back from ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a ground the moment we pressed'on it. We must be whirled down the gulf of an infinite series. But this would make our reason baffle the end and purpose of all reason, nanlely, unity and system. Or we must break off the series arbitrarily, and affirm an absolute something that is in and of itself at once cause and effect (causc sui) subject and object, or rather the absolute identity of both. But as this is inconceivable, except in a self-consciousness, it follows, that even as natural philosophers we must arrive at the same principle from which as transcendental philosophers we set out; that is, in a self-consciousness in which the p1rincipium essendi does not stand to the prinqzcipizrn cognoscendi in the relation of cause to effect, but both the one and the other are co-inherent and identical. Thus the true system of natural philosophy places the sole reality of things in an ABSOLUTE, which is at once causa sui et efectus, ncziar;o ao0ror)w,, vtio Eavi-in the absolute identity of subject and object, which it calls nature, and which in its highest power is nothing else but self-conscious will or intelligence. In this sense the position of Malebranche,* that we see all things in God, is a strict philosophical truth; and equally true is the assertion. [See his treatise De la Recherche de la Ver'it. Book iii. especially chap. 6. See Appendix Q.] 350 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. of Hobbes, of Hartley, and of their masters in ancient Greece, that all real knowledge supposes a prior sensation. For sensation itself is but vision nascent, not the cause of intelligence, but intelligence itself revealed as an earlier power in the process of self-constr-uction. Mcicap,'ZaOi uot' IITrep, XZtaOi Hot EL wrapa xSau/ov, Et wCapa fotpav Tev a6v Otyov * Bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-development, not a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all deg'ree, and for the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to kind, under the idea of an indestructible power with two opposite and counteracting forces, whi-cih, by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we may call the centrifugal and centripetal forces. The intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object. It will be hereafter my business to construct by a series of intuitions the progressive schemes, that must follow from such a power with such forces, till I arrive at the fulness of the humann intelligence. For my present purpose, I assume such a power as my principle, in order to deduce from it a faculty, the generation, agency, and application of which form the contents of the ensuing chapter. In a preceding page I have justified the use of technical terms in philosophy, whenever they tend to preclude confusion of thought, and when they assist the memory by the exclusive singleness of their meaning more than they may, for a short time, bewilder the attention by their strangeness. I trust, that I have not extended this privilege beyond the grounds on which I have claimed it; namely, the conveniency of the scholastic phrase to distinguish the kind from all degrees, or rather to express the kind with the abstraction of degree, as for instance nulteity instead of multitude; or secondly, for the sake of correspondence in sound in interdependent or antithetical terms, as subject and object; or lastly, to avoid the wearying recurrence of circumlocutions and definitions. Thus I shall venture to use potence, in order to express a specific degree of a power, in imitation of the Algebraists. I have even hazarded the new verb potenzziate, * [Synesii Episcopi. Hymn iii. 113.1 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 351 with its derivatives, in order to express the combination or transfer of powers. It is with new or unusual terms, as with privileges in courts of justice or legislature; there can be no legitimate privilege, where there already exists a positive law adequate to the purpose; and when there is no law in existence, the privilege is to be justified by its accordance with the end, or final cause, of all law. Unusual and new-coined words are doubtless an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and imperfect conveyance of our thoughts are a far greater. Every system, iwhich is under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the metaphysics in fashion, will be described as written in an unintelligible style, and the author must expect the charge of having substituted learned jargon for clear conception; while, according to the creed of our modern philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear conception, but what is representable by a distinct image. Thus the conceivable is reduced within the bounds of the picturable. Ilinc patet, qtui fiat, utt, cum irreprmsentabile et impossibile vulgo ejtusdem significatus habeantur, conceptuzs tans continui, quam? infiniti, a plurimnis rejiciantur, quippe quor'um, secundum leges cognitionis intuitivae epraesentatio est impossibilis. Quanuqam autemZ haruvm e on panlcis scholis explosarumn notionum, prcesertinm prioris, causamn hic non0 gero, mnaxinmi tamnen momenti erit monuisse: gravissivzo illos errore labi, qui tam perversa argtumentandi,ratione ututntur. Quicquid enim repugnat legibus intellectus et rationis, vtique est imzpossibile; quod autem, cu s' rationis piurce sit objectzum, legibus cognitionis intuitivac tantunmmnodo non subest, nzon itemn. Nancna hic dissensus inter facultatem sensitivam et intellectualem (quar~um indolemn mzox exponamn), nihil izcdigitat, qnisi, quas mens ab intellectu acceptas fert ideas abstractas, illas in concreto exsequi et in intuitus commutare smepenumero non posse. Hiec auctem'elzuctantia subjectiva 7mentitur, fut plZ.'i42um, repugnantiamv aliqzuan objectivarn, et incautos facile fallit, limitibus, quibus mens humana circumscribitur, pro iis habitis, quibus ipsa rerum essentia continetur.* * TRANSLATION. "Hence it is clear, from what cause many reject the notion of the continuous and the infinite. They take, namely, the words irrepresentable and impossible in one and the same meaning; and, according to the forms of sensuous evidence, the notion of the continuous and the infinite is doubtless impossible. I asm not now pleading the cause of these laws, which not a few 852 BIOGRAPIIIA LITERARIA. Critics,* who are most ready to bring this charge of pedantry and unintelligibility, are the most apt- to overlook the important fact, that, besides the language of words, there is a language of spirits (sermo interior)-and that the fbrmer is only the vehicle of the latter. Consequently their assurance, that they do not understand the philosophic writer, instead of proving any thing against the philosophy, may furnish an equal, and (cceteris pa,'ibus) even a stronger presumption against their own philosophic talent. Great indeed are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the concerns and interests of human life, and who bring with them to the perusal of a philosophic system an habitual aversion to all speculations, the utility and application of which are not evident and immediate. To these I would in the first instance merely oppose an authority, which they themselves schools have thought proper to explode, especially the former (the law of continuity). But it is of the highest importance to admonish the reader, that those, who adopt so perverted a mode of reasoning, are under a grievous error. Whatever opposes the formal principles of the understanding and the reason is confessedly impossible; but not therefore that, which is therefore not amenable to the forms of sensuous evidence, because it is exclusively an object of pure intellect. For this non-coincidence of the sensuous and the intellectual (the nature of which I shall presently lay open) proves nothing more, but that the mind can not always adequately represent in the concrete, and transform into distinct images, abstract notions derived from the pure intellect. But this contradiction, which is in itself merely subjective (i. e. an incapacity in the nature of man), too often passes for an incongruity or impossibility in the object (i. e. the notions themselves), and seduces the incautious to mistake the limitations of the human faculties for the limits of things, as they really exist." I take this occasion to observe, that here and elsewhere Kant uses the terms intuition, and the verb active (intceri Germanice anschauen) for which we have unfortunately no correspondent word, exclusively for that which can be represented in space and time. He therefore consistently and rightly denies the possibility of intellectual intuitions. But as I see no adequate reason for this exclusive sense of the term, I have reverted to its wider signification, authorized by our elder theologians and metaphysicians, according to whom the term comprehends all truths known to us without a medium. From Kant's Treatise De nmtndi sensibilis et intelligibilis forrc et principiis, 1770. [(Sect. i. ~ 1. Works, vol. iii. pp. 126-7.)-S. C.] * [This paragraph and the second sentence of the following are nearly the same as some sentences that occur in Abhandlungen, Phil. Sehrift. pp. 203-4.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 358 hold venerable, that of Lord Bacon: non inutiles Scientiac existinandc sent, qua'unz in se nzltlus est usus, Si ingenia acuant et or-dinent.* There are others, whose prejudices are still more formidable inasmuch as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles, which had been alarmed and shocked by the impious and pernicious tenets defended.by Hume, Priestley, and the French fatalists and necessitarians; some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings to the denial of the mysteries and indeed of all the peculiar doctrines of Christianity; and others even to the subversion of all. distinction between right and wrong; I would request such men to consider what an eminent and successful defender of the Christian faith has observed, that true metaphysics are nothing else but true divinity, and that in fact the writers, who have given them such just offence, were sophists, who had taken advantage of the general neglect into which the science of logic has unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians, a name indeed which those writers were the first to explode as unmeaning. Secondly, I would remind them, that as long as there are men in the world to whom the FrvOt aoccrmev,' is an instinct and a command from their own nature, so long will there be metaphysicians and metaphysical speculations; that false metaphysics can be effectually counteracted by true metaphysics alone; and that if the reasoning be clear, solid and pertinent, the truth deduced can never be the less valuable on account of the depth from which it may have been drawn. A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to system or terminology, provided it be the method and the nomenclature to which they have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume, Hartley, Condillac,t or perhaps DPr. Reid,? and Professor Stewart.~ To objections from this cause, it * [De Augmnent. Scient. vi. c. 3.-S. C.] ~ [Appendix Q.]: [Appendix R.] [Schelling also says (in Abhandlungen, Phil. Schrift. p. 204), " Others were not prejudiced against nomenclature, terminology, —the spirit of syste-m in general, —but only against this nomuenclature," namely t;hat orf Kant; which he attributes to their halving been long accustomed to the statements of Leibnitz, who had communicated his philosophical principles fragmentarily, in letters to. friends, or to distinguished and great Lords, ever with much forbearance towards prevailing opinions, and on that account with 354 3BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. is a sufficient answer, that one main object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great Britain since the revolution, and that the errors which I propose to attack can not subsist, except as they are concealed behing the mask of a plausible and indefinite nomenclature. But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. It is that corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics,? who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connection, pick and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select, whatever words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the least expenditure of thought; in short whatever may enable men to talk of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every thing that might awaken them to a moment's suspicion of their ignorance. This, alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with it, not so much an indisposition to any particular system, but an utter loss of taste and faculty for all system and all philosophy. Like echoes that beget each other amongst the mountains, the praise or blame of such men roll in volleys long after the report from the original blunderbuss. Sequacitas est potius et coitio quamn consensus: et tanzen (quod pessinzbun est) pusillanimitts ista non sine arrogantia etfasticlio se offert.t I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but I must first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal of Mr. Wordsworth's rermarks on the Imagination, in his preface to the new edition of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so consistent with his as, I confess, I had taken for granted. In an article contributed by me to Mr. Southey's Omniana, On the soul and its organs of sense, are the following less of sharpness and precision than is suitable to scientific explanation; or to their having grown stiff' in the school-language and method of Wolf.-S. C.] * ["Finally, the last of all, through the impotent shaml philosophy of some waterish authors, or the pandect wisdom of aphoristic eclectics, had lost all sense and taste, not perhaps for a determined system, but for philosophy in general1, before Kant had published a syllable of his philosophy." Transl. (Abhandbl'ngen, Phil. Schrift. p. 204.) S. C.] f Franc. Baconis de Verulam, Nowvui ORGANUM. [Aphorisms LXXVII. and LXXXVIII.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 355 sentences. "These (the human faculties) I would arrange under the different senses and powers: as the eye, the ear, the touch, &c.; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic; the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy, or the aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative, substantiating and realizing power; the speculative reason, vis theoreticac et scientjifica, or the power by which we produce, or aim to produce unity, necessity, and universality in all our knowledge'by means of principles c priori;* the will, or practical reason; the faculty of choice (Gezmanzice, Willkiihr) and (distinct both from the moral will and the choice) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to include under the head of single and double touch." To this, as far as it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative and associative power') Mr. Wordsworth's " objection is only that the definition is too general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy."t I reply, that if, by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the same as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative, I continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the Imagination; and I am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the co-presence of Fancy with Imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may work with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and different. But it will probably appear in the next chapter, that deeming it necessary to go back much further than Mr. Wordsworth's subject required or permitted, I have attached a meaning to both Fancy and Imagination, which he had not in view, at least while he was writing that preface. He will judge. * This phrase, Qpriori, is in common, most grossly misunderstood, and an absurdity burdened on it, which it does not deserve! By knowledge ad priori, we do not mean, that we can know any thing previously to experience, which would be a contradiction in terms; but that having once known it by occasion of experience (that is, something acting upon us from without) we then know, that it must have pre-existed, or the experience itself would have been impossible. By experience only I know, that I have eyes; but then my reason convinces me, that I must have had eyes in order to the experience. I [Preface to the Poetical Works, Vol. i. p. xxxiv.) 356 3BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Would to Heaven, I might meet with many such readers! I will conclude with the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor: " He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace and rest of spirit."* CHAPTER XIII. ON TIE IMAGINATION, on ESEMPLASTIC POWER. O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom All things proceed, and up to him return, If not deprav'd from good, created all Such to perfection, one first matter all Endued. with various forms, various degrees Of substance, and, in things that live, of life; But more refin'd, more spiritous and pure, As nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending, Each in their several active spheres assign'd, Till body up to spirit work, in bounds Propoltion'd to each kind. So from the root Springs lighter the green stalk, fiom thence the leaves More aery: last the bright consummate flower Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit, Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd, To vital spirits aspire: to animal: To intellectual!-give both life and sense, Fancy and understanding; whence the soul REASON receives, and reason is her being, Discursive or intuitive.t'Sane si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent, verissime dicerentur in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam, quemadmodum et Platonici olimn recte agnovere. " Hine igitur, praiter pure mathematica et phantasie subjecta, collegi quwedam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda: et massoe materiali prinecipiuim quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam,formnale addendumn: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerumn corporearum ex solis axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toteo et parte, figura et situ,,oalligi non possint; sed alia de causa et effectu, actioneque et' Jer. Taylor's Via pacis. [Sunday. The First Decad. 8.-S. C.] t Par. Lost. Book v. 1. 469. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 857 passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis rerum rationes salventur. Id principium rerum, an 4vrerexciav an vim appellemus, non refert, modo menminerimus, per solam Virimu notionem, intelligibiliter explicari."* poosal voepev K,ovpiav TftSv. Xopet TI MEZON Ov KaraXv&S v.f DES CARTES,$ speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes, said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe. We must of course understand him to have meant: I will render the construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the transcendental philosopher says: grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you. Every other science pre-supposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity. The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of * Leibnitz. Op. T. ii. P. ii. p. 53.-T. iii. p. 321. [The first sentence of this quotation is from the treatise of Leibnitz De Ipsea Natura, sive de Vi insita Actionibusque creaturarum, ~ 8. ed. Erdmann. P. i. p. 157:-the second is from his Specimen Dynamicumz, pro admirandis NVturme leygibus circa corporTum WVires, et mutuas Actiones detegendis et ad suas causas revocandis. Ex Actis Erudit. Lips. ann. 1695. In the second extract Mr. C. has substituted the word phantasie for imzaginationi, and, in the beginning of the last sentence rerum for fornman. He quoted from the edition of Lud. Dutens, a Frenchman resident in Britain, as I learn from Erdmann's Preface, in which it is mentioned that neither his collection nor that of Raspe, who added posthumous works of Leibnitz, contains all his philosophical writings, and that both the one and the other. frustro a bibliopolis quaeres, ino in publicis bibliothecis desiderabis. The former, however, is at the British Museum, presented by himself in 1800. The new edition comprehends only the philosophical works, —the Specimen Dynamicnum is classed among the mathematical,-but, as Erdmann himself observes, it is often very difficult to judge utrusm scriptio aliqua philosophicce indolis sit an non sit. See Appendix S.-S. C.] f Synesii Episcop. HVymn. iii. i. 231.: [This first paragraph of Chap. xiii. with the exception of the second sentence, is freely translated from Transsc. Id. first ~ of Section C. p. 147. — S. C.] 358 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. this master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the introduction of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763.* In this he has shown, that instead of assailing the science of mathematics by metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYST,t or of sophisticating it, as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the first principles of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology,f it behooved the metaphysician rather to examine whether the only province of knowledge, which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure science, might not furnish materials, or at least hints, for establishing and pacifying the unsettled, warring, and embroiled domain of philosophy. An imitation of the mathemetical method had indeed been attempted with no better success than attended the essay of David to wear the armor of Saul. Another use however, is possible and of far greater promise, namely, the actual application of the positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the discoveries of geometry, mutatis mzttandis, to philosophical subjects.~ Kant having * [V ersuch, den Begri:' der Negativen Ger ssen in die WIeltweisheit einzufiihrenl. An attempt towards introducing the idea of negative magnitudes into philosophy, 1763. Works, vol. i. p. 19.-S. C.] t [The Analyst was published soon after Berkeley's promotion to the see of Cloyne, March 17, 1834. It is said that the Bishop addressed it to Dr. Halley on learning fiom Mr. Addison that he, " who dealt so much in demonstration," had brought Dr. Garth into a state of general skepticism or even unbelief on religious subjects, as appeared in the latter's last illness. Its whole title is The A nalyst; or, a -Discourse addressed to an infidel iat hematician: oherein it is examinzed whether the object, principles, and issferences, of the modern Analysis are more distinctly conceived, or more evidently deduced, than religious mysteries and points of faith. He endeavored to show that the doctrine of fluxions furnished a strong example of mathematical uncertainty and fallacy.] t [Cousin represents Wolf as having improved the Leibnitzian philosophy by qualifying it in some directions and filling it up in others. He seems to consider his mathematical method as at once his strength and his weakness-for he says-" Son merite principal consiste dans l'unit6, la soliaiti et l'enchainement systimatique qs'eil sut donner a touLt l'ensemble a l'aide de la mithode appelee mathgmatique, methode qci, selon lui, n'ctoit autre chose qce I'application lacplusparfcaite des loisdue raisonnement." Then after enumerating the defects of his philosophy he sums them up thus —" Enfin" il " ngyligea la distinction, des caracteres propres quei sparent la philosophie et ies matihecatigues dclans leusrforme et leur matuire." (Manuel. vol. ii. 175-6.) I suppose that no man before Kant's day had seen this distinction so clearly, and laid it down so determinately, as did the sage of Koenigsberg.-S. C.] ~ [Kant says in his Preface to the Versuch already referred to: " The use BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 359 briefly illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the questions of space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as employed by the mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and the transfer of them to metaphysical investigation.* Opposites, he well observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are absolutely incompatible; or real without being contradictory. The fobrmer he denominates Nihil negativurn ir'reprcesentabile, the connection of which produces nonsense. A body in motion is something —Aliquid cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in motion and not in motion, is nothing, or, at most, air articulated into nonsense. But a motory force of a body in one direction, and an equal force of the same body in an opposite direction is not incompatible, and the result, namely rest, is real and representable. For the purposes of mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term negative, and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to that, which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus if a man's capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be the same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt negative capital. But in as much as the latter stands practically in reference to the former, we of' course represent the sum as 10-8. It is equally clear that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must neutralize or:educe each other to inaction. tNow the transcendental philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all direction, nay, which may be made of mathematics in philosophy consists either in an imitation of the method or in the real application of their positions to the objects of philosophy." He shows the ill success of the former attempt, and that the troublesome non lipqet would not yield to all this pomp of demonstration.-S. C.] [Ibid. 1. Absch. Works, i. 25-33. MIr. C. repeats the teaching of the Versuch, in language of his own, till he comes to the application, " It is equally clear," &c.-S. C.] 1 [The reader may compare the rest of the paragraph and the following one with the doctrine of the Transsc. Id. especially the section entitled b)eduction der produlctiven Anschaung, pp. 156-185. But the sentences of the B. L. are not the same with those of Schelling, nor is the application of the analogy suggested by Kant made in the r'lanssc. ld. —8. C. 360 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. as the primary forces from which the conditions of all possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike indestructible. The problem will then be to discover the result or product of two such forces, as distinguished from the result of those forces which are finite, and derive their difference solely from the circumstance of their direction. When we have formed a scheme or outline of these two different kinds of force, and of their different results by the process of discursive reasoning, it will then remain for us to elevate the thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively this one power with its two ilherent indestructible yet counteracting forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-penetration gives existence, in the living principle and in the process of our self-consciousness. By what instrument this is possible the solution itself' will discover, at the same time that it will reveal to and for whom it is possible. Non omnia possumus omnes. There is a philosophic, no less than a poetic genius, which is differenced fiom the highest perfection of talent, not by degree but by kind. The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on their meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly reebullient; and as something must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite, and both alike indestructible; and as rest or neutralization can not be this result; no other conception is possible, but that the product must be a tertiumn aliquid, or finite generation. Consequently this conception is necessary. Now this tertiu?mn aliquid can be no other than an inter-ponetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have had ample reason to estimate and revere, and w-Yhose taste and sensibility preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly have prompted me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good sense, but with less tact and feeling. "Dear C. " You ask mny opinion concerning your Chapcter on the Irmagination, both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 361 those which I think it wzill make on the Public, i. e. that part of the public, who, frome the title of the work and from its forming a sort of introduction to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute the great 9majority of your readers. " As to myself, and stating in the first place the efect on my understanding, your opinions and method of argument were not only so new to me, but so directly the reverse of all I had ever been accustomed to consider as truth, that even if I had comprehended?your premises sufliciently to have admitted them, and had seen the necessity of your coonclusions, I should still have been in that state of mind, which in your note in Chap. IV-. you have so ingeniously evolved, as the antithesis to that in which a mnan is, when he?nmakes a bull. In your own words, I should have felt as if I had been standing on?my head. "The eg'ect on my feelings, on the other hand, I can not better represent, thanc by supposing myself to have known only our light airy modern chapels of ease, and then; for the first time to have been placed, and left alone, inz one of our lavrgest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty moonlight night of aututmn.'lVow in% glimmer, and now in gloomn;' often in palpcable darkeness not without a chilly sensation of terror; then suddenly ererging into broad yet visionary lights with, colored shadows of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and mystic symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and stone-work images of' great men, with whose names I was familiar, but which looked upon me with countenances and acn expression, the most dissimilar to all I had been in the habit of connecting/ with those names. Those whom I had Ibeen taught to venerate as almost superhuman in maynitude of intellect, I found perched in little fret-work ntiches, as grotesque dlwatfs; while the ygrotesques, in ny hitherto belief, stood guarding the high altar with all the characters of apotheosis. In short, what I had supposed submstances were thinned eaway into shadows,?while everywhere shadows were deepened into substances: If substance might be call'd that shadow seeem'd, For each seem'd either!I " Yet after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted from a JfS. poem of your own in the FRIENuD, and applied * [Milton's Par. Lost, Book ii. 1. 669.-S. C.] VOL. III. Q 362 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. to a work of Mr. Wordsworth's though with a few of the words altered: An Orphic tale indeed, A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts To a strange mIusic chanted!* "Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and announced: and that I will do my best to understand it. Only I will not promise to descend into the dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub my own eyes, in order to make tile sparks and figured flashes, which I am required to see. " So snuch for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate a moment in advising and urging you to withdraw the Chcapter from the present work, and to reserve it for your annoeunced treatises on the Logos or commurnicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because inpeifectly as I understand the present Chapter, I see clearly that you have clone too?nuch, and yet not enough. You have been obliged to omit so many links, from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if I snzay recur to sry.former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps qf an old ruined tower. Secondly, a still stronger argument (at least one that I am sure will be moreforcible with y/you) is, that your readers will hcave both right and reason to complain of you. This Chcapter. which can not, when it is printed, amount to so little as an hundred pages, will of necessity greatly increase the expense of the work; and every reader who, like snyself, is neither prepared nor perhaps calculated for the study of so abstruse a subject so abstrusely treated, will, as I have before hintec, be almost entitled to accuise you of a sort of imposition on him. For who, he might truly observe, could fronm your title-page, to wit,'My Literary Life and Opinions," published too as introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipcated, or even comnjectzured, a long treatise on Ideal Realismi, which holds the same relation in abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato. It will be well, if already you have not too much of muetaphysical disquisition in your work, though as the larger part of the disquisition is historical, it will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to many to whose unprepared mninds your speculations on the esemplastic power would - [Coleridge's Poetic. Works, p. 159.] - BIOGRAPHIA LITERAARIA. 363 be utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish this Chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop Berkeley's Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which beginning with Tar ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace. I say in the present work. In that greater work to which you have devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be in its proper place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both its contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who feel no interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have themselves only to blame. " I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives, and particularly frjom the probable effects on the sale of your present publication; but they would weigh little with you compared twith the preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from your own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion of pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable creatures, m.ust occasionally be 1pulled backward fromt the boat in order to make you enter it. All success attend you, for if hard thinking and hard reading are merits, you ]lave deserved it. " Your affectionate, &c." In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader Nwill find at the close of the volume. The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AaIr. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind: of its agency, and differing only in degree, * LThis last clause "and as a repetition," &c. I find stroked out in a copy of the B. L. containing a few MS. marginal notes of the author, which are printed in this edition. I think it best to preserve the sentence, while I mention the author's judgment upon it, especially as it has been quoted.S. C. 864 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. and in the mnode of its operation.* It dissolves, diffiuses, dissipates, in order to re-create: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.f FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. CHAPTER XIV. OCCASION OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS, AND THE OBJECTS ORIGINALLY PROPOSED-PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION-THE ENSUING CONTROVERSY, ITS CAUSES AND ACRIMONY-PHILOSOPI-IIC DEFINITIONS OF A POE1I AND POETRY WITII SCHOLIA. DURING the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbors,1 our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the, reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature,'and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought * [Compare this distinction with that of the Productive and Reproductive Imagination given in the section on the Transcendental Synthesis of the Imagination (synthesis speciosa) in the YK'itik; der reinen YVernunft. Works, vol. ii. p. 14. 1. 2.] f [For what is said of objects in the last sentence see Transsc. I1. p. 68 Abisandlungen, Phil. Sehrift. p. 224.] t [In 1797-8, whilst Mr. Coleridge resided at Nether Stowey, and Mr Wordsworth at Alfoxton. —Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 865 suggested itself-(to which of us I do not recollect)-that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. in the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, fiom whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analo- 1 gous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfishl solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. With this view I wrote TII ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing among other poems, T-E DIARK LADIE, and the CHRaSTABEL,* in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the * [The Ancient Mariner, Poet. W. p. 219.-Christabel, ibid. p. 239.-The Dark Ladie, P. W. p. 119.-Ed.] 866 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. LYRICAL BALLADS were published;* and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest, which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the secound edition he added a preface of considerable length;t in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of speech that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life.: From this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole longcontinued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the assailants.~ * [The first volume of the Lyrical Ballads was published in l198.-Ed.] t [The second edition, with an additional volume and the preface, was published in 1800.-Ed.]: [" The first volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general perusal. It was published as an experiment, which I hoped might be of some use to ascertain how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavor to impart." Preface P. W. ii. p. 303.-Ed.] ~ [In illustration of these remarks or the allusions that follow, the Editor gave rather copious extracts from the E. Review of Oct. 1807, Nov. 1814, and Oct. 1815, which I believe that, after all, he would have felt it not worth while to reprint; and I therefore refer the curious reader to those specimens of the criticisms of thirty years since in their own place. I think it right however to preserve the Editor's comment upon them, which is as follows:It is of great importance to the history of literature in this country that the critiques contained in the Edinboro' Review on Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, should be known and reperused in the present day;-not as reflecting any special disgrace on the writers-(for as to them, the matter and tone of these essays only showed theft the critics had not risce above the level of the mass of their age)-but for the purpose of demonstrating that immediate popularity, though it may attend, can never be a test of, excellence in works of the imagination; and of teaching, if possible, the BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 367 Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which they were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of' language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the duty and advantages of respect for admitted genius, even when it pursues a path of its own making. Just consider what was the effect of all the scorn and ridicule of Wordsworth by which the Edinboro' Review, the leading critical Journal of the nation for a long time, distinguished itself for twenty years together. A great laugh was created in the fashionable world of letters, and the poet's expectation of pecuniary profit was destroyed. Public opinion was, for about a quarter of a century, set against the reception of works, which were always allowed to be innocent, and are now everywhere proclaimed as excellent; and for the same space of tiume a great inan was defrauded of that worldly remuneration of his virtuous labors, which the authors of frivolous novels and licentious poems were permitted-and in some instances helped-during the same period to obtain for their compositions. To make the lesson perfect, it has pleased Heaven to let Wordsworth himself live to see that revolution legitimated which he and his compeers, Coleridge and Southey, in different ways and degrees, together wrought; and to read his own defence and praise in the pages of the same work by which some of his most exquisite productions were once pronounced below criticism.-E-d. Agreeing as I do with these remarks in the main, I venture to observe that in my mind they ascribe too much influence upon the early fate of Mr. W.'s poems to the E. Review. That those poems were not generally admired from the first, was, in my opinion, their owozfault, that is to say, arose principally from their being works of great genius, and consequently, though old as the world itself, in one way, yet in another, a new thing under the sun. Novelty is delightful when it is understood at once, when it is but the old familiar matters newly set forth; but here was a new world presented to the reader which was also a strange world, and most of those who had grown to middle age acquainted with the old world only, and chiefly with that part of it which was least like Wordsworth'sorth he hither part, out of sight of Chaucer and Spenser and the old English Poets in general, could never learn their way, or find themselves at home there. Periodical literature can hardly be said to create public taste and opinion: I believe it does no more than strongly reflect and thereby concentro and strengthen it. The fashionable journal is expected to be a mirror of public opinion in its own party, a brilliant magnifying mirror, in which the mind of the public may see itself look large and handsome. Woe be to the mirror if it presumes to give pictures and images of its own!-it will fall to th, ground, even if not shivered at once by popular indignation. Such publications depend for their maintenance on the public which they are to teach, and must therefore, like the pastor of a voluntary flock, pipe only such tunes as suit their auditor's sense of harmony. They can not afford to 808 BIOGRAPEIA LITERARIA. parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found too not in the lower classes of the reading public, but make ventures, like warm-hearted disinterested individuals. It is far from my intention to deny, that the boldest things are often said, the most extravaglant novelties broached in publications of this kind: that the strongest and most sweeping assertions, fit, as might be supposed, to startle and shock even the cold and careless,-ascriptions of saintly excellence to men whose unchristian acts of duplicity or clrelty are undenied and undeniable -of worse than human, folly and wickedness to men, whom millions have regarded -with reverential gratitude, and this in the vay of mlere assertion, with no attempt at proof, or only the merest shadow of a shade of one,references to the authority of accusers, who are themselves resting their vague and violent charlrges on the authority of previous accusers and bitter enemlies-w-ill never be ventured upon in the public journal. We have had evidence enough in our day to the contrary.1 Still I aver that such things are not done till nothing but truth and charity is risked in the doing of them; till the mass of readers are known to be in such a state of mind, that these bold utterances will move theni not at all, or only with a pleasureable excitement. A.gain, the chief contributors to the leading periodicals- are for the most partu a class of persons opposed to essential novelty; able men more or less advanced beyond t.he period of impressible youth, whose intellectual frame is set,-who are potent in exposing new follies and false pretensions; but slow to understand the fresh products of genius, un-willing even to believe in theim. It is by the young, or at least by the youthful, that accessions to the old stores of thought and imagination are welcomed and placed in the treasury. Still it is a remarkable fact, that the journal, which especially professed faith in the intellectual progress of the human race, and to be open-eyed to mnodern excellence, should have shown itself blind to the merits of a body of poetry, in which the spirit of the age, in its noblest and most refined characteristics, is more amply and energetically nanifested than in any other. When tile luminary first appeared above the horizon, those admirers of new light declared it to be nothing better than green cheese, yet assailed it with as violent outcries as if they thought it w:as able to set the world on fire. If these criticisms excited "a great laugh," this shows with how little expenditure of wit a great laugh may be TFor some considerable evidence on these points I refer the reader to Note 10 in Vol. ii. (pp. 656-878), of Archdeacon Hare's new work, The Mission of the Comforter, &c., whlich contains a thorough investigationl of the charges brought against M.lartin Luther of late years, includiin7. those of Bossuet, and a most animated'and luminous exposure of the perversions aind transmutations, rather than misrepresentations, of his teaching, imputable to certain reviewerls BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 869 chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and t~heir admir-ation (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious- fervor. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round and round. With many parts of this preface in the sense attributed to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in principle, arnd as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the author's own practice in the greater part of the poems themselves. Mr. Words-vworth in his recent collection has, I find, deexcited; for whatever talents in that way the writers may have possessed and on other occasions shown, I think they displayed none of them at the expense of Mr. WordsAworth. The same kind of attack has been repeated of late years with a far more cunning malice and amusing injustice, without exciting any general laughter at all, simply because the time for laughing at a great poet is over and gone. Ii any laughter is heard now it is but an echo of the past:-if there be any minds that have been dwelling in caves under the earth during the last quarter of a century, they may suppose that Wordsworth's fame has never risen above the horizon. Not that every man of sense must needs bo-w down before it; there are clever persons who deny the greatness of Milton; some ingenious critics have pronounced Homer a barbarian, others have decried Shakspeare, many have looked upon Pindar as a "crazy fellow," and Spenser is thought even by some of the poetical a very great bore. In like manner there may be a man of sense who has no sense of the merits of Mr. Wordsworth's writings; but to be ignorant of their power and influence is to be ignorant of the mind of the age in relation to poetry. The laughter of thirty years ago must have been chiefly produced by a sense of the contrast between the great concep tion of the Poet entertained by a few, and the small conception which the many were then alone able to form of it. " He strides on so far before us," said Mr. Coleridge of his friend, "that he dwarfs himself in the distance." People saw him as a dwarf yet had a suspicion that he might in reality be a giant. One advantage of the present time to Mr. Wordsworth is this that poetry is not now the fashion. We bestow our "ignorance, incapat bility and presumnption," or at least our superficiality, incompetence and hastiness on the religious tract or controversial pamphlet, and poetry is resigned to those who have a true taste for it and study it in earnest. — S. C.] 870 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. graded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice.* But he has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy, in which I have been honored more than I deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare once for all, in what points I coincide with the opinions supported in that preface, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible I must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my views, first, of' a Poem; and secondly, of Poetry itself, in kind, and in essence. The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinctionl; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference therefbre must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object being proposed. According to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination. It is possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months; * [" The observations prefixed to that portion of these Volumes which was published many years ago, under the title of Lyrical Ballads, have so little of a special application to the great part of the present enlarged and diversified collection, that they could not'with propriety stand as an Introduction to it. Not deeming it, however, expedient to suppress that exposition, slight and imperfect as it is, of the feelings which had determined the choice of the subjects, and the principles which had regulated the composition of these Pieces, I have transferred it to the end of the second volume, to be attended to, or not, at the pleasure of the Reader." Pref. to edition of 1815. This preface is now to be found in Vol. ii. p. 303, of the edition of 1840. --,L BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 371 "Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November," &e. and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all compositions that have this charm superadded, whatever be their contents, may be entitled poems. So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents supplies an additional ground of distinction. The inzmediate purpose may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the highest and most permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is not itself the immediate end. In other works the communication of pleasure may be the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs. Blest indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the BATHYLLUS even of an Anacreon, or the ALEXIS of Virgil, from disgust and aversion! But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere superaddition of metre, with or -without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be supersdded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such, as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite. The final definition then, so deduced, may be thus worded. A ppem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immnecliate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species-(having this object in common with it)-it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part. 372 3BIOGRAPtHIA LITERARIA. Colltroversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputantssattaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few instances has this been msore striking, than in disputes concerning the present subject. If a man chooses to call every composition a poem, which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize the writer's intention. If it were subjoined, that -the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of interesting reflections, I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem, and an additional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, t answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and lknown influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or dis-.tiches, each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself, becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate whole, in.stead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts. The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the rnechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited -y the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air:-at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward. Prcecipitandus est liber spir'itzus, says Petronius most happily.& The * [These words occur in the passage in which Petronius is supposed to attack Lucan. Cceteri enim, aut nonr viderunt viam. qua irietur ad carmen, aut visamn timue-'unt calcare. Ecce, belli civilis ingens opus quasquis attigerit, i.,isi plenums liters, sub onere labetur. Aron enim res gesta versibus comprehendendzle smut, qutod lonzqe nelhius Iistoricifcciunt; sed per abages, Deo-rumique qeeinisteria, etfcabulotszn seutentiarumn tormnentzn prCecipitandes est liber spiritus; ~ut potius fizrentis animi vaticihzatio appareat, quam relicqiosee orationis sub testibusfides: taLqguam si placet hic impetus, etiamnsi ntcdca. rece it ultimam maii um. Satyric. p. 63, edit. Lugy. Bat. 1623. And then follows a specimen of a new Pharsalie, which a great many learned critics, to BIOGRAPEIA LITERARIA. 873 epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words. But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of Plato and Jeremy Taylor, and Burnet's Theory of the Earth,* furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem. The first chapter of Isaiah-(indeed a very large proportion of the whole book)-is poetry in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be not less irrational than strange to assert, that pleasure, and not truth was the immediate object of the prophet. In short, whatever specific import we attach to the word, Poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with the poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected than bysuch a studied selection and artificial arrangement, as will partake of one, though not a peculiar property of poetry. And this again can be no other than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written. My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word, have been in part anticipated in some of the remarks on the Fancy and Imagination in the first part of this work. What is poetry?-is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet?-that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the the confusion of ordinary readers, prefer to Lucan's. Douza says, se hune inmpetum pltris facere, qcuam trecenta Cordubulensis illits volu.mina.-Ed.] Petronius!-all the muses weep for thee, But every tear shall scald thy memory.So speaks Cowper in a strong passage upon this' polishd and high finish'd foe to truth," in his poem called the Progress of Error. Southey's edit. vol. viii. pp. 155, 156.-S. C.] X [Tellhtris 7heoria Sacra. London, 1681: by Thomas Burnet, D.D. The work was translated into English by order of King Charles, and was in a sixth edit. in 1726. The author, a native of Scotland, and Master of Sutton's Hospital, London, wrote also De Statu Mlortuorum et Resurgentium, and several other books, died Sep. 27, 1715. —S. C.] '7/4 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and letained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertutr habenis, (reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harnionizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. Doubtless, as Sir John Davies observes of the soul-(and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic Imagination)Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, As fire converts to fire the things it burns, As we our food into our nature change. From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, And draws a kind of quintessence from things; Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings. ThZus does she, when from individual states She doth abstract the universal kinds; Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates Steal access through the senses to our minds.* Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its * [Of the Soul of Man, s. 4. Mr. Coleridge's alterations are printed in italics. -Ed.] BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. 375 Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.* CHAPTER XV. THE SPECIFIC SYMPTOMS OF POETIC POWERv ELUCIDATED IN A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF SIHAKSPEARE S VENUS AND ADONIS, AND RAPE OF LUCRECE. IN the application of these principles to purposes of practical criticism, as employed in the appraisement of works more or less imperfect, I have endeavored to discover what the qualities in a poem are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power, as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the inspiration of a genial and productive nature. In this investigation, I could not, I thought, do better, than keep before me the earliest work of the greatest genius, that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriadmindedl Shakspeare. I mean the VENUS AND ADONIS, and the LucREcE; works which give at once strong promises of the strength, and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity of his genius. From these I abstracted the following marks, as characteristics of original poetic genius in general. 1. In the VENUS AND ADONIS, the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhlthnm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant. * [The reader is referred generally to Mr. Coleridge's Lectures on Shakspeare, IV. pp. 19-22. —Ed.] f [See Works, IV. pp. 48-50.-Ed.]:'Avrp fuvpt6vovf, a phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I might have said, that I have reclaimed, rather than borrowed it: for it seems to belong to Shakspeare, de jure siniyglari, et ex privileyio )taturae. 876 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favorable promise in the compositions of a young man. The man that hath not music in his soul* can indeed never be a genuine poet. Imagery, — (even taken from nature, much more when transplanted from books, as travels, voyages, and works of natural history),-affecting incidents, just thoughts, interesting personal or domestic feelings, and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem,-may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talent and much reading, who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius; the love of the arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imaginationl; and this together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned. It is in these that " poeta nctscitur non fit." 2. A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At least I have fobund, that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's persona] sensations and experiences, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power. We may perhaps remember the tale of the statuary, who had acquired considerable reputation for the legs of his goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with ideal beauty; till his wife, elated by her husband's praises, modestly acknowledged that she had been his constant model. In the VENUS AND ADONIS this proof of poetic power exists even to excess. It is throughout as if a superior spirit more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement, which had resulted from the energetic fervor of his own [" The man that hath not music in himself."-Merchant of Venice, iv se. l.-Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 377 spirit in so vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think, I should have conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct, which impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly.working him in, prompting him-by a series and never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and, because unbroken, often minute; by the highest effort of the picturesque in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted;;. —to provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear every thing. Hence it is, from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playfuil nature of the thoughts and images; and above all firom the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of * [" Consider how he paints," says Mr. Carlyle, "he has a great power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and nothing more. You remember the first view he gets of the Hall of Dite; red pinnacle, red hot cone of iron glowing through the immensity of gloom;-so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and forever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante." " Milton," says Lessing in his Laokoon, "can indeed fill no galleries. Yet is the Par. Lost the first Epic after Homer no whit the less because it affords few pictures, than the History of Christ is a Poem, because we'can not put so nmuch as a nail's head upon it without hitting on a place which has employed a crowd of the greatest artists." "A poetic picture is not necessarily that which can be converted into a material picture; but every stroke or combination of strokes, by which the Poet makes his object so sensuous to us, that we are more conscious of this object than of his words, may be called picturesque." Thus Dante's sqc'zlela da lonteno (Purg. c. viii. 1. 5) nmay well be called a picture. His picture words have not done much for the material painter's art, if we may judge by Flaxman's illustrations. The famous image in the Purgatorio solo guardando A guisa di leon quando si posse, is, as has been shown, not a mere presentation of "picturable mnatter," but a picture ready drawn and " so clearly visible that the pencil can not make its outline clearer." (See Art. on Pindiar. Q. Review, March 1834.) Yet it would he nothing in a material painting, because the illustration and the thing illustrated could not be given together.-S. C.] 378 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. the poet's own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst;-that though the very subject can not but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more offensively, ~Wieland has done, instead of degrading and deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence; —Shakspeare has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; or by diverting our attention fiom the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows. 3. It has been befibre observed that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity,* or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit, Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air.J. In the two following lines for instance, there is nothing objectionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place, part of a descriptive poem: Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve. ~* " The truth is, he does not possess imagination in its highest form.that of stamp;ng ii ptfi nell' uno." Table Talk, VI. p. 4' 71. "The Imagination modifies images, and gives ufnity to variety; it sees all things at once, il pii) nell' uno." Ib. p. 518. —Ed.] i [France. An Ode. Mr. C.'s P. W. p. 104. —Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 379 But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The same image will rise into a semblance of poetry if thus conveyed: Yon row of bleak and visionary pines, By twilight glimpse discerned, mark I how they flee From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild Streaming before them. I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which Shakspeare even in his earliest, as in his latest, works surpasses all other poets. It is by this, that he still gives a dignity and a passion to the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power,"Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye."* "Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to comea * X * The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, And the sad augurs mock their own presage Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd, And Peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes. And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrant's crests, and tombs of brass are spent."f As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colors itself to the circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind. For unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader's own memory will refer him to the LEAR, OTHELLO, in short to which not of the " gSieat, ever-living, dead man's" dramatic works? Inogpem rne copia, fecit. How true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the instance of love in his 98th Sonnet. * [Shakspeare's 33d Sonnet.-Ed.] t [Solmet cvii.-Ed.] 880 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. "From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April drest in all its trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing; That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odor and in hue, Could make nle any summer's story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them, where they grew: Nor did I wonder at the lilies white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; They were, tho' sweet, but figures of delight, Drawn after you, you pattern of all those. Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away, As with your shadow, 1 with these did play!"* Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark rivt/zov tIiv c01u70o-e OT. 5rf ptl/a 7evva5ov 2a Kot,t will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the painter, the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of simultaneousness:With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace Of those fair arms, which bound him to her breast, And homeward through the dark laund runs apace;Look! how a bright star shooteth fromz the sky, So glides he its the night frome Venus' eye.. 4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former;yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were possible) would give promises only of tran[ LSee Table Talk, VI. p. 452. for Mr. Coleridge's general view of Shakspeare's Sonnets, and also Mr. Knight's valuable essay on the same subject in that beautiful edition of our great poet by which he has rendered so signal and enduring a service to the cause of English literature.-Ed.] t [Aristoph./ Ran, v. 96-7. Mr. Frere, in the tone of the Bacclhus of the play, translates thus: There's not one hearty Poet amongst them all That's fit to risque an adventurous valiant phrase. But it is obvious that M1r. Coleridge meant by y6vtsog 7rotslrc, the genuine poet.-Ed.] I [Venus and Adonis.-Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 881 sitory flashes and a meteoric power;-is depth, and energy of thought. No man was ever yet a great'poet,' Without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossorn and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotion, language. In Shakspeare's poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. The VENUS AND ADONIS did not perhaps allow the display of' the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favor and even demand their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakspeare's management of the tale neither pathos, nor any other drazamtic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colors, inspirited by the same impetuous vigor of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with yet a larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language. What then shall we say? even this; that Shakspeare, no mere child of nature; no aultomnaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power, which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten sulnmits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakspeare becomes all things, yet forever remaining him 882 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. self.* 0 what great men hast thou not produced, England, my country! —Truly indeedWIe must be free or die, who speak the tongue, Which Shakspeare spake; the faith and morals hold, Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold.t CHAPTER XVI. STRIKING POINTS OF DIFFERENCE BETXWEEN THE POETS OF THE PRESENT AGE AND THOSE OF THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES-WVISH EXPRESSED FOR THE UNION OF THE CHARACTERISTIC MERITS OF BOTH. CHRISTENDOM, from its first settlement on feudal rights, has been so far one great body, however imperfectly organized, that a similar spirit will be found in each period to have been acting - [" Shakspeare's poetry is characterless, that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton is in every line of the Paradise Lost." Table Talk, VI. p. 31 2.-Ed.]. [Mr. Wordsworth's P. W. iii. p. 190, edit. 1840.-Ed.] [Mr. Wordsworth's noble Preface, often referred to in these pages, contains as high a tribute to __- that mighty orb of song The divine Milton (to quote the author's words in another place) as one great poet could pay to another. (See also his three fine sonnets relating to Milton, Poet. Works, iii. pp. 188-90.) It would have been out of his way to speak of Milton's prose —though such prose as none but the author of Paradise Lost could have written. If matter is spiritus in coagulo' as some philosophers aver, this grand Miltonic prose may fancifully be called poisis in coagulo. Yet I think it is more truly and properly prose than the high-strained passages of Jeremy Taylor. Dante is by some accounted a greater poet than Milton, as being a greater "When Leibnitz calls matter the sleep-state of the monads, or when lEemsterhuis names it-den geronnenen (Geist-curdled spirit,-there lies a meaning in these expressions, &c." Treassc. Id. p. 190. See also Lit. Remaius, V. p. 221. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 388 in all its members. The study of Shakspeare's poers — (I do not include his dramatic works, eminently as they too deserve that title) —]ed me to a more careful examination of the contemporary poets both in England and in other countries. But my attention was especially fixed on those of Italy, from the birth to philosopher; I think that he showed the philosopher in his poetry too much to be the best of poets, especially in the Paradiso. A poet should avoid science, which is ever in a process of change and development, and abide by the fixed and eternal; great part of that thirteenth century lore contained in Dante's poem is dead, and but for the poetic spices with which it is embalmed, and the swathe-bands of the poetic form in which it is preserved, would long since have been scattered abroad, like any unsepulchred dust and ashes. I am here speaking of physics and metaphysics: if wise reflections, just sentiments and deep moral and spiritual maxims are referred to in this comparison, then surely the English poet has greatly the advantage in thought and still more in expression. Philosophy in the song of Milton is better harmonized with poetry than in that of Dante; it is fused into the poetic mass by something accompanying it which appeals to the heart and moral being; or it is introduced obliquely, with a touch of tenderness, which brings it into unison with the human actions and passions-of the poem, as in that beautiful passage, Others apart sate on a hill retired — which seems so like a new voice of The Preacher, pathetically satirizing the efforts of man after speculative knowledge and insight. There is to be sure some fictitious or defunct astronomy and spherology in the great poem of Milton;2 but it is lightly touched on and imaginatively presented; compare the passages that treat of these subjects in the Paradise Lost, especially that noble speech of the Angel' in the eighth book, with the first and second cantos of the Paradiso; surely the later poetry is to the earlier as " Hyperion to a Satyr," so far does it exceed in richness and poetic grace. Bizzarra Teologia! says a Commentator on a passage in the Purgatorio (C. iii. 1. 18). Bizzarrca Filosofta may we say of that in the Paradiso (C. i. at the end), which begins finely, but ends with making specific gravity depend upon original sin; unless nothing but a fanciful flight is intended. What a pomp of philosophy, exclaims M. Merian, speaking of this passage,and all to usher in a foolery! " Every great poet is a profound philoso. pher:" that is, he sees deep into the life and soul of the things which are already known-and has a special mastery over them; but is not necessarily beyond his age in speculative science. Certainly this can not be predicated either of Dante or of Milton. I own myself of the vulgar herd in greatly preferring the first to the other sections of Dante's Poem-nay even venture to think, that if it had Par. Lost, b. ii. 1. 555-61. 2 Ib. b. iii. 1. 481, et seq. 3 lines 39-178. 3884 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. the death of Shakspeare; that being the country in which the fine arts had been most sedulously, and hitherto most successfully cultivated. Abstracted from the degrees and peculiarities of individual genius, the properties common to the good writers of each period seem to establish one striking point of difference between the poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that of the not been both more striking than those two other parts in its general structure and more abundant in passages of power and of beauty, the D)ivina Gomnnedia would never have been a famous poem at all. The mere plan of describing the unseen world in three divisions would not have made it so; there were Paradise Losts before Milton's which it would be time lost to read. Milton is finer in Hell than in Heaven, finest of all in his earthly Paradise, and Dante's Iisferno is better than his Puryatorio or Paradiso, because he could put more of this earth into it,-conform it more to the only world the form of which he was acquainted with. Men can not make bricks without straw nor fine houses without bricks or stones, nor fine poems without sensuous material. The Divina Cornmedia is more considerable in religion and ecclesiastical politics, I think,-on which last head there was some accordance betwixt its author and Milton,-than for its philosophy; the highest conception of it is that of Mr. Carlyle, that it is "the soul of the Middle Ages rendered rhythmically visible"-the voice of "ten Christian centuries;"-" the Thought they lived by bodied forth inl everlasting music." Its author is great, as Mr. C. observes, from "fiery emphasis," and intensity rather than from comprehensiveness or catholicity of spirit. His was "not a great Catholic-was even a narrow sectarian iind." If Medinevalism in Dante's day was a sectarian thing, cut off from thought expanding beyond it-thee, when the torch had not been kindled in the hand of Des Cartes, and the revolt against the dominant Aristotelianism was yet to begin, what must it be now, when thought has been expanding during six more centuries, whilst It remains fixed, rigid-not lifeless as a mummy-but imprisoning the life it has with bands and cerements in a body of death i But Dante's imagination was as mediwval as his theology and philosophy; hovering continually between the horrible sublime and the hideous grotesque, and sometimes saved only from the ridiculous by the chaste severity of a style which is the very Diana of poetical compositions. Witness, amongst a cloud of witnesses. his Minos, whom he has equipped with a tail long and lithe enough to go nine times round his body!-the wise conqueror and righteous judge is degraded into a worse monster than the Minotaur, in order that he may indicate every circle in a fantastic hell down to the ninth and last. How would Pindar have been horror stricken to see the Hero thus turned into a hideous automaton sign-post! In Dante's hands the demigod sinks into the beastman, while in those of Milton devils appear as deities, fit indeed to obtain adoration from the dazzled mind,-not firightful fiends but wicked angels-specious and seductive as they actually are to the human heart and imagination. Milton has borrowed from Dante, but how has he BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 885 present age. The remark may perhaps be extended to the sister art of painting. At least the latter will serve to illustrate the former. In the present age the poet-(I would wish to be understood as speaking generally, and without allusion to individual names)seems to propose to himself as his main object, and as that which is the most characteristic of his art, new and striking images; with multiplied his splendors, how nobly exchanged his " detestable horrors"' for a pageantry of Hell that far exceeds the luminous pomp of his Paradise in sublimity and beauty! We, who feel thus can enter into Mr. Carlyle's high notion of Dante's genius, yet own the justice of Mr. Landor's searching and severe criticism upon the products of it, though the two views appear dissimilar as day and night. The one displays the D. C. under a rich moonlight, which clothes its dreary flats and rugged hollows with sublime shadow; the other under a cold keen dawning daylight, which shows the whole landscape, but not its noblest countenance. Mr. C. so far idealizes his Hero Poet, that without keeping out of view his characteristic faults he, with a far finer economy, converts them into cognate virtues; the poet's stern, angry temper, for instance, appears through Mr. C.'s glorifying medium like earnest sincerity, religious severity, a spiritual sadness; and he contrasts his "implacable, grim-trenchant face" -with his " soft ethereal soul" more beautifully perhaps than quite truthfully; for Dante's soul was not all softness. Indeed it escapes this powerful advocate that the heroic poet was bitter. Are the noblest minds embittered then by evil and calamity? Do they clothe themselves with cursing as with a garment, and forget that judgment as well as vengeance belongs to God? Dante's soul was full of pity, say other apologists, but he deemed it sinful to commiserate those -whom God's justice had condemned. Justice forsooth!-and how knew he who2 God lhad condemnedthat He had sunk Brutus and Cassius into the nethermost pit, and doomed poor Pope Celestine to be wasp-stung to all eternity on the banks of Acheron? I deny not his pity or his piety; yet I say that thus to fabricate visions of divine wrath upon individuals was a bad sign both of his age and of himself-the sign of a violent and presumptuous spirit. Again, are the noblest minds soodly and mournful as Dante is described to have been? Rather they batte no jot Of heart or hope, but st;i:ll bear up and steer Right onward. Thus did John Milton, whom with Mr. Landor I can lot help honoring and admiring above any other poet of past times except Shakspeare. His indeed was what Mr. Carlyle ascribes to Johnson, " a gigantic calmness" -nay more, an almost angelic serenity and cheerfulness; to judge from the tone of his writings with which the tenor of his life seems to agree.-S. C.]' For a striking account of these "detestable horrors" see Mr. Leigh Hunt's Fancy and Imagination. VOL. M. R 386 - BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. incidents that interest the affections or excite the curiosity. Both his characters and his descriptions he renders, as much as possible, specific and individual, even to a degree of portraiture. In his diction and metre, on the other hand, he is comparatively careless. The measure is either constructed on no previous system, and acknowledges no justifying principle but that of the writer's convenience; or else some mechanical movement is adopted, of which one couplet or stanza is so far an adequate specimen, as that the occasional differences appear evidently to arise from accident, or the qualities of the language itself; not from meditation and an intelligent purpose. And the language from Pope's translation of Homer, to Darwin's Temple of Nature,* may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized, as claiming to be poetical for no better reason, than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose. Though alas! even our prose writings, nay even the style of our more set discourses, strive to be in the fashion, and trick themselves out in the soiled and over-worn finery of the meretricious muse. It is true that of late a great improvement in this respect is observable in our most popular writers. But it is equally true, that this recurrence to plain sense and genuine mother English is far from being general; and that the composition of our novels, magazines, public harangues and the like is commonly 1as trivial in thought, and yet enigmatic in expression, as if Echo and Sphinx had laid their heads together to construct it. Nay, even of those who have most rescued themselves from this contagion, I should plead inwardly guilty to the charge of duplicity or cowardice, if I withheld my conviction, that few have guarded the purity of their native tongue with that jealous care, which the sublime Dante in his tract De lc voolgare Eloquenzca, declares to be the first duty of a poet.t For language is the armory of the human mind; * First published in 1803. 1 [See I. c. xix. s. ii. c. i. The spirit breathing in this Fragment may justify what Mr. C. says; but Dante does not appear to have used the expression attributed to him in the text. —Ed.] It seems probable that Mr. Coleridge alluded to the following passage, which I found written by his hand in a copy of the first edition of Joan of Are. Degne di sommto stilo sono le somne Cose, ciu e, I'Amnore, la Liberta, la Virtg, l'fmmortalita, e quelle allre Cose che per cagion di esse sono nella MFente nostra concepuzti; per ohe per nium Acciclente non siano fatte vili. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 387 and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests. Animadverte, says Hobbes, quam sit ab imrproprietate verborum p73ronzun homninibus prolabi in errores ciirca ipsas res.'* Sat [vero], says Sennertus,t inz hac vitae brevitate et naturce obscztritate, r'erumn est, quibzs cognoscendis ternpus inmpencdatu r, zt [confusis et zmdtivocis] sermonibuts intell7igendis illud consutere opuzs non sit. [Ehei /! quztantas strages paravere verba nzbila, quce tot cliczcnt ut nihil dicunt; —nubes potiuns, e quzibus et in rebus )politicis et in ecclesia turbines et tonitruza erZumptnnt.'] Et Proinde r'ecte dictzutm 7tamus a Platone in Go)rgia: og cl Tca 06'0,pua. CZ, 6'erElae xPlx tt'.o(7,uamt: et ab Epicteto,,o%' 7rcat&C-Eia6Sg r,ray VOouc'riwe'nlax6tq'I et prudentissime Galenies scribit, s TPlY OVO,t11trwtv Z'qaet -Taq.XZOEUa X(X 2 T~; I, zCy IC'T', LT()X' EXYa(TTSt YlV6Y. Egregie nero J. C. Scaliger, in Lib. I. de Plantis: Est Gu'ardisi adunque ciascuno, e discernsa quello chse dicemo: e quanzdo vuole qTueste somme Cose puramente cantare, pritmal bevendo nel Fote di E'licona, poegca sicuramente a l'accordata Lyra il so ome Plettro, e costmartamnente cornieci. Ara a fare questa Cianzone, e queste Divisione, come si dee-quzi la DiJficoltct, qut e la Fatica.' percio che nmai seenza Acume d'Ingegno, ne senza A ssid1it'c d'Arte, nte senza Abito di Scienze, nonl si potrd fare. E questi sono quclli, che'l Poeta nel L. VI. de la Eneide chiami Diletti da Die, e da la ardente VT;t7'A alzati al' Cielo, e Figlinoli di lDio, avegna che figurafamente parli. _E per6 si confessa lae Sciocchezza di coloro, i quali senza Arte, e senza Sciecza, confidando si solamelete del loreo ngegno, si pongono a cantar sonmmnanmente le Cose somme. Adatnque cessino questi tali Ida tanta loreo Presunzione, e se per la loro nsaturale Desidia sono Oche, non voyliaCso l'Aquila, cihe altamente vola, imitare. Dante, de la volgare Eloquenza, 1. ii. c. 4.'-S. C.] * [Examinatio et Enmendalio Afathemnatica hodiernc. (Dial. II. vol. iv p. 83 of Molesworth's edit.)-S. C. 1 [See the chapter p. 193, De ncomninibus novis Paracelsicis in his folio works, Leyden 1676. The words in brackets, are not in the original, and there are several onmissions.-Ed. The sentence cited as from the Gorgias, is not contained, I believe, in that dialogue.-S. C.] -'That is, waiting for, and seizing the moment of deep Feeling, and stirring Imagination, after having by steadfast accurate Observation, and by calm and profound Meditation, filled himself, as it were, with his subject. -S. T. C. 2 [This Italian version of the treatise -De mdg. Eloq. was by Trissino, according to A. Zeno, who says that the translator has, in many places, confounded and altered the sense. The Latin tractate, which the Editor refers to, is by Dante himself. —S. C.] 888 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. primum, inquit, sapientis officiurn, bene sentire, ut sibi vivat: proximum, bene loqui, ut patrim vivat." Something analogous to the materials and structure of modern poetry I seem to have noticed-(but here I beg to be understood as speaking with the utmost diffidence)-in our common landscape painters. Their foregrounds and intermediate distances are comparatively unattractive: while the main interest of the landscape is thrown into the back-ground, where mountains and torrents and castles forbid the eye to proceed, and nothing tempts it to trace its way back again. But in the works of the great Italian and Flemish masters, the front and middle objects of the landscape are the most obvious and determinate, the interest gradually dies away in the back-ground, and the charm and peculiar worth of the figure consists, not so much in the specific objects which it conveys to the understanding in a visual language formed by the substitution of figures for words, as in the beauty and harmony of the colors, lines, and expression, with which the objects are represented. Hence novelty of subject was rather avoided than sought for. Superior excellence in the manner of treating the same subjects was the trial and test of the artist's merit. Not otherwise is it with the more polished poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially those of Italy. The imagery is almost always general: sun, moon, flowers, breezes, murmuring streams, warbling songsters, delicious shades, lovely damsels cruel as fair, nymphs, naiads, and goddesses, are the materials which are common to all, and which each shaped and arranged according to his judgment or fancy, little solicitous to add or to particularize. If we make an honorable exception in favor of some English poets, the thoughts too are as little novel as the images; and the fable of their narrative poems, for the most part drawn from mythology, or sources of equal notoriety, derive their chief attractions fromr the manner of treating them; from impassioned flow, or picturesque arrangement. In opposition to the present age, and perhaps in as faulty an extreme, they placed the essence of poetry in the cat. The excellence, at which they aimed, consisted in the exquisite polish of the diction, combined with perfect simplicity. This their prime object they attained by the avoidance of every word, which a geztlemzan would not use in dignified conversation, and of every word and BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 389 phrase, which none but a lear.ned man would use; by the studied position of words and phrases, so that not only each part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to the harmony of the whole, each note referring and conducting to the melody of all the foregoing and following words of the same period or stanza; and lastly with equal labor, the greater because unbetrayed, by the variation and various harmonies of their metrical movement. Their measures, however, were not indebted for their variety to the introduction of new metres, such as have been attempted of late ill the Alonzo and Imogen,* and others borrowed from the German, having in their very mechanism a specific overpowering tune, to which the generous reader humors his voice and emphasis, with more indulgence to the author than attention to the meaning or quantity of the words; but which, to an ear familiar with the numerous sounds of the Greek and Roman poets, has an effect not unlike that of galloping over a paved road in a German stage-wagon without springs. On the contrary, the elder bards both of Italy and England produced a far greater as well as more charming variety by countless modifications, and subtle balances of sound inll the common metres of their country. A lasting and enviable reputation awaits that man of genius, who should attempt and realize a union;-who should recall the high finish, the appropriateness, the facility, the delicate proportion, and above all, the perfusive and omnipresent grace, which have preserved, as in a shrine of precious amber, the Sparrow of Catullus, the Swallow, the Grasshopper, and all the other little loves of Anacreon; and which, with bright, though diminished glories, revisited the youth and early manhood of Christian Europe, in the vales oft Arno, and the groves of Isis * [Here is a stanza of this overpowering metre:A warrior so bold and a virgin so bright Conversed as they sat on the green; They gazed on each other with tender delight: Alonzo the brave, was the name of the knight, The maid's was the fair Imogene. Mr. Southey adopted this metre for his popular ballad —Mary the Maid of the Inn. Poet. Works, 1838, vol. vi. p. 3.-S. C.] 1 These thoughts were suggested to me during the perusal of the Madrigals of Giovambatista Strozzi published in Florence in May, 1593, by his sons Lorenzo and Filippo Strozzi, with a dedication to their paternal uncle, 390 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. and of Cam;-and who with these should combine the keener inSignor Leone Strozzi, Generale delle battaglie di Santa Chiesa. As I do not remember to have seen either the poems or their author mentioned in any English work, or to have found them in any of the common collections of Italian poetry;' and as the little work is of rare occurrence; I will transcribe a few specimens. I have seldom met with compositions that possessed, to my feelings, more of that satisfying entireness, that complete adequateness of the manner to the matter which so charms us in Anacreon, joined with the tenderness, and more than the delicacy of Catullus. Trifles as they are, they were probably elaborated with great care; yet in the perusal we refer them to a spontaneous energy rather than to voluntary effort. To a cultivated taste there is a delight in perfection for its own sake, independently of the material in which it is manifested, that none but a cultivated taste can understand or appreciate. After what I have advanced, it would appear presumption to offer a translation; even if the attempt were not discouraged by the different genius of the English mind and language, which demands a denser body of thought as the condition of a high polish, than the Italian. I can not but deem it likewise an advantage in the Italian tongue, in many other respects inferior to our own, that the language of poetry is more distinct from that of prose than with us. From the earlier appearance and established primacy of the Tuscan poets, concurring with the number of independent states, and the diversity of written dialects, the Italians have gained a poetic idiom, as the Greeks before them had obtained from the same causes, withgreater and more various discriminations, for example, the Ionic for their heroic verses; the Attic for their iambic; and the two modes of the Doric for the lyric or sacerdotal, and the pastoral, the distinctions of which were doubtless more obvious to the Greeks themselves than they are to us. I will venture to add one other observation before I proceed to the trla:~scription. I am aware that the sentiments which I have avowed concerning the points of difference between the poetry of the present age, and that of the period between 1500 and 1650, are the reverse of the opinion commonly entertained. I was conversing on this subject with a friend, when the servant, a worthy and sensible woman, coming in, I placed before her two engravings, the one a pinky-colored plate of the day, the other a masterly etching by Salvator Rosa from one of his own pictures. On pressing her to tell us, which she preferred, after a little blushing and flutter of feeling, she replied-" Why, that, Sir, to be sure! (pointing to the ware from the Fleetstreet print-shops);-it's so neat and elegant. T'other is such a scratcAy slovenly thing." An artist, whose writings are scarcely less valuable than his pictures, and to whose authority more deference will be willingly paid, than I could even wish should be shown to mine, has told us, and from his own experience too, that good taste must be acquired, and like all other good things, is the result of thought and the submissive study of the best 1 [Gamba, p. 593, calls this edition rara edizione.-Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 391 terest, deeper pathos, manlier reflection, and the fresher and more models.' If it be asked, "But what shall I deem such?"-the answer is; presume those to be the best, the reputation of which has been matured into fame by the consent of ages. For wisdom always has a final majority, if not by conviction, yet by acquiescence. In addition to Sir J. Reynolds I may mention Harris of Salisbury; who in one of his philosophical disquisitions has written on the means of acquiring a just taste with the precision of Aristotle, and the elegance of Quinetilian.2 M11ADRIGAL. Gelido sqto l'iLscel chiaro, e tramqumillo iM'insegn6 Anor di state a mezzo'l giono; Ardean le selve, a'rdean le piagge, e i colli. On~d'io, cAl' al pim g'ra.l gielo ardo e sfavillo, Su2bito corsi; ma si per'o adorno Girsene il vidi, cke tlbare1 no'l volli: Sol ["On whom then can he rely, or who shall show him the path that leads to excellence? The answer is obvious. Those great masters who have travelled the same road with success are the most likely to conduct others. The works of those who have stood the test of ages have a claim to that respect and veneration to which no modern can pretend. The duration and stability of their fame is sufficient to evince that it has not been suspended upon the slender thread of fashion and caprice, but bound to the human heart by every tie of sympathetic admiration." Reynolds. Discour.se ii. —Ed.] 2 [See Philological Inquiries: Part ii. chap. xii. especially the concluding paragraphs. This Treatise is contained in vol. ii. of the collective edition of the works of Harris, —by his soLi, the Earl of Mahlesbury, i.an two vols. 4to. London, 1801. James Harris, the author of those volumes, was born in the Close of Salisbury, July 29, 1709 —died Dec. 22, 17S0. He is best known as the author of Hermes, a work on Universal Gramnmar; which, according to Bishop Lowth, presents "the most beautiful example of analysis that has been exhibited since the days of Aristotle:" and three Treatises concerning Art, — Music, Painting and Poetry, and Happiness, —which imitate the method of Plato, and are written with admirable distinctness. Harrlis was not given up wholly to literary pursuits, and( domlestic and social amusements, though possessed of high qualifications for both the one and the other: he also took a part in public life, held the office first of a Lord of the Admiralty, then for about two years of a Lord of the Treasury. In 1774 he became Secretary and Comptroller to the Queen. He represented the Borough of Christ Church till the day of his death, was assiduous in the discharge of his parliamentary duty and occasionally took a share in debates. See Memoirs of the Author by his Son, prefixed to his works.-S. C.] 892 BIOGR:APtHIA LITERARIA. various imagery, which give a value and a name that will not Sol mi specciliava, e'n cl dolce ombrosa sponda ]I1i stava intento al mormorar dell' onda. Antre dell' angoscioso viver mio Reffrigerio soave, E dolce si, che piU non mi par grave Ne'l arder, nte'l morir, anz' il desio; De/h voi'l gtiaccio, e le'nibi, e'l tempo rio Disccecciatene omaai, che l'onda cliara, E l' ombra non oi en cara A scherzcre, e canLtar per suoi boschelti, E pratifesta et allegrezza alletti. Pacifiche, vma spesso in amorosa Guterra co'fiori, e 1' erba Alla srcagione acerba'elrdi insegrne del giglio e della rosa, Movete, Auzre, pian p]iao; cie treguia o posa, So non pace, io ritrove e; F3 so ben? dove:- O7 vago, e mansueto Sgutardo, olt labbra d'ambrosia, oh rider lieto I Hor come sin scoglio stassi, Hot come qci, r io se'si fit,,ge, Ed hor clrud' orsa r'cgge, lHo canta asigelo pio: tma che non fassi 7 E che non fammi, 0 sassi, 0?rivi, o behlte, o Dii, questa mia vaga Non so, se?infac, 6 maga, i~No so, se doznna, 6 Dea, 2Non so, se dolce 6?sea? Pianlgendo mi bcaciaste, E ridesido il nLegaste: Ibt doglia hebbivi pia, it Jfesta hebbivi cria: ia-cque g ioia d i pialnti, Dolor di riso: 0 aait.aLti Aliseri, habbiale isitsiewe Og'nor palsra e speeme. Bel Fior, t mili r'ime?nmbri La s'4g iadosa guaicia del bel viso; E si vera l'assezmbri, Che'n te sovente, come in lei m'affso Et BIOGRAPHtIA LITERARIA. 893 pass away to the poets who hlave done honor to our own times, and to those of our imnmediate predecessors.* Et hor del vago riso, Hor del sereno sguardo Ia pur cieco rignardo. Ma qual fugge, 0 Rosa, il smattin lieve? E cii te, come neve, E'l mio cor teco, e la mgia vita strugge? Arnnal mia, An7la dolce, oli seinpre qnovo E pin cliaro concento, Quarlta dolcezza sento In sol As,717na dicendo? lo?ni put pruovo, Ne qui tra noi ritruovo, Ne trd cieli armosnia, (Ce: del bel nome sno piie dolce sia: Altro il Cielo, altro Amore, Altro non stona l'Ecco del mio corc. lior che'l prato, e la selva si scolora, Al tuo sereno oabroso Mluovine, alto Riposo, Delh c/i'io riposi igna sol notte, n hora: Ham le fere, e gli augelli, ognn, talora Ha qualche pace; io quando, Lasso! non vonne errando, E non piango, e non grido? e qual pur forte? Ma poichb, nion sent' egli, odime, Morte. Risi e piansi d'Amor; ne pero mai Se non in fiamma, o'n onda, o', venlto scrissi: Spesso merce trovai Crucdel; sempre in me morot, in altri vissi: Hol? da' piic scqtri Abissi al ciel r'alzai, lor sie pur caddi giuso; Stanco al fin qui son chiso. * [The union of " high finish and perfusive grace with pathos and manly reflection"-pathos recalling the peculiar tone of Southey with a Wordsworthian strength of thought and st;ateliness of sentiment-is exemplified, as it seems to me, in the poetry of Mr. H. Taylor (not to speak of its other merits of a different kind), especially his later poetry, and very exquisitely in his printed but unpublished lines vritten in remembrance of E. E. Villiers. A friend pointed out to me, what I had before been feeling, the fine interwoven harmony of the stanza in this poem, which, though long and [Filli in Strozzi's Madrigal-S. C.] CIHAPTER XVII. EXAMINATION OF TIlE TENETS PECULIAR TO MR. WORDSWVORTHRUSTIC LIFE (ABOVE ALL, LOW AND RUSTIC LIFE) ESPECIALLY UNFAVORABLE TO THE FORMATION OF A HUMAN DICTION-THE BEST PARTS OF LANGUAGE TIIE PRODUCT OF PHILOSOPHERS, NOT OF CLOWNS OR SHEPHERDS-POETRY ESSENTIALLY IDEAL AND GENERIC-TIIE LANGUAGE OF MILTON AS MUCH THE LANGUAGE OF REAL LIFE, YEA, INCOMPARABLY MORE SO THAN THAT OF THE COTTAGER. As far then as Mr. Wordsworth in his preface contended, and most ably contended, for a reformation in our poetic diction, as far as he has evinced the truth of passion, and the dramatic propriety of those figures and metaphors in the original poets, which, stripped of their justifying reasons, and converted into mere artifices of connection or ornament, constitute the characteristic falsity in the poetic style of the moderns; and as far as he has, with equal acuteness and clearness, pointed out the process by which this change was effected, and the resemblances between that state into which the reader's mind is thrown by the pleasurable confusion of thought from an unaccustomed train of words and images; and that state which is induced by the natuvaried, forms a whole to the ear as truly as the more formal Spenserican stanza, but has a soft, floving movement remarkably well fitted for the expression of thoughtful tenderness, and well illustrates Mr. Wordsworth's remark, recorded in this work, on the musical "sweep of whole paragraphs." It is easy enough to invent new metres, but some new metres which the world has lately been presented with will never live, I fear, to be old. They are as unmusical and not so spirited as a Chicasaw war-song. — There is a witch in Mr. Tennyson's poetry, but I do not imagine that any great part of her witching power resides in newness of metre-though perhaps it is rash even to hazard a conjecture on the properties of such a subtle enchantress, or to say how such a mysterious siren does or does not bewitch.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 895 ral language of impassioned feeling; he undertook a useful task, and deserves all praise, both for the attempt and for the execution.. ) The provocations to this remonstrance in behalf of truth andn'ature were still of perpetual recurrence before and after the publication of this preface. I can not likewise but add, that the comparison of such poems of merit, as have been given to the public within the last ten or twelve years, with the majority of those produced previously to the appearance of that preface, leave no doubt on my mind, that Mr. Wordsworth is fully justified in believing his efforts to have been by no means ineffectual. Not only in the verses of those who have professed their admiration of his genius, but even of those who have distinguished themselves by hostility to his theory, and depreciation of his writings, are the impressions of his principles plainly visible. It is possible, that with these principles others may have been blended, which are not equally evident; and some which are unsteady and subvertible from the narrowness or imperfection of their basis. But it is more than possible, that these errors of defect or exaggeration, by kindling and feeding the controversy, may have conduced not only to the wider propagation of the accompanying truths, but that, by their frequent presentation to the mind in an excited state, they may have won for them a more permanent and practical result. A man will borrow a part from his opponent the more easily, if he feels himself justified in continuing to reject a part. While there remain important points in which he can still feel himself in the right, in which he still finds firm footing for continued resistance, he will gradually adopt those opinions, which were the least remote from his own convictions, as not less congruous with his own theory than with that which he reprobates. In like manner with a kind of instinctive prudence, he will abandon by little and little his weakest posts, till at length he seems to forget that they had ever belonged to him, or affects to consider them at most as accidental and "petty annexments," the removal of which leaves the citadel unhurt and unendangered. My own differences from certain supposed parts of Mr. Wordsworth's theory ground themselves on the assumption, that his words had been rightly interpreted, as purporting that the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due exceptions, from the mouths of men in real life, 896 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. a language which actually constitutes the natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings. My objection is, first, that in any sense this rule is applicable only to certain classes of poetry; secondly, that even to these classes it is not applicable, except in such a sense, as hath.never by any one (as far as I know or have read) been denied or doubted; and lastly, that as far as, and in that degree in which it is practicable, it is yet as a rule useless, if not injurious, and therefore either need not, or ought to be practised. The poet informs his reader, that he had generally chosen low and rustic life;* but not as low and rustic, or in order to repeat that pleasure of doubtful moral effect, which persons of elevated rank and of superior refinement oftentimes derive from a happy imitation of the rude unpolished manners and discourse of their inferiors. For the pleasure so derived may be traced to three exciting causes. The first is the naturalness, in fact, of the things represented. The second is the apparent naturalness of the representation, as raised, and qualified by an imperceptible infusion of the author's own knowledge and talent, which infusion does, indeed, constitute it an imitation as distinguished from a mere copy. The third cause may be found in the reader's conscious feeling of his superiority awakened by the contrast presented to him; even as for the same purpose the kings and great barons of yore retained, sometimes actual clowns and fools, but more frequently shrewd and witty fellows in that character. These, however, were not Mr. Wordsworth's objects. He chose low and rustic life, " because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint. and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural occupations are more easily comprehlended, and are more durable; and lastly,because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." Now it is clear to me, that in the most interesting of the * [In the last edition of this preface the word " hmuble" is substituted for "low" See P. W. ii. p. 306.-Ed.] BIOGRAPIIA LITERARIA. 897 poems, in which the author is more or less dramatic, as THE BROTHERS, MICHAEL, RUTH, THE MAD MOTHER, and others,* the persons introduced are by no means taken from low or rustic life in the common acceptation of those words; and it is not less clear, that the sentiments and language, as far as they can be conceived to have been really transferred from the minds and conversation of such persons, are attributable to causes and circumstances not necessarily connected with " their occupations and abode." The thoughts, feelings, language, and manners of the shepherd-farmers in the vales of Cumberland and Westmoreland, as far as they are actually adopted in those poems, may be accounted for from causes, which will and do produce the same results in every state of life, whether in town or country. As the two principal I rank that independence, which raises a man above servitude, or daily toil-for the profit of others, yet not above the necessity of industry and a frugal simplicity of domestic life; and the accompanying unambitious, but solid and religious, education, which has rendered -few books familiar, but the Bible, and the Liturgy or Hymn-book. To this latter cause, indeed, which is so far accidental, that it is the blessing of particular countries and a particular age, not the product of particular places or employments, the poet owes the show of probability, that his personages might really feel, think, and talk with any tolerable resemblance to his representation. It is an excellent remark of Dr. Henry More's that " a man of confined education, but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will naturally -form a more winning and commanding rhetoric than those that are learned; the intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases debasing their style."t * [The Brothers: P. W. i. p. 109. Mlichael: ib. p. 222. The Mad Mother, now simply entitled " Her eyes are wild:" ib. p. 256, and Ruth ii. p. 106.Ed. The Edition of Mr. Wordsworth's Poems, referred to by Mr. Coleridge in this critique, is that of 1815, in two vols. large 8vo.-S. C.] f [Enthusiasmnus Triamnphatus, Sect. xxxv. "For a man illiterate, as he was,' but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will naturally contract a more winning and commanding Rhetoric than those that are learned, the intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases deforming their style, and making it sound more after the manner of men, though ordinarily there may be more of God in it than in that of the enthusiast." P. 34, Ed. Lon[This is spoken of the enthusiast, David George, who was born at Delph; died 1556.-S. C.] 398 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. It is, moreover, to be considered, that to the formation of healthy feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain vantage-ground is pre-requisite. It is not every man that is likely to be improved by a country life or by country labors. Education, or original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist if the changes, forms, and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant. And where these are not sufficient, the mind contracts and hardens by want of stimulants; and the man becomes selfish, sensual, gross, and hard-hearted. Let the management of the Poor Laws in Liverpool, Manchester, or Bristol be compared with the ordinary dispensation of the poor-rates in ag'ricultural villages, where the farmers are the overseers and guardians of the poor. If my own experience have not been particularly unfortunate, as well as that of the many respectable country clergymen with whom I have conversed on the subject, the result would engender more than skepticism concerning the desirable influences of low and rustic life in and for itself. Whatever may be concluded on the other side, from the stronger local attachments and enterprising spirit of the Swiss, and other mountaineers, applies to a particular mode of pastoral life, under forms of property that permit and beget manners truly republican, not to rustic life in general, or to the absence of artificial cultivation. On the contrary, the mountaineers; whose manners have been so often eulogized, are in general better educated and greater readers than men of equal rank elsewhere. But where this is don, 1656. Dr. Henry More, the friend and colleague of Cudworth, was born in 1614, died 1687. He was educated in Christ College, Cambridge, in which university he spent his life. His theological works,-the chief of which are The Mystery of Godliness and a Modest Inquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity, a detailed argument against the Church of Rome,-fill one large folio volume, and his philosophical writings are numerous. IIe studied Plotinus and, rejecting the doctrines of Aristotle and the scholastics, sought the principles of divine philosophy in the writings of the Platonists. Their teaching and that of the ancient Cabbalists he traced to the same source, the Hebrew Prophets, whose doctrines he believed to have been transmitted to Pythagoras, and from him to Plato. Though an opponent of mystics and enthusiasts, his own mind had a strong tendency to mysti cism; he was profoundly learned and of a most contemplative spirit. Cousin says that in combating the errors of Des Cartes and Spinoza he showed great respect for the genius of these two philosophers.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. 899 not the case, as among the peasantry of North Wales, the ancient mountains, with all their terrors and all their glories, are pictures to the blind, and music to the deaf. I should not have entered so much into detail upon this passage, but here seems to be the point, to which all the lines of difference converge as to their source and centre; —I mean, as far as, and in whatever respect, my poetic creed does differ from the doctrines promulgated in this preface. I adopt with full faith, the principle of Aristotle, that poetry, as poetry, is essentially* ideal,f that it avoids and excludes all accident; that its apparent individualities of rank, character, or occupation must be representative of a class; and that the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes, with the common attributes of the class; not with such as one gifted individual might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it is most probable beforehand that he would possess.4 If my premises are right and my deductions * [Mr. Coleridge here quoted, in a foot-note, from the first edition of The Friend the passage, " Say not that I am recommending abstractions," to the end of the paragraph, which occurs in the Second of the Letters from Germany, placed near the end of this volume.] t [See Poetic. s. 18. Q, avepv 6e ES riv elpjzIvOv, cKai 0r o rTO rai yev6eva 2I'yetv, rTOro wrotTroa. Ipyov cri7v, adZ' ola av yevotro, ca r7a dvvara iacr Tr eilcor, ia) i dvaytcalov. e * * / AGt cat rfteocCOarepov wcai arovdat6Oepov 7ro1iatic larcopiac Ea7iv.'H Rev yap 7roatclr Zudiov r2 Kaia6Zov, i 6' a7ropta ir KaO' Ecaarov 2i'yet. "Ea:r 61 KcaO6Zov riEv, rM TrOtGO 7ra 7ro' ar7ra ovafcaivveL 2XyeLv, I) lrpTrreFv, CaTd 7-o Eic, r ro ivcayKaiov, ov o roxod aerac 7 roi[atg, ovA/ure EarT:/Liezv~' ra 62 leaO' lceaarov, 7i'A2~atltcd/r Ergpa~ev, - 7-i,craOev.-Ed. It appears from what has been said, that the object of the poet is not to relate what has actually happened, but what may possibly happen, either with probability or from necessity. The difference between the poet and the historian does not arise from one writing in verse and the other in prose; for if the work of Herodotus were put into verse, it would be no less a history than it is in prose. But they differ in this, that one relates what has actually been done, the other what may be done. Poetry, therefore, is more philosophical and instructive than history. Poetry speaks more of general things, and history of particular. By general things Imean what any person of such a character would probably and naturally say or do in such a situation; and this is what poetry ainms at even in giving names to the characters. By particular things I mean what any individual, as Alcibiades, for instance, either acted or suztfered in reality. Pye's Translation.-S. C.] [" It is Shakspeare's peculiar excellence, that throughout the whole of his splendid picture-gallery-(the reader will excuse the acknowledged inadequacy of this metaphor)-we find individuality everywhere, mere por 400 ]BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. legitimate, it follows that there can be no poetic medium between the swains of Theocritus and those of an imaginary golden age. The characters of the vicar and the shepherd-mariner in the poem of THE BROTIHERS,* and that of the shepherd of Green-head Ghyll in the MICHAEL,t have all the verisimilitude and representative quality, that the purposes of poetry can require. They are persons of a known and abiding class, and their manners and sentiments the natural product of circumstances common to the class. Take Michael for instance: An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb. His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen, Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs, And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt And watchful more than ordinary men. Hence he had learned the meaning of all winds Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes When others heeded not, he heard the South Make subterraneous music, like the noise Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills. The Shepherd, at such warning, of his flock Bethought him, and he to himself would say,'The winds are now devising work for me!' And, truly, at all times, the storm, that drives The traveller to a shelter, summoned him Up to the mountains: he had been alone Amid the heart of many thousand mists, That came to him and left him on the heights. So lived he, till his eightieth year was past. And grossly that man errs, who should suppose That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks, Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts. Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed The common air; the hills, which he so oft trait nowhere. In all his various characters we still feel ourselves communing with the same nature, which is everywhere present as the vegetable sap in the branches, sprays, leaves, buds, blossoms, and fruits, their shapes, tastes, and odors. Speaking of their effect, that is, his works themselves, we may define the excellence of their method as consisting in that just proportion, that union and interpenetration of the universal and the particular, which must ever pervade all works of decided and true science." The Friend, II. p. 416. —Ed.] * [P. W. i. p. 109.-Ed.] t [b. p. 222.-Ed.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 401 Had climbed with vigorous steps;* which had impressed So many incidents upon his mind Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear; Which, like a book, preserved the memory Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved, Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts, So grateful in themselves, the certainty Of honorable gain; these fields, these hills Which were his living Being, even more Than his own blood-what could they less? had laid Strong hold on his affections,t were to him A pleasurable feeling of blind love, The pleasure which there is in life itself. On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched in a lower key, as the HARRY GILL,? and THE IDIOT Boy,~ the feelings are those of human nature in general; though the poet has judiciously laid the scene in the country, in order to place himself in the vicinity of interesting images, without the necessity of ascribing a sentimental perception of their beauty to the persons of his drama. In THE IDIOT BOY, indeed, the mother's character is not so much the real and native product of a A" situation where the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they can attain their maturity and speak a plainer and more emphatic language," as it is an impersonation of an instinct abandoned by judgment. Hence the'two following charges seem to me not wholly groundless: at least, they are the only plausible objections, which I have heard to that fine poem. The one is, that the author has not, in the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader's fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention to represent. He has even by the "burr, burr, burr," uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. The other is, that the idiocy of the boy is so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the [" ~ -- hills, which with vigorous step He had so often climbed."-Last edition. —Ed.] C"[" —-- linking to such acts The certainty of honorable gain; Those fields, those hills-what could they less? had laid Strong hold on his affections." —Last edition.-Ed.]: [P. W. ii. p. 135. —Ed.] ~ [lb. i. p. 203. —Ed.] 402 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARiA. general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile dotage, than an analytic display of maternal affection in its ordinary workings. In THE THORN,* the poet himself acknowledges in a note the necessity of an introductory poem, in which he should have portrayed the character of the person from whom the words of the poem are supposed to proceed: a superstitious man moderately imaginative, of slow faculties and deep feelings, "a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who, being past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity, or small independent income, to some village or country town of which he was not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such men having nothing to do become credulous and talkative from indolence." But in a poem, still more in a lyric poem-and the Nurse in ROMEO AND JULIET alone prevents me from extending the remark even to dramatic poetry, if indeed even the Nurse can be deemed altogether a case in point-it is' not possible to imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourser. without repeating the effects of dulness and garrulity. However this may be, I dary assert, that the parts-(and these form the far larger portion of the whole)-which might as well or still better have proceeded from the poet's own imagination, and have been spoken in his own character, are those which have given, and which will continue to give, universal delight;' and that the passages exclusively appropriate to the supposed narrator, such as the last couplet of the third stanza;t the seven last lines of the tenth;: and the five following stanzas, with the exception of the four * [P. W. ii. p. 124. The note to which Mr. Coleridge refers is omitted in the last editions. —Ed.] * 1 "I've measured it from side to side;'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide." t 2 "Nay, rack your brain-'tis all in vain, I'll tell you every thing I know; But to the Thorn, and to the Pond Which is a little step beyond, [These two lines are left out in the latter editions. So are the two stanzas (originally the 11th and 12th) cited in the next note, and some parts of the present 12th, 13th, and 14th, are altered from what they were as quoted by Mr. C.-S. C.] 2 [Preface, P. W. i. p. 307.-S. 0.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 403 admirable lines at the commencement of the fourteenth, are felt by many unprejudiced and unsophisticated hearts, as sudden and unpleasant sinkings from the height to which the poet had previously lifted them, and to which he again re-elevates both himself and his reader. If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice I wish that you would go: Perhaps, when you are at the place, You something of her tale may trace. I'll give you the best help I can: Before you up the mountain go, Up to the dreary mountain-top, I'll tell you all I know.'Tis now some two-and-twenty years Since she (her name is Martha Ray) Gave, with a maiden's true good will, Her company to Stephen Hill; And she was blithe and gay, And she was happy, happy still Whene'er she thought of Stephen Hill. And they had fixed the wedding-day, The morning that must wed them both; But Stephen to another maid Had sworn another oath; And, with this other maid, to church Unthinking Stephen wentPoor Martha! on that woful day A pang of pitiless dismay Into her soul was sent; A fire was kindled in her breast, Which might not burn itself to rest. They say, full six months after this, While yet the summer leaves were green, She to the mountain-top would go, And there was often seen.'Tis said, a child was in her womb, As now to any eye was plain; She was with child, and she was mad; Yet often she was sober sad From her exceeding pain. Oh me! ten thousand times I'd rather That he had died, that cruel father! * *~ * * *K *I * *i * 404 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. of characters was to be directed, not only a priori, from grounds of reason, but both from the few instances in which the poet himself need be supposed to have been governed by it, and fiom the comparative inferiority of those instances; still more must I hesitate in my assent to the sentence which immediately follows the former citation; and which I can neither admit as particular fact, nor as general rule. "The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions."* To this I reply; that a rustic's language, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far re-constructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar —(which are in essence no other than the laws of universal logic, applied to psychological materials)-will not differ from the language of any other man of common sense, however learned or refined he may be, except as far as the notions, which the rustic has to convey, are fewer aud more indiscriminate. This Last Christmas when they talked of this, Old farmer Simpson did maintain, That in her womb the infant wrought About its mother's heart, and brought Her senses back again: And, when at last her time drew near, Her looks were calm, her senses clear. No more I know, I wish I did, And I would tell it all to you; For what became of this poor child There's none that ever knew: And if a child was born or no, There's no one that could ever tell; And if'twas born alive or dead, There's no one knows, as I have said: But some remember well, That Martha Ray about this time Would up the mountain often climb." * [Preface, P. Wi. ii. p. 307. —S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 405 will become still clearer, if we add the consideration-(equally important though less obvious)-that the rustic, fiom the more imperfect development of his faculties, and from the lower state of their cultivation, aims almost solely to convey insulated facts, either those of his scanty experience or his traditional belief; while the educated man chiefly seeks to discover and express those connections of things, or those relative bearings of fact to fact, from which some more or less general law is deducible. For facts are valuable to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling law, which is the true being of things, the sole solution of their modes of existence, and in the knowledge of' which consists our dignity and our power. As little can I agree with the assertion, that from the objects with which the rustic hourly communicates the best part of language is formed. For first, if to communicate with an object implies such an acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of being discriminately reflected on, the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would furnish a very scanty vocabulary. The few things and modes of action requisite for his bodily conveniences would alone be individualized; while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of confused general terms. Secondly, I deny that the words and combinations of words derived from the objects, with which the rustic is familiar, whether with distinct or confused knowledge, can be justly said to form the best part of language. It is more than probable, that many classes of the brute creation possess discriminating sounds, by which they can convey to each other notices of such objects as concern their food, shelter, or safety. Yet we hesitate to call the aggregate of such sounds a language, otherwise than metaphorically. The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination, the greater part of which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man; though in civilized society, by imitation and passive remembrance of what they hear from their religious instructors and other superiors, the most uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed, nor reaped. If the history of the phrases in hourly currency among our peasants were traced; a person not previously aware of the fact would be surprised at finding so large a number, 406 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. which three or four centuries ago were the exclusive property of the universities and the schools; and, at the commencement of the Reformation, had been transferred from the school to the pulpit, and thus gradually passed into common life. The extreme difficulty, and often the impossibility, of finding words for the simplest moral and intellectual processes in the languages of' uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the weightiest obstacle to the progress of our most zealous and adroit missionaries. Yet these tribes are surrounded by the same nature as our peasants are; but in still more impressive forms: and they are, moreover, obliged to particularize many more of them. When, therefore, Mr. Wordsworth adds, " accordingly, such a language" —(meaning, as before, the language of' rustic life purified from provincialism) —" arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted obr it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honor ulpon themselves and their art in proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression;"* it may be answered, that the language, which he has in view, can be attributed to rustics with no greater right than the style of Hooker or Bacon to Torn Brownt or Sir * [Ib.-" In proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation."-S. C.] 1 [Thomas Brown, the son of a farmer in Shropshire, lived towards the close of the seventeenth century, died in 1704. His works in prose and verse, with his remains, were printed in 4 vols. 12mo., in 1707. There was a 9th edition in 1730. "His poems,"' says Dr. Drake, in his' Character of the author,' "are most of them imitations of antiquity, and so called by him, but generally so improved under his hands, they may justly be esteemed originals. They were generally Odes, Satires, or Epigrams, Paraphrases, Imitations of Horace and Martial." His prose works consist of Letters from the Dead to the Living, &c., after the manner of Lucian, Dialogules, Essays, Declamations, Satires, Letters, and other miscellaneous productions, being Amusements Serious and Comical, calculated for the Meridian of London. I would fain believe, to speak from a mere glance into these volumes, that the Meridian of London is improved since Mr. Brown's days: and am sorry to learn that this "vulgar writer's" works are not likely just yet to visit "The waters of Oblivion's lake." The atithor appears to have possessed, besides an acquaintance with French, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 407 Roger L'Estrange.* Doubtless, if what is peculiar to each were omitted in each, the result must needs be the same. Further, that the poet, who uses an illogical diction, or a style fitted to excite only the low and changeable pleasure of wonder by means of groundless novelty, substitutes a language of folly and vanity, Italian, and Spanish, some classic lore, and to have employed it in working up the alloy and baser portions of ancient wit into modern shapes. "And if he was not so nice in the choice of his authors," says Dr. Drake, " as might be expected from a man of his taste, he must be excused; because, doing those things for his subsistence, he did not consult his own liking so much as his booksellers', taking such as they offered the best price for." Poor man! he had better have tried to dig, and ought to have been less ashamed to beg, than to follow in the track of those who, though they do not call evil good, yet stimulate under pretence of satirizing it. His eulogist and defender adds, "Nor can he be blam'd for this, since fortune having provided no other way for him to live by, prudence directed him to prefer the drudgery of most gain, before a more specious one of applause, and taught him not to barter his ease and profit for the reputation of being nice." What lax notions must have been generally tolerated in times when a grave man coluld write such a sentence as this in sober earnest, weighing money gains against reputation for delicacy, and leaving morals out of the question! It would seem as if Charles Lamb's remark On the Artificial Comedy of the last Century must be applied to a great deal of our literature beside comedy, both in that century and the preceding one: that it is out of the moral world altogether, to be judged by no laws but those of a land where laws of conscience are unrecognized-a Utopian place, where " pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom." —S. C.] * [Sir Roger L'Estrange, of an ancient family in Norfolk, is another "eminent writer in the 17th century," who eminently displays the worse characteristics of that period of our literature. He lived from about 1617 to December 12, 1705; was a royalist; contrived to keep in with Crom well, but was in trouble, as a disaffected person, under King William. He wrote a great many tracts for those times, but as an author is at present best known by the Alliance of Divine Offices, exhibiting all the Liturgies of the Church of England since the Reformation, 1699, folio-The Reign of Charles I, 1654-History of the Times 1687, and a tract against Milton, entitled No Blind Guides. His writings have been characterized with great severity by Mr. Thomas Gordon, who declares them "not fit to be read by fay who have taste and breeding"-" full of technical terms, of phrases picked up in the streets from apprentices and porters." " His sentences," says the critic, "beside their grossness, are lively nothings, which can never be translated." After giving a specimen, " Yet this man," he adds, "was reckoned a master, nay, a reformer of the English language; a man who writ no language, nor does it appear that he understood any; witness his miserable translations of Cicero's Ofces and Josephws.-Sir Roger had a genius for buffoonery and a 408 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. not for that of the rustic, but for that of' good sense and natural feeling. Here let me be permitted to remind the reader, that the positions, which I controvert, are contained in the sentences —" a selection of the real language of men;"* —" the language of these men" (that is, men in low and rustic life) " has been adopted; I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men." "Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there neither is, nor can be, any esseztial difference:" it is against these exclusively that my opposition is directed. I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of the word " real." Every man's language varies, according to the extent of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or quickness of his feelings. Every man's language has, first, its individualities; secondly, the common properties of the class to which he belongs; and thirdly, words and phrases of universal use. The language of Hooker, Bacon, Bishop Taylor, and Burke differs from the common language of the learned class only by the superior number and novelty of the thoughts and relations which they had to convey. The language of Algernon Sidney differs not at all from that, which every well-educated gentleman would wish to write, and (with due allowances for the undeliberateness, and less connected train, of thinking natural and proper to conversation) such as he would wish to talk. Neither one nor the other differ half as much from the general language of cultivated society, as the language of Mr. Wordsworth's homeliest composition differs from that of a common peasant. For "real" therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or linguca conmunis. And this, we have proved, is no more to be fbund in the rabble, and higher he never went.-To put his books into the hands of youth, or boys, for whom Esop, by him burlesqued, was designed, is to vitiate their taste, and to give them a poor, low turn of thinking: not to mention the vile -and slavish principles of the man. He has not only turned.Esop's plain beasts from the simplicity of nature into jesters and buffoons, but out of the mouths of animals inured to the boundless freedom of air and deserts, has drawn doctrines of servitude and a defence of tyranny." (Quoted from the General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, vol. vii.)-S. C.] * [" A selection of language really used by men," in the later editions. — s. C.] BIOGRAPEIIA LITERARIA. 409 phraseology of low and rustic life than in that of any other class. Omit the peculiarities of each and the result of course must be common to all. And assuredly the omissions and changes to be made in the language of rustics, before it could. be transferred to any species of poem, except the drama or other professed imitation, are at least as numerous and weighty, as would be required in adapting to the same purpose the ordinary language of tradesmen and manufacturers. Not to mention, that the language so highly extolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in every county, nay in every village, according to the accidental character of the clergyman, the existence or non-existence of schools; or oven, perhaps, as the exciseman, publican, and barber happen to be, or not to be, zealous politicians, and readers of the weekly newspaper pr'o bono publico. Anterior to cultivation the linguca comnnmunis of every country, as Dante has well observed, exists everywhere in parts, and nowhere as a whole. Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addition of the words,' in a state of excitement." For the nature of a man's words, when he is' strongly affected by joy, grief; or anger, must necessarily depend on the niunber and quality of the general truths, conceptions and images, and of the words expressing them, with which his mind had been previously stored. For the property of passion is not to create; but to set in increased activity. At least, whatever new connections of' thoughts or images, or-(which is equally, if not more than equally, the appropriate effect of strong excitement)-whatever generalizations of truth or experience the heat of passion may produce; yet the terms of *their conveyance must have pre-existed in his former conversations, and are only collected and crowded together by the unusual stimulation. It is indeed very possible to adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and other blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused understanding interposes at short intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject, which is still slipping from him, and to give him time for recollection; or, in mere aid of vacancy, as in the scanty companies of a country stage the same player pops backwards and forwards, in order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the procession of Macbeth, or Henry VIII. But what assistance to the poet, or ornament to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture. Nothing assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more voL. III. 8 410 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. widely from the apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in which the passion is greater and of longer endurance than to be exhausted or satisfied by a single representation of the image or incident exciting it. Such repetitions I admit to be a beauty of the highest kind; as illustrated by Mr. Wordsworth himself from the song of Deborah. At ]her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay dowen; at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead. Judges v. 27. CHAPTER XVIII. LANGUAGE OF METRICAL COMPOSITION, WVIIY AND WHEREIN ESSENTIALLY DIFFERENT FROM THAT OF PROSE-ORIGIN AND ELEMENTS OF METRE-ITS NECESSARY CONSEQUENCES, AND THE CONDITIONS THEREBY IMPOSED ON THE METRICAL WRITER IN THE CHOICE OF HIS DICTION. I CONCLUDE, therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; and that, were it not impracticable, it would still be useless. For the very power of making the selection implies the previous possession of the language selected. Or where can the poet have lived? And by what rules could he direct his choice, which would not have enabled him to select and arrange his words by'the light of his own judgment?'We do not adopt the language of a class by the mere adoption of such words exclusively, as that class would use, or at least understand; but likewise by fbllowing the order, in which the words of such men are wont to succeed each other. Now this order, in the intercourse of uneducated men, is distinguished from the diction of their superiors in knowledge and power, by the greater disjunction and separation in the component parts of that, whatever it be, which they wish to communicate. There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to any one point; and by this means so to subordinate and arrange the different parts according to their relative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an organized whole. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 411 Now I will take the first stanza, on which I have chanced to open, in the Lyrical Ballads. It is one of the most simple and least peculiar in its language. "In distant countries have I been, And yet I have not often seen A healthy man, a man full grown, Weep in the public roads, alone. But such a one, on English ground, And in the broad highway, I met; Along the broad highway he came, His cheeks with tears were wet: Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad; And in his arms a lamb he had."* The words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks of life; and of course not less so in, the hamlet and cottage than in the shop, manufactory, college, or palace. But is this the or'der in which the rustic would have placed the words? I am grievously deceived, if the following less compact mode of conmmencing the same tale be not a far more faithful copy. "I have been in a many parts, far and near, and I don't know that I ever saw before a man crying by himself in the public road; a grown man I mean, that was neither sick nor hurt, &c. &c." But when I turn to the following stanza in The Thorn: "At all times of the day and night This wretched woman thither goes; And she is known to every star, And every wind that blows: And there beside the Thorn, she sits, When the blue daylight's in the skies, And when the whirlwind's on the hill, Or frosty air is keen and still, And to herself she cries, Oh misery Oh misery I Oh woe is me! Oh misery l"J' and compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with that which I can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life, from such a narrator, as is supposed in the note to the poem; compare it either in the succession of the images or of the sentences; I am reminded of the sublime prayer and hymn of praise, which Milton, inl opposition to an established liturgy, pre* tThe last of the Flock, 1st stanza. P. W. i. p. 169.-S. C.] t [P. W. ii. p. 127.-S. C.] 412 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. sents as a fair specimen of common extemporary devotion, and such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired minister of a conventicle! And I reflect with delight, how little a mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the processes of genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius, who possesses, as Mr. Wordsworth, if ever man did, most assuredly does possess, "The Vision and the Faculty divine." One point then alone remains, but that the most important; its examination having been, indeed, my chief inducement for the preceding inquisition. " There neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition."t Such is Mr. Wordsworth's assertion. Now prose itself, at least in all argumentative and consecutive works, differs, and ought to differ, from the language of conversation; even ass * [The Excursion, B. i. P. W. vi. p. 6.-S. C.] f [P. W. ii. p. 315. Preface. The word essential is marked with italics in the edition of 1840.-S. C.] 4 It is no less an error in teachers, than a torment to the poor children, to enforce the necessity of reading as they would talk. In order to cure them of singing as it is called, that is, of too great a difference, the child is made to repeat the words with his eyes from off the book; and then, indeed, his tones resemble talking, as far as his fears, tears and trembling will permit. But as soon as the eye is again directed to the printed page, the spell begins anew; for an instinctive sense tells the child's feelings, that to utter its own momentary thoughts, and to recite the written thoughts of another, as of another, and a far wiser than himself, are two widely different things; and as the two acts are accompanied with widely different feelings, so must they justify different modes of enunciation. Joseph Lancaster, among his other sophistications of the excellent Dr. Bell's invaluable system, cures this fault of singing by hanging fetters and chains on the child, to the music of which one of his school-fellows, who walks before, dolefully chants out the child's last speech and confession, birth, parentage, and education. And this soulbenumbing ignominy, this unholy and heart-hardening burlesque on the last fearful infliction of outraged law, in pronouncing the sentence to which the stern and familiarized judge not seldom bursts into tears, has been extolled as a happy and ingenious method of remedying-what? and how?why, one extreme in order to introduce another, scarce less distant from good sense, and certainly likely to have worse moral effects, by enforcing a semblance of petulant ease and self-sufficiency, in repression, and possibly afterperversion of the natural feelings. I have to beg Dr. Bell's pardon for this connection of the two names, but he knows that contrast is no less powerful a cause of association than likeness. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 413 reading ought to differ fiom talking. Unless therefore the difference denied be that of mere words, as materials common to all styles of writing, and not of the style itself in the universally admitted sense of the term, it might be naturally presumed that there must exist a still greater between the ordonnance of poetic composition and that of prose, than is expected to distinguish prose from ordinary conversation. There are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of literature, of apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public wonder as new and startling truths, but which, on examination, have shrunk into tame and harmless truisms; as the eyes of a cat, seen in the dark, have been mistaken for flames of fire. But Mr. Wordsworth is among the last men, to whom a delusion of this kind would be attributed by any one, who had enjoyed the slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and character. Where an objection has been anticipated by such an author as natural, his answer to it must needs be interpreted in some sense which either is, or has been, or is capable of being controverted. My object then must be to discover some other meaning for the term " essential difference" in this place, exclusive of the indistinction and community of the words themselves. For whether there ought to exist a class of words in the English, in any degree resembling the poetic dialect of the Greek and Italian, is a question of very subordinate importance. The number of such words would be small indeed, in our language; and even in the Italian and Greek, they consist not so much of different words, as of slight differences in the forms of declining and conjugating the same words; forms, doubtless, which having been, at some period more or less remote, the common grammatic flexions of some tribe or province, had been accidentally appropriated to poetry by the general admiration of certain master intellects, the first established lights of inspiration, to whom that dialect happened to be native. Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing, as that particular thing. It is equivalent to the idea of a thing, whenever we use the word, idea, with philosophic precision. Existence, on the other hand, is distinguished fiom essence, by the superinduction of reality. Thus we speak of the essence, and essential properties of a circle; but we do not therefore as 414 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. sert, that any thing, which really exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too, without any tautology, we contend for the existence of the Supreme Being; that is, for a reality correspondent to the idea. There is, next, a secondary use of the word essence, in which it signifies the point or ground of contra-distinction between two modifications of' the samrne substance or subject. Thus we should be allowed to say, that -the style of architecture of Westminster Abbey is essentially different from that of Saint Paul, even though both had been built with blocks cut into the same form, and from the same quarry. Only in this latter sense of the term must it have been denied by Mr. Wordsworth (fbr in this sense alone is it affirmed by the general opinion) that the language of poetry (that is the formal construction, or architecture, of the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of prose. Now the burden of the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the supporters of the common belief: Mr. Wordsworth, in consequence, assigns as the proof of his position, " that not only the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written. The truth of this assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages from almost all the poetical writings, even of Milton himself." He then quotes Gray's sonnet-' In vain to me the smiling mornings shine, And reddening Phcebus lifts his golden fire; The birds in vain their amorous descant join, Or cheerful fields resume their green attire. These ears, alas! for other notes repine; A different object do these eyes requilre; My lonely anguish nmelts no heart but mine; And in?my breast the imperfect joys expire. Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, And new-born pleasure brings to happier men; The fields to all their wonted tribute bear; To warm their little loves the birds complain: Ifruzitlcss monrn to hins that can not hear, And weep the more, because Iweep) in vain." and adds the following remark:-" It will easily be perceived, that the only part of this Sonnet which is of any value, is the BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 415 lines printed in Italics; it is equally obvious, that, except in the rhyme, and in the use of the single word "fruitless" for fruitlessly, which is so far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect diffier from that of prose."* An idealist defending his system by the fact, that when asleep we often believe ourselves awake, was well answered by his plain neighbor, " Ah, but when awake do we ever believe ourselves asleep?" Things identical must be convertible. The preceding passage seems to rest on a similar sophism. For the question is not, whether there may not occur in prose an order of words, which would be equally proper in a poem; nor whether there are not beautiful lines and sentences of frequent occurrence in good poems, which would be equally becoming as well as beautiful in good prose; for neither the one nor the other has ever been either denied or doubted by any one. The true question must be, whether there are not modes of expression, a construetion, and an order of sentences, which are in their fit and natural place in a serious prose composition, but would be disproportionate and heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and vice versa, whether' in the language of a serious poem there may not be an arrangement both of words and sentences, and a use and selection of (what are called) figures of speech, both as to their kind, their frequency, and their occasions, which on a subject of equal weight would be vicious and alien in correct and manly prose. I contend, that in both cases this unfitness of each fbr the place of the other frequently will and ought to exist. And first from the origin of metre. This I would trace to the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion. It might be easily explained likewise in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted by the very state, which it counteracts; and how this balance of antagonists became organized into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term), by a supervening act of the will and judgment, consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure. Assuming these principles, as the data of our argument, we deduce from them two legitimate conditions, which the critic is entitled to expect in every metrical work. First, that, as the elements of metre owe their existence to a: state of increased excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the nat[P.. ii. pp. 313-14. —S. C.] 41 6 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ural language of excitement. Secondly, that as these elements are formed into metre artificially, by a voluntary act, with the design and for the purpose of blending delight with emotion, se the traces of present volition should throughout the metrical language be proportionably discernible. Now these two conditions must be reconciled and co-present. There must be not only a partnership, but a union; an interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose. Again, this union can be manifested only in a frequency of forms and figures of speech (originally the offspring of passion, but now the adopted children of power), greater than would be desired or endured, where the emotion is not voluntarily encouraged and kept up for the sake of that pleasure, which such emotion, so tempered and mastered by the will, is fbund capable of communicating. It not only dictates, but of itself' tends to produce a more frequent employment of picturesque and vivifying language, than would be natural in any other case, in which there did not exist, as there does in the present, a previous and well understood, though tacit, compact between the poet and his reader, that the latter is entitled to expect, and the former bound to supply this species and degree of pleasurable excitement. We may in some measure apply to this union the answer of Polixenes, in the Winter's Tale, to Perdita's neglect of the streaked gilliflowers, because she had had heard it said, "There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares With great creating nature. Pol. Say there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean; so, o'er that art, Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art, That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to tare wuildest stock; And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. This is an art, Which does mend nature,-change it rather; but The art itself is nature."~ Secondly, I argue from the ejflects of metre. As far as metro acts in and for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general -eclings and of -the attention. This effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprise, and * [Act iv. sc. iii.-S. C.] BIOGRAPH1IA LITERARIA. 417 by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still reexcited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation, they act powerfiully, though themselves unnoticed. Where, therefore, correspondent food and appropriate matter are not provided fobr the attention and feelings thus roused there must needs be a disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four. The discussion on the powers of metre in the preface is highly ingenious and touches at all points on truth. But I can not find any statement of its powers considered abstractly and separately. On the contrary Mr. Wordsiworth seems always to estimate metre by the powers, which it exerts during (and, as I think, in consequence of) its combination with other elements of poetry. Thus the previous difficulty is left unanswered, what the elements are, with which it must be combined, in order to produce its own effects to any pleasurable purpose. Double and tri-syllable rhymes, indeed, form a lower species of wit, and, attended to exclusively for their own sake, may become a source of momentary amusement; as in poor Smart's distich to the Welsh Squire who had promised him a hare: "Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader! Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallow'd her?" But for any poetic purposes, metre resembles (if the aptness of the simile may excuse its meanness) yeast, worthless or disagreeable by itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is proportionally combined. The reference to THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD* by no means satisfies my judgment. We all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the feelings of our childhood. This ballad, therefore, we read under such recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to us poems, which Mr. Wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament., Before the invention of printing, and in a still greater degree, befbre the introduction of writing, metre, especially alliterative metre (whether alliterative at the * [P. 333.-S-. C.] 3* 418 BIOGRAPIIIA LITERARIA. beginning of the words, as in PIEaCE PLOULIAN, or at the end, as in rhymes), possessed an independent value as assisting the recollection, and consequently the preservation, of any series of truths or incidents. But I am not convinced by the collation of facts, that THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD owes either its preservation, or its popularity, to its metrical form. Mr. Marshal's repository affords a number of tales in prose inferior in pathos and general merit, some of as old a date, and many as widely popular. Ton HICKATHRIFT, JACK THE GIANT-KILLER, GOODY Two-SHOES, and LITTLE RED RIDING-HOOD are formidable rivals. And that they have continued in prose, can not be fairly explained by the assumption, that the comparative meanness of their thoughts and images precluded even the humblest forms of metre. The scene of GOODY Two-sIHOES in the church is perfectly susceptible of metrical narration; and, among the Oav~ircxa Oavuaazra6zcxa even of the present age, I do not recollect a more astonishing image than that of the "whole rookery, that flew out of the giant's beard," scared by the tremendous voice, with which this monster answered the challenge of the heroic Tom HICKATHRIFT! If from these we turn to compositions universally, and independently of all early associations, beloved and admired; would the MARIA, THE MONiK, or THE POOR MAN'S Ass of Sterne,* be read with more delight, or have a better chance of immortality, had they without any change in the diction been composed in rhyme, than in their present state? If I am not grossly mistaken, the general reply would be in the negative. Nay, I will confess, that, in Mr. Wordsworth's own volumes, the ANECDOTE FOR FATHERS, SIMON LEE, ALICE FELL, BEGGARS, and THE SAILOR S MOTHER,t notwithstanding the beauties which are to be found in each of them where the poet interposes the music of his own thoughts, would have been more delightful to me in prose, told and managed, as by Mr. Wordsworth they would have been, in a moral essay or pedestrian tour. Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore excites the question: Why is the attention to be thus stimulated? Now the question can not be answered by the pleasure of the metre itself: for this we have shown to be conditional, * [Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy. Works II. pp. 247, 394, 271, 312.-S. C.] t [P.W.. p. 22. V.p. 1y. I. p. 13. II.p. 101. I.p. 182. —S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 419 and dependent on the appropriateness of the thoughts and expressions, to which the metrical form is superadded. Neither can I conceive any other answer that can be rationally given, short of this: I write in metre, because I am about to use a language different from that of prose. Besides, where the language is not such, how interesting soever the reflections are, that are capable of being drawn by a philosophic mind from the thoughts or incidents of the poem, the metre itself must often become feeble. Take the three last stanzas of THE SAILOR'S MOTHER, for instance. If I could for a moment abstract fioom the effect produced on the author's feelings, as a man, by the incident at the time of its real occurrence, I would dare appeal to his own judgment, whether in the metre itself be found a sufficient reason for their being written mzet2rically? And, thus continuing, she said "I had a Son, who many a day Sailed on the seas; but he is dead; In Denmark he was east away; And I have travelled far as Hull, to see What clothes he might have left, or other property.* The Bird and Cage they both were his:'Twas my Son's Bird: and neat and trim He kept it; many voyages This Singing-bird hath gone with him; When last he sailed he left the Bird behind; As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind. He to a Fellow-lodger's care Had left it, to be watched and fed, Till he camne back again; and there I found it when my Son was dead; And now, God help me for my little wit! I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it." * [In the edit. of 1840, " And I have travelled weary miles to see If aught which he had owned might still remain for me." The last line of stanza 5 in that edit. stands thus: "From bodings, as might be, that hung upon his mind." The end of stanza 6 has been altered thus:' And pipe its song in safety;-there I found it when my Son was dead; And now, God help me for mny little wit I bear it with me, Sir; —he took so mfuch delight in it" —S. 0.] 420 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. If disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make the rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would further ask whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet's imagination,-(a state, which spreads its influence and coloring over all, that co-exists with the exciting cause, and in which "The simplest and the most familiar things Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them"),@ I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall in these verses from the preceding stanza? "The ancient spirit is not dead; Old times, thought I, are breathing there; Proud was I that my country bred Such strength, a dignity so fair; She begged an alms, like one in poor estate; I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate." It must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that those stanzas furnish the only fair instance that I have been able to discover in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings, of an actual adoption, or true imitation of the Freal and very language of low and rustic life, freed from provincialisms. Thirdly, I deduce the position from all the causes elsewhere e Altered from the description of Night-Mair in the REMORSE. "Oh Heaven!'twas frightful! Now run down and stared at By hideous shapes that can not be remembered; Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing; But only being afraid-stifled with fear! While every goodly or familiar form Has a strange power of spreading terror round me 1"' N.B. Though Shakspeare has, for his own all-justifying purposes, introduced the Night-Mlaere with her own foals, yet Mair means a Sister, or per. haps a Hag. 2 [Coleridge's Poet. Works, VII. p. 367. Act iv. sc. 1. Altered thus: O sleep of horrors! Now run down and stared at By forms so hideous that they mock remembranceNow seeing nothing, &e.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 421 assigned, which render metre the proper form of' poetry, and poetry imperfect and defective without metre. Metre, therefore, having been connected with poetry most often and by a peculiar fitness; whatever else is combined with metre, must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium of affinity, a sort (if I may dare borrow a well-known phrase from technical chemistry) of mordaunt between it and the super-added metre. Now, poetry, Mr. Wordsworth truly affirms, does always imply passion; which word must be here understood in its most general sense, as an excited state of the feelings and faculties. And as every passion has its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its characteristic modes of expression. But where there exists that degree of genius and talent which entitles a writer to aim at the honors of a poet, the very act of poetic composition itself is, and is allowed to imply and to produce, an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a correspondent difference of language, as truly, though not perhaps in as marked a degree, as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The vividness of the descriptions or declamations in Donne, or Dryden, is as much and as often derived from the force and fervor of the describer, as from the reflections, forms or incidents, which constitute their subject and materials. The wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion. To what extent, and under what modifications, this may be admitted to act, I shall attempt to define in an after-remark on Mr. Wordsworth's reply to this objection, or rather on his objection to this reply, as already anticipated in his preface. Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the same argument in a more general form, I adduce the high spiritual instinct of the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establishing the principle, that all the parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to the more imtportant and essential parts. This and the preceding arguments may be strengthened by the reflection, that the composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically different, or of the different throughout a base radically the same. Lastly, I appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all coun 422:3BIOGtIAPHIA LITERARIA. tries and inL all ages, as authorizing the opinion (deduced fiom all the foregoing), that in every import of the word essential, which would not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be, an essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical composition. In Mr. Wordsworth's criticism of Gray's Sonnet, the reader's sympathy with his praise or blame of the different parts is taken for granted rather perhaps too easily. He has not, at least, attempted to win or compel it by argumentative analysis. In my conception at least, the lines rejected as of no value do, with the exception of the two first, differ as much and as little from the language of common life, as those which he has printed in italics as possessing genuine excellence. Of the five lines thus honorably distinguished, two of them differ from prose even more widely than the lines which either precede or follow, in the position of the words. "A diferent object do these eyes require; My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; And in my breast the imperfect joys expire." But were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of which no man ever doubted?-videlicet, that there are sentences, which would be equally in their place both in verse and prose. Assuredly it does not prove the point, which alone requires proof; namely, that there are not passages, which would suit the one and not suit the other. The first line of this sonnet is distinguished from the ordinary language of men by the epithet to morning. For we will set aside, at present, the consideration, that the particular word " smiling" is hackneyed, and, as it involves a sort of personification, not quite congruous with the common and material attribute of " shining." And, doubtless, this adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional description, where no particular attention is demanded for the quality of the thing, would be noticed as giving a poetic cast to a man's conversation. Should the sportsman exclaim, " Come boys! the rosy morning calls you up:"-he will be supposed to have some song in his head. But no one suspects this, when he says, " A wet morning shall not confine us to our beds." This then is either a defect in poetry, or it is not. Whoever should decide in the affirmative, I would request him to re-peruse any one poem, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 423 of any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from 2Eschylus to Shakspeare; and to strike out (in thought I mean) every instance of this kind. If the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him; or if he continued to deem the work improved by their total omission; he must advance reasons of no ordinary strength and evidence, reasons grounded in the essence of human nature. Otherwise I should not hesitate to consider him as a man not so much proof against all authority, as dead to it. The second line, "And reddening Phebus lifts his golden fire; —" has indeed almost as many faults as words. But then it is a bad line, not because the language is distinct from that of prose; but because it conveys incongruous images; because it confounds the cause and the effect, the real thing with the personified representative of the thing; in short, because it differs from the language of good sense! That the " Phcebus" is hackneyed, and a schoolboy image, is an accidental fault, dependent on the age in which the author wrote, and not deduced from the nature of the thing. That it is part of an exploded mythology, is an objection more deeply grounded. Yet when the torch of ancient learning was rekindled, so cheering were its beams, that our eldest poets, cut off by Christianity from all accredited machinery, and deprived of all acknowledged guardians and symbols of the great objects of nature, were naturally induced to adopt, as a poetic language, those fabulous personages, those forms of the* supernatural in nature, which had given them such dear delight in the poems of their great masters. Nay, even at this day what scholar of genial taste will not so far sympathize with them, as to read with pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser, what he would perhaps condemn as puerile in a modern poet? I rememember no poet, whose writings would safelier stand the test of Mr. Wordsworth's theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say, that the style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from prose, and the language of ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and that the stanzas are blots in THE FAErY QUEEN? But still more by the mechanical system of philosophy which has needlessly infected our theological opinions, and teaching us to consider the world in its relation to God, as of a building to its mason, leaves the idea of omnipresence a mere abstract notion in the state-room of our reason. 424 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. "By this the northern wagoner had set His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre, That was in ocean waves yet never wet, But firme is fixt and sendeth light from farre To all that in the wild deep wandering arre: And chearfull chaunticlere with his note shrill Had warned once that Phcebus' fiery carre In hast was climbing up the easterne hill, Full envious that night so long his roome did fill."* "At last the golden orientall gate Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre, And Phcebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate, Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre, And hurl'd his glist'ring beams through gloomy ayre: Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway He started up, and did him selfe prepayre In sun-bright armes and battailous array; For with that pagan proud he combat will that day."t On the contrary to how many passages, both in hymn books and in blank verse poems, could I (were it not invidious) direct the reader's attention, the style of which is most unpoetic, because, and only because, it is the style of prose? He will not suppose me capable of having in my mind such verses, as "I put my hat upon my head And walk'd into the Strand; And there I met another man, Whose hat was in his hand." To such specimens it would indeed be a fair and full reply, that these lines are not bad, because they are unpoetic; but because they are empty of all sense and feeling; and that it were an idle attempt to prove that " an ape is not a Newton, when it is self-evident that he is not a man."? But the sense shall be good and weighty, the language correct and dignified, the subject interesting and treated with feeling; and yet the style shall, notwithstanding all these merits, be justly blamable as prosaic, and solely because the words and the order of the words would find their appropriate place in prose, but are not suitable to metrical composition. The CIVIL WARs of Daniel is an instructive, and even interesting work; but take the following stanzas (and from * [Book ii. can. i. st. 1.1] [Book i. can. v. st. 2.]: [Preface, pp. 833-4.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 425 the hundred instances which abound I might probably have se lected others far more striking): "And to the end we may with better ease Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to show What were the times foregoing near to these, That these we may with better profit know. Tell how the world fell into this disease; And how so great distemperature did grow So shall we see with what degrees it came; How things at full do soon wax out of frame." "Ten kings had from the Norman Conqu'ror reign'd With intermix'd and variable fate, When England to her greatest height attain'd Of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state; After it had with much ado sustain'd The violence of princes, with debate For titles, and the often mutinies Of nobles for their ancient liberties. For first, the Norman, conqu'ring all by might, By might was fore'd to keep what he had got; Mixing our customs and the form of right With foreign constitutions, he had brought; Mast'ring the mighty, humbling the poorer wight, By all severest means that could be wrought; And, making the succession doubtful, rent His new-got state, and left it turbulent."* Will it be contended on the one side, that these lines are mean and senseless? Or on the other, that they are not prosaic, and for that reason unpoetic? This poet's well-merited epithet is that of the " well-languaged Daniel;" but likewise, and by the consent of his contemporaries no less than of all succeeding critics, the " prosaic Daniel." Yet those, who thus designate this wise and amiable writer from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction to his metre in the majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and interesting on other accounts; but willingly admit, that there are to be found throughout his poems, and especially in his EPISTLES and in his HYMEN's TrIUiivH, many and exquisite specimens of that style which, as the neutral gfTo clnd of prose and verse, is common to both. A fine and almost faultless extract, eminent as for other beauties, so for its perfection in this species of diction, may be seen in Lamb's DRA* [Book I. Stanzas vii. viii. and ix.] 426 BIOGRPAPHIA LITERARIA. MATIC SPECIMENS,* a work of various interest from the nature of the selections themselves,-(all from the plays of Shakspeare's contemporaries),-and deriving a high additional value from the notes, which are full of just and original criticism, expressed with all the freshness of originality. Among the possible efiects of practical adherence to a theory, that aims to identify the style of prose and verse-(if it does not indeed claim for the latter a yet nearer resemblance to the average style of men in the viva voce intercourse of real life)-we might anticipate the following as not the least likely to occur. It will happen, as I have indeed before observed, that the metre itself, the sole acknowledged difference, will occasionally become metre to the eye only. The existence of prosaisms, and that they detract from the merit of a poem, must at length be conceded, when a number of successive lines can be rendered, even to the most delicate ear, unrecognizable as verse, or as having even been intended for verse, by simply transcribing them as prose: when if the poem be in blank verse, this can be effected without any alteration, or at most by merely restoring one or two * [Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakspeare, with notes by Clharles Lamb. Vol. i. p. 284. The first extract, Love in Infancy, is as follows: Ah, I remember well (and how can I But evermore remember well) when first Our flame began, when scarce we knew what was The flame we felt: when as we sat and sigh'd And look'd upon each other, and conceiv'd Not what we ail'd, yce something we did ail; And yet were well, and yet we were not well. And what was our disease we could not tell, Then would we kiss, then sigh, then look: And thus In that first garden of our simpleness We spent our childhood: but when years began To reap the fruit of knowledge; ah, how then Would she with graver looks, with sweet stern brow, Check my presumption and nmy forwardness; Yet still would give me flowers, still would me show What she would have me, yet not have me, know. Two other extracts are also given; Love after deathFie, Thyrsis, with what fond remembrances Dost thou, &c. and the story of Isulia.-S. e.] BIOGRAPIIIA LITERARIA. 427 words to their proper places, from which they had been transplanted* for no assignable cause or reason but that of the author's convenience; but if it be in rhyme, by the mere exchange of the final word of each line for some other of the same meaning, equally appropriate, dignified and euphonic. The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark " that metre paves the way to other distinctions,"f' is contained in the following words. "The distinction of rhyme and metre is regular and uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is usually called) poetic diction, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices, upon which no calculation whatever can be made. In the one case the reader is utterly at the mercy of the * As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the Tragic Muse contrived to dislocate, " I wish you a good morning, Sir! Thank you, Sir, and I wish you the same," into two blank-verse heroics:To you a morning good, good Sir! I wish. You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I. In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth's works which I have thoroughly studied, I find fewer instances in which this would be practicable than I have met in many poems, where an approximation of prose has been sedulously and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas already quoted from THE SAILOR'S MOTHER, I can recollect but one instance: that is to say, a short passage of four or five lines in THE BROTHERS,1 that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with unclouded eye.-" James, pointing to its summit, over which they had all purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait for them there. They parted, and his comrades passed that way some two hours after, but they did not find him at the appointed place, a circumnstance of which they took no heed: but one of them, going by chance into the house, which at this time was James's house, learnt there, that nobody had seen him all that day." The only change which has been made is in the position of the little word there in two instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation. The other words printed in italics were so marked because, though good and genuine English, they are not the phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in apposition, or in the connection by the genitive pronoun. Men in general would have said, "but that was a circumstance they paid no attention to, or took no notice of;" and the language is, on the theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator's being the Vicar. Yet if any ear could suspect, that these sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have been grounded. j [Preface, p. 316.-S. C.] [P. W. i. pp.109.-S. C.] 428 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. poet respecting what imagery or diction he may choose to connect with the passion."* But is this a poet, of whom a poet is speaking? No surely! rather of a fool or madman: or at best of a vain or ignorant phantast! And might not brains so wild or so deficient make just the same havoc with rhymes and metres, as they are supposed to effect with modes and figures of speech? How is the reader at the mercy of such men? If he continue to read their nonsense, is it not his own fault? The ultimate end of criticism is much more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible that the two could be separated. But if it be asked, by what principles the poet is to regulate his own style, if he do not adhere closely to the sort and order of words which he hears in the market, wake, highroad, or plough-field? I reply; by principles, the ignorance or neglect of which would convict him of being no poet, but a silly or presumptuous usurper of the name. By the principles of grammar, logic, psychology. In one word by such a knowledge of the facts, material and spiritual, that most appertain to his art, as, if it have been governed and applied by good sense, and rendered instinctive by habit, becomes the representative and reward of our past conscious reasonings, insights, and conclusions, and acquires the name of Taste. By what retze that does not leave the reader at the poet's mercy, and the poet at his own, is the latter to distinguish between the language suitable to suppressed, and the language, which is characteristic of indulged, anger? Or between that of rage and that of jealousy? Is it obtained by wandering about in search of angry or jealous people in uncultivated society, in order to copy their words? Or not far rather by the power of imagination proceeding upon the all in each of human nature? By meditation, rather than by observation? And by the latter in consequence only of the former? As eyes, for which the former has pre-determined their field of vision, and to which, as to its organ, it communicates a microscopic power? There is not, I firmly believe, a man now living, who has, from his own inward experience, a clearer intuition, than Mr. Wordsworth himself, that the last-mentioned are the true sources of genial discrimination. Through the same process and by the same creative agency will the poet distinguish the degree and * [Preface, pp. 325-6.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 429 kind of the excitement produced by the very act of poetic composition. As intuitively will he know, what differences of style it at once inspires and justifies; what intermixture of conscious volition is natural to that state; and in what instances such figures and colors of speech degenerate into mere creatures of an arbitrary purpose, cold technical artifices of ornament or connection. For, even as truth is its own light and evidence, discovering at once itself and falsehood, so is it the prerogative of poetic genius to distinguish by parental instinct its proper offspring from the changelings, which the gnomes of vanity or the fairies of fashion may have laid in its cradle or called by its names. Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be lhcQqFWatq, not orioyaig. The rules of the Imagination are themselves the very powers of growth. and production. The words to which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colors may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths. We find no difficulty in admitting as excellent, and the legitimate language of poetic fervor self-impassioned, Donne's apostrophe to the Sun in the second stanza of his PROGRESS OF TIIE SOUL. "Thee, eye of heaven! this great Soul envies not; By thy male force is all, we have, begot. In the first East thou now beginn'st to shine, Suck'st early balm and island spices there, And wilt anon in thy loose-rein'd career At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine, And see at night this western world of mine: Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she, Who before thee one day began to be, And, thy frail light being quench'd, shall long, long outlive thee." Or the next stanza but one: " Great Destiny, the commissary of God, That hast mark'd out a path and period For every thing! Who, where we offspring took, Our ways and ends see'st at one instant: thou Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow Ne'er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look, And show my story in thy eternal book, &e." As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honors 430 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. of unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudopoesy, or the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which bursts on the unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to abstract terms. Such are the Odes to Jealousy, to Hope, to Oblivion, and the like, in Dodsley's collection and the magazines of that day, which seldom fail to remind me of an Oxford copy of verses on the two SUTTONS, commencing with "Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!" It is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even poets of true, though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mistaken theory deluded both themselves and others in the opposite extreme. I once read to a company of sensible and well-educated women the introductory period of Cowley's preface to his "Pindaric Odes, written in imitation of the style and manner of the Odes of Pindar." " If" (says Cowley), " a man should undertake to translate Pindar, word for word, it would be thought that one madman had translated another; as may appear, when he, that understands not the original, reads the verbal traduction of him into Latin prose, than which nothing seems more raving." I then proceeded with his own free version of the second Olympic, composed for the charitable purpose of r'ationalizing the Theban Eagle. " Queen of all harmonious things, Dancing words and speaking strings, What god, what hero, wilt thou sing What happy man to equal glories bring? Begin, begin thy noble choice, And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice. Pisa does to Jove belong, Jove and Pisa claim thy song. The fair first-fruits of war, th' Olympic games, Alcides offer'd up to Jove; Alcides, too, thy strings may move, But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove? Join Theron boldly to their sacred names; Theron the next honor claims; Theron to no man gives place, Is first in Pisa's and in Virtue's race; Theron there, and he alone, Ev'n his own swift forefathers has outgone." One of the company exclaimed, with the full assent of the rest, BIOGR1APHIA LITERARIA. 431 that if the original were madder than this, it must be incurably mad.* I then translated the ode from the Greek, and as nearly as possible, word fbr word; and the impression was, that in the general movement of the periods, in the form of the connections and transitions, and in the sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared * [But is not this equally delirious, close as it keeps to the Pindaric images? It is the exordium of the first Pythian, characterized by " lightning energy" in an article on Pindar by Mr. Coleridge's late editor~ Q. Review, March, 1834. O thou whom Phoebus and the quire Of violet tressed Muses own, Their joint treasure, golden Lyre, Ruling step with warbled tone, &c. &c. Ir thy mazes, steep'd, expire Bolts of ever-flowing fire. Jove's eagle on the sceptre slumbers Possest by thy enchanting numbers: On either side, his rapid wing, Drops, entranc'd, the feather'd king; Black vapor o'er his curved head, Sealing his eyelids, sweetly shed; Upheaving his moist back he lies, Held down with thrilling harmonies. Surely this is but a brilliant chaos. "IHyacinthine locks" have been kindly received at the bounteous hand of Milton, though no one in this age of the world, quite understands the epithet, or has seen that black orferrtugineous, or " ensanguined flower inscribed with woe;" the ancient hyacinth. The sound is beautiful, and we imagine the sense to be right; but violet tresses look as strangely in our modern eyes as the green locks of the Nereids; for to us the violet is the type of blueness, and we talk of violet eyes, but never of violet hair. Then Pindar as little dreamed of presenting to his auditors a moist-backed eagle, by the phrase v'ypov Vyerov, as we nowa-days dream of bringing into view a man with drenched raiment of a peculiar cut when we mention a wet Quaker. And who can suppose that the eagle was lying held down by harmony? That would be an inconvenient posture for a sleeping biped, however convenient for the translator's verse. According to Moore Slumbering he sits aloft With ruffling plumes and heaving spine, Quelled by thy potent strain. It is interesting to compare Cowley's second Olympic, of which stanzas iii. v. and vii. are very readable in their way, with Moore's and Cary's translations-to see how the first displays the genius of Cowley, while the others are attempts at adapting Pindar to our language, and are the works of poetical minds rather than of poets. There are very good passages in Mr. 432 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. to them to approach more nearly, than any other poetry they had heard, to the style of our Bible in the prophetic books. The first strophe will suffice as a specimen: " Ye harp-controlling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps I What God? what Hero? What Man shall we celebrate? Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove, But the Olympiad (or the Olympian games) did Hercules establish, The first-firuits of the spoils of war. Cary's translation, but it strikes me as a fault in his version, that it brings the lyric flow of the Allegro, Penseroso, and Lycidas so strongly to mind, that we seem to be reading Milton instead of Pindar, yet feel that we have the mere manner of the one and the bare matter of the other. Those who bring a knowledge of the original to Moore's and Cary's translations, and thus illuminate them with Pindar himself, may enjoy the perusal; to others they must seem, I should think, like water of Helicon bewitched. Cary's Dante, on the other hand, is a noble poem that may be read and admired apart from the Italian. A prose translation, like that of the Psalms and Prophets, would exhibit more of Pindar to the English reader, or would at least disguise him less than any metrical version of a poet, whose metre is so irrepresentable in a modern tongue, and whose metaphors are so bold, and thickly interlaced, that in order to be well understood they should be rendered into the plainest and most straightforward language that can be employed. I tried the simple plan thus, but can not judge whether it will seem tolerable to others. Golden Lyre, joint possession of Apollo and the Muses with braided hair dusky as violets, Thee the movements of the choir obey, thou Ruler of Festivity, And the singers attend to thy signals, When thrillingly thou settest up the preamble which leads the feet of the dancers. Also thou quenchest the pointed thunder-bolt Of everlasting fire; for Jove's Eagle sleeps on the sceptre, his swift wing drooping on each side, King of Birds, W'hen o'er his curv'd head thou hast pour'd a dark mist, sweet seal of his eyelids, he slumbering Lifts up the plumes of his back, overcome by thy vibrations. Yea and ev'n impetuous Mars, far away from the bristling spear-ranks, Softens his heart with sleep,-and thy shafts soothe the souls of the divinities, Through the skill of Latona's son, Apollo, and the deep-bosom'd Muses. Gray and Akenside have each given a modification of this passage, the one in the Progress of Poetry, the other in his Hynm to the Naiads.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 433 But Theron for the four-horsed car, That bore victory to him, It behooves us nowY to voice aloud: The Just, the IHospitable, The Bulwark of Agrigentum, Of renowned fathers The Flower, even him Who preserves his native city erect and safe." But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation from the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and verse, save that of metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insight into the constitution of the human mind, would be amply sufficient to prove, that such language and such combinations are the native produce neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxtaposition and apparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things. As when, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the image of a voice. Surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that this compulsory juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation of impressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any sympathy with the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet had united and inspired all the objects of his thought; that it is therefore a species of wit, a pure work of the Will, and implies a leisure and self-possession both of thought and of feeling, incompatible with the steady fervor of mind possessed and filled with the grandeur of its subject. To sum up the whole in one sentence. When a poem, or a part of a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently vicious in the figures and contexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it differs from the style in which men actually converse, then, and not till then, can I hold this theory to be either plausible, or practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule, guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as well as more naturally, have been deduced in the author's own mind from considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things, confirmed by the authority of works, whose fame is not of one country, nor of one age. VOL. III. T CHAPTER XIX. CONTINUATION-CONCERNING THE REAL OBJECT WHIIICH, IT IS PROBABLE, IMR. WVORDSWORTH HAD BEPOEE HIM IN HIS CRITICAL PREFACE-ELUCIDATION AND APPLICATION OF THIS. IT might appear from some passages in the former part of Mr. Wordsworth's preface, that he meant to confine his theory of style, and the necessity of a close accordance with the actual language of men, to those particular subjects from low and rustic life, which by way of experiment he had purposed to naturalize as a new species in our English poetry. But from the train of argument that follows; from the reference to Milton; and from the spirit of his critique on Gray's sonnet; those sentences appear to have been rather courtesies of modesty, than actual limitations of his system. Yet so groundless does this system appear on a close examination; and so strange and overwhelming* in its consequences, that I can not, and I do not, believe that the poet did ever himself adopt it in the unqualified sense, in which his expressions have been understood by others, and which, indeed, according to all the common laws of interpretation they seem to bear. What then did he mean? I apprehend, that in the clear perception, not unaccompanied with disgust or contempt, of the gaudy affectations of a style which passed current with too many for poetic diction (though in, truth it had as little pretensions to. I had in my mind the striking but untranslatable epithet, which the celebrated Mendelssohn applied to the great founder of the Critical Philosophy, " Der alleszeulrmahnende KANT," that is, the all-becrushiug, or rather the all-to-nothing-crushing Kant. In the facility and force of compound epithets, the German from the number of its cases and inflections approaches to the Greek, that language so "Bless'd in the happy marriage of sweet words." It is in the woful harshness of its sounds alone that the German need shrink from the comparison. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 485 poetry, as to logic or common sense), he narrowed his view for the time; and feeling a justifiable preference for the language of nature and of good sense, even in its humblest and least ornamented forms, he suffered himself to express, in terms at once too large' and too exclusive, his predilection for a style the most remote possible from- the false and showy splendor which he wished to explode. It is possible, that this predilection, at first merely comparative, deviated for a time into direct partiality. But the real. object which he had in view, was, I doubt not, a species of excellence which had been long before most happily characterized by the judicious and amiable Garve, whose works are so justly beloved and esteemed by the Germans, in his remarks on Gellert, from which the following is literally translated. " The talent, that is required in order to make excellent verses, is perhaps greater than the philosopher is ready to admit, or would find it in his power to acquire: the talent to seek only the apt expression of the thought, and yet to find at the same time with it the rhyme and the metre. Gellert possessed this happy gift, if ever any one of our poets possessed it; and nothing perhaps contributed more to the great and universal impression vVwhich his fables made on their first publication, or conduces more to their continued popularity. It was a strange and curious phienomenon, and such as in Germany had been previously unheard of, to read verses in which every thing was expressed j ust as one would wish to talk, and yet all dignified, attractive, and interesting; and all at'the same time perfectly correct as to the measure of the syllables and the rhyme. It is certain, that poetry when it has attained this excellence makes a far greater impression than prose. So much so indeed, that even the gratification which the very rhymes afford, becomes then no longer a contemptible or trifling gratification."' However novel this phenomenon may have been in Germany, at the time of Gellert, it is by no means new, nor yet of recent existence in our language. Spite of the licentiousness with which Spenser occasionally compels the orthography of his words into a subservience to his rhymes, the whole FAERY QUEEN is an almost continued instance of this beauty. Waller's song, Go, LOVELY ROSE, is doubtless familiar to most of my readers; but if I had hap* Sammlung einiger Ablandlingen von Christian Garve. [Leipzig, 1779, pp. 233-4, with slight alterations.-S. C.] 436 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. pened to have had by me the Poems of Cotton, more but far less deservedly celebrated as the author of the VIRGIL TRAVESTIED, I should have indulged myself, and I think have gratified many, who are not acquainted with his serious works, by selecting some admirable specimens of this style. There are not a few poems in that volume, replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion, which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder muse; and yet so worded, that the reader sees no one reason either in the selection or the order of the words, why he might not have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and can not conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise, without loss or injury to his meaning.* * [Charles Cotton, the poet, was born of a good family in Staffordshire in 1630, died at Westminster in 1687. His Scarronides or Virgil Travestie, a burlesque on the first and fourth books of the iEneid, was printed for the fifteenth time in 1771. The first book was first published in 1664. It seems to have owed its popularity less to its merits than to its piquant demerits, which were infused into it, because, as the author says in the Epilogue to another work in the same style, Burlesque upon Burlesque (quoted in Sir H. Nicolas's Memoirs), in the "precious age" in which he lived. "Coarse hempen trash Awas sooner read, Than poems of a finer thread," and therefore he must -.- ".. wisely choose To dizen up his dirty muse, In such an odd fantastic weed, As every one, he knew, would read:" thus coolly resolving to minister to the worse than levity of his age instead of aiming to correct it. The Biographie UniiversClle affirms that to compare the Virgil Travestie to Hudibras is to compare a caricature to a painting which, though a little overchasrged, has a great foundation of truth. He published several prose works beside the Second Part of the Complete Angler. Sir Harris Nicolas observes, that as these " consist almost entirely of translations, and with the exception of Montaigne's Essays, of Memoirs of warriors whose deeds have been eclipsed by modern prowess, it is not surprising that his labors should be forgotten." His volume of Poems oil several Occasions was in a sixth edition in 1770. As a poet Cotton appears to most advantage, when teaching in easy verse and transparent language, a sort of Horatian morality, serious but not ardent or profound, as in his poem called Contentation: or in lively pictures of nature and rustic life, as in his Quatrains on Morning and Noon, o Evening and Night, particularly the two last, which are like Milton's Allegro and Penseroso pitched at a lower key: or in poems of sentiment, as BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 437 But in truth our language is, and from the first dawn of poetry ever has been, particularly rich in compositions distinguished by this excellence. The final e, which is now mute, in Chaucer's age was either sounded or dropt indifferently. We ourselves still use either "beloved" or "belov'd" according as the rhyme, or the Ode to Chlorinda: or the sportive Epistle, as that to Bradshaw quarrelling with him for epistolary neglect; or in the picturesque Anacreontic, a fine specimen of which is his Ode entitled Winter. This poem Mr. Wordsworth describes, in his Preface, as " an admirable composition;" and he quotes the latter part of it as " an instance still more happy of Fancy employed in the treatment of feeling than in the preceding passages, the Poem supplies of her management of forms." The poems of Cotton have the same moral stain as Herrick's, with not less fancy but a less Arcadian air, —more of the world that is about them. The spirit of poetry was indeed on the tvay downward from "great Eliza's golden time" till its reascent into the region of the pure and elevated towards the end of the last century, and a declension may even be observed, I think, from Herrick to Cotton, who came into the world about thirty-nine years later. His poetry, indeed, has more of Charles II.'s time and less of the Elizabethan period in its manner and spirit than that of Waller, who was but twenty-five years his senior. Cotton writes like a man of this world, who has glimpses now and then of the other; not as if he lived utterly out of sight of it, like the dramatists characterized by C. Lamb. There are more detailed corporeal descriptions in his poetry than in any that I know, of not more than equal extent; descriptions of the youthful body more vividly real than is to be desired, and of the body in age, when it "demands the translucency of mind not to be worse than indifferent" so full of mortality, or, what it grieves us-more to contemplate than ashes and the grave, the partial perishing of the natural man while he is yet alive, that they excite an indignant disgust on behalf of our common humanity. That Cotton was " an ardent royalist," appears in many of his poems, and with special vehemence in his denunciation of Waller for his Panegyric upon Cromwell, which exhibits, in its features, all the ugliness, with some of the energy, of anger. If, as is said, the admirer of Saccharissa leant to monarchy in his heart, his poetic genius had a heart of its own, and a far stronger one, which leant another way; for both his poems on Cromwell have vastly more heart in them than his poetical address to Charles at the Restoration. And this the King himself, among whose faults want of discernment was not to be reckoned, took care to point out, enjoying, no doubt, the versatile poet's double mortification as much as he would have done the best verses. Cotton should have given Waller a receipt for writing as finely about an hereditary imonarch, as about a1 king of "noble nature's crownVilg" —a Hero. Some men are worse upon the whole than they appear in their writings: there is reason to hope that Cotton, though an imprudent, was a better man than might be inferred from the tone of much of his poetry, which 438 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. measure, or the purpose of more or less solemnity may require. Let the reader then only adopt the pronunciation of the poet and of the court, at which he lived, both with respect to the final e and to the accentuation of the last syllable: I would then venture to ask, what even in the colloquial language of elegant and unaffected women, (who are the peculiar nmistresses of " pure English and undefiled,") what could we hear more natural, or seemingly more unstudied, than the following stanzas from Chaucer's TROILUS AND CRESEIDE. " And after this forth to the gate he wente, Ther as Creseide out rode a ful gode paas, And up and doun there made he mnany a wente, And to himselfe ful oft he said, Alas! Fro hennis rode my blisse and my solas: As would6 blisful God now for his joie, I might her sene agen come in to Troie! And to the yondir hil I gan her gide, Alas! and there I toke of her my leve: And Yond I saw her to her fathir ride; For sorow of whiche mine hert shall to-cleve; And hithir home I came when it -was eve, And here I dwel, out-cast from alil joie, And shal, til I maie sene her efte in Troie. "And of himselfe imaginid he ofte To ben defaitid, pale and woxin lesse Than he was wonte, and that men saidin softe, What may it be? who can the soth6 gesse, Why Troilus hath al this hevinesse? And al this n' as but his melhancolie, That he had of himselfe suche fantasie. Anothir time imaginin he would That every wight, that past him by the wey, probably exaggerates the features of his earthly mind as much as that of many others exalts the heavenly part of them. The persistent friendship of Isaac Walton is a great testimony in his favor, and it might be conjectured, from the internal evidence of his productions in verse, that of all the poets of his day he was the most agreeable companion, the least apt to fly above his company though never lagging behind in any conversation. A memoir of Cotton by Sir Harris Nicolas is prefixed to the beautifully illustrated edition of the Complete Angler of 1836. This edition was published by Mr. Pickering, and, as his friend the Editor declares, is very largely indebted to his taste and exertions and biographical knowledge for the value which the volumes possess. I believe that Mr. Pickering intends to bring out a select edition of the occasional poems of Cotton.-S. C.] BIOGRAPiHIA LITERARIA. 439 Had of him routhe, and that thei saien should, I am right sory, Troilus wol dey! And thus he drove a daie yet forth or twey, As ye have herde: suche life gan he to lede As he that stode betwixin hope and drede: For which him likid in his songis shewe Th' encheson of his wo as he best might, And made a songe of wordis but a fewe, Somwhat his woful hert6 for to light, And when he was from every mann'is sight With soft6 voice he of his lady dere, That absent was, gan sing as ye may here: This song, whcn he thus songin had, ful sone He fil agen into his siglis olde: And every night, as was his wonte to done; He stod6 the bright moone to beholde And all his sorovwe to the moone he tolde, And said: I wis, whan thou art hornid newe, I shall be glad, if al the world be trewe!"Another exquisite master of this species of style, where the scholar and the poet supplies the material, but the perfect wellbred gentleman the expressions and the arrangement, is George Herbert. As from the nature of the subject, and the too frequent quaintness of the thoughts, his TEMPLE; or SACRED POEuMS AND PRIVATE EJACULATIONS are comparatively but little known, I shall extract two poems. The first is a sonnet, equally admirable for the weight, number, and expression of the thoughts, and for the simple dignity of the language. Unless, indeed, a fastidious taste should object to the latter half of the sixth line. The second is a poem of greater length, which I have chosen not only for the present purpose, but likewise as a striking example and illustration of an assertion hazarded in a former page of these sketches: namely, that the characteristic fault of our elder poets is the reverse of that, which distinguishes too many of our more recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language; the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts. * [Boke V. The first lines of the first stanza stand thus in the original: And aftir this he to the yatis wente and the first of the last stanza thus: This song6 when he thus songin had sone.-S. C.] 440 BIOGURAPRIA LITERARIA. The latter is a riddle of words; the former an enigma of thoughts. The one reminds me of an old passage in Drayton's IDEAS: As other men, so I myself do muse, Why in this sort I wrest invention so; And why these giddy metaphors I use, Leaving the path the greater part do go I will resolve you: I am lunalic!o The other recalls a still odder passage in THE SYNAGOGUE: or THE SHADOW OF THE TMPLE, a connected series of poems in imitation of Herbert's TEMPLE, and, in some editions, annexed to it. O how my mind Is gravelld 7 Not a thought, That I can find, But's ravell'd All to naught! Short ends of threads, And narrow shreds Of lists, Rnots, snarled ruffs, Loose broken tufts Of twists, Are my torn meditations' ragged clothing, Which, wound and woven, shape a suit for nothing: One while I think, and then I am in pain To think how to unthink that thought again.j' Immediately after these burleslque passages I can not proceed to the extracts promised, without changing the ludicrous tone of feeling by the interposition of the three following stanzas of Herbert's. VIRTUE. Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so brig~ht, The bridal of the earth and sky, The dew shall weep thy fall to-night; For thou must die. * Sonnet IX. f [The Synagogue, a collection of poems generally ap-ended to the Temple, has been retained in Mr. Pickering's cdition of 18835. "The we-vre first printed," as tile Preface mentions, A.D. 1640, and have been Trwith much probability, attributed to the Rev. Christopher Harvie, M.A. The poem quoted is at p. 274 of the edit.-S. C.] BIOGRAPIIA LITERARIA, 441 Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye: Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box, where sweets compacted lie: My music shows, ye have your closes, Andi all must die. THE BOSOM SIN: A SONNET BY GEORGE HERBERT. Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round! Parents first season us; then schoolmasters Deliver us to laws; they send us bound To rules of reason, holy messengers, Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin, Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in, Bibles laid open, millions of surprises; Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness, The sound of Glory ringing in our ears: Without, our shame; within, our consciences; Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears. Yet all these fences and their whole array One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away. LOVE UNKNOWN. Dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad: And in my faintings, I presume, your love Will more comply than help., A Lord I had, And have, of whom some grounds, which may improve, I hold for two lives, and both lives in me. To him I brought a dish of fruit one day, And in the middle placed my heart. But he (I sigh to say) Look'd on a servant, who did know his eye, Better than you know me, or (which is one) Than I myself. The servant instantly, Quitting the fruit, seiz'd on my heart alone, And threw it in a font, wherein did fall A streamu of blood, which issued from the side Of a great rock: I well remember all, And have good cause: there it was dipt and dyed, And wash'd, and wrung: the very wringing yet Enforceth tears. "Yourl heart was foul, I fear." 442 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Indeed'tis true. I did and do commit Many a fault, more than my lease will bear Yet still ask'd pardon, and was not denied. But you shall hear. After my heart was well, And clean and fair, as I one eventide (I sigh to tell) Walk'd by myself abroad, I saw a large And spacious furnace flaming, and thereon A boiling caldron, round about whose verge Was in great letters set AFFLICTION. The greatness show'd the owner. So I went To fetch a sacrifice out of my fold, Thinking with that, which I did thus present, To warm his love, which, I did fear, grew cold. But as my heart did tender it, the man Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand, And threw nay heart into the scalding pan; MIy heart that brought it (do you understand?) The offerer's heart. " Your heart was hard, I fear." Indeed'tis true. I found a callous matter Began to spread and to expatiate there: But with a richer drug than scalding water I bath'd it often, ev'n with holy blood, Which at a board, while many drank bare wine, A friend did steal into my cup for good, Ev'n taken inwardly, and most divine To supple hardnesses. But at the length Out of the caldron getting, soon I fled Unto my house, where to repair the strength Which I had lost, I hasted to my bed: But when I thought to sleep out all these faults, (I sigh to speak) I found that some had stuff'd the bed with thoughts, I would say thorns. Dear, could my heart not break, When with my pleasures ev'n my rest was gone? Full well I understood who had been there: For I had given the key to none but one: It must be he. " Your heart was dull, I fear." Indeed a slack and sleepy state of mind Did oft possess me; so that when I pray'd, Though my lips went, my heart did stay behind. But all my scores were by another paid, Who took my guilt upon him. " Truly, Friend, For aught I hear, your Master shows to you More favor than you weot of. Mark the end. The font did only what was old renew: The caldron suppled what was grown too hard: BIOGlRAPHIA LITERARIA. 448 The thorns did quicken what was grown too dull: All did but strive to mend what you had marr'd. Wherefore be cheer'd, and praise him to the full Each day, each hour, each moment of the week, Who fain would have you be new, tender, quick."* CHAPTER XX. THE FORMER SUBJECT CONTINUED-THE NEUTRAL STYLE, OR THAT COMMON TO PROSE AND POETRY, EXEMPLIFIED BY SPECIMENS FROM CHAUCER, HERBERT, AND OTHERS. I HAVE no fear in declaring my conviction, that the excellence defined and exemplified in the preceding chapter is not the characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's style; because I can add with equal sincerity, that it is precluded by higher powers. The praise of uniform adherence to genuine, logical English is undoubtedly his; nay, laying the main emphasis on the word unibform, I will dare add that, of all contemporary poets, it is his alone. For, in a less absolute sense of the word, I should certainly include Mr. Bowles, Lord Byron, and, as to all his later writings, Mr. Southey, the exceptions in their works being so few and unimportant. But of the specific excellence described in the quotation from Garve, I appear to find more, and more undoubted specimens in the works of others; for instance, among the minor poems of Mr. Thomas Moore, and of our illustrious Laureate. To me it will always remain a singular and noticeable fact; that a theory, which would establish this lingua comnmunis, not only as the best, but as the only commendable style, should have proceeded firom a poet, whose diction, next to that of Shakspeare and Milton, appears to me of all others the most izacividualized and characteristic. And let it be remembered, too, that I am now interpreting the controverted passages of Mr. Wordsworth's critical preface by the purpose and object, which he may be supposed to have intended, rather than by the sense * [The three poems are at pp. 87, 40, and 133 respectively. —S. 0.] 444 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. which the words themselves must convey, if they are taken without this allowance. A person of any taste, who had but studied three or four of Shakspeare's principal plays, would without the name affixed scarcely fail to recognize as Shakspeare's a quotation from any other play, though but of a few lines. A similar peculiarity, though in a less degree, attends Mr. Wordsworth's style, whenever he speaks in his own person; or whenever, though under a feigned name, it is clear that he himself is still speaking, as in the different d'caLzatis personce of THE RECLUSE. Even in the other poems, in which he purposes to be most dramatic, there are few in which it does not occasionally burst forth. The reader might often address the poet in his ownl words with reference to the persons introduced: "It seems, as I retrace the ballad line by line That but half of it is theirs, and the better half is thine."* Who, having been previously acquainted with any considerable portion of Mr. Wordsworth's publications, and having studied them with a full feeling of the author's genius, would not at once claim as Wordsworthian the little poem on the rainbow? " The Child is father of the Man, &c."j Or in the LUCY GRAY? "No mate, no comrade Lucy knew; She dwelt on a wide moor; The sweetest thing that ever grew Beside a humGan door."t' [Altered from The Pet Lamb, P. W. p. 30.-S. C.] f P. W. p. 2, line 7. "tMy heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky; So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety."-S. 0.] 4[Ilb. i. p. 16.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 445 Or in the IDLE SHEPHERD-BOYS?* "Along the river's stony marge The sand-lark chants a joyous song; The thrush is busy in the wood, And carols loud and strong. A thousand lambs are on the rocks, All newly born! both earth and sky Keep jubilee, and more than all, Thos boys with their green coronal, They never hear the cry, That plaintive cry! which up the hill Comes from the depth of Dungeon-Ghyll." Need I mention the exquisite description of the Sea Loch in THE BLIND HIGHLAND BoY. Who but a poet tells a tale in such language to the little ones by the fire-side as"Yet had he many a restless dream; Both when he heard the eagle's scream, And when he heard the torrents roar, And heard the water beat the shore Near where their cottage stood. Beside a lake their cottage stood, Not small like our's, a peaceful flood; But one of mighty size, and strange; That, rough or smooth, is full of change, And stirring in its bed. For to this lake, by night and day, The great Sea-water finds its way Thr=ough long, long windings of the hills, And drinks up all the pretty rills And rivers large and strong: Then hurries back the road it cameReturns on errand still the same; This did it when the earth was new; And this for evermore will do, As long as earth shall last. And with the coming of the tide, Come boats and ships that sweetly ride, Between the woods and lofty rocks; And to the shepherds with their flocks Bring tales of distant lands."t *[Ib. i. p. 31.-S. C.] [Ilb. iii. pp. 145-6. Mr. Wordsworth has altered " sweetly" in the last 446 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. I might quote almost the whole of his RUTH,* but take the following stanzas: "But as you have before been told, This Stripling, sportive, gay, and bold, And, with his dancing crest, So beautiful, through savage lands Had roamed about with vagrant bands Of Indians in the West. The wind, the tempest roaring high, The tumult of a tropic sky, Might well be dangerous food For him, a Youth to whom -was given So much of earth-so much of heaven, And such impetuous blood. Whatever in those climes he found Irregular in sight or sound Did to his mind impart A kindred impulse, seemed allied To hiis own powers, and justified The workings of his heart. Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought, The beauteous forms of nature wrought, Fair trees and lovely flowers; The breezes their own languor lent; The stars had feelings, which they sent Into those magic bowers. Yet in his worst pursuits, I ween, That sometimes there did intervene Pure hopes of high intent: For passions linked to forms so fair And stately, needs must have their share Of noble sentiment." But from Mr. Wordsworth's more elevated compositions, which already form three fourths of his works; and will, I trust, constitute hereafter a still larger proportion;-from these, whether stanza to "safely." In the first I venture to prefer "the eagle's scream," which my father wrote, to "the eagles," as it is written by Mr. Wordsworth-because eagles are neither gregarious nor numerous, as the first expression seems to mark the nature of the bird, and to bring it more interestingly before the mind, than the last.-S. C.] * [P. W. ii. p. 106.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. d447 in rhyme or blank verse, it would be difficult and almost superfluous to select instances of a diction peculiarly his own, of a style which can not be imitated without its being at once recognized, as originating in Mr. Wordsworth. It would not be easy to open on any one of his loftier strains, that does not contain examples of this; and more in proportion as the lines are more excellent, and most like the author. For those, who may happen to have been less familiar with his writings, I will give three specimens taken with little choice. The first from the lines on the BOY OF WINANDER-MERE,'-who "Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him.-And they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, With long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of mirth and jocund din! And when it chanced, That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, Then sometimes in that silence, wohile he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carriedfar into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scenet * [There was a Boy. P. W. ii. p. 79.-S. C.] 1 Mr. Wordsworth's having judiciously adopted " concourse wild" in this passage for "a wild scene" as it stood in the former edition, encourages me to hazard a remark which I certainly should not have made in the works of a poet less austerely accurate in the use of words, than he is, to his own great honor. It respects the propriety of the word, " scene," even in the sentence in which it is retained. Dryden, and he only in his more careless verses, was the first, as far as my researches have discovered, who for the convenience of rhyme used this word in the vague sense, which has been since too current even in our best writers, and which (unfortunately, I think) is given as its first explanation in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, and therefore would be taken by an incautious reader as its proper sense. In Shakspeare and Milton the word is never used without some clear reference, proper or metaphorical, to the theatre. Thus Milton: " Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm A sylvan scene; and, as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view."l I object to any extension of its meaning, because the word is already l [Par. Lost, iv. 1. 139.-S. C.] 448 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. t;lould enter unawares into his mind WVith all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, anld that uncertain heaven, s'eceivcd Insto the bosom of the steady lake."* more equivocal than might be wished; inasmuch as in the limited use, which I recommend, it may still signify two different things; namely, the scenery, and the characters and actions presented on the stage during the presence of particular scenes. It can therefore be preserved from obscurity only by keeping the original signification full in the mind. Thus Milton again, - " Prepare thee for another scene."' * [Part of this poetical description has been altered or expanded, thus: __- And they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call,-with quivering peals, And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause Of silence such as baffled his best skill: Then, sometimes, in that silenceI fear it is presumptuous even to express a feeling, which hardly dares to be an opinion, about these fine verses (one of the most exquisite specimens of blank verse that I know, and fit to be placed beside the most exquisite specimens from Milton, though different from them in the kind of excellence) and yet I can not forbear to express the feeling, that the latter part of this quotation stood better at first; or that any improvement,-if any there be -in the first of the two altered lines, is dearly purchased by the comparative languor which has thus been occasioned in the second:Of silence such as baflled his best skill seems to me almost prose in comparison with That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,which presents the image (if so it may be called), at once without dividing it, while the spondaic movement of the verse corresponds to the sense. Neither can I think that "mirth" is here a superfluity even in addition to "jocund din;" the logic of poetic passion may admit or even require what the mere logic of thought does not exact: and what is the objection to " chane'd," which Milton uses just in the same way in Paradise Lost?2 The utter silence of the owls, after such free and full communications, is as good an instance of chance, or an event of which we can not see the cause, as the affairs of this world commonly present; and the word seems to me particularly expressive.-S. C.] 1 [Par. Lost, xi. 1. 637.-S. C.] 2 Book Ix. i 575. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 449 The second shall be that noble imitation of Drayton' (if it was not rather a coincidence) in the lines To JOANNA.t -" When I had gazed perhaps two minutes' space, Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud. The Rock, like something starting from a sleep, Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed ag'ain! That ancient Woman seated on Helmn-crag Was ready with her cavern; lramrmar-scar, And the tall Steep of Silver-How sent forth A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard, And Fairfield answered with a mnountain tone. Ielvellyn far into the clear blue sky Carried the Lady's voice I-old Skiddaw blew His speaking trumpet!-back out of the clouds From Glaramara southward came the voice: And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head!" The third, which is in rhyme, I take from the SONG AT THE FEAST OF BntOUGHAM CASTLE, upon the restoration of Lord Clifford, the Shepherd, to the Estates and Honors of his Ancestors.: -" Now another day is come, Fitter hope, and nobler doom; He hath thrown aside his crook, And hath buried deep his book Armor rzsting in his halls On the blood of ClIfford calls; Quell the Scot,' exclaiims the Lance I Bear mre to the heart of France, Is the longing of the ShieldTell thy namne, thou trembling Field!Field of death, sohere'er thou be, Groan thou with our victory! Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every bill, Upon her verge that stands, the neighboring valleys fill; Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw, From whom as soon again, the sound Dunhalrase drew, From whose stone-trophied head, it on the Wendross went, Which, tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent. That Brodwater, therewith within her banks astound, In sailing to the sea, -told it to Egreimo und,, Whose buildings, wsdks, and strlects, with echoes loud and long, Did mightily commend old Copland for her song. Drayton's POLYOLBION: Song XXX. t [P. W. ii. p. 289.-S. C.],: [P. W. ii. p. 154.-S. C.] 450 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Happy day, and mighty hour, When our Shepherd, in his power, Mailed and horsed, with lance and sword, To his ancestors restored, Like a re-appearing Star, Like a glory from afar, First shall head the flock of war!" "Alas! the fervent harper did not know, That for a tranquil Soul the Lay was framed, Who, long compelled in humble walks to go, Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed. Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills." The words themselves in the foregoing extracts, are, no doubt, sufficiently common for the greater part. —But in what poem are they not so, if we except a few misadventurous attempts to translate the arts and sciences into verse? In THE EXCURSION the number of polysyllabic (or what the common people call, dictionary) words is more than usually great. And so must it needs be, in proportion to the number and variety of an author's conceptions, and his solicitude to express them with precision.-But are those words in those places commonly employed in real life to express the same thought or outward thing? Are they the style used in the ordinary intercourse of spoken words? No! nor are the modes of connections; and still less the breals and transitions. Would any but a poet-at least could any one without being conscious that he had expressed himself with noticeable vivacity-have described a bird singing loud by, "The thrush is busy in the wood?"-or have spoken of boys with a string of club-moss round their rusty hats, as the boys "with, their green coronal..?" —or have translated a beautiful May-day into "Both earth and sky keep jubilee?" or have brought all the different marks and circumstances of a sea-loch before the mind, as the actions of a living and acting power? Or have represented the reflection of the sky in the water as c" That uncertain heaven receizved into the bosoml of the steady lake?" Even the grammatical construction is not unfrequently peculiar; as, " The wind, the tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic sky, might well be dangerous food to him, a youth to whom was given," &c. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 451 There is a peculiarity in the frequent use of the d&rJvvdzQTfToV (that is, the omission of the connective particle before the last of several words, or several sentences used grammatically as single words, all being in the same case and governing or governed by the same verb), and not less in the construction of words by apposition (" to him, a youth"). In short, were there excluded from Mr. Wordsworth's poetic compositions all that a literary adherence to the theory of his preface would exclude, two thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry must be erased. For a far greater number of lines would be sacrificed than in any other recent poet; because the pleasure received from Words-worth's poems being less derived either from excitement of curiosity or the rapid flow of narration, the striking passages form a larger proportion of their value. I do not adduce it as a fair criterion of comparative excellence, nor do I even think it such: but merely as matter of fact. I affirm, that from no contemporary writer could so many lines be quoted, without reference to the poem in which they are found, for their own independent weight or beauty. From the sphere of my own experience I can bring to my recollection three persons of no every-day powers and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more and more unallayed pleasure, and had thought more highly of their authors, as poets; who yet have confessed to me, that from no modern work had so many passages started up anew in their minds at different times, and as different occasions had awakened a meditative mood. CHAPTER XXI. REMAtKS ON THE PRESENT MODE OF CONDUCTING CRITICAL JOURNALS. LONG have I wished to see a fair and philosophical inquisition into the character of WVordsworth, as a poet, on the evidence of his published works; and a positive, not a comparative, appreciation of their charadcteristic excellencies, deficiencies, -and defects. I know no claim, that the mere opinion of any individual can 452 BIOGRAPHIA LITERATIA. have to weigh down the opinion of the author himself; against the probability of whose parental partiality we ought to set that of his having thought longer and more deeply on the subject. But I should call that investigation fair and philosophical in which the critic announces and endeavors to establish the principles, which he holds for the foundation of poetry in general, with the specification of these in their application to the different classes of poetry. Having thus prepared his canons of criticism for praise and condemnation, he would proceed to particularize the most striking passages to which he deems them applicable, faithfully noticing the frequent or infrequent recurrence of similar merits or defects, and as faithfully distinguishing what is characteristic from what is accidental, or a mere flagging of the wing. Then if his premises be rational, his deductions legitimate, and his conclusions justly applied, the reader, and possibly the poet himself, may adopt his judgment in the light of judgment and in the independence of free-agency. If he has erred, he presents his errors in a definite place and tangible form, and holds the torch and guides the way to their detection. I most willingly admit, and estimate at a high value, the services which the EDINBURGH REVIEW, and others formed afterwards on the same plan, have rendered to society in the diffhsion of knowledge. I think the commencement of the EDINBURGH RUEVIEW an important epoch in periodical criticism; and that it has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary republic, and indeed of the reading public at large, for having originated the scheme of reviewing those books only, which are susceptible and deserving of argumentative criticism. Not less meritorious, and far more faithfully and in general far more ably executed, is their plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or mediocrity, wisely left to sink into oblivion by its own weight, with original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious, or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition. I do not arraign the keenness, or asperity of its damnatory style, in and for itself, as long as the author is addressed or treated a.s the mere impersonation of the work then under trial. I have no quarrel with'lhem on G'l this account, as long as no personal allusions are admitted, and no re-commitment (for new trial) of juvenile performances, that were published, perhaps forgotten, many BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 459 years before the commencement of the review: since for the forcing back of such works to public notice no motives are easily assignable, but such as are furnished to the critic by his own personal malignity; or what is still worse, by a habit of malignity in the form of mere wantonness. "No private grudge they need, no personal spite: The viva sectio is its own delight! All enmity, all envy, they disclaim, Disinterested thieves of our good name: Cool, sober murderers of their neighbor's fame!"-S. T. C. Every censure, every sarcasm respecting a publication which the critic, with the criticized work before him, can make good, is the critic's right. The writer is authorized to reply, but not to complain. Neither can any one prescribe to the critic, how soft or how hard; how friendly, or how bitter, shall be the phrases which he is to select for the expression of such reprehension or ridicule. The critic must know, what effect it is his object to produce; and with a view to this effect must he weigh his words. But as soon as the critic betrays, that he knows more of his author, than the author's publications could have told him; as soon as from this more intimate knowledge, elsewhere obtained, he avails himself of the slightest trait against the author; his censure instantly becomes personal injury, his sarcasms personal insults. He ceases to be a critic, and takes on him the most contemptible character to which a rational creature can be degraded, that of a gossip, backbiter, and pasqzillant: but with this heavy aggravation, that he steals the unquiet, the deforming passions of the world into the museum; into the very place which, next to the chapel and oratory, should be our sanctuary, and secure place of refunge; offers abominations on the altar of' the Muses; and makes its sacred paling the very circle in which he conjures up the lying and profane spirit. This determination of unlicensed personality, and of permitted and legitimate censure (which I owe in part to the illustrious Lessing,* himself a model of acute, spirited, sometimes stinging,: [See a few remarks on this subject in Lessing's Preface to his Essay on the manner in which the Ancients represented Death (iVie die Alten den Tod gebildet). Works, Leipzig, 1841, vol. v. pp. 273-4. Lessing also remonstrates against a certain sort of personality in criticism in the Advertisement prefixed to his fIamburgische.Dramaturgie. lb. vol. vii. pp. 3-6.-S. C.] 454 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. but always argumentative and honorable, criticism), is beyond controversy the true one: and though I would not myself exercise all the rights of the latter, yet, let but the former be excluded, I submit myself to its exercise in the hands of others, without complaint and without resentment. Let a communication be formed between any number of learned men in the various branches of science and literature; and whether the president and central committee be in London, or Edinburgh, if only they previously lay aside their individuality, and pledge themselves inwardly, as well as ostensibly, to administer judgment according to a constitution and code of laws; and if by grounding this code on the two-fold basis of universal morals and philosophic reason, independent of all foreseen application to particular works and authors, they obtain the right to speak each as the representative of their body corporate; they shall have honor and good wishes from me, and I shall accord to them their fair dignities, though self-assumed, not less cheerfully than if I could inquire concerning them in the herald's office, or turn to them in the book of peerage. However loud may be the outcries for prevented or subverted reputation, however numerous and impatient the complaints of merciless severity and insupportabte despotism, I shall neither feel, nor utter aught but to the defence and justification of the critical machine. Should any literary Quixote find himself provoked by its sounds and regular movements, I should admonish him with Sancho Panza, that it is no giant but a windmill; there it stands on its own place, and its own hillock, never goes out of its way to attack any one, and to none and from none either gives or asks assistance. When the public press has poured in any part of its produce between its mill-stones, it grinds it off, one man's sack the same as another, and with whatever wind may happen to be then blowing. All the two-and-thirty winds are alike its friends. Of the whole wide atmosphere it does not desire a single finger-breadth more than what is necessary for its sails to turn round in. But this space must be left free and unimpeded. Gnats, beetles, wasps, butterflies, and the whole tribe of ephemerals and insignificants, may flit in and out and between; may hum, and buzz, and jarr; may shrill their tiny pipes, and wind their puny horns, unchastised and unnoticed. But idlers and bravadoes of larger size and prouder show must beware, how they place themselves within its BIOGRAPIIIA LITERARIA. 455 sweep. Much less may they presume to lay hands on the sails, the strength of which is neither greater nor less than as the wind is, which drives them round. Whomsoever the remorseless arm slings aloft, or whirls along with it in the air, he has himself alone to blame; though, when the same arm throws him from it, it will more often double than break the force of his fall. Putting aside the too manifest and too frequent interference of national party, and even personal predilection or aversion; and reserving for deeper feelings those worse and more criminal intrusions into the sacredness of private life, which not seldom merit legal rather than literary chastisement, the two principal objects and occasions which I find for blame and regret in the conduct of the review in question are: first, its unfaithfulness to its own announced and excellent plan, by subjecting to criticism works neither indecent nor immoral, yet of such trifling importance even in point of size and, according to the critic's own verdict, so devoid of all merit, as must excite in the most candid mind the suspicion, either that dislike or vindictive feelings were at work; or that there was a cold prudential pre-determination to increase the sale of the review by flattering the malignant passions of human nature. That I may not myself become subject to the charge, which I am bringing against others, by an accusation without proof; I refer to the article on Dr. Rennell's sermon in the very first number of the EDINBURGH REVrEW as an illustration of my meaning. If in looking through all the succeeding volumes the reader should find this a solitary instance, I must submit to that painful forfeiture of esteem, which awaits a groundless or exaggerated charge. The second point of objection belongs to this review only in common with all other works of periodical criticism; at least, it applies in common to the general system of all, whatever exception there may be in favor of particular articles. Or if it attaches to THE EDINBURGH LEVIEVW, and to its only corrival (THE QUARTERLY), with any peculiar force, this results from the superiority of talent, acquirement, and information which both have so undeniably displayed; and which doubtless deepens the regret though not the blame. I am referring to the substitution of assertion for argument; to the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even by a single quotation from the work condemned, which might at least have 456 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, explained the critic's meaning, if it did not prove the justice of his sentence. Evenr_ where this is not the case, the extracts are too often made without reference to any general grounds or rules from which the faultiness or inadmissibility of -the qualities attributed may be deduced; and without any attempt to show, that the qualities are attributable to the passage extracted. I have met with such extracts from Mr. Wordsworth's poems, annexed to such assertions, as led me to imagine, that the reviewer, having written his critique before he had read the work, had then pricked with a pin for passages, wherewith to illustrate the various branches of his preconceived opinions. By what principle of rational choice can we suppose a critic to have been directed (at least in a Christian country, and himself, we hope, a Christian) who gives the following lines, portraying the fervor of solitary devotion excited by the magnificent display of the Almighty's works, as a proof and example of an author's tendency to downright ravings, and absolute unintelligibility? " 0 then what soul was his, when on the tops Of the high -mountains he beheld the sun Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He lookedOcean and earth, the solid frame of earth, And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched, And in their silent faces did he read Unutterable love. Sound needed none, Nor any voice of joy: his spirit drank The spectacle! sensation, soul, and form, All melted into him; they swallowed up His animal being; in them did he live, And by them did he live: they were his life." * [Excursion. (Book I. P. W. vi. p. 10. The passage now begins thus: "Such was the Boy-but for the growing Youth What soul was his, when, from the naked top Of some bold headland, he beheld, &c." Compare with this Goethe's Sunset (in the dialogue between Faust and Wagner after the scene of out-door festivity), the diction and versification of which are exquisite: O glicklichl! we e noch horesn kansn Aus diesem M~eer des'rrtthuems aufzutauchens, &c. The two passages, in each of which the tone of reflection is beautifully accordant with the natural image,-in Goethe's with a setting, as in that BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 457 Can it be expected, that either the author or his admirers, should be induced to pay any serious attention to decisions which prove nothing but the pitiable state of the critic's own taste and sensibility? On opening the review they see a favorite passage, of the force and truth of which they had an intuitive certaility in their own inward experience confirmed, if confirmation it could receive, by the sympathy of their most enlightened friends; some of whom perhaps, even in the world's opinion, hold a higher intellectual rank than the critic himself would presume to claim. And this very passage they find selected, as the characteristic effusion of a mind deserted b6y'eason.-as furnishing evidence that the writer was raving, or he could not have thus strung words together without sense or purpose! No diversity of taste seems capable of explaining such a contrast in judgment. That I had over-rated the merit of a passage or poem, that I had erred concerning the degree of its excellence, I might be easily induced to believe or apprehend. But that lines, the sense of which I had analyzed and found consonant with all the best convictions of my understanding; and the imagery and diction of' which had collected round those convictions my noblest as well as my most delightful feelings; that I should admit such lines to be mere nonsense or lunacy, is too much for the most ingenious arguments to effect. But that such a revolution of taste should be brought about by a few broad assertions, seems little less than impossible. On the contrary, it would require an effort of charity not to dismiss the criticism with the aphorism of the wise man, in anirnavn malevolaqn sapientia haud intrar e potest. What then if this very critic should have cited a large number of single lines and even of long paragraphs, which he himself acknowledges to possess eminent and original beauty? What if he himself has owned, that beauties as great are scattered in abundance throughout the whole book? And yet, though under this impression, should have commenced his critique in vulgar exultation with a prophecy meant to secure its own fulfilment? With a " This won't do!" What? if after such acknowledgments exfrom The Excursion, with a rising sun, —might be pendants to each other, and form such a bright pair as Mr. Turner's two pictures called the Rise and Decline of Carthage,-" or brighter." Would that the hues of the material paintings were as fadeless as those of the poetry, for they too deserve to live.-S. C.] VOL. III. U 458 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. torted from his own judgment he should proceed from charge to charge of tameness and raving; flights and flatness; and at length, consigning the author to the house of incurables, should conclude with a strain of rudest contempt evidently grounded in the distempered state of his own moral associations? Suppose too all this done without a single leading principle established or even announced, and without any one attempt at argumentative deduction, though the poet had presented a more than usual opportunity for it, by having previously made public his own principles of judgment in poetry, and supported them by a connected train of reasoning The office and duty of the poet is to select the most dignified as well as "' The gayest, happiest attitude of things."? The reverse, fobr in all cases a reverse is possible, is the appropriate business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste for which has been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind. When I was at Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of Julius II. I went thither once with a Prussian artist, a man of genius and great vivacity of feeling. As we were gazing on Michael Angelo's MosEs, our conversation turned on the horns and beard of' that stupendous statue; of' the necessity of each to -support the other; of the superhuman effect of the former, and the necessity of the existence of both to give a harmony and integrity both to the image and the feeling excited by it. Conceive them removed, and the statue would become uzn-natural, without being super-natural. We called to mind the horns of the rising sun, and I repeated the noble passage from Taylor's HOLY DYING.t That horns were the emblem of power and sovereignty among the Eastern nations, and are still retained as such in Abyssinia; the Achelous of the ancient Greeks; and the probable ideas and feelings, that originally suggested the mixture of the human and the brute form in the figure, by which they realized the idea of their mysterious Pan, as representing intelligence blended with a darker power, deeper, mightier, and more universal than the conscious intellect of man; than intelligence;-all these thoughts and recollections passed in procession before our minds. My * [Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination, Bk. I. 1. 30.-S. C.] f' [Chap. i. sect. 3, ~ 2.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 459 companion who possessed more than his share of the hatred, which his countrymen bore to the French, had just observed to me, " A Frenchman, Sir! is the only animal in the human shape, that by no possibility can lift itself up to religion or poetry:" when, lo! two French officers of distinction and rank entered the church! " Mark you," whispered the Prussian, "the first thing, which those scoundrels-will notice-(for they will begin by instantly noticing the statue in parts, without one moment's pause of admiration impressed by the whole)-will be the horns and the beard. And the assbciations, which they will immediately connect with them will be those of a he-goat and a czckold." Never did man guess more luckily. Had he inherited a portion of the great legislator's prophetic powers, whose statue we had been contemplating, he could scarcely have uttered words more coincident with the result: for even as he had said, so it came to pass. In TiE ExcuRSION the poet has introduced an old man, born in humble but not abject circumstances, who had enjoyed more thani usual advantages of education, both from books and from the more awful discipline of nature. This person he represents, as having been driven by the restlessness of fervid feelings, and from a craving intellect to an itinerant life; and as having in consequence passed the larger portion of his time, from earliest manhood, in villages and hamlets from door to door, "A vagrant Merchant bent beneath his load."* Now whether this be a character appropriate to a lofty didactic poem, is perhaps questionable. It presents a fair subject for controversy:; and the question is to be determined by the congruity or incongruity of such a character with what shall be proved to be the essential constituents of poetry. But surely the critic who, passing by all the opportunities which such a mode of life would present to such a man; all the advantages of the liberty of nature, of solitude, and of solitary thought; all the varieties of places and seasons, through which his track had lain, with all the varying imagery they bring with them; and lastly, all the observations of men, ["A vagrant Merchant under a heavy load Bent as he moves"Book I. P. W. vol. vi. p. 15, edit. of 1840.-S. C.] 460 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. "Their manners, their enjoyments, and pursuits, Their passions and their feelings —."* which the memory of these yearly journeys must have given and recalled to such a mind-the critic, I say, who from the multitude of possible associations should pass by all these in order to fix his attention exclusively on the pin-papers, and stay-tap2es, which mnight have been among the wares of his pack; this critic, in my opinion, can not be thought to possess a much higher or much healthier state of moral feeling, than the Frenchmen above recorded. CHAPTER XXII. THE CHARACTERISTIC DEFECTS OF WORDSWORtTIIHS POETRY, WITH THE PRINCIPLES FROM ~WHICH THE JUDGMENT, THAT THEY ARE DEFECTS, IS DEDUCED-THEIR PROPORTION TO THE BEAUTIES -FOR TI-IE GREATEST PART CHARACTERISTIC OF I-IIS THEORY ONLY. IF Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his arguments are insufficient to support, let him and those who have adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of those arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles. And still let the due credit be given to the portion and importance of the truths, which are blended with his theory; truths, the too exclusive attention to which had occasioned its errors, by tempting him to carry those truths beyond their proper limits. If his mnistaken theory have at all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects be pointed out, and the instances given. But let it likewise be shown, how far the influence has acted; whether diffusively, or only by starts; whether the number and importance of the poems and passages thus infected be great or trifling compared with the sound portion; and lastly, whether they are inwoven into the texture of his works, or are loose and separable. The result of such a trial would evince beyond a doubt, what it is high time to announce decisively and * [Book I. P. W. vol. vi. p. 15, last edit.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 461 aloud, that the supposed characteristics of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, whether admired or reprobated; whether they are simplicity or simpleness; faithful adherence to essential nature, or wilful selections fiorn human nature of its meanest forms and under the least attractive associations; are as little the real characteristics of his poetry at large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind. In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an experiment; and this experim-ent we will suppose to have failed. Yet even in these poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural tendency of the poet's mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions. The poem entitled FIDELITY* is for the greater part written in language, as unraised and naked as any perhaps in the two volumes. Yet take the following stanza and compare it with the preceding stanzas of the same poem. "There sometimes doth a leaping fish Send through the tarn a lonely cheer; The crags repeat the raven's croak, In symphony austere; Thither the rainbow comes-the cloudAnd mists that spread the flying shroud; And sunbeams; and the sounding blast, That, if it could, would hurry past; But that enormous barrier holds it fast." Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the former half: " Yes, proof was plain that, since the day On which the Traveller thus had died, The Dog had watched about the spot, Or by his Master's side: How nourish'd here through such long time lie knows, who gave that love sublime, And gave that strength of feeling, great A bove all humanz estimate!"f Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining, which of these best represents the tendency and native character of,he poet's genius? Will he not decide that the one was writ[P. W. v. p. 43.-S. C.j f [The second line of this stanza is now " When this ill-fated Traveller died." S. C.] 462 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ten because the poet would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or other of every composition write otherwise? In short, that his only disease is the being out of his element; likbe the swan, that, having amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river's bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and sustaining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided against the poet's theory, as far as it is difierent from the principles of the art, generally acknowledged. I can not here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Wordsworth's works; but I will attempt to give the main results of my own judgment, after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. And though, to appreciate the defects of a great mind, it is necessary to understand previously its characteristic excellences, yet I have already expressed myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most of the ill effects that might arise from my pursuing a contrary arrangement. I will therefore commence with what I deem the prominent defects of his poems hitherto published. The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity-(at all events striking and original)-to a style, not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. He sinks too often and too abruptly to that style, which T should place in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species; first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is only proper in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both. There have been works, such as Cowley's Essay on Cromwell,* in which prose and verse are * [This is an eloquent declamation against Cromwell, in the guise of an argument, the defence of "the late man, who made himself to be called Protector," being put into the mouth of one whose appearance was " strange and terrible," and whose figure was taller than that of a giant, or " the shadow of any giant in the evening." This personage turns out to be the Wicked One himself, and the discourse which he utters is, indeed, most dramatically appropriate to him, however unserviceable to the cause of Cromwell. After despatching the Protector's religion and morals, disparaging his powers, reducing his parts to diligence and dissimulation, and BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 468 intermixed (not as in the Consolation of Boetius,* or the ARGENIS of Barclay,t by the insertion of poems supposed to have been spoken or composed on occasions previously related in prose, but) the poet passing from one to the other, as the nature of the thoughts or his own feelings dictated. Yet this mode of composition does not satisfy a cultivated taste. There is something unpleasant in the being thus obliged to alternate states of feeling so dissimilar, and this too in a species of writing, the pleasure froni which is in part derived from the preparation and previous:xpectation of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern comic operas; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever making away with his achievements at home and abroad, or bringing them very nearly to nothing, the Evil One's opponent proceeds to demolish his intellectual pretensions; and here he attacks him on the side of his speeches, which Mr. Carlyle has lately brought forth from the shadows in which they have so long been lying. According to this essay, all the war and bloodshed at the time of the Rebellion, vwas on account of " a little ship-money," or to revenge the loss "of three or four ears,"-not to decide whether the country was to be governed by an absolute or a limited monarchy; whether the Church of England should be approximated to Rome or maintained in the spirit of the Reformation; whether ecclesiastical rulers were to fine, scourge, mutilate, and immure for life in wretched prisons any who opposed their views and proceedings, or whether they must learn to uphold the Church in a manner more conformable to Christianity. Yet Cowley, while he thus could represent the cause of Hampden, exalts that of Brutus!-whom Dante places for his rebellion in the lowest deep of punishment; such is poetical injustice! Methinks this whole discourse against old Noll is like "the shadow of a giant in the evening"-big and black, but of no force or substance. Cowley wrote eleven other discourlses by way of essays in verse and prose, ib. pp. 79-148. This remarkable writer and worthy man died July 28, 1667, aged forty-nine.-S. C.]'S [An. Maul. Sever. Bodtii Conzsolationzis Philosophice, Lib. v. IBoetius or Bobthius, was born about A.D. 470.-S. C.] t [The Argenis, quoted toward the end of chap. ix. is a sort of didactic romance, in imitation of the Sactyricon qf Petronius. The author, John Barclay, was born 1582, died 1621. He flourished at the Court of James 1. (who was delighted with his Saltyricon luLphormniouis)-and published, beside several prose works, a collection of poems in two vols. 4to. It is said that his prose is superior to his verse, but that all his works discover wit and genius.-S. C.] 464 BIOGIRAPHIA LITERARt1IA. doubts may be entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly placed the arcia at the end of the scene, at the same time that he almost always raises and impassions the style of the recitative immediately preceding.* Even in real life, the difference is great and evident between words used as the arbitrary marks of thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse, with the image and superscription worn out by currency; and those which convey pictures either borrowed from one outward object to enliven and particularize some other; or used allegorically to body forth the inward state of the person speaking; or such as are at least the exponents of his peculiar turn and unusual extent of faculty. So much so, indeed, that in the social circles of private life we often find a striking use of the latter put a stop to the general flow of conversation, and by the excitement arising from concenaed attention, produce a sort: f damp and interruption for some minutes after. But in the perusal of worlik of literary art, we prepare ourselves for such language; and the business of the writer, like that of a painter whose subject requires unusual splendor and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral tints, that what in a different style would be tihe commanding colors, are here used as the means of that gentle deg9adaclotion requisite in order to produce the effeet of a whole. Where this is not achieved in a poem, the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in order to disappoint them; and where this defect occurs frequently, his feelings are alternately startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax. I refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another purpose from THE BLIND HIGHLAND BOY; and then annex, as being in my opinion instances of this dishar'nmony in style, the two following: ~ [The popular Italian dramatic poet, Pietro 5Metastasio, whose original name was Trapassi, was born at Rome on the 2d of January, 1698, died April 12ath, 1182. Mietastasio, though not born to affluence or gentility, vwas pursued through life by the favors of the rich and powerful, as well as the adcmiration of the crowd. He was a favorite of Nature in such a Yw"ay as made him also a favorite of Fortiune, and possessed all admi'ranble qualities of mind and person that are understood at first sigiht. He toolkthe eeelesiastical habit and the title of Abcte, though his life and,writings, so closelY connected with the stage, were not much in accordance with the exterior of a grave-spiritual calling. But the Church of Rome has never disdained att;raetive worldly alliances.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 465 "And one, the rarest, was a shell, Which he, poor child, had studied well: The shell of a green turtle, thin And hollow;-you might sit therein, It was so wide, and deep." "Our Highland Boy oft visited The house which held this prize; and, led By choice or chance, did thither come One day, when no one was at home, And found the door unbarred."'* * [Mr. Wordsworth has interposed three new stanzas between the first and second of the quotations, and has altered the first thus: "The rarest was a turtle-shell Which he, poor child, had studied well: A shell of ample size and light As the pearly car of Amphitrite, That sportive dolphins drew." The history of the Blind Boy's choice of a vessel is now told in nine stanzas -(besides a tenth at the end of the whole poem) —originally in these three: Strong is the current; but be mild, Ye waves, and spare the helpless child! If ye in anger fret or chafe, A bee-hive would be ship as safe As that in which he sails. But say what was it? Thought of fear! Well may ye tremble when ye hear! - A Household Tub, like one of those Which iwomene, use to wash their clothes. This carried the blind Boy. Close to the water he had found This vessel, pushed it from dry ground, Went into it; and without dread, Following the fancies in his head, He paddled up and down. Vol. ii. pp. 72-3, edit. 1807. There are some lovers of poetry, and Mr. Wordsworth's especially, whe can not help preferring these three stanzas to the nine of later date; if the words in italics could be replaced by others less anti-poetic. The advantage of the real incident they think, is that, as being more simple and seeming natural, and capable of being quickly told, it detains the mind but a Little while from the main subject of interest: while the other is so peculiar that it claims a good deal of separate attention. The new stanzas are beautiful, but being more ornate than the rest of the poems, they look An.* 466 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Or page 172, vol. i.* "'Tis gone forgotten, let me do S~y best. There was a smile or twoI can remember them, I see The smiles worth all the world to me. Dear Baby 1 I must lay thee down: Thou troublest me with strange alarms; Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own; I can not keep thee in my arms; For they confound me: as it is, I have forgot those smiles of his!" Or page 269, vol. i.t "Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest, And though little troubled with sloth, Drunken lark! thou would'st be loth To be such a traveller as I. Happy, happy liver! With a soul as strong as a noztcstairn river Pouring out praise to th' Almiyhty giver, rather like a piece of decorated architecture introduced into a building in an earlier and simpler style. Such are the -whims of certain crazy lovers of the Wordsworthian M.luse, who are so loyal to her former self that they sometimes forget the deference due to her at present.-S. C.] * [P. W. i. p. 186. Mr. Wordsworth has altered some lines in the fifth stanza of this deeply affecting poem, thus:'Tis gone-like dreams that we forget There was a smile or two-yet-yet I can remember them, I see, &c. Smiles hast thou, briglht ones of thy own; I can not keep thee in my arms; For they confound me;-where-where is That last, that sweetest smile of his? S. C.] [P. W. ii. p. 29. After " Joy and jollity be with us both!" the poem now ends thus: Alas! my journey, rugged and uneven, Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind; But hearing thee, or others of thy kind, As full of gladness and as free of heaven, I, with my fate contented, will plod on, And hope for higher raptures, when Life's day is done. S..] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 467 Joy and jollity be with us both! Hearing thee or else some other, As merry a brother I on the earth will go plodding on By myself cheerfully till the day is done." The incongruity, which I appear to find in this passage, is that of the two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. So v-ol. ii. page 30.* "Close by a Pond, upon the further side, He stood alone; a minute's space, I guess, I watch'd him, he continuing motionless: To the Pool's further margin then I drew; He being all the while before me full in view."f Compare this with the repetition of the same image, in the next stanza but two. "And, still as I drew near with gentle pace, Beside the little pond or moorish flood Motionless as a Cloud the Old Man stood, That heareth not the loud winds when they call; And moveth altogether, if it move at all." Or lastly, the second cf the three following stanzas, compared both with the first and the third. * [P. W. i. p. 117. The poem is entitled Resolution and Independence, and is sometimes spoken of as The Leech-gatherer.] f [Mr. Wordsworth has now done away the original ixth stanza to which these five lines belonged, and concludes the viiith thus: Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven I saw a Man before me unawares: The oldest man he seemed that ever wore gray hairs. instead of: And I with these untoward thoughts had striven, I saw a Man, &c. some regret the old conclusion of stanza xiv. "He answered me with pleasure and surprise; And there was, while he spake, afifre about his eyes." which now stands thus: "Ere he replied, a flash of mild surprise Broke from the sable orbs of his yet vivid eyes." —S. C.] 408 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. "ATy former thoughts returned; the fear that kills; And hope that is unwilling to be fed; Cold, pain, and labor, and all fleshly ills; And mighty Poets in their misery dead. But now, perplex'd by what the Old Man had said, My question eagerly did I renew,' How is it that you live, and what is it you do 8' Ile with a smile did then his words repeat; And said, that, gathering Leeches, far and wide He travelled; stirring thus about his feet The waters of the Ponds where they abide.' Once I could meet with them on every side; But they have dwindled long by slow decay; Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.' While he was talking thus, the lonely place, The Old Man's shape, and speech, all troubled me: In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace About the weary moors continually, Wandering about alone and silently." Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to repeat that this defect is only occasional. From a careful re-perusal of the two volumes of poems, I doubt whether the objectionable passages would amount in the whole to one hundred lines; not the eighth part of the number of pages. In THE EXCURSION the feeling of incongruity is seldom excited by the diction of any passage considered in itself, but by the sudden superiority of some other passage forming the context. The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the reader will pardon an uncouth and new coined word. There is, I should say, not seldom a matter-of~fcac Ztzess in certain poems. This may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing is taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. To this accidentality I object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which Aristotle pro BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 469 nounces to be aurovSacoTdraro';cal pctoaopcrracrov ysoVg,* the most intense, weighty, and philosophical product of human art; adding, as the reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The following passage from Davenant's prefatory letter to Hobbes well expresses this truth. " When I considered the actions which I meant to describe (those inferring the persons), I was again persuaded rather to choose those of a former age, than the present; and in a century so far removed, as might preserve me from their improper examinations, who lknow not the requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable), who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian. For why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune by more delightful conveyances of probable fictions, because austere historians have entered into bond to truth? An obligation, which were in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is the bondage of false martyrs, who lie in chains for a mistaken opinion. But by this I would imnply, that truth,, narr'ative and past, is the idol of historians'(who worship a dead tehing), and truth ope9?ative, and by effects continually alive, is the mistress of poets, idto- hoath not her existence in ~matter, but in r'eason."t For-this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines in THE ExcuslION, pp. 96, 97, and 98, may be taken, if not as a striking instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning.4 It must be some strong motive-(as, for instance, that the description was necessary to the intelligibility of the tale)-which could induce me to -describe in a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to the eye with incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes of his pencil, or the painter with as many touches of his brush. Such descriptions too often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand his author, a feeling of labor, not very dissimilar to that, with which he would construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, * [Ao scaK tlooo~'repoV cac crvovdac6repov wroiat'G iaropiac &ariv. HEPI IIOJHTIKH;. See the quotation, p. 399. (Note).-S. 0.] { [From the Preface before Gondibert. To his much honored friend, Mr. Hobbes, dated Louvre in Paris, Jan. 2, 1650.-S. C.] t [Book iii. P. W. vi. pp. "8-9.-S. C.] 470:BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. then join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind' to behold it as a whole. The poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and I ksiow no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two faculties. Masterpiecos of the former mode of poetic painting abound in the writings of Milton, for example: "The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown'd, But such as at this day, to Indians known, In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms Branching so broad and long, that in the ground The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow About the mother-tree, a pillar'd shade High over-arch'd, and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN: There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat, Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds At hoop-holes cut through thickest shade:"-* This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia comnmunia of the senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical penna duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of sound. Thus, " The echoing walks between," may be almost said to reverse the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the Egyptian statue.t Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in the world of imagination. <[Uhe second division respects an apparent minute adherence to matter-of-fact in character and incidents; a biographical attention to probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect. [ tPar. Lost, Book ix. 1. 1101.] 1 [The Statue of Memnon, one of two statues called Shamy and Damy, which stand at a little distance from Medinet Abou, towards the Nile, looking eastward, directly opposite to the Temple of Luxor, was said to utter a sound like the snapping asunder of a musical string, when it was struck by the first beams of the sun. There is no doubt, that before Cambyses brioke this colossus, it uttered sounds when the sun shone on it: the statue is composed of a quartzy sandstone, highly crystallized, containing a considerable portion of iron, and this material, when struck, gives a metallic ring. The excitement of vision by the suggestion of sound is the converse of the excitement of sound by the impulse of light.-S. C.] BIOGRAP]IEA LITERARIA. 471 Under this head I shall deliver, with no feigned diffidence, the results of my best reflection on the great point of controversy between Mr. Wordsworth and his objectors; namely, oln the choice of his characters. I have already declared, and I trust justified, my utter dissent from the mode of argument which his critics have hitherto employed. To their question, —" Why did you choose such a character, or a character from such a rank of life?"-the poet might in my opinion fairly retort: why with the conception of my character did you make wilful choice of mean or ludicrous associations not furnished by me, but supplied from your own sickly and fastidious feelings? How was it, indeed, probable, that such arguments could have any weight with an author, whose plan, whose guiding principle, and main object it was to attack and subdue that state of association, which leads us to place the chief value on those things on which man differs from man, and to forget or disregard the high dignities, which belong to Human Nature, the sense and the feeling, which may be, and ought to be, found in all ranks? The feelings with which, as Christians, we contemplate a mixed congregation rising or kneeling before their common Maker, Mr. Wordsworth would have us entertain at all times, as men, and as readers; and by the excitement of this lofty, yet prideless impartiality in poetry, he might hope to have encouraged its continuance in real life. The praise of good men be his! In real life, and, I trust, even in my imagination, I honor a virtuous and wise man, without reference to the presence or absence of artificial advantages. Whether in the person of an armed baron, a laurelled bard, or of an old Pedler, or still older Leech-gatherer, the same qualities of head and heart must claim the same reverence. And even in poetry I'am not conscious, that I have ever suffered my feelings to be disturbed or offended by any thoughts or images, which the poet himself has not presented. But yet I object, nevertheless, and for the following reasons. First, because the object in view, as an immediate object, belongs to the moral philosopher, and would be pursued, not only more appropriately, but in my opinion with far greater probability of success, in sermons or moral essays, than in an elevated poem. It seems, indeed, to destroy the main fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as it proposes truth, A472 BIOGORAPHIA LITERARIA. for its immediate object, instead of pleasu~re. Now till the blessed time shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure, and both shall be so united, as to be distinguishable in vwords only, not in feeling, it will remain the poet's office to proceed upon that state of association, which actually exists as general; instead of attempting first to make it what it ought to be, and then to let the pleasure follow. But here is unfortunately a small hysteronproteron. For the communication of pleasure is the introductory means by which alone the poet must expect to moralize his readers. Secondly: though I were to admit, for a moment, this argument to be groundless: yet how is the moral effect to be produced, by merely attaching the name of some low profession to powers which are least likely, and to qualities which are assuredly not more likely, to be found in it? The Poet, speaking in his own person, may at once delight and improve us by sentiments, which teach us the independence of goodness, of wisdom, and even of genius, on the favors of fortune. And having made a due reverence before the throne of Antonine, he may bow with equal awe before Epictetus among his fellow-slavesand rejoice In the plain presence of his dignity." Who is not at once delighted and improved, when the P,'~: Wordsworth himself exclaims, "Oh! many are the Poets that are sown By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts The vision and the faculty divine, Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, Nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led By circumstance to take unto the height The measure of themselves, these favored Beings, All but a scattered few, live out their time, Husbanding that which they possess within, And go to the grave, unthought of. Strongest minds Are often those of whom the noisy world Hears least." To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, de one's heart good; though I for my part, have not the fullest ~ [The Excursion, Book I. P. WV. vi. p. 10. After " accomplishment of verse" there is a parenthesis of five lines omitted in the extract; the little quotation that occurs just before is from the same place.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 473 faith in the truth of the observation. On the contrary I believe the instances to be exceedingly rare; and should feel almost as strong an objection to introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black swans on a lake, in a fancy landscape. WYhen I think how many, and how much better books than Homer, or even than Herodotus, Pindar or iEschylus, could have read, are in the power of almost every man, in a country where almost every man is instructed to read and -write; and how restless, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are; and yet find even in situations the most favorable, according to Mr. Wordsworth, fobr the formation of a pure and poetic language; in situations which insure familiarity with the grandest objects of the imagination; but one Burns, among the shepherds of Scotland, and not a single poet of humble life among those of English lakes and mountains; I conclude, that Poetic Genius is not only a very delicate but a very rare plant. But be this as it may, the feelings with which, " I think of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul, that perished in his pride; Of Burns, who walk'd in glory and i n joy Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side"- -X are widely different from those with which I should read a p2oem, where the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and a philosopher in the fable of his narration, had chosen to make him a chimney-sweeper; and then, in order to remove all doubts on the subject, had invented an account of his birth, parentage and education, with all the strange and fortunate accidents,7which had concurred in making him at once poet, philosopher, and sweep! Nothing but biography can justify this. If it be admissible even in a novel, it must be one in the manner of De Foe's, that were meant to pass for histories, not in the manner of Fielding's: in TIIu LIFEr o MOLnL FLANDERS, Or COLONEL JACIK, not in a TOeM JONES 01r even a JosEPI ANDmREWS. Much less then can it be legitimately introduced in a poem, the characters of which, amid the strongest individualization, must still remain representative. The precepts of Horace, on this [" Of him who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough, along the mountain side:"P. W. ii. p. 119.-S. 0.] 4174: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of the human mind.* They are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent. For in the first place a deviation from them perplexes the reader's feelings, and all the circumstances which are feigned in order to make such accidents less improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather than aid and support it. Spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear, and unfortunately not as fictitious but as false. The reader not only knows, that the sentiments and language are the poet's own, and his own too in his artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless endeavors to make him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to forget it. The effect is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when the fable and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in THE MESSIAH OF KLOPSTOCK, or in CUIMBERLAND'S CALVARY:t and' [There are many precepts in Horace -De Arte Poetica that bear on this subject, as those on congruity at the beginning, and those on giving suitable attributes to every character, and duly regarding the exemplar of life and manners, v. 309-18; but none, I think, that forbids the choice of too peculiar a subject, except so far as this is implied in the condemnation of what appears improbable. Ficta voluptati.s caucsa, sint proxima veris: NVe, quodcuqgue volet, poscat sibifabula credi. v. 338. Mr. Coleridge's observation on laborious fidelity in representations, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect, are supported, in a general way, by those lines of Horace: Semper ad eventum festinat, et in medias res, Non secus ac notas, auditorem rapit: et quae Desperat tractata nitescere posse, relinquit. v. 148.-S. C.]. [This Epic is written in blank verse, and is a, studied imitation of Milton. In its best passages, as the Assemnbling of the Devils, in the first book, it is but a mocking-bird strain, with scarce a note in it of native music; and generally where the Poenm is not tame it borders on the burlesque. The dispute in B. VII. between Satan and Death, who, rather unnaturally, refuses to harbor his old father, and is informed, as it appears, in reward of this conduct, that he may live till the end of the world, seems to have been written in order to serve as a foil to Milton's grand episode of Satan's encounter with his " fair Son" at the gates of Hell:-it brings our moral and metaphysical ideas into such an odd sort of conflict and confusion. By comlparing the two, we see clearly how little this allegorical subject supports itself; how soon it sinks into the ridiculous in unequal hands; how completely its sublimity in those of Milton is the result of consummate skill and high poetic genius. Perhaps too it may be questioned whether the author baa not too much interfered with the Scriptural representations of Death BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 475 not merely suggested by it as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is rendered impossible by their imrrmediate neighborhood to words and facts of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even historic belief, must absolutelyf2iut out this Inere poetic Lanacogon of faith, as the summer Stn is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines full upon them. - What would otherwise have been yielded to as by makling him turn out mild and amiable, and oppose himself to the great Enemy. Revelation, as Lessing observes in his Essay on this subject, has made him the " king of terrors," the awful offspring of Sin, and the dread way to its punishment; though to the imagination of the ancient Heathen world, Greek or Etrurian, he was a youthful Genius —-the twin brother of Sleep-or a lusty boy with a torch held downward. But the accomplished author of The Choleric MIan has dramatized him as freely as if he were but a Jack Nightshade; although he avers that there is " very little of the audacity of fancy in the composition of Calvary." The poem sho-ws want of judgment, if not audacity, in another way also. Of all subjects in the wide range of thought the Death of Christ is that which Fiction should approach most warily. Milton left it untouched. The " narrow basis" of the Paradise Regained seems to me one of the numberless proofs of the mighty master's judgment; the whole poem is comprised within the linmits of that passage of our Lord's history, which is least defined in Holy Writ,-the Sojourn in the wilderness,-and could best bear to have an invention grafted into it. To bring angels and devils, not mentioned in the Scripture narrative of the Death and Passion, around the cross or into any sort of connection with it, either in foreground or background, that narrative being so full as it is of actual facts and particulars, is to jar, if not absolutely to shock, the feelings of most readers. When fanciful fiction is brought so near to sacred history of the most definite character, we recoil, and feel as if the former, clashed with the latter, and was broken against it, like the china vase against the vessel of iron. This collision the plan of Cumberland's poem involved, and poets of greater genius than he, in an enterprise of like nature, have but failed, I think, more splendidly. The author of Calvary thought himself well off, because he had so much fine subject ready to his hand. It was just that which ruined him. He had not capital enough to invest in such an undertaking; for the more is given, in this way, to the poet, the more is required out of his own brain, for the,oriptolr, which must be made with materials furnished by himself, whatever he adopts for the foszdation matter. A man may even take from various places a certain amount of material ready wrought, as Milton did, and yet add that, in the using of it, which makes the result entirely his own.-S. C.] '476 BIOGRAPHIIA LITEtRARIA. pleasing fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect produced in this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is in a less degree brought about in the instances, to which I have been objecting, by the baffled attempts of the author to make him believe. Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word for instance, attributed to the pedler in THE ExcURSION, characteristic of a Pedler? One sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? When on the contrary this information renders the man's language, feelings, sentiments, and information a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes of anecdote? Finally when this, and this alone, could have induced a genuine Poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of fact (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the friends of some obscure "ornament of society lately deceased'.' in some obscure town), as " Among the hills of Athol he was born: There, on a small hereditary Farm, An unproductive slip of rugged ground, His Father dwelt; and died in poverty; While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace, The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe, A little One-unconscious of their loss. But ere he had outgrown his infant days His widowed Mother, for a second Mate, Espoused the teacher of the Village School; Who on her offspring zealously bestowed Needful instruction." "From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak, In summer, tended cattle on the Hills; But, through the inclement and the perilous days Of long-continuing winter, he repaired To his Step-father's School,;'&c."-U. [Book I. P. W. vi. p. 7. The first three lines of the first passage are BIOGRAPHIHA LITERARIA. 477 For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might,,with trifling alterations, have been fatr more appropriately, and with far greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet; and without incurring another defect, which I shall now mention, and a sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated. Third; an undue predilection for the drclcmatic form in certain poems, from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks. The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28, and 62 of the Poems, Vol. i.* now alone retained. The story of the Step-father is left out, aud the narrative proceeds thus: "His parents, with their numerous offspring, dwelt: "A virtuous household," &c. In the next paragraph the fifth line now is "Equipped with satchel, to a school, that stood," &c. S. C.]'* [The anecdote for Fathers: stanzas 4-13. Two of these stanzas are now condensed into one, and a new one is added. P. 62 in vol. i. is a blank. Probably Mr. C). referred to the same page in vol. ii., which contains Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, froml the line O'er whom such thankful tears were shed When Falcons were abroad for prey. I have heard my father object to the paragraph Alas when evil men are strong, I believe on account of its too much retarding the impassioned flow of the 478 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. and the first eighty lines of the VIth Book of THE ExcURSION. * Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the bye, is a faiiut of which none but ai man of genius is capable. It is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale. It is a well-known fact, that bright colors in motion both make and leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become the link of association in recallingtfse poem, and thus injuring its general effect, though the passage is beautiful in itself and in harmony with the rest. The transitions and vicissitudes in this noble Lyric I have always thought rendered it one of the finest specimens of modern subjective poetry which our age has seen. The ode commences in a tone of high gratulation and festivity-a tone not only glad but comparatively even jocund and lightheartAed. The Clifford is restored to the home, the honors and estates of his ancestors. Then it sinks and falls away to the remembrance of tribulation —times of war and bloodshed, flight and terror, and hiding away from the enemy-times of poverty and distress, when the Clifford was brought, a little child, to the shelter of a northern valley. After a while it emerges froml those depths of sorrow-gradually rises into a strain of elevated tranquillity and contemplative rapture; through the power of inmagination, the beautiful and impressive aspects of nature are brought into relationship with the spirit of him, whose fortunes and character form the subject of the piece, and are represented as gladdening and exalting it, whilst they keep itpure and u.n.spotted from the world. Suddenly the Poet is carried on with greater animation and passion:-he has returned to the point whence he started-flung himself back into the tide of stirring life and moving events. Allis to come over again, struggle and conflict, chances and changes of war, victory and triumph, overthrow and desolation. I lknow nothing, in lyric poetry, more beautiful or affecting than the final transition from this part of the ode, with its rapid metre, to the slow elegiac stanzas at the end, when from the warlike fervor and eagerness, the jubilant menacing strain which has just been described, the Poet passes back into the sublime silence of Nature, gathering amid her deep and quiet bosom a more subdued and solemn tenderness than he had manifested before:-it is as if from the heights of the imaginative intellect his spirit had retreated into the recesses of a profoundly thoughtful Christian heart.-S. C.] * [P. W. vi. pp. 205-8 —as far as "genuine fruits."-S. C.] BIOGRAPIIA LITERARIA. 479 feelings and images that had accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in such lines, as "They flash upon that inward eye, Which is the bliss of solitude!" in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed " t~he bliss of solitude?" Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to"And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daJfodils." Vol. i. p. 328. The second instance is from Vol. ii. page 12,t where the poet * [I wandered lonely. P. W. ii. p. 93. And yet the true poetic heart "with pleasure fills" in reading or remembering this sweet poem. How poetry multiplies bright images like a thousand-fold kaleidoscope-for how many " inward eyes" have those daffodils danced and fluttered in the breeze, the waves dancing beside them!-S. C.] T [Gipsies. P. W. ii. p. 105. These lines are in themselves very grand. The last three are now replaced thus: " Oh better wrong and strife (By nature transient) than this torpid life; Life which the very stars reprove As on their silent tasks they move! Yet, witness all that stirs in heaven or earth! In scorn I speak not; they are what their birth And breeding suffer them to be: Wild outcasts of society." I hope it is not mere poetic partiality, regardless of morality, that makes so many readers regret the sublime conciseness of the original conclusion. " Oh better wrong and strife! Better vain deeds or evil than such life!" if unexplained, might pass for a strong figure of speech, the like to which might be shown both in sacred and profane writings. Thus in the Blind Highland Boy the Poet exclaims " And let him, let him go his way!" though his way was probably to destruction, in order to express with vivacity the special Providence that seems to watch over the "forlorn unfortunate," who are innocent like this poor sightless voyager. Some may object that the Gipsies have tasks of their own, such as Mr. 480 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. having gone out for a day's tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning' with a knot of Gipsies, who had pitched their blankettents and straw-beds, together with their children and asses, in some field by the road-side. At the close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place. "Twelve hours," says he, "Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I Have been a traveller under open sky, Much witnessing of change and cheer, Yet as I left I find them here!" Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite as necessary fobr them, as a walk WVordsworth himself has beautifully described in the two following stanzas of his Female Vagrant, a poem which has much of the peculiar pathos of Crabbe conveyed in a more deeply poetical medium than that very interesting and powerful writer was able to adopt. I say more deeply poetical, for I see a great deal of true poetry in Crabbe's productions, pitched in a grave key accordant with the nature of his thoughts. Rough potters seemed they, trading soberly With panniered asses driven from door to door; But life of happier sort set forth to me, And other joys my fancy to allure; The bag-pipe dinning on the midnight moor, In barn uplighted; and companions boon Well met from far with revelry secure, Among the forest glacdes, while jocund June Rolled fast along the sky his warm and genial moon. But ill they suited me-those journeys dark O'er moor and mountain, midnight theft to hatch! To charm the surly house-dog's faithful bark, Or hang on tip-toe at the lifted latch. The gloomy lantern and the dim blue match, The black disguise, the warning whistle shrill, And ear still busy on its nightly watch, Were not for me brought up in nothing ill: Besides on griefs so fresh my thoughts were brooding still. But these are the irregular doings of men too idle and undisciplined for regular employment, and do but confirm the Poet's sentence upon them as taskless loiterers. —S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 481 of the same continuance was pleasing or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty centuries: "The weary Sun betook himself to rest:-Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west, Outshining, like a visible God, The glorious path in which he trod. And now, ascending, after one dark hour, And one night's diminution of her power, Behold the mighty Moon! this way She looks, as if at them-but they Regard not her:-oh, better wrong and strife, Better vain deeds or evil than such life! The silent Heavens have goings on: The stars have tasks?-but these have none!" The last instance of this defect (for I know no other than these already cited), is from the Ode, page 351, Vol. ii.,i* where, speaking of a child, "a six years' darling of a pigmy size," he thus addresses him: "Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, Haunted forever by the Eternal Mind,Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find! Thou, over whom thy Innmortality Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave, A Presence which is not to be put by!" [Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye: or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, "Philosopher") the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of making a "Master brood o'er a Slave," or "the Day" brood at all; we will merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read "the eternal deep?" * [Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. P. W. v. 337.] VOL. Ill. X 482 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. In what sense is he declared to be "forever haunted" by the Supreme Being? or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a Ml]ighty Prop~het, a blessed Seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or by any form or modification of consciousness? These would be tidings indeed; but such as would pre-suppose an immediate revelation to the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his inspiration. Children at this age give us no such information of themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the Lethe, which has produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike? There are many of us that still possess some remembrances, more or less distinct, respecting themselves at six years old; pity that the worthless straws only should float, while treasures, compared with which all the mines of Golconda and Mexico were but straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into some un known abyss. But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having been the poet's meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and operations, are -not accompanied with consciousness; who else is conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part of the child's conscious being? For aught I know, the thinking Spirit within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of vital operation. For auight I know, it may be employed as a secondary agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body. But, surely, it would be strange language to say, that I construct my heart! or that I propel the finer influences through my Serves! or that I compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own eyes! Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems, both Pantheists; and among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of' the ENiV 1iI HAN, who not only taught that God was All, but that this All constituted God. Yet not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between the individual and God, between the Modification and the one only Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of Spinoza. Jacobi* * [Fr. H. Jacobi was born at Diisseldorf, in 1743, was President of the Academy of Sciences at Munich from 1804, died March 16, 1819. He wrote upon Spinoza and against Mendelsohn, on Realism and Idealism, on the JUndertaking of Criticism to convert Reason into the Under BI3GRAPHIA LITERARIA. 483 indeed relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation with him at the house of the Poet, Gleim (the Tyrtweus and Anacreon of the German Parnassus), in which conversation Lessing had avowed privately to Jacobi his reluctance to admit any personal existence of the Supreme Being, or the possibility of personality except in a finite Intellect, and while they were sitting at table, a shower of rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his regret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their wine in the garden; upon which Lessing, in one of his halfearnest, half-joking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, " It is I, perhaps, that am doing theat," i. e. raining.' —and Jacobi answered, " Or perhaps I;" Gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for any explanation.*' So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the magnificent attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child; which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or a field of corn; or even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the child is equally unconscious of it as they. It can not surely be, that the four lines, immediately following, are to contain the explanation? "To whom the grave Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight Of day or the warm light, A place of thought where we in waiting lie;"-t standing, and other works of metaphysical controversy. His complete works in 5 vols. 8vo. Leipzig, 1812-1822, include his celebrated philosophical romances. Cousin's Manuel, vol. ii. pp. 330-331, Note. Gleim died in 1803, at the age of eighty-four. Taylor says of him: " Gleim had a loving heart, a house always open to literary guests, and a passion for corresponding with all his acquaintance, especially with young men of letters, in whom he anticipated rising genius. His scrutoire has been edited; and it abounds with complaints that his friends are less fond of writing useless epistles than himself, and were one by one letting drop an intercourse which amused his leisure, but interrupted their industry. Klopstock and Kleist were among his favorite correspondents."-S. C.] * [ Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza. Works, iv. s. 79. An attack upon Spinoza, in letters to MIendelsohn.-Asn. Ed.] f [These lines are now omitted; after the line, "Which we are toiling all our lives to find," we now read, "In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave."-S. C.] 484 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Surely, it can not be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a comment on the little poem, " We are Seven?"* —that the whole meaning of the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who by-the-by at six years old would have been better instructed in most Christian families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in a dark, cold place? And still, I hope, not as inz a place of thought! not the frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! The analogy between death and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so horrid a belief possible for children; even had they not been in the habit, as all Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used to express the former. But if the child's belief be only, that "he is not dead, but sleepeth:" wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother, or any other adult and instructed person? To form an idea of a thing's becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing; is impossible to all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however educated or uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general. If the words are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity; and if, in contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so interpreted as to avoid the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some bald truism. Thus you must at once understand the words cont'raC' y to their common import, in order to arrive at any sense; and acco-Ldifng to their common import, if' you are to receive from them any feeling of sutblimity or acdiciatiogn. Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth's poems are so few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract the reader's attention toward them; yet I have dwelt on it, and perhaps the more for this very reason. For being so very few, they can not sensibly detract firom the reputation of an author, who is even characterized by the number of' profound truths in his writings, which will stand the severest analysis; and yet few as they are, they are exactly those passages which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able, to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed Wordsworth, may be mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by plagiarists; but he can not be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. For without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would want its vital warmth and [P. W. i. p. 19.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 485 peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his mzysticism would become sickly-mere fog, and dimnes s To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only occasional, I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the dissent of any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the most part correspondent) excellencies. Fi an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaniig. Of how high value I deem this, and how particularly estimable I hold the example at the present day, has been already stated: and in part too the reasons on which I ground both the moral and intellectual importance ofSabituating ourselves to a strict accuracy of expression. It is noticeable, how limited an acquaintance with the master-pieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even a sensitive taste, where none but master-pieces have been seen and admired; while on the other hand, the most correct notions, and the widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages and countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of tastelessness or of a perverted taste. If this be the case, as it notoriously is, with the arts of music and painting, much more difficult will it be, to avoid the infection of multiplied and daily examples in the practice of an art, which uses words, and words only, as its instruments. In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that u.ltimnatnm, which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely, its ent ranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I include in the nzeaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all the associations which it recalls. For the language is framed to convey not the object alone, but likewise the character, mood and intentions of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations and misappropriations, which promiscuous authorship, and reading not promiscuous only because it is disproportionally most conversant with the compositions of the day, have rendered /eneral. Yet even to the poet, composing in his own province t is an arduous work: and as the result and pledge of a watchful good sense, of fine and luminous distinction, and of complete self 486 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. possession, may justly claim all the honor which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable, and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper food of the understanding but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food and antidotf) In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere, ffom the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment. Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them. The poems of Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris,* and others. They might even be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the writer. Much however may be effected by education. I believe not only from grounds of reason, but from having in a great measure assured myself of the fact by actual though limited experience, that, to a youth led from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and the reason of its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under new names. On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition, I shall attempt to prove the close connection between veracity and habits of mental accuracy; the beneficial aftereffects of verbal precision in the preclusion of fanaticism, which mnasters the feelings more especially by iniistinct watchwords; and to display the advantages which language alone, at least which language with incomparably greater ease and certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and as it were by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time the formation of a second nature. When we reflect, that the cultivation of the judgment is a positive command of the moral law, since the reason can give the prinzciple alone, and the conscience bears witness only to the vwotive, while the application and effects must depend on the judgment: when we consider, that the greater part of our success and comfort in life deperfds on distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is * [Sidonius Apollinaris was a Christian writer born A.D. 430, author of Letters and Poems.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 487 peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common with others, so as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a practical seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and society, of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same unremembered process and with the same never forgotten results, as those by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now how much warmer the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality and practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet, excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in the earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add, that all the praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a purpose so important, joined with that which must be claimed for the infrequency of the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in full right to AMr. Wordsworth. I am far however from denying that we have poets whose general style possesses the same excellence, as AMr. Moore, Lord Byron, Mr. Bowles, and, in all his later and more important works, our laurel-honoring Laureate. But there are none, in whose works I do not appear to myself to find more exceptions, than in those of Wordsworth. Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out of place, and must be left for the critic who doubts and would invalidate the justice of this eulogy so applied. gThe second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's works is: a correspondnt weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments,-won, not from books; but from the poet's own meditative observation. They arefr'esh and have the dew upon them.; His muse, at least when in I"er strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element, Makes audibly a linked lay of truth, Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay, Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!* Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one, which is not rendered valuable by some just and original reflection See page 25, vol. ii.:t or the two following passages in one of his humbler compositions. * [Coleridge's Poet. Works, 1. 160.-S. C.] { [Star-Gazers, stanzas 3-6. P. W. ii. p. 98.-S. C.] 488 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 0 Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would lind A tale in every thing." "I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning; Alas! the gratitude of men Has oftener left mne mourning."* or in a still higher strain the six beautifiul quatrains, page 134. "Thus fares it still in our decay: And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away Than what it leaves behind. The Blackbird in the summer trees, The Lark upon the hill, Let loose their carols when they pleasec Are quiet when they will. With Nature never do they wage A foolish strife; they see A happy youth, and their old age Is beautiful and free! But we are pressed by heavy laws; And often, glad no more, We wear a face of joy, because We have been glad of yore. If there is one, who need bemoan His kindred laid in earth, The household hearts that were his own, It is the man of mirth. My days, my Friend, are almost gone, My life has been approved, And many love me; but by pone Am I enough beloved."f or the sonnet on Bonaparte, page 202, vol. ii.;t or finally (for a [ [Simon Lee. P. W. v. p. 17.-S. C.] f [The Fountain. P. W. v. pp. 34-5-S. C.] t [Sonnets dedicated to Liberty. Part I. Sonnet TIV P. W. iii. p. p18. I grieved for Bonaparte, with a vain And an unthinking grief! for who aspires To genuine greatness but from just desires And knowledge such as lie could never gain?'Tis not in battles that from youth we train BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. 489 volume would scarce suffice to exhaust the instances), the last stanza of' the poem on the withered Celandine, vol. ii. p. 312,* "To be a Prodigal's Favorite —then, worse truth, A Miser's Pensioner-behold our lot! 0 Man! that from thy fair and shining youth Age might but take the things Youth needed not." Both in respect of this and of the former excellence, Mr. Wordsworth strikingly resembles DS~ue Daniel, one of the golden writers of our golden Elizabethan age, now most causelessly neglected; Sarnuel Daniel, whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction of age, which has been, and as long as our language shall last, will be so far the language of the to-day and forever, as that it is more intelligible to us, than the transitory fashions of our own particular age. A similar praise is due to his sentiments. No frequency of perusal can deprive them of their freshness. For though they are brought into the full daylight of every reader's comprehension; yet are they drawn up from depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, into which few in any age have courage or inclination to descend. If Mr. Wordsworth is not equally with Daniel alike intelligible to all readers of average understanding in all passages of his works, the comparative difficulty does not arise fiom the greater impurity of the ore, but from the nature and uses of the metal. A poem is not necessarily obscure, because it does not aim to be popular. It is enough, if a work be perspicuous to those fbr whom it is written, and " Fit audience find, though few." To the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from RecollecThe Governor who must be wise and good, And temper with the sternness of the brain Thoughts motherly, and weak as womanhood. Wisdom doth live with children round her knees: Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk MIan holds with week-day man in the hourly walk Of the mind's business: these are the degrees By which true Sway doth mount; this is the stalk True Power doth grow on; and her rights are there. The third and fourth lines and part of the second are now a little altered. -S. C.] * [The Small Celandine. P. W. v. p. 294.-S. C.] x* 490 BIOGRAPHIA LITERAtRIA. tions of early Childhood" the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante addresses to one of his own Canzoni"Canzone, i' credo, che saranno radi Color, che tua ragione intendan bene, Tanto lol sei faticoso ed alto."* "O lyric song, there will be few, think I, Who may thy import understand aright: Thou art for them so arduous and so high 1" But the ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with believing the Platonic pre-existence in the ordinary interpretation of the words, as I am to believe, that Plato himself ever meant or taught it. IIocZ o& vSiT"' dyrccvog Whcea /3fen lvdov Evr2 CapeTpar owvdvr-a cvverTOl5l' 2f dS ro irdv EpFjlvkav Xairret. aobobf 6 wo-ro ca Eidcjg ~vd' /uca6vrec 6X ai3pot 7rayy2oaaia, Kpcpalcef dcf, d(cpavra yapverov Atlf rpbOf 6pvtxa &Eiov.t * [Canzoni Morali, lib. iv. canz. i. Tanto lor parli faticoso eforte is the original third line.-S. C.] t [Olymp. ii. v. 150. Beneath mine elbow a full quiver lies Of fleetest arrows, sounding to the wise; But for the crowd they need interpreters. His skill is most who learns in Nature's school; All else, expert by rule, Are none of hers; Mere tongues in vehement gabble idly heard, Clamoring, like daws, at Jove's celestial bird. This is one of the good passages of Mr. Cary's translations of Pindar.-S. 0.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 491.Tdhird (and wherein he soars far above Daniel), the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs: the frequent curiosafelicitfas of his diction, of which I need not here give specimens, having anticipated them in a preceding page. This beauty, and as eminently characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, his rudest assailants have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire3 4Fourth.; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as taken inmmediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colors its objects; but on the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high-road of custom. Let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. i. pages 42 to 47,# especially to the lines "So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle: with the din Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars, Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away." Or to the poem on THE GREEN LINNET, vol. i. p. 244.t What can be more accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding stanzas? "Upon yon tuft of hazel-trees, That twinkle to the gusty breeze, Behold him perched in ecstasies, Yet seeming still to hover; There! where the flutter of his wings Upon his back and body flings Shadows and sunny glimmerings, That cover him all over. * [Influence of Natural Objects. P. W. i. p. 38.-S. C.] t [P. W. ii. p. 27. The last stanza is now a little altered.-S. C.] 492 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. While thus before my eyes he gleams, A Brother of the Leaves he seems; When in a moment forth he teems His little song in gushes: As if it pleased him to disdain And mock the Form which he did feign, While he was dancing with the train Of Leaves among the bushes." Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noontide silence, p. 284;* or the poem to the cuckoo, p. 299;t or, lastly, though * [P. W. ii. p. 71. Where is he that giddy Sprite Blue-cap, with his colors bright, Who was blest as bird could be, Feeding in the apple-tree; Made such wanton spoil and rout, Turning blossoms inside out; Hung with head towards the ground, Fluttered, perched, into a round Bound himself and then unbound; Lithest, gaudiest Harlequin! Prettiest Tumbler ever seen! Light of heart, and light of limb! What is now become of HIim? Lambs, that through the mountains went Frisking, bleating merriment, When the year was in its prime, They are sobered by this time. If you look to vale or hill, If you listen, all is still, Save a little neighboring Rill, That from out the rocky ground Strikes a solitary sound. Vainly glitters hill and plain, And the air is calm in vain! Vainly Morning spreads the lure Of a sky serene and pure; Creature none can she decoy Into open sign of joy: Is it that they have a fear Of the dreary season near X Or that other pleasures be Sweeter even than gayety? —S. C.] j [P. W. ii. p. 81.l BIOGRAPRIA LITERARIA. 493 I might multiply the references to ten times the number, to the poem, so completely Wordsworth's, commencing "Three years she grew in sun and shower"-*.Fifth: a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as -man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, (spectator, hacud particeps) but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and the image of the Creator still remain legible to him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or crossbarred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth a ears to me without a compeer. Such as he is: so he writes. See vol. i. pages 134 to 136,t or that most affecting composition, THE AF* [Lucy. P. W. ii. p. 91. This poem contains those most beautiful stanzasShe shall:be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And her's shall be the breathing babn, And her's the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things. The floating clouds their state shall lend To her; for her the willow bend; Nor shall she fail to see Even in the motions of the storm Grace that shall mould the maiden's form By silent sympathy. The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face.-S. C.] f ['Tis said, that some have died for love. P. W. i. p. 164. Amongst the Poems founded on the Affections is one called, from its first line, "I travelled among unknown men," which ends with these lines, wherein the poet addresses his native land: 494 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. FLICTION OF MARGARET OF,* pages 165 to 168, which no mother, and if I may judge by my own experience, no parent can read without a tear. Or turn to that genuine lyric, in the former edition, entitled, THE MAD MOTHER,t pages 174 to 178, of which I can not refrain from quoting two of the stanzas, both of them for their pathos, and the former for the fine transition in the two concluding lines of the stanza, so expressive of that deranged state, in which, from the increased sensibility, the sufferer's attention is abruptly drawn off by every trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by the one despotic thought, bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing power of Imagination and Passion, the alien object to which it had been so abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate. "Suck, little babe, oh suck again! It cools my blood; it cools my brain; Thy lips, I feel them, baby! they Draw from my heart the pain away. Oh! press me with thy little hand; It loosens something at my chest; About that tight and deadly band I feel thy little fingers prest. The breeze I see is in the tree! It comes to cool my babe and me." "Thy father cares not for my breast,'Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest;'Tis all thine own!-and, if its hue Be changed, that was so fair to view,'Tis fair enough for thee, my dove! My beauty, little child, is flown, Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed The bowers where Lucy played; And thine too is the last green field That Lucy's eyes surveyed. A friend, a true poet himself, to whom I owe some new insight into the merits of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, and who showed me, to my surprise, that there were nooks in that rich and varied region, some of the shy treasures of which I was not perfectly acquainted with, first made me feel the great beauty of this stanza; in which the Poet, as it were, spreads day and night over the object of his affections, and seems, under the influence of passionate feeling, to think of England, whether in light or darkness, only as her playplace and verdant home.-S. C.] * [The Affliction of Margaret. P. W. i. p. 117.-S. C.] f [Her eyes are wild. P. W. i. p. 256.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 4995 But thou wilt live with me in love; And what if my poor cheek be brown?'Tis well for md thou canst not see How pale and wan it else would be."* tfLast, and pre-eminently I challenge for this poet the gift of Imarrination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and unmodified fancy.- But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakspeare and Milton; * [" Meditative pathos," "the union of subtle thought with sensibility," is highly manifested in a poem among those On the Naming of Places, entitled " When to the attractions of the busy world." The last paragraph contains those lines of marked expression Even so didst thou become A silent poet; from the solitude Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart Still couchant, an inevitable ear, And an eye practised like a blind man's touch. P. W. ii. p. 301. The speech of Francis to his sister in Canto ii. of The White Doe, especially from the lines For thee, for thee, is left the sense Of trial past without offence To God or man, is a beautiful and lofty strain, breathing, amid deep pathos, a spiritual ele vation, for which dignity seems a poor word.-S. C.] t [How true this is! The Fancy in Mr. Wordsworth's poems I feel disposed, in my own mind, to resign to my Father's stricture; it is rather like the miniature painting of one who has been accustomed to a bold style in crayons. But most of the poems, placed by the author himself under the head of Fancy, are superficially fanciful, but internally far more. 2'Ae Green Linnet derives its charm from the exquisite description of the bird, and the feeling conveyed through him, of vernal rapture-of " the music and the bloom, And all the mighty ravishment of Spring." In the little poem lo a Sexton, Fancy does but flit, like a swallow, over a depth of human tenderness. Stanzas viii. and ix. of The Oak and Broom contain a lovely natural description. The first poem To the Daisy is full of sweet sentiment, reminding one a little of Burns. The poems to the Celandine 496 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objectsadd the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the Poet's dream."* I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this faculty; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render my analysis of Imagination, its origin and characters, thoroughly intelligible to the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this poet's works without recognizing, more or less, the presence and the influences of this faculty. From the poem on the YEW TREES,'~ vol. i. pages 303, 304. abound in happy expressions and images. What truth of naturme poetically exhibited is there in this stanza! Ere a leaf is on a bush, In the time before the thrush Has a thought about her nest, Thou wilt come with half a call, Spreading out thy glossy breast Like a careless Prodigal; Telling tales about the sun When we've little warmth or none Of all common flowers the small celandine is the most burnished: it seems as if the Sun had inclosed a bit of gold in its cup when he sent it forward as his harbinger. In the poems To a Skylark and The -Danish Boy the general conception seems to me imaginative, though the particulars in each case are instances of Fancy. To call up that " spirit of Noon-day," to clothe him with the attributes of Spring and of Day-time, and by an exquisite mstathesis to invest his habitation,-the " lovely dell" in which "he walks alone,"-with the spirituality of his presence, was surely the work of imagination; no mere effort of memory, or of the associative power alone, for the result of the whole is something which acts upon the mind "like a new existence." (See Mr. Wordsworth's Preface to the edit. of 1815. P. W. p. xxviii.) This poem seems to illustrate the joint action of Fancy and Imagination. The mere "aggregation or association" of images, -that part of the process, in any example, however, upon the whole, imaginative,-my Father would, I suppose, have assigned to Fancy; for how otherwise can we define her office? But this operation may be carried on, more or less, in subservience to the higher law of poetic creation, as it seems to me to be in The Danish Boy.-S. C.] * [From Elegiac Stanzas. P. W. v. p. 311.-S. C.] t [From Yew Trees. P. W. ii. p. 84.-S. C.] BIOGRAPTIA LITEERARIA. 497 "But worthier still of note Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale, Joined in one solemn and capacious grove; Huge trunks!-and each particular trunk a growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved; Not uninformed with phantasy, and looks That threaten the profane;-a pillared shade, Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue, By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tingedi Perennially —beneath whose sable roof Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked With unrejoicing berries-ghostly shapes May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE, SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton, And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate, As in a natural temple scattered o'er With altars undisturb'd of mossy stone, United worship; or in mute repose To lie, and listen to the mountain flood Murmuring from Glazamara's inmost caves." The effect of the old man's figure in the poem of RESOLUTTION AND INDEPENDENCE, vol. ii. page 33. " While he was talking thus, the lonely place, The Old iMan's shape, and speech, all troubled me: In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace About the weary moors continually, Wandering about alone and silently."j. Or the 8th, 9th, 19th, 26th, 31st, and 33d, in the collection of miscellaneous sonnets —the sonnet on the subjugation of Swit" Pining umbrage" in all the editions. I have left my Father's substitution, as a curious instance of a possible different reading. " Piny shade" and " piny verdure" we read of in the poets; but " pinal" I believe is new. Pining, which has quite a different sense, is doubtless still better; but perhaps my Father's ear shrunk from it after the word " sheddings" at the beginning of the line.-S. C.]' [P. W. ii. p. 123. Stanza xix.-S. C.] [ L" Where lies the Land." lb. iii. p. 33. "Even as a Dragon's Eye," p. 66. "O 3Mountain Stream 1" iv. p. 20. "Earth has not any thing to show more fair," iii. p. 78. "Methought I saw the footsteps of a throne," p. 30. "It is a beauteous Evening —calm and free." (Now —" Air sleeps, -fromr strife or stir the clouds are free") p. 32.-S. C.] 498 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. zerland, page 210,* or the last ode, from which I especially select the two following stanzas or paragraphs, pages 349 to 350.1 "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, ore' life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy; But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy The Youth who daily further from the East Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, [" Two voices are there." P. W. iii. p. 186. The Sonnet " I heard (alas!'twas only in a dream)" iii. p. 47, is a beautiful companion to " Methought I saw." I have sometimes amused myself with finding this sort of cognateness or companionable character amongst the sonnets of Mr. Wordsworth; as we play with a wreath of gems, placing them in many different lights and positions for the gratification of the eye, so playing with these jewels of poetry I have coupled the splendid sonnet, "Fair Star of Evening," p. 176, with that composed on Westminster bridge, p. 1'78;-" Two voices are there," ib. p. 186, with " Once did she hold the gorgeous earth in fee," ib. p. 180;-" The world is too much with us," ib. p. 35, with " I watch and long have watched," ib. p. 46;-and, not to trouble the reader with the whole of my match-making fancies, " It is not to be thought of," ib. p. 190, or " When I have borne in memory," ib. p. 191, with that truly majestic one, -Inland, within a hollow vale, I stood: ib. p. 185. which begins with such a quiet gravity, and flows on so naturally into the excess of solenm grandeur. Iy Father quoted this noble sonnet in The Friend, when it first appeared, but the PPublic of 1809 cared little for The Friend and its philosophy, or for the strains of the great philosophic Poet. Mr. Wordsworth's sonnets have been collected and published separately in one vol. by Moxon, 1838. The finest set, in my opinion, is Part i. of those dedicated to Liberty. (P. W. iii. pp. 175-200.) The three sonnets to Sleep, ib. pp. 14, 15, 16, and the four on Personal Talk, ib. pp. 39, 40, 41, 42, are very beautiful and peculiar; not Miltonic or Shakspearian, or Petrarchian; nor like the productions of any later sonneteers; but entirely Wordsworthian,and inimitable.-S. C.] 1. [P. W. v. p. 340.-S. C] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 499 And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Mian perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day." And pages 352 to 354 of the same ode.* "0 joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive! The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benedictions: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest; Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise; But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts, before which our moral Nature Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised i But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, Are yet a master-light of all our seeing; Uphold us-cherish-and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake To perish never; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, Nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy! Hence, in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither; Can in a moment travel thither,And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." * [P. W. v. pp. 342-4.-S. C.] 5O0:3BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. And since it would be unfair to conclude with an extract, which, though highly characteristic, must yet, from the nature of the thoughts and the subject, be interesting or perhaps intelligible, to but a limited number of readers; I will add, from the poet's last published work, a passage equally Wordsworthian; of the beauty of which, and of the imaginative power displayed therein, there can be but one opinion, and one feeling. See White Doe, page 5.* " Fast the church-yard fills;-anon Look again and they all are gone; The cluster round the porch, and the folk Who sate in the shade of the Prior's Oak! And scarcely have they disappeared Ere the prelusive hymn is heard:With one consent the people rejoice, Filling the church with a lofty voice! They sing a service which they feel: For'tis the sunrise now of zeal; And faith and hope are in their prime In great Eliza's golden time." "A moment ends the fervent din, And all is hushed, without and within; For though the priest, more tranquilly, Recites the holy liturgy, The only voice which you can hear Is the river murmuring near. -When soft!-the dusky trees between, And down the path through the open green, Where is no living thing to be seen; And through yon gateway, where is found, Beneath the arch with ivy bound, Free entrance to the church-yard groundAnd right across the verdant sod, Towards the very house of God; Comes gliding in withllovely gleam, Comes gliding in serene and slow, Soft and silent as a dream, A solitary Doe! White she is as lily of June, And beauteous as the silver mnoon When out of sight the clouC,:n are driven And she is left alone in heaven!' [P. W. iv. pp. 48-50. There are now two or three slight alterations.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 501 Or like a ship some gentle day In sunshine sailing far awayA glittering ship that hath the plain Of ocean for her own domain." "What harmonious pensive changes Wait upon her as she ranges Round and through this Pile of state Overthrown and desolate! Now a step or two her way Is through space of open day, Where the enamored sunny light Brightens her that was so bright; Now doth a delicate shadow fall, Falls upon her like a breath, From some lofty arch or wall, As she passes underneath." ZjThe following analogy will, I am apprehensive, appear dim and fantastic, but in reading Bartram's Travels I could not help transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of Wordsworth's intellect and genius."The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their backs above the surface.* The trees which chiefly grow here are the gigantic, black oak; magnolia grandi-flora; fraximnus excelsior; platane; and a few stately tulip-trees." What Mr. Wordsworth will produce, it is ~not for me to prophesy: but I could pronounce with the liveliest convictions what he is capable of producing. It is the FIRST G ENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEMr. [Travels through North and South Carolina, &c., and the Cherokee country, &c., by W. Bartram, 17i92, p. 36. At p. 397 of this book Mr. Wordsworth may have found his authority for the strawberry gathering of the Cherokee girls spoken of in Ruth. "I-e told of girls-a happy rout!" &e.-S. C.] f [Mr. Coleridge has spoken of " the poem so completely Wordsworth's commencing Three years she grew in sun and shower." It is indeed exquisitely Wordsworthian, and there are many others of our great poet which, like this, some in an equal degree, are characterized by a most transparent diction which holds, as in a crystal shrine, a subtle strain of thought and feeling, that seems so intimately united with the peculiar words in which it is uttered as to be almost one with them. Such are the 502 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. The preceding criticism will not, I am aware, avail to overcome the prejudices of those, who have made it a business to attack and ridicule Mr. Wordsworth's compositions. Truth and prudence might be imaged as concentric circles. The poet may perhaps have passed beyond the latter, but he has confined himself far within the bounds of the former, in designating these critics, as " too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, Lines to H. C. six years old. The Highland Girl, She was a Phantom of delight, and others. Due honor is done to Peter Bell, at this time, by students of poetry in general, but some, even of Mr. Wordsworth's greatest admirers, do not quite satisfy me in their admiration of the Wagoner, a poem which my dear uncle, Mr. Southey, preferred even to the former. Ich will meilne Denkungsart hierin niermancden aufdri?.gen, as Lessing says: I will force my way of thinking on nobody, but take the liberty, for my own gratification, to express it. The sketches of hill and valley in this poem have a lightness and spirit-an Allegro touch-distinguislhing them firom the grave and elevated splendor which characterizes Mr. Wordsworth's representations of Nature in general, and from the pensive tenderness of those in The White Doe, while it harmonizes well with the human interest of the piece: indeed it is the harmonious sweetness of the composition which is most dwelt upon by its special admirers. In its course it describes, with boid. brief touches, the striking mountain tract from Grasmnere to Keswick;qit commences with an evening storm among the mountains, presents a lively interior of a country inn during midnight, and concludes after bringing us in sight of St. John's Vale and the Yale of Keswick seen by daybreak"Skiddaw touched with rosy light," and the prospect from Nathdale Fell " hoar with the frost-like dews of dawn:" thus giving a beautiful and wellcontrasted Panorama, produced by the most delicate and masterly strokes of the pencil. Well may Mr. Ruskin, a fine observer and eloquent describer of various classes of natural appearances, speak 6f Mr. Wordsworth as the great poetic landscape painter of the age. But Mr. Ruskin has found how seldom the great landscape painters are powerful in expressing human passions and affections on canvass, or even successful in the introduction of human figures into their foregrounds: whereas in the poetic paintings of Mr. Wordsworth the landscape is always subordinate to a higher interest; certainly, in the Wagoner, the little sketch of human nature which occupies, as it were, the front of that encircling back-ground, the picture of Benjamin and his temptations, his humble friends and the mute companions of his way, has a character of its owln, combining with sportivelless a homely pathos, which must ever be delightful to some of those who are thoroughly conversant with the spirit of Mr. WordsTworth's poetry. It may be compared with the ale-house scene in Tam O'Shanter, parts of Voss's Luise or Ovid's Baucis and Philemon; though it differs from each of them as much as they differ from each other. The Epilogue carries on the feeling of the piece very beautifully.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 503 and too feeble to grapple with him;*** men of palsied imaginations, in whose, minds all healthy action is languid;*** who, therefore, feed as the many direct them, or with the many are greedy after vicious provocatives."" So much for the detractors from Wordsworth's merits. On the other hand, much as I might wish for their fuller sympathy, I dare not flatter myself, that the freedom with which I have declared my opinions concerning both his theory and his defects, most of which are more or less connected with his theory, either as cause or effect, will be satisfactory or pleasing to all the poet's admirers and advocates. More indiscriminate than mine their admiration may be: deeper and more sincere it can not be. But I have advanced no opinion either for praise or censure, other than as texts introductory to the reasons which compel me to form it. Above all, I was fiully convinced that such a criticism was not only wanted; but that, if executed with adequate ability, it must conduce, in no mean degree, to Mr. Wordsworth's reptutation. His fame belongs o another age, and can neither be accelerated nor retarded. iLow small the proportion of the defects are to the beauties, I have repeatedly declared; and that no one of them originates in deficiency of poetic genius Had they been more and greater, I should still, as a friend to his literary character in the present age, consider an analytic display of them as 7zr'e gain; if only it removed, as surely to all reflecting minds even thegoregoinrg analysis must have removed, the strange mistake, so slightly grounded yet so widely and industriously propagated, of Mr. Wordsworth's turn for simplicit y. I am not half as much irritated by hearing his enemies abuse him for vulgarity of style, subject, and conception; as I am disgusted with the gilded side of the same meaning, as displayed by some affected admirers, with whom he is, forsooth, a " sweet, simple poet!" and so natural, that little master Charles and his younger sister are so charmed with them, that they play at "Goody Blake," or at " Johnny and Betty Foy![1 Were the collection of poems, published with these biographical sketches, important enough (which I am not vain enough to * [Supplement to the Preface. P. W. iii. p. 322. The next paragraph to this sentence, with a small foot-note, is with. drawn; respecting which see the Introduction.-S. C!.] 504 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. believe), to deserve such a distinction; even as I have done, so would I be clone unto. For more than eighteen months have the volume of Poems, entitled SIBYLLINE LEAVES, and the present volumes, up to this page, been printed, and ready for publication. But, ere I speak of myself in the tones, which are alone natural to me under the circumstances of late years, I would fain present myself to the Reader as I was in the first dawn of my literary life: When Hope grew round me, like the climbing vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem'd mine!For this purpose I have selected from the letters, which I wrote home from Germany, those which appeared likely to be most interesting, and at the same time most pertinent to the title of this work. * [Coleridge's Poetical Works, p. 181.-S. C. Miraturque novas frondes, et non suca poma. Georg. II. v. 82.-Ed.] SATYRANE'S LETTERS, LETTER I. ON Sunday morning, September 16, 1798, the Hamburg packet set sail fiom Yarmouth: and I, for the first time in my life, behlleld my native land retiring from me. At the moment of its disappearance-in all the kirks, churches, chapels, and meetinghouses, in which the greater number, I hope, of my countrymen were at that time assembled, I will dare question whether there was one more ardent prayer offered up to heaven, than that which I then preferred for my country. "Now then," (said I to a gentleman who was standing near me), "we are out of our country." " Not yet, not yet!" he replied, and pointed to the sea; " This, too, is a Briton's country." T'his bon mnot gave a fillip to my spirits, I rose and looked round on my fellow-passengers, who were all on the deck. We were eighteen in number, videlicet, five Englishmen, an English lady, a French gentleman and his servant, an Hanoverian and his servant, a Prussian, a Swede, two Danes, and a AlMulatto boy, a German tailor and his wife (the smallest couple I ever beheld), and a Jew.'We were all on the deck; but in a short time I observed marks of dismay. The lady retired to the cabin in some confusion, and many of the faces round me assumed a veiry doleful and frog-colored appearance; and within an hour the nurnmber of those on deck was lessened by one half. I was giddy, but not sick, and the giddiness soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of appetite, which I attributed, in great measure, to the scunv a ephitis of the bilge-water; and it was certainly not decreased by the exportations from the cabin. However, I was well enough to join the able-bodied passengers, one of whom observed not inaptly, that VO: TT. Y i06 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Momus might have discovered an easier way to see a man's inside, than by placing a window in his breast. He needed only have taken a salt-water trip in a packet-boat. I am inclined to believe, that a packet is far superior to a stagecoach, as a means of making men open out to each other. In the latter the uniformity of posture disposes to dozing, and the definitiveness of the period, at which the company will separate, makes each individual think more of those to whom he is going, than of those with whom he is going. But at sea, more curiosity is excited, if only on this account, that the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of your companions are of greater importance to you, from the uncertainty how long you may be obliged to house with them. Besides, if you are countrymen, that now begins to form a distinction and a bond of brotherhood; and if of different countries, there are new incitements of conversation, more to ask and more to communicate. I found that I had interested the Danes in no common degree. I had crept into the boat on the deck and fallen asleep; but was awakened by one of them, about three o'clock in the afternoon, who told me that they had been seeking me in every hole and corner, and insisted that I should join their party and drink with them. He talked English with such fluency, as left me wvArholly unable to account for the singular and even ludicrous incorrectness with which he spoke it. I went, and found some excellent wines and a dessert of grapes with a pine-apple. The Danes had christened me Doctor Teology, and dressed as I was all in black, with large shoes and black worsted stockings, I might certainly have passed very well for a Methodist missionary. However I disclaimed my title. What then may you be? A man of fortune? No!-A merchant? No!-A merchant's traveller? No!-A clerk? No! Un Philosophe, perhaps? It was at that time in my life, in which of all possible names and characters I had the greatest disgust to that of" u,n Philosophe." But I was weary of being questioned, and rather than be nothing, or at best only the abstract idea of a man, I submitted by a bow, even to the aspersion implied in the word " un Philosophe." -The Dane then informed me, that all in the present party were Philosophers likewise. Certes we were not of the Stoic school. For we drank and tallied and sung, till we talked and sung all together; and then we rose and danced on the deck a set of dances, which in one sense of the word at SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 507 least, were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels. The passengers, who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of sea-sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment a tune Harsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint.? I thought so at the time; and (by way, I suppose, of supporting my newly assumed philosophical character) I thought too, how closely the greater number of our virtues are connected with the fear of death, and how little sympathy we bestow on pain, where there is no danger. The two Danes were brothers. The one was a man with a clear white complexion, white hair, and white eyebrows; looked silly, and nothing that he uttered gave the lie to his looks. The other, whom, by way of eminence, I have called the Dane, had likewise white hair, but was much shorter than his brother, with slender limbs, and a very thin face slightly pock-fretten. This man convinced me of the justice of an old remark, that many a faithful portrait in our novels and farces has been rashly censured for an outrageous caricature, or perhaps nonentity. I had retired to my station in the boat-he came and seated himself by my side, and appeared not a little tipsy. He commenced the conversation in the most magnific style, and, as a sort of pioneering to his own vanity, he flattered me with such grossness! The parasites of the old comedy were modest in the comparison. His language and accentuation were so exceedingly singular, that I determined for once in my life to take notes of a conversation. Here it follows somewhat abridged, indeed, but in all other respects as accurately as my memory permitted. THE DANE. Vat imagination! vat language! vat vast science! and vat eyes! vat a milk-vite forehead 0 my heafen! vy, you're a Got! ANSWER. You do me too much honor, Sir. THE DANE. 0 me! if you should dink I is flattering you!No, no, no! I haf ten tousand a year-yes, ten tousand a yearyes, ten tousand pound a year! Vell-and vat is dhat? a mere trifle! I'ouldn't gif my sincere heart for ten times dhe money. Yes, you're a Got! I a mere man! But, my dear friend! dhink of me, as a man! Is, is-I mean to ask you now, my dear * [Milton's Samson Agonistes, i. 661.-S. (.] 508 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. friend-is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak English very fine? ANSW. Most admirably! Believe, me, Sir! I have seldom heard even a native talk so fluently. THE DANE. (Squeezing my hand with great vehemence.) My dear friend! vat an affection and fidelity ve have for each odher! But tell me, do tell me, —Is I not, now and den, speak some fault? Is I not in some wrong? ANsw. Why, Sir! perhaps it might be observed by nice critics in the English language, that you occasionally use the word " is" instead of " am." In our best companies we generally say I arm, and not I is or'se. Excuse me, Sir! it is a mere trifle. TI-HE DANE. 0!-iS, is, asm, an, anam. Yes, yes-I know, I know. ANSsw. I am, thouZ ar't, he is, we are, ye are, they are. TIIE DANE. Yes, yes —I know, I know-Am, am, am, is dhe prcesens, and is is dhe pevfectumz-yes, yes-and are is dhe plusquanz pe'sfectunm. ANSW. And art, Sir! is-? THE DANE. My dear friend! it is dhe plzsquam 2peifectumn, no, no —dhat is a great lie; are is dhe plusquam perfectulnzand art is dhe plusqztuam plue-)pefectumvz-(theln, swinging mny hand to and fro, and cocking his little bright hazel eyes at me, that danced with vanity and wine)-You see, my dear friend I that I too have some lehrning. ANsw. Learning, Sir? Who dares suspect it? Who can listen to you for a minute, who can even look at you, without perceiving the extent of it? TIE DANE. My dear friend! (then witl a wozdld-be humble look, and in a tone of voice as if he was r'easoning) I could not talk so of prcesens and imlzpefectuzm, and fut zurum and pizsquaemplue pejfectzum, and all dhat, my dear friend! without some lehrning? ANSW. Sir! a man like you can not talk on any subject without discovering the depth of his information. THE DAN:E. Dhe grarnmatic Greek, my fiiend; ha! ha! ha! (laughing, and swinging may hanzd to and fro —then with a sudden transzsitionz to great solemnity.) Now I will tell you, my dear friend! Dhere did happen about me vat de whole historia of Denmark record no instance about nobody else. Dihe SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 509 bishop did ask me all dhe questions about all dhe religion in dhe Latin grammar. ANsw. The grammar, Sir? The language, I presumeTHE DANE. (A little offended.) Grammar is language, and language is grammarANsw. Ten thousand pardons! TIE DANE. Yell, and I was only fourteen yearsANSW. Only fourteen years old? THE DANE. No more. I vas fourteen years old-and he asked me all questions, religion and philosophy, and all in dhe Latin language-and I answered him all every one, my dear friend! all in dhe Latin language. ANsw. A prodigy! an absolute prodigy! THE DANE. No, no, no! he was a bishop, a great superintendent. ANSW. Yes! a bishop. THE DANE. A bishop-not a mere predicant, not a predigerANsw. My dear Sir! we have misunderstood each other. I said that your answering in Latin at so early an age was a prodigy, that is, a thing that is wonderful; that does not often happen. THE DANE. Often! Dhere is not von instance recorded in dhe whole historia of Denmark. ANswV. And since then, Sir-.? THE DANE. I was sent ofer to dhe Vest Indies-to our Island, and dhere I had no more to do vid books. No! no! I put my genius anodher way-and I haf made ten tousand pound.a year. Is not dhat ghenitus, my dear friend?-But vat is money?-I dhink dhe poorest man alive my equal. Yes, my dear friend! my little fortune is pleasant to my generous heart, because I can do good-no man with so little a fortune ever did so much generosity-no person,-no man person, no woman person ever denies it. But we are all Got's children. Here the Hanoverian interrupted him, and the other Dane, the Swede, and the Prussian, joined us, together with a young Englishman who spoke the German fluently, and interpreted to me many of the Prussian's jokes. The Prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of threescore, a hale man, tall, strong, and stout, full of stories, gesticulations, and buffoonery, with the soul as well -as the look of a mountebank, who, while he is making 510 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid all his droll looks and droll gestures, there remsiined one look untouched by laughter; and that one look was the true face, the others were but its mask. The Hanoverian was.a pale, fat, bloated young xman, whose father had made a large fortune in London, as an army-contractor. He seemed to emunlate the manners of young Englishmen of fortune. He was a good-natured fellow, not without information or literature; but a most egregious coxcomb. He had been in the habit of attending the House of Commons, and had once spoken, as he informed me, with great applause in a debating society. For this he appeared to have qualified himself with laudable industry: for he was perfect in Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary, and with an accent, which forcibly reminded me of the Scotchman in Roderic Random, who professed to teach the English pronunciation, he was constantly dleferri'ng to my superior judgment, whether or no I had pronounced this or that word with propriety, or " the true delicacy." W/hen he spoke, though it were only half a dozen sentences, he always rose; for which I could detect no other motive, than his partiality to that elegant phrase so liberally introduced in the orations of our British legislators, " While I am on my legs." The Swede, whom for reasons that will soon appear, I shall distinguish by the name of Nobility, was a strong-featured, scurvy-faced man, his complexion resembling, in color, a red hot poker beginning to cool. He appeared miserably dependent on the Dane; but was, however, incomparably the best informed and most rational of the party. Indeed his manners and conversation discovered him to be both a man of the world and a gentleman. The Jew was in the hold: the French gentleman was lying on the deck so ill, that I could observe nothing concerning him, except the affectionate attentions of his servant to him. The poor fellow was very sick himself, and every now and then ran to the side of the vessel, still keeping his eye on his master, but returned in a moment and seated himself again by him, now supporting his head, now wiping his forehead and talking to him all the while in the most soothing tones. There had been a matrimonial squabble of a very ludicrous kind in the cabin, between the little German tailor and his little wife. He had secured two beds, one for himself and one for her. This had struck the little woman as a very cruel action; she insisted upon their having but one, and assured the mate in SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 511 the most piteous tones, that she was his lawful wife. The mate and the cabin boy decided in her favor, abused the little man for his want of tenderness with much humor, and hoisted him into the same compartment with his sea-sick wife. This quarrel was interesting to me, as it procured me a bed, which I otherwise should not have had. In the evening, at seven o'clock, the sea rolled higher, and the Dane, by means of the greater agitation, eliminated enough of what he had been swallowing to make room for a great deal more. His favorite potation was sugar and brandy, i. e. a very little warm water with a large quantity of brandy, sugar, and nutmeg, His servant boy, a black-eyed Mulatto, had a goodnatured round face, exactly the color of the skin of the walnutkernel. The Dane and I were again seated, tete-c-t te, inthe ship's boat. The conversation, which was now indeed rather an oration than a dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that I ever heard. He told me that he had made a large fortune in the island of Santa Cruz, and was now returning to Denmark to enjoy it. He expatiated on the style in which he meant to live, and the great undertakings which he proposed to himself to commence, till, the brandy aiding his vanity, and his vanity and garrulity aiding the brandy, he talked like a madman-entreated me to accompany him to Denmark-there I should see his influence with the government, and he would introduce me to the king, &c. &c. Thus he went on dreaming aloud, and then passing with a very lyrical transition to the subject of general politics, he declaimed, like a member of the Corresponding Society, about (not concerning) the Rights of Man, and assured me that, notwithstanding his fortune, he thought the poorest man alive his equal. "All are equal, my dear friend! all are equal! Ye are all Got's children. The poorest man haf the same rights with me. Jack I Jack! some more sugar and brandy. Dhere is dhat fellow now! He is a Mulatto-but he is my equal.-That's right, Jack! (taking the sugar and brandy.) Here you, Sir! shake hands with dhis gentleman! Shake hands with me, you dog! Dhere, dhere!-,We are all, equal my dear fiiend! Do I not speak like Socrates, and Plato, and Cato-they were all philosophers, my dear philosophe! all very great men! —and so was Homer and Virgil-but they were poets. Yes, yes! I know all about it! -But what can any body say more than this? We are all equal, 512 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. all Got's children. I haf ten tollsand a year, but I am no more dhan de meanest man alive. I haf no pride; and yet, my dear friend! I can say, do! and it is done. Ha! ha! ha! my dear friend! Now dhere is dhat gentleman (poinzting to Nobility) he is a Swedish baron —you shall see. -o! (calling' to the Siwede) get me, will you, a bottle of wine from the cabin. SWEDE.Here, Jack! go and get your master a bottle of wine from the cabin. Dane. No, no, no! do yozue go now-you go yourselfyOZe go now! Swede! Pah!-DcaZe. Now go! Go, I pray you. And the Swede went!.' After this the Dane commenced an harangue on religion, and mistaking me for tsnz ph/ilosophe in the continental sense of the word, he talked of Deity in a declamatory style, very much resembling the devotional rants of that rude blunderer, Mr. Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, and whispered in my ear, what damned hypocrisn all Jesus Christ's business was. I dare aver, that few men have less reason to charge themselves with indulging in perisiflage than myself. I should hate it, if it were only that it is a Frenchman's vice, and feel a pride in avoiding it, because our oven language is too honest to have a word to express it by. But in this instance the temptation had been too powverful, and I have placed it on the list of my offences. Pericles answered one of his dearest friends, who had solicited him on a case of life and death, to take an equivocal oath for his preservation: _Debeo anicis opitulari, sed usqzue ad Deos.* Friendship herself must place her last and boldest step on this side the altar. What Pericles would not do to save a fiiend's life, you may be assured, I would not hazard merely to mill the chocolate-pot of a drunken fool's vanity till it frothed over. Assuming a serious look, I professed myselff a believer, and. sunk at once an hundred fathoms in his good graces. He retired to his cabin, and I wrapped myself up in my great coat, and looked at the water. A beautiful white cloud of fbam at momently intervals coursed by the side of the vessel with a roar, and little stars of flame danced and sparkled and went out in it; and every now and then light detachments of this white cloud-like foam darted off from the vessel's side, each with its own small constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a Tartar troop over a wilderness. * Translation. It behooves me to side with my friends, but only as far as the gods. SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 513 It was cold, the cabin was at open war with my olfactories, and I found reason to rejoice in my.great coat, a weighty highcaped, respectable rug, the collar of which turned over, and played the part of a night-cap very passably. In looking up at two or three bright stars, which oscillated with the motions of the sails, I fell asleep, but was awakened at one o'clock, Monday morning, by a shower of rain. I found myself compelled to go down into the cabin, where I slept very soundly, and awoke with a very good appetite at breakfast time, my nostrils, the most placable of all the senses, reconciled to, or indeed insensible of the mzeph2itis. Monday, September 17th, I had a long conversation with the Swede, who spoke with the most poignant contempt of the Dane, whom he described as a fool, purse-mad; but he confirmed the boasts of the Dane respecting the largeness of his fortune, which he had acquired in the first instance as an advocate, and afterwards as a planter. From the Dane and from himself I collected that he was indeed a Swedish nobleman, who had squandered a fortune, that was never very large, and had made over his property to the Dane, on whom he was now utterly dependent. He seemed to suffer very little pain from the Dane's insolence. He was in a high degree humane and attentive to the English lady, who suffered most fearfully, and for whom he performed many little offices with a tenderness and delicacy which seemed to prove real goodness of heart. Indeed his general manners and conversation were not only pleasing, but even interesting; and I struggled to believe his insensibility respecting the Dane's philosophical fortitude. For though the Dane was now quite sober, his character oozed out of him at every pore. And after dinner, when he was again flushed with wine, every quarter of an hour or perhaps oftener he would shout out to the Swede, " Ho! Nobility, go-do such a thing! Mr. Nobility!-tell the gentlemen such a story, and so forth;" with an insolence which must have excited disgust and detestation, if his vulgar rants on the sacred rights of equality, joined to his wild havoc of general grammar no less than of the English language, had not rendered it so irresistibly laughable. At four o'clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single, solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing it looked in that round, objectless desert of wa Ye 514, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ters. I had associated such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt exceedingly disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So little are images capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words. In the evening the sails were lowered, lest we should run foul of the land, which can be seen only at a small distance. And at four o'clock, on Tuesday morning, I was awakened by the cry of " land! land!" It was an ugly island rock at a distance on our left, called Heiligeland, well known to many passengers from Yarmouth to Hamburg, who have been obliged by stormy weather to pass weeks and weeks in weary captivity on it, stripped of all their money by the exorbitant demands of the wretches who inhabit it. So at least the sailors informed me.-About nine o'clock we saw the main land, which seemed scarcely able to hold its head above water, low, flat, and dreary, with light-houses and landmarks which seemed to give a character and language to the dreariness. We entered the mouth of the Elbe, passing Neu-werk; though as yet the right bank only of the river was visible to us. On this I saw a church, and thanked God for my safe voyage, not without affectionate thoughts of those I had left in England. At eleven o'clock on the same morning we arrived at Cuxhaven, the ship dropped anchor, and the boat was hoisted out, to carry the Hanoverian and a few others on shore. The captain agreed to take us, who remained, to Hamburg for ten guineas, to which the Dane contributed so largely, that the other passengers paid but half a guinea each. Accordingly we hauled anchor, and passed gently up the river. At Cuxhaven both sides of the river may be seen in clear weather; we could now see the right bank only. We passed a multitude of English traders that had been waiting many weeks for a wind. In a short time both banks became visible, both flat and evidencing the labor of human hands by their extreme neatness. On the left bank I saw a church or two in the distance; on the right bank we passed by steeple and windmill and cottage, and windmill and single house, windmill and windmill, and neat single house, and steeple. These were the objects and in the succession. The shores were very green, and planted with trees not inelegantly. Thirty-five miles from Cuxhaven the night came on us, and, as the navigation of the Elbe is perilous, we dropped anchor. SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 515 Over what place, thought I, does the moon hang to your eye, my dearest friend? To me it hung over the left bank of the Elbe. Close above the moon was a huge volume of deep black cloud, while a very thin fillet crossed the middle of the orb, as narrow and thin and black as a ribbon of crape. The long trembling road of moonlight, which lay on the water and reached to the stern of our vessel, glilmmered dimly and obscurely. We saw two or three lights fiom the right bank, probably from bedrooms. I felt the striking contrast between the silence of this majestic stream, whose banks are populous with men and women and children, and flocks and herds-between the silence by night of this peopled river, and the ceaseless noise, and uproar, and loud agitations of the desolate solitude of the ocean. The passengers below had all retired to their beds; and I felt the interest of this quiet scene the more deeply from the circumstance of having just quitted them. For the Prussian had, during the whole of the evening, displayed all his talents to captivate the Dane, who had admitted him into the train of his dependents. The young Englishman continued to interpret the Prussian's jokes to me. They were all without exception profane and abominable, but some sufficiently witty, and a few incidents, which he related in his own person, were valuable as illustrating the manners of the countries in which they had taken place. Five o'clock on Wednesday morning we hauled the anchor, but were soon obliged to drop it again in consequence of a thick fog, which our captain feared would continue the whole day; but about nine it cleared off, and we sailed slowly along, close by the shore of a very beautiful island, forty miles from Cuxhaven, the wind continuing slack. This holm or island is about a mile and a half in length, wedge-shaped, well wooded, with glades of the liveliest green, and rendered more interesting by the remarkably neat farm-house on it. It seemed made for retirement without solitude-a place that would allure one's fiiends, while it precluded the impertinent calls of mere visitors. The shores of the Elbe now became more beautiful, with rich meadows and trees running like a low wall along the river's edge; and peering over them, neat houses and (especially on the right bank) a profusion of steeple-spires, white, black, or red. An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries with spiresteeples, which, as they can not be referred to any other object, 516 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. point, as with silent finger, to the sky and stars, and sometimes, when they reflect the brazen light of a rich though rainy sunset, appear like a pyramid of flame burning heavenward. I remember once, and once only, to have seen a spire in a narrow valley of a mountainous country. The effect was not only mean but ludicrous, and reminded me against my will of' an extiZnguisher; the close neighborhood of' the high mountain, at the foot of which it stood, had so completely dwarfe, d it, and deprived it of all connection with the sky or clouds. Forty-six English miles from Cuxhaven, and sixteen from Hamburg, the Danish village Veder ornaments the left bank with its black steeple, and close by it is the wild and pastoral hamlet of Schulau. Hitherto both the right and left bank, green to the very brink, and level with the river, resembled the shores of a park canal. The trees and houses were alike low, sometimes the low trees overtopping the yet lower houses, sometimes the low houses rising above the yet lower trees. But at Schulau the left bank rises at once forty or fifty feet, and stares on the river with its perpendicular faacde of sand, thinly patched with tufts of green. The Elbe continued to present a more and more lively spectacle front the multitude of fishing boats and the flocks of sea-gulls wheeling round them, the clamorous rivals and companions of the fishermen; till we came to Blankaness, a most interesting village scattered amid scattered trees, over three hills.in three divisions. Each of the three hills stares upon the river, with faces of bare sand, with which the boats with their bare poles, standing in files along the banks, made a sort of fantastic harmony. Between each fagade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper than the other. In short it is a large village made up of individual cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or orchard, and each with its own separate path: a village with a labyrinth of paths, or rather a qzeighborhood of houses! It is inhabited by fishermen and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in great request through the whole navigation of the Elbe. Here first we saw the spires of Hamburg, and from hence, as far as Altona, the left bank of the Elbe is uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of' an industrious and republican city-in that style of beauty, or rather prettiness, that might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet gratify the taste which he had acquired in the town. Summer-houses and Chinese show-work are every SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 617 where scattered along the high and green banks; the boards of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily painted with green and yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes and made to remind the human being of his own power and intelligence instead of the wisdom of nature. Still, however, these are links of connection between town and country, and far better than the affectation of tastes and enjoyments for which men's habits have disqualified them. Pass them by on Saturdays and Sundays with the burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the women and children feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a nature of its own. On Wednesday, four o'clock, we left the vessel, and passing with trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to choke the wide Elbe from Altona upward, we were at length landed at the Boom House, Hamburg. LETTER II. To A LADY. Ratzeburg. M/eine liebe Fezzundinn, See how nataral the German comes from ne, though I have not yet been six weeks in the country -almost as fluently as English from my neighbor the Amtsschreiber (or public secretary) who as often as we meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day, never fails to greet me with-" * * ddam your ploot unt eyes, my dearest Englander! vhee goes it.'"which is certainly a proof of great generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of English. I had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my proficiency: for I wished to put you in good-humor with a language, from the acquirement of which I have promised myself much edification and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this better than by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? Our English affix, ess, is, I believe, confined either to words derived from the Latin, as actress, directress, &c., or from the French, mistress, duchess, and the like. But the German, inn, enables us to designate the sex in every possible relation of life. Thus the Amtmann's lady is the Frau Amtmanninn-the secre 518 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. tary's wife (by-the-bye the handsomest woman I have yet seen in Germany) is die allerliebste Fraue Arntsschreiberinn-the colonel's lady, die Frau Ob6istinn or Colonelinn-and even the parson's wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am especially pleased with their Freundinn, which, unlike the arnica of the Romans, is seldom used but in the best and purest sense. Now, I know it will be said, that a ifiend is already something more than a friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a female; but this I deny-in that sense at least in which the objection will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a sister —nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name. Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself-" This is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance has blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to learn where he is and what he has seen." Well then! that I am settled at Ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey hither will inform you. My first letter to him, with which doubtless he has edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg on the Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I was amused by the contents of the passage-boat which crosses the river once or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was stowed close with all people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men all with pipes in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and fancies-straight and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short, cane, clay, porcelain, wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with silver chains and silver bole-covers. Pipes and boots are the first universal characteristic of the male Hamburgers that would strike the eye of a raw traveller. But I forget my promise of journalizing as much as possible.-Therefore, Septr. 19t]h Afternoon. My companion who, you recollect, speaks the French language with unusual propriety, had formed a kind of confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who appeared to be a man of sense, and whose manners were those of a perfect gentleman. He seemed about fifty or rather more. Whatever is unpleasant in French manners from-the excess in the degree, SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 510 had been softened down by age or affliction; and all that is delightful in the kind, alacrity and delicacy in little attentions, &c., remained, and without bustle, gesticulation, or disproportionate eagerness. His demeanor exhibited the minute philanthropy of a polished Frenchman, tempered by the sobriety of the English character disunited from its reserve. There is something strangely attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is more easy to feel than to define. It neither includes the possession of high moral excellence, nor of necessity even the ornamental graces of manner. I have now in my mind's eye a person whose life would scarcely stand scrutiny even in the court of honor, much less in that of conscience; and his manners, if nicely observed, would of the two excite an idea of awkwardness rather than of elegance: and yet every one who conversed with him felt and acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the matter, I believe to be this —we feel the gentlemanly character present to us, whenever, under all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial not less than the important, through the whole detail of his manners and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to others in suchl a wray, as at the same time implies in his own feelings an habitual and assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to himself. In short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling of Equality acting, as a Habit, yet flexible to the varieties of Rank, and modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. This description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting dialogue concerning the causes of the corruption of eloquence. "What perfect gentlemen these old Romans must have been! I was impressed, I remember, with the same feeling at the time I was reading a translation of Cicero's philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary correspondence: while in Pliny's letters I seemed to have a diflierent feeling-he gave me the notion of a very fine gentleman." You uttered the words as if you had felt that the adjunct had injured the substance and the increased degree altered the kind. Pliny was the courtier of an absolute monarch -Cicero an aristocratic republican. For this reason the character of gentleman, in the sense to which I have confined it, is frequent in England, rare in France, and found, where it is found, 520 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. in age or the latest period of manhood; while in Germany the character is almost unknown. But the proper antipode'of a gentleman is to be sought for among the Anglo-American democrats. I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable Frenchman, and of humiliation for myself. For in a little controversy between us on the subject of French poetry, he made me feel my own ill-behavior by the silent reproof of contrast, and when I afterwards apologized to him for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful expression of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman might both make with dignity and receive with pleasure. I was pleased, therefore, to find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up our quarters in the same house. My friend went with him in search of an hotel, and I to deliver my letters of recommendation. I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by any thing I actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for the first time in my life on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally I began to wonder at all things, some for being so like, and some fobr being so unlike the things in England-Dutch women with large umbrella hats shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of petticoat behind-the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the caul with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled through it-the Hanoverian women with the fore part of the head bare, then a stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on the cap, and the cap behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon which lies or tosses on the back: "Their visnomies seem'd like a goodly banner Spread in defiance of all enemies." The ladies all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth: which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal, too glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth of the laughing, loud-talking countrywomen and servant-girls, who, with their clean, white stockings SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 621 and with slippers without heel quarters, tripped along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by a charm from the dirt: with a lightness, too, which surprised me, who had always considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an Inn, that I had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets narrow; to my English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at first sight the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street, some in the ordinary triangular form and entire, as the botanists say; but the greater number notched and scolloped with more than Chinese grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion of windows, so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mir. Pitt's window tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out from it like young toadlets on the back of a Surinam toad, would certainly improve the appearance of the Hamburg houses, which have a slight summer look, not in keelping with their size, incongruous with the climate, and precluding that feeling of retirement and self-content, which one wishes to associate with a house ill a noisy city. But a conflagration would, I fear, be the previous requisite to the production of any architectural beauty in Hamburg: for verily it is a filthy town. I moved on and crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with huge black deformities of water wheels close by them. The water intersects the city everywhere, and would have furnished to the genius of Italy the capabilities of all that is most beautiful and magnificent in architecture. It might have been the rival of Venice, and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and stagnation. The Jungfer Stieg (that is, Young Ladies' Walk), to which my letters directed me, made an exception. It was a walk orpronenade planted with treble rows of elm-trees, which, being yearly pruned and cropped, remain slim and dwarf-like. This walk occupies one side of a square piece of water, with many swans on it perfectly tame, and, moving among the swans, showy pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by their husbands or lovers.' * * * e (Some paragraphs have been here omitted.) * * * thus embarrassed by sad and solemn politeness, still more than by broken English, it sounded like the voice of an old friend when I heard the emigrant's servant inquiring after me. He had come for the -purpose of guiding me to our hotel. Through 522 BIOGRAPHIA LTTERARIA, streets and streets I pressed on as happy as a child, and, I doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy eyes, amused by the wicker wagons with movable benches across them, one behind the other (these were the hackney-coaches); amused,by tlhe sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion (a useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations); amused with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house-door bells, the bell hanging over each door, and struck with a small iron rod at every entrance and exit;-and finally, amused by looking in at the windows, as I passed along; the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee or playing cards, and the gentlemen all smoking. I wished myself a painter, that I might have sent you a sketch of one of the card parties. The long pipe of one gentleman rested on the table, its bowl half a yard from his mouth, fuming like a censer by the fish-pool —the other gentleman, who was dealing the cards, and of course had both hands employed, held his pipe in his teeth, which hanging down between his knees, smoked beside his ankles. Hogarth himself never drew a more ludicrous distortion both of attitude and physiognomy, than this effort occasioned: nor was there wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same Hogarth, in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly introduces, as the central figure, in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figure (such is the power of true genius!) neither acts, nor is mneaznt to act as a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group, a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and, even when the attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter: and thus prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature or the foibles or humors of our fellow-men from degenerating into the heart poison of contempt or hatred. Our hotel DIE WILDE MAN (the sign of'which was no bad likeness of the landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a restless grin, that was at every man's service, and which indeed, lilke an actor rehearsing to himself, he kept playing in explectation of an occasion for it) —neither our hotel, I say, nor its landlord were of the genteelest class. But it has one great advantage for a stranger, by being in the market-place, and the next neigh SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 523 bor of the huge church of St. Nicholas: a church with shops and houses built up acgainst it, out of which itengs and tzalrts its highl rmassy steeple rises, nlec/laced near the top with a round of large gilt balls. A better pole-star could scarcely be desired. Long shall I retain the impression made on my mind by the awful echo, so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-toned clock within this church, which awoke me at two in the morning from a distressfill dream, occasioned, I believe, by the feather-bed, which is used here instead of bed-clothes. I will rather carry my blanket about with me like a wild InLcdian, than submit to this abomin.able custom. Our emigrant acquaintance was, rwe found, an intimaLte firiend of the celebrated Abbe de Lisle: and from the large fortunle which he possessed under the monarchy, had rescued sufficient not only for independence, but for respectability. He had offended some of his fellow-emigrants in London, whom he had obliged with considerable sums, by a refilsal to make further advances, and in consequence of their intrigues had received an order to quit the kingdom. 1 thought it one proof of his innocence, that he attached no blame either to the alien act, or to the minister who had exerted it against him; and a still greater, that he spoke of London with rapture, and of his favorite niece, who had married and settled in England, with all the fervor and all the pride of a fond parent. A man sent by force out of a country, obliged to sell. out of the stocks at a great loss, and exiled from those pleasures and that style of society which habit had rendered essential to his happiness, whose predominant feelings were yet all of a private nature, resentment for friendship outraged, and anguish for domestic afiections interrupted-such a man, I thinkl, I could dare warrantt guiltless of espionage in any service, mnost of all in. that of the present French Directory. He spoke with ecstacy of Paris under the Monarchy: and yet the particular facts, which made up his description, left as deep a conviction on mnay mind, of French worthlessness, as his own tale: had done of emigrant ingratitude. Since my arrival in Germany, I have not met a single person, even among those who abhor the Revolution, that spoke with favor, or even charity, of the French emig(rants. Though the belief of' their influence in the organization of this disastrous war (fiom the horrors of' which, North Germany deems itself' only reprieved, not secured), may have some share in the general aversion with which they are regarded: 524 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. yet I am deeply persuaded that the far greater part is owing to their own profligacy, to their treachery and hard-heartedness to each other, and the domestic misery or corrupt principles which so many of them have carried into the families of their protectors. }My heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled to mind the stern yet amiable characters of the English patriots, who sought refuge on the Continent at the Restoration 0 let not our civil war under the first Charles be paralleled with the French revolution! In the former, the chalice overflowed from excess of principle; in the latter, from the fermentation of the dregs! The former, was a civil war between the virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the latter, between the vices., The Venetian glass of the French monarchy shivered and flew asunder with the working of a double poison. Sept. 20th. I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the brother of the poet, who again introduced me to professor Ebeling, an intelligent and lively man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort to talk with him, as Awe were obliged to drop all our pearls into a huge ear-trumpet. From this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters (I hope, the German literati in general may resemble this first specimen), I heard a tolerable Italian pun, and an interesting anecdote. ~When Bonaparte was in Italy, having been irritated by some instance of perfidy, he said in a loud and vehement tone, in a public company-"'Tis a true proverb, gli Italianzi tzutti ladroni" —(that is, the Italians all plu nderers). A lady had the courage to reply, " Non tuztti; m2?a BUONA PARTE," (not all, but a good par't, or Buonaparte). This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one of the many good things that might have been said. The anecdote is more valuable; for it instances the ways and means of French insinuation. Hoche had received much information concerning the face of the country from a map of unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker of which, he heard, resided. at D iisseldorf. At the storming of IDiisseldorf by the French army, Hoche previously ordered, that the house and property of this man should be preserved, and intrusted the performance of the order to an officer on whose troop he could rely. Finding afterwards, that the man had escaped before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, " HE had no reason to flee! It is for such men, not against them, that the SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 525 French nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its children." You remember Milton's sonnet"The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus when temple and tower Went to the ground" I* Now though the Diisseldorf map-maker may stand in the same relation to the Theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by lines of film on the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars sunward and beats the tempest with its wings; it does not therefore follow, that the Jacobin of France may not be as valiant a general and as good a politician, as the madman of Macedon. From Professor Ebeling's Mr. Klopstock accompanied my friend and me to his own house, where I saw a fine bust of his brother. There was a solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance, which corresponded to my preconceptions of his style and genius.-I saw there, likewise, a very fine portrait of Lessing, whose works are at present the chief object of my admiration. His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if any thing, rather larger and more prominent. But the lower part of his face and his nose -O what an exquisite expression of elegance and sensibility!There appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in the forehead.-The whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a man of quick and voluptuous feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute; yet acute not in the observation of actual life, but in the arrangeinents and management of the ideal world, that is, in taste, and in metaphysics. I assure you, that I wrote these very words in my memorandum-book with the portrait before my eyes, and when I knew nothing of Lessing but his name, and that he was a German writer of eminence. We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d'hbte. "Patience at a Germcan orclirnary, smiling at timze." The Germans are the worst cooks in Europe. There is placed for every two persons a bottle of common wine-Rhenish and Claret alternately; but in the houses of the opulent, during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the servants hand round glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin's they came in this order. Burgundy-Madeira-Port-Frontiniac-Pacchiaretti-Old Hock —Mlountain-Champagne-Hock again —Bishop, X [Sonnet viii. " Captain, or Colonel, or Knight in arms."] 526 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. and lastly, Punch. A tolerable quantum, methinks! The last dish at the ordinary, viz. slices of roast pork (for all the larger dishes are brought in, cut up, and first handed round; and then set on the table), with stewed prunes and other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese and butter, with plates of apples, reminded me of Shakspeare,* and Shakspeare put it in my head to go to the French comedy. * e * Bless me! why it is worse than our modern English plays! The first act informed me, that a court-martial is to be held on a Count Vatron, who had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his brother-in-law. The officers plead in his behalf-in vain! His wife, the Colonel's sister, pleads with most tempestuous agonies — in vain! She falls into hysterics, and faints away, to the dropping of the inner curtain! In the second act sentence of death is passed on the Count-his wife, as frantic and hysteric as before; more so (good industrious creature!) she could not be. The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic indeed! -the soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard fiom behind the scenes: and in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still frantic, only with joy; that was all! 0 dear lady! this is one of' the cases, in which laughter is followed by melancholy: fbr such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted everywhere for Shakspeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer violence to my own feelings in joining these names. But however meanly I may think of the French serious drama, even in its most perfect specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion; still, however, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own, though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the * "Slender. I bruised my shin with playing with sword and dagger for a dish of stewed prunes, and by my troth I can not abide the smell of hot meat since."-So again, Evans. "I will make an end of my dinner: there's pippins and cheese to come." [Merry Wives of Windsor. Act i. sc. 1, and sc. 2.-S. C.] SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 527 spectators to active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The soul is not stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless'sympathy with our own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising, undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight the imagination. What (I would ask of the crowd, that press forward to the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of Kotzebue and his imitators*), what are you seeking? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of Shakspeare and Moliere the more accurate the knowledge, and the more profobundly I think,, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers portray are ludicrous indeed, either frorn the kind or the excess, and exquisitely ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind, and such as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human thought and action to quotations, not only, from the tragic characters, but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and clowns of Shakspeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and Hypocrite, of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions: for these class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of a character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the Shaksperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the essential properties of geometry is not less essential to dramatic excellence, and (if I may mention his name without pedantry to a lady) Aristotle has accordingly required of the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief differences are, that in geometry it is the universal truth itself, which is uppermost in the consciousness, in poetry the individual form in which the truth is clothed. With the ancients, and not less with the elder dramatists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy to make us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of common-place morals in metaphors drawn from the shops L [See note at the end of this letter.] 528 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. or mechanic occupations of their characters; nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similes of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to affect us indeed, but within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with the activity both of our understanding and imagination. They wished to transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant the germs of that greatness during the temporary oblivion of the worthless "' thing, we are" and of the peculiar state, in which each man happens to be; suspending our individual recollections, and lulling them to sleep amid the music of' nobler thoughts. Hiolcl! —(ethinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defendant.) DEFENDANT. Hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the best Christian morality? PLAINTIFF. Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which you can exercise without a single Christian virtue-without a single sacrifice that is really painful to you!-just as much as flatters you, sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled to your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards-no Antony, no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache!D. No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain citizen of London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body knows the stories: and what curiosity can we feel P. What, Sir, not for the manner?-not for the delightful language of the poet? —not for the situations, the action and reaction of the passions? D. You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 629 story: and how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be surprised by it, when we know how it will turn out? P. Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the highest effort of human genius, the same gratifatition, as that you receive from a new novel, the last Gernian romance, and other dainties of the day, which can be enjoyed but once. If you carry these feelings to the sister art of Painting, Michael Angelo's Sixtine Chapel, and the Scripture Gallery of Raphael can expect no favor from you. Yost knot all abonzt thenb beforehandtc; and are, doubtless, more familiar with the subjects of' those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the historic or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore, in your preference of contemporary writers: for the great men of former times, those at least who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so little to gratitfy this kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have regarded the story in a not much higher light, than the painter regards his canvass: as that on, not by, which they were to display their appropriate excelleirce. No work, resembling a tale or romance, can well show less variety of invention in the incidents, or less anxiety in weaving them together, than the DoN QUIXOTE of Cervantes. Its admirers feel the disposition to go back and re-peruse some preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they find any eag'erness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts which they best recollect, even as wre visit those friends oftenest whom wle love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most intimately acquainted. In the divine Ariosto (as his countrymen call this, their darling poet), I question wrhether there be a single tale of his own invention, or the elements of' which, wnere not; familiar to the readers of " old romance." I will pass by the ancient Greeks, who thought it even necessary to the fatble of a tragedy, that its substance should be previously knowrn. That there had been at least fifty tragedies with the same title, -would be one of the motives which determined Sophocles and Euripides, in the choice of Electra, as a subject. But liltonlD. Aye Milton, indeed! —but do not Dr. Johnson and other great men tell us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task? P. So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! But why then do you pretend. to admire Shakspeare? VOT,. iT. Z 530 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. The greater part, if not all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main incidents are concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at least, on which they are built, pre-existed in the chronicles, ballads, or translations of contemporary or preceding English writers. Why, I repeat, do you pretend to admire Shakspeare? Is it, perhaps, that you only pretend to admire him? However, as once for all, you have dismissed the wellknown events and personages of history, or the epic muse, what have you taken in their stead? Whom has yoder tragic muse armed with her bowl and dagger? the sentimental muse I should have said, whom you have seated in the throne of tragedy? What heroes has she reared on her buskins? D. O! our good fiiends and next-door neighbors-honest tradesmen, valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews, virtuous courtesans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental rat-catchers!-(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous, tender-hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all our misanthropes very tender-hearted.) P. But I pray you, friiend, illn what actions great or interesting can such men be engaged? D. They give awray a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young men and maidens who have all other good qualities: they browbeat lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as Hector!) —they rescue stage-coaches at the instant they are falling down precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing, armies; and some of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such perfection, that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in their eye, seldom fail to make their favorite male character as strong as Samson. And then they take such prodigious leaps! And what is clone on the stage is more striking even than what is acted. I once remember such a deafening explosion, that I could not hear a word of the play for half an act after it: and a little real gunpowder being set fire to at the same time, and smelt by all the spectators, the naturalness of the scene was quite astonishing! P. But how can you connect with such men and such actions that dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an interest to the personages of Shalkspeare, and the Greek Tragedians? How can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the power of destiny and the controlling might of SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 681 heaven, which seems to elevate the characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow? D. 0 mere fancies! We seek and find on the present stage our own wants and passions, our own vexations, losses and embarrassments. P. It is your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to have represented before you?-not human nature in its height and vigor? But surely you might find the former with all its joys and sorrows, more conveniently in your own houses and parishes. D. True! but here comes a difference. Fortune is blind, but the poet has his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is capricious. He makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it. He gratifies us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom we hate and wish to despise. P. (aside.) That is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your superiors. D. He makes all those precise moralists, who aflic.t to be better than their neighbors, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honor, and (that no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied) reform in the last scene, and leave no doubt on the minds of the ladies, that they will make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a pity, that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had made them so interesting! Besides, the poor become rich all at once; and in the final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born themselves are made to confess, that VIRTUE IS THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY, AND THAT A LOVELY WOMAN IS A DOWVRY OF HERSELF! P. Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of loyalty, those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which, especially if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so often solicit and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give your prudence credit for the omission. For the whole system of your drama is a moral and intellectual Jacobizismz of the most dangerous kind, and those common-place rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion. For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you in the confusion and sub 532 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. version of the natural order of things, their causes and their efiects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honor (those things rather which pass among you for such) in persons and in classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and in rewarding with all the sympathies, that are the dues of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem! And now — ood night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet without having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by your own fire-side, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to forget now and then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other good friends have made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever place I write you will expect that part ofl my " Travels" will consist of the excursions;1_ my own mind. " ]otzebue and his imeitators." NVote. [Kotzebue was born May 3d, 1761, at Weiumar, assassinated at Manheim, as being a " foe, to freedom and too great a friend to Russia," his adopted country, March 11th, 1819. His father, a counsellor of legation, died early, and left him to the sole care of the young widow his mother, whose mind seems to have moulded his so far as early influences could mould it. "According to my judgment," says Mr. Taylor in his survey of German Poetry, "Kotzebue is the greatest dramatic genius that Europe has evolved since Shakspeare. In the hundred-fold variety of his effusions are comprehended plays of every form: farces,-melodrama,-mixt or sentimental d(ralnas, lIhisanthropy and Repentance (known on our stage as The Stranger) T'he Natutral Sone, &c.-household tragedies,-classical tragedies-and especially that vaster and more difficult form of art, which may best be denominated the gothic tragedy, of which Shakspeare's AIncbeth, and Schiller's WtilAhels Tell," (Macbeth and-Y Wilhelms 2ell!) "are perhaps the noblest specimens, but of which Kotzebue has added a full score to the dramnatic repertory of Europe: Vircgin of the Sun, Spaniards in? Perzu, Count of Burgund.!, Gustavus Vasa," &c. cc. Mr. Carlyle thinks that this playwright has added nothing to the dramatic repertory of Europe.' Kotzebue," says he, in his animated Review of the Survey, —"Kotzebue, whom all nations and kindreds and tongues and peoples, his own people the foremost, after playing with him for some foolish hour, have swept out of doors as a lifeless bundle of dyed rags, is here scientifically examined, measured, pulse-felt, and pronounced to be living and a divinity." " Such is the table," says he, after giving a sarcastic sketch of one of his plays, " which Mr. Taylor has spread for Pilgrims in the Prose Wilderness of Life: thus does he sit like a kind host ready to carve; and SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 533 though the viands and beverage are but as it were, stewed garlic, Yarmouth herrings, and blue ruin, praises them as'stimulant,' and courteously presses the universe to fall to." This is substantially the same doctrine as that of my Father's first Letter from Germany, which I believe to be unexceptionable, though I doubt whether the application of it to Kotzebue has not been a little too sweeping. I stick to the principle of giving Old Nick his due and a fort.ori all whom the world associates with him. The genius of Kotzebue was a theatrical rather than a dramatic genius, and hence its products were in their nature transitory, though I can not agree with Mr. Taylor that "all comedies are local and transient." The Present lends her most powerful aid to those who rely upon her aid alone, and pay no homage to the Permanent. I should think that Kotzebue was as great a master of stage effect, as Whitfield of effect in the pulpit, and was as warm an enthusiast in his lower vocation as the field-preacher in his loftier one: it may be seen from his autobiography, of which Mr. Taylor gives an interesting abridgment, how from his earliest years a passion for the representable was nourished in him rather than a love of literature; how he came to be a great scene-painter and adapted his pie, tures to pit and boxes rather than to mankind. In this line he was first rate, and filled a broad space; perhaps the species of art displayed in it rather deserves to be called of slight worth than worthless, or altogether a vain and spurious thing. Of course I speak thus of these stage-pieces only so far as they were innlocent. Mr. Taylor thinks that their morality has been too seriously condemned; that on one point only they were reprehensible, and " trod upon the brink of moral licentiousness." " But on the higher virtues," says he, " their author everywhere bestows a dignified approbation"-" he has painted more disinterestedly virtuous characters, who, under adversity, persecution, and misrepresentation, remain content with the consciousness of duty performed, and find, in a triumphal self-complacence, an antidote to injustice, and a consolation in death, than any other dramatist ancient or modern." The plays of Kotzebue with all the stimulants they held in solution, are now evaporated, but their character and the acceptance they found belong to the history of the past and are worth recording. To judge from Mr. Taylor's specimens and analysis I should say that there was in them an alloy, but that they were by no means wholly immoral, or to be compared for vileness and corruptive tendencies with a class of productions which have obtained a great deal of favor in France and, occasionally, some passing favor even amongst ourselves-that most despicable class, in which base desires, morbid feelings, and distempered thoughts form the very staple of the piece; in which there is not one breath of air that has blown in the face of heaven. Kotzebue's flashy dramas exhibit a genuine admiration of what is noble and virtuous, while they openly protect certain kinds of vice; it seems as if in them a mistaken philosophy were encroaching on the ground of morals, while in those worse productions corrupt moral feeling is brought face to face with a cold correct morality, and the glow of unworthy passion, sedulously revealed in all its workings and with all that excites it, is met not 534 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. quenched by cool breezes of respect, on the author's part, for the sternest and purest virtue. Mr. Taylor describes the marvellous combinations and moral prodigies which Kotzebue resorted to in his demand for the impressive, and condemns them; but thinks the liveliness of his dialogue, and its "boldness of appeal to the fairest sentiments and dearest feelings of our nature," deserving of commendation. He has stated fairly enough in what the merits of Kotzebue consisted, only he made the small mistake of comparing them with those of Shakspeare; and he certainly injured the cause of the stage-hero by bringing forward dialogues from his defunct spectaclepieces for readers to peruse in the cool of their closets. They were never meant for that; it was as though we should transport a clever scene-painting into a picture-gallery, or spell out at home a popular preacher's manuscript sermon. He should have confined himself to celebrating the life, movement, and stirring adventure of these dramas, which, by a small hyper bole. he might have compared to the pictures of Rubens; —their "facility, fertility, mutability" —" as of English weather;"-their costume, "full of discrimination and pictorial effect;"-the scope they gave for the exhibition of brilliant spectacle (especially in The Virgin of the Sun) and for the dcisplay of an actor's noble figure, as in Rolla;-above all the skill with which they made advantage of the passions and excitements of the day-conducting into their own circle the electric fluid of emotion, which had been generated elsewhere:-whence, in part, they gained their "sudden power" over the feelings, compared by the author of the Survey to " magic metamorphosis." Mr. Carlyle says of Mr. Taylor's parallel between Schiller, Goethe and Kotzebue, in his "smiting" way, that it is almost as if we should compare scientifically Paradise Lost, the Prophecies of Isaialh, and Mat. Lewis's Tales of Terror. Goethe has something of the Seer in him, I dare say: all powerful thinkers and writers have: but Religion and Virtue-whether they have not even more serious quarrel with the immortal author of Faust, than with him whose productions are now " swept forth as a bundle of dyed rags"-I more than doubt. Goethe's poison is subtler, better disguised, than that of such writers as Kotzebue; but it is the strong-minded Goethes of the age that mould the transiently powerful Kotzebues; and it seems likely enough that the author of The Stranger received some of his French Revolution principles from the author of Werter. The Present will ever have her special votaries in the world of letters, who collect into their focus, by a kind of burning-glass, the feelings of the day. Amongst such Kotzebue holds a high rank. Those " dyed rags" of his once formed gorgeous banners, and flaunted in the eyes of refined cornpanies from London to Madrid, from Paris to Moscow.-S. C.] SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 535 LETTER II1. Ratzeburg. No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unirnprisoned from a child's hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I this clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves, and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing. My spirits certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink under the noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I left it on Sunday, Sept. 23d, with a letter of introduction from the poet Klopstock, to the Anstmaznn of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me with kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The vehicle, in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an English stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude resemblance, that an elephant's ear does to the human. Its top was composed of naked boards of different colors, and seeming to have been parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were leathern curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly answered the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold. I could observe little, therefore, but the inns and farm-houses at which we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room, like a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes one, sometimes two smaller ones, are inclosed at one end. These are commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men, women, and children, live in amicable community: yet there was an appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of these houses I measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken offfirorn one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirtytwo where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight feet in depth. The faces of the cows, &c. were turne(d towards the room; indeed they were in it, so that they had at 3 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. least the comfort of seeing each other's faces. Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany, a practice concerning' which the agriculturist and the poet are likely to entertain opposite opinions —or at least, to have very different feelings. The woodwork of these buildilngs onl the outside is left unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within three miles of Hamburg almost to Miolln, which is thirty miles fiiom it, the country, as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by woods. At Molln it became more beautifill. I observed a small lake nearly surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred and twenty-six miles. The lake of Ratzeburgf runs fiom south to north, about nine miles in length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About a mile fioom the southilernmost point it is divided into two, of course very unequal, parts by all islalid, which, being connected by a bridge and a narrow slip of' land with the one shore, and by another bridge of' immense length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. OnL this island the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor's house or vicarage, together with the A.ntmazznn's Amtssclzreiber's, and the church, stands near the summit of a hill, wNhich slopes down to the slip of land and the little bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you step into the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little hill, by ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long bridge, and so to the other shore. The water to the south of the town is called the Little Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties of the whole: the shores being just often enough green and bare to give the proper effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater part of their circumference. From the turnings, windings, and indentations of the shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the whole has a sort of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the north of the Great Lake, and peeping over it, I see the seven church towers of Lubec, at the distance of' twelve or thirteen miles, yet as distinctly as if they were not three. The only defect in the view SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 537 is, that Ratzeburg is built entirely of red bricks, and all the houses roofed with red tiles. To the eye, therefore, it presents a clump of brick-dust red. Yet this evening, Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five, I saw the town perfectly beautiful, and the whole softened down into complete keeping, if I may borrow a term from the painters. The sky over Ratzeburg and all the east was a pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered with light sandy clouds. Hence a deep red light spread over the whole prospect, in undisturbed harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake. Two or three boats, with single persons paddling them, floated up and down in the rich light, which not only was itself in harmony with all, but brought all into harmony. I should have told you that I went back to Havnburg on Thursday (Sept. 27th), to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half-way from Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverized; but the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses, which you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with arbors and trellis-work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in cloisters and piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green seats within the rails. Every object, whether the growth of nature or the work of man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better, than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure-fields, had been in a nobler taste: for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The busy, anxious, money-loving merchant of Hamrburg could only have adopted, he could not have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. The mind begins to love nature by imitating human conveniences in nature; but this is a step in intellect, though a low one-and were it not so, yet all around me spoke of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered with unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this charitable and catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city. These are huge green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my return I have nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which answers to posting Z*3F 638 ~BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. in England. These north German post-chaises are uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a chef d'euzvre of mechanism, compared with them: and the horses!a savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration-table. Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin. Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to the objects in search of which I left you namely, the lite'ati and literature of Germany. Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as W and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother, the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate. It is one of a row of' little common-place summer-houses (for so they looked), with four or five rows of young meagre elm-trees before the windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with several roads. Whatever beauty (thought I) may be before the poet's eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We waited a few minutes in a neat little parlor, ornamented with the figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were from Klopstock's odes.* The poet entered. I was much disappointed in his countenance, and recognized in it no likeness to the bust. There was no comprehension in the forehead, no * [" There is a rhetorical amplitude and brilliancy in the Messias," says Mr. Carlyle, "which elicits in our critic (Mr. Taylor) an instinct truer than his philosophy is. Neither has the still purer spirit of Klopstock's odes escaped him. Perhaps there is no writing in our language that offers so correct an emblem of him as this analysis." I remember thinking Taylor's "clear outline" of the Messias the most satisfying account of a poem I ever read: it fills the mind with a vision of pomp and magnificence, which it is pleasanter to contemplate, as it were, from afar, massed together in that general survey, than to examine part by part. Mr. Taylor and Mr. Carlyle agree in exalting that ode of Klopstock's, in which he represents the Muse of Britain and the Muse of Germany running a race. The piece seems to me more rhetorical than strictly poetical; and if the younger Muse's power of keeping up the race depends on productions of this sort, I would not give a penny for her chance, at least if the contest relates to pure poetry. Klopstock's Herman (mentioned afterwards), consists of three chorus-dramas, as Mr. Taylor calls them: The Battle of Herman, Herman and the Princes, and The Death of Herman. Herman is the Arminius of the Roman historians.-S. C.] SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 539 weight over the eyebrows, no expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on the eyes, no massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if any thing, rather below the middle size. He wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled, so fearfully were they swollen. However, though neither WYV nor myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his physiognoy, we e w both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French to my friend, and with difficulty spoke a few sentences to mne in English. His enunciation was not in the least affected by the entire want of' his upper teeth. The conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the surren(ler of the detachment of French troops under General Humbert. Their proceedings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have given the poet great entertainmlent. He then declared his sanguine belief in Nelson's victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement Ariti-G allicanism. The subject- changed to literature, and I inquired in Latin concerning the history of German poetry and the elder German poets. To my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little on the subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits. Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity. He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse superior to Milton's. * TV and myself expressed our surprise: and my friend gave his definition and * [Leonidas, an epic poem, by R. Glover, first appeared in May, 1737: in the fifth edition, published in 1'70, it was corrected, and extended from nine books to twelve. Glover was the author of Boadicea and Medea, tragedies, which had some success on the stage. I believe that Leonidas has more merit in the conduct of the design, and in the delineation of character, than as poetry. " He write an epic poem," said Thomson, " who never saw a mountain i" Glover had seen the sun and moon, yet he seems to have looked for their poetical aspects in Homer and Milton, rather than in the sky. " There is not a single simile in Leonidas," says Lyttleton, " that is borrowed from any of the ancients, and yet there is hardly any poem that has such a variety of beautiful comparisons." The similes of Milton come so flat and dry out 540 BIOGRAPrIA LITERARIA. notion of harmonious verse, that it consisted (the English iambic blank verse above all), in the apt arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs, " with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out," and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence or antiof Glover's mangle, that they are indeed quite another thing from what they appear in the poems of that Immortal: ex. gr. Like wintry clouds, which, opening for a time, Tinge their black folds with gleams of scattered light:Is not this Milton's " silver lining" stretched and mangled? The Queen of Night Gleam'd from the centre of th' ethereal vault, And o'er the raven plume of darkness shed Her placid light. This is flattened from the well-known passage in Comus, Soon will savage Mars Deform the lovely ringlets of thy shrubs. A genteel improvement upon Milton's "bush with firizzled hair implicit." Then we have - delicious to the sight Soft dales lneand'ring show their flowery laps Among rude piles of nature, spoiled from the flowery lap Of some irriguous valley spread its store. Thus does this poet shatter and dissolve the blooming sprays of another man's plantation, instead of pushing through them some new shoots of his own to crown them with fresh blossoms. Milton himself borrowed as much as Glover. Aye, ten times more; yet every passage in his poetry is Miiltonic, —more that than any thing else. On the other hand, his imitators 3Iiltonize, yet produce nothing worthy of Milton, the important characteristic of whose writings mly Father well expressed, when he said, " The reader of Milton must be always on his duty: he is surro'unded woith sense." A man must have his sense to imitate him worthily. How we look through his words at the Deluge, as ]le floods it upon us in Bbok xi. 1. 738-53!-The Attic bees produce honey so flavored with the thyme of Hymettus that it is scarcely eatable, though to smell the herb itself in a breezy walk upon that celebrdted Mount would be an exceeding pleasure; thus certain epic poems are overpoweringly flavored with herbs of Milton, while yet the fragrant balm and fresh breeze of his poetry is not to be found in them.-S. C.] SATYRANE S LETTERS. 541 thetic vigor, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose. Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover's superiority to single lines.* He told us that he had read * [The "abrupt and laconic structure" of Glover's periods appears at the very commencement of Leonidas, which has something military in its movement, but rather the stiff gait of the drilled soldier than the proud march of the maltial hero. The virtuous Spartan who resign'd his life To save his country at th' Oetmean straits, Thermopyle, when all the peopled east In arms with Xerxes filled the Grecian plains, O Muse record! The Hellespont they passed O'erpowering Thrace. The dreadful tidings swift To Corinth flew. Her Isthmus was the seat Of Grecian council. Orpheus thence returns To Lacedremon. In assembly full, &c. Glover's best passages are of a soft character. This is a pleasing Homerism: Lycis dies, For boist'rous war ill-chosen. He lwas skill'd To tune the lulling flute, and melt the heart; Or with his pipe's awak'ning strains allure The lovely dames of Lydia to the dance. They on the verdant level graceful mov'd In vary'd measures; while the cooling breeze Beneath their swelling garments wanton'd o'er Their snowy breasts, and smooth Cayster's stream Soft-gliding murmur'd by. The hostile blade, &c. Bk. viii. And here is a pleasing expansion of Pindar, Olymp. ii. 109: Placid were his days, Which flow'd through blessings. As a river pure, Whose sides are flowery, and whose meadows fair, Meets in his course a subterranean void; There dips his silver head, again to rise, And, rising, glide through flow'rs and meadows new; So shall Oileus in those happier fields, Where never tempests roar, nor humid clouds In mists dissolve., nor white descending flakes Of winter violate th' eternal green; Where never gloom of trouble shades the mind, Nor gust of passion heaves the quiet breast, Nor dews of grief are sprinkled. Bk. x.-S. C.] 642 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Milton, in a prose translation, when he was fourteen.* I understood him thus myself, and W — interpreted Klopstock's French as I had already construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad, very bad-but the English was no translation-there were pages on pages not in the original:-and half the original was not to be found in the translation. W told him that I intended to translate a few of his odes as specimens of G(erman lyrics-he then said to me in English, " I wish you would render into English some select passages of THIE MEsSIAH, and revenge me of your countryman!" It was the liveliest thing which he produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that his first ode was fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion-I considered him as the ven-. erable father of German poetry; as a good man; as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen; yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his physiognomy —Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By-the-bye, old men ought never to wear powder-the contrast between a large snow-white wig and the color of an old man's skin is disgusting, and wrinkles in such a neighborhood appear channels for dirt. It is an honor to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of nature; and any thing of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks.-The author of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own gray hair.-His powder and periwig were to the eye what MiVr. Virgil would be to the ear. Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the Germanl language possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you can not do this. I answered, that in English we * This was accidentally confirmed to me by an old German gentleman at Helimstadt, who had been Klopstoek's school and bed-fellow. Among other boyish anecdotes, he related that the young poet set a particular value on a translaltion of the PARADISE LOST, and always slept with it under his pillow. SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 643 could commonly render one Greek heroic line in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me:* and I, who wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did not. We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French X Klopstock's observation was partly true and partly erroneous. In the literal sense of his words, and, if we confine the comparison to the average of space required for the expression of the same thought in the two languages, it is erroneous. I have translated some German hexameters into English hexameters, and find, that on the average three English lines will express four lines German. The reason is evident: our language abounds in monosyllables and dissyllables. The German, not less than the Greek, is a polysyllable language. But in another point of view the remark was not without foundation. For the German possessing the same unlimited privilege of forming componnds, both with prepositions and with epithets, as the Greek, it can express the richest simple Greek word in a single German one, and is thus freed from the necessity of weak or ungraceful paraphrases. I will content myself with one example at present, viz. the use of the prefixed participles yer, zer, eat, and weg: thus reissers to rend, verreissen to rend away, zerreissen to rend to pieces, entreissen to rend off or out of a thing, in the active sense: or schmelzen to melt —ve, zer, eat, schmelzezsand in like manner through all the verbs neuter and active. If you consider only how much we should feel the loss of the prefix be, as in bedropt, besprinkle, besot, especially in our poetical language, and then think that this same mode of composition is carried through all their simple and compound prepositions, and many of their adverbs; and that with most of these the Germans have the same privilege as we have of dividing them from the verb and placing them at the end of the sentence; you will.have no difficulty in comprehending the reality and the cause of this superior power in German of condensing meaning, in which its great poet exulted. It is impossible to read half a dozen pages of Wieland without perceiving' that in this respect the German has no rival but the Greek. And yet I feel, that concentration or condensation is not the happiest mode of expressing this excellence, which seems to consist not so much in the less time required for convey~ing an impression, as in the unity and simultaneousness with which the impression is conveyed. It tends to make their language more picturesque: it depictlres images better. We have obtained this power in part by our compound verbs derived from the Latin: and the sense of its great effect no doubt induced our Milton both to the use and the abuse of Latin derivatives. But still these prefixed particles, conveying no separate or separable meaning to the mere English reader, can not possibly act on the mind with the force or liveliness of an original and homogeneous language such as the German is, and besides are confined to certain words. 544 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Revolution Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary presents from the French Republic (a golden crown, I believe), and, like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he sent back these presents with a palinoclia, declaring his abhorrence of their proceedings; and since then he has been perhaps more than enough an AntiGallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence; and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klopstock's house we walked to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation, till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the distance. A rich sandy light (nay, of a much deeper color than sandy), lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions could not have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a fairy scene!and to increase its romantic character, among the moving objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other accoutrements of which were in a high decree costly and splendid. Before I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two longer than I otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see the civic pomp of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed. There were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two or three old women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of entertainment, theatre, &c., being shut up on this day. In Hamburg there seems to be no religion at all; in Lubec it is confined SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 545 to the women. The men seem determined to be divorced from their wives in the other world, if they can not in this. You will not easily conceive a more singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisles of the principal church at Lubec seen from the organ-loft; for, being filled with female servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold and silver. I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which my friend W - made of his conversations with Klopstock, during the interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall make but one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely, that Klopstock's remarks on the venerable sage of Kdnigsberg are to my own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true, that his system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of Germany there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean or a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean, and pre-supposes its truth; or lastly, who, though an antagonist of Kant, as to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. " Klopstock having wished to see the CALVArY of Cumberland, and asked what w,7,as thought of it in England, I went to Remnant's (the English bookseller), where I procured the Analytical Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland's CALVARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen: he devoted three entire years to the plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of versification in the German language before this time. The first three cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This, though done with much labor and some success, was far from satisfying him. He had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and there had been also in the German language attempts in that style of versification. These were only of very moderate merit.-One day he was struck with the idea of what could be done in this way 646 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. he kept his room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased with his efforts, he composed no more in prose. To-day he informed me that he had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted to see an author who before him had trod the same path. This is a contradiction of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his poem to any one till it was finished: but some of his friends who had seen what he had finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in a journal. He was then, I believe, very young, about twenty-five. The rest was printed at different periods, four books at a time. The reception given to the first specimens was highly flattering. He was nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem, but of these thirty years not more than two were employed in the composition. He only composed in favorable moments; besides he had other occupations. He values himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical writers of gross deficiency in this respect. I laid the same accusatiorn against Horace: he would not hear of it-but waived the discussion. He called Rousseau's ODE TO FORTUNTE a moral dissertation in stanzas.* I spoke of DryTden's ST. CECILIA; but he' [A la Fortune. Liv. ii. Ode vi. (Euvres de Jean Baptiste Rousseau, p. 121, edit. 1820. One of the latter strophes of this ode concludes with two lines, which, as the editor observes, have become a proverb, and of which the thought and expression are borrowed from Lucretius: eripitur, persona, manet dres: iii. v. 58. Montrez nous, guerriers magnanimnes, Votre vertu dans tout son jour: Voyons comment vos ccurs sublimes Du sort soutiendront le retour. Taut que sa faveur vous seconde, Vous 6tes les maitres du monde, Votre gloire nous eblouit: Mais au moindre revers funeste, Le masque tormbe, i'homme reste, Et le h6ros s'6vanouit. Horace, says the Editor, en traitant ce meme sujet, liv. x. ode xxxv. et Pindare en l'esquissant h grands traits, au commencement de sa douzibme Olynlpique, n'avoient laiss6 leurs successeurs que son c6te moral a envisager, et c'est le parti que prit Rousseau. The general sentiment of the ode is handled with great dignity in Paradise Regained. Bk. iii. 1. 43-157 SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 547 did not seem familiar with our writers. He wished to know the distinctions between our dramatic and epic blank verse. He recommended me to read his HErIMA:NN before I read either THE MESSIAH or the odes. He flattered himself that some time or other his dramatic poems would be known in England. He had not heard of Cowper. He thought that Voss in his translation of TuI ILIAD had done violence to the idiom of the Germans, and had sacrificed it to the Greeks, not remembering sufficiently that each language has its particular spirit and genius.* He said -a passage which, as Thyer says, contains thile quintessence of the subject. DIante has some noble lines on Fortune in the viith canto of the Ilnferno,lines Aworthy of a great mystic poet. After referring to the vain complaints and maledictions of men against this Power, he beautifully coneludes: Ma. ella s'5 beata e cio non ode: Con l'altre prime creature lieta Volve stua spera, e beata si gode. J. 13. Rousseau was born in 1669, beganu his career at the close of the age of Louis Quatorze, died at Brussels. March l1', 1741. He had been banisbed from France, by an intrilgue, on a false charge, as now seems clear, of having composed and distributed defainatory verses, in 1712; and it was engriaved upon his toml that lie wavs " tlirty yearsl an object of envy and thirty of compassion." Belonging to the classical school of the 17th century, of which lie was the last survivor, he came somewhat into conflict with the spirit of the 1 8thl, which was prepa-ring a new vintage, and would have none but new wine in new bottles. Rousseau, hsowever, was a very finished writer in his way, and has been compared to Pindar, Horace, Anacreon and Mialberbe. His ode to IL. le Cosite du Ltuc is as fine an example as I know of the modern classical style. This is quite different from that -which is exemplified in Mr. Wordsworth's Laodamia and Sergeant T'alfourd's Ion; for in them the subjects only are ancient, while both the form and spirit are modern; whereas in the odes of Rousseau a modern subject is treated, as far as difference of times and language will allow, in the manner and tone of the Ancients. Samson Agonistes and Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris are conformed to ancient modes of thought, but in them the subject also is taken from antiquity. Rousseau's works consist of Odes, Epistles in verse, Cantatas, Epigrams, &c. &c. He wrote for the stage at the beginning of his literary life, but with no great success.-S. C.] * [Voss, who lived from Feb. 20, 1151, to MIarch, 1826, was author of the Luise, "a rural epopcea of simple structure divided into three idyls, which; relate the betrothment and marriage of the heroine." Tlhis is a pleasing and very peculiar poem, composed in hexameter verse. " The chlarm of the narrative," says Mr. T., " consists in the minute description of the local domestic manners of the personages." The charm consists, I think, in the blending of these manners with the beauty of nature, and the ease 548 IBIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Lessing was the first of their dramatic writers. I complained of NATHIAN as tedious. He said there was not enough of action in it; but that Lessing was the most chaste of their writers. He spoke favorably of Goethe; but said that his SORROwS OF WERTER was his best work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred the first written to the rest of Goethe's dramas. Schiller's ROBBERS he found so extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of the setting sun. * He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live. He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot was inextricable.-It was evident he knew little of Schiller's works: indeed, he said, he could not read them. B-iirger, he said, was a true poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakspeare, who often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times more so.t He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an imand suitability of the versification. Voss's translation of the Odyssey is praised for being so perfect an imitation of the original. The Greek has been rendered, " with a fidelity and imitative harmony so admirable, that it suggests to the scholar the original wording, and reflects, as from a mirror, every beauty and every blemish of the ancient poem." Hist. Survey, pp. 61-68.-S. C.] * [Act iii. se. 2. The night scene, which is the 5th of Act iv. is fine too in a frantic way. The songs it contains are very spirited. That sung by the Robbers is worthy of a Thug: it goes beyond our notions of any Eurolpean bandit, and transports us to the land of Jaggernat.-S. C.] t [The works of Btirger, who -was born on the first day of 1748, died June 8, 1194, consist of Poems (2 vols.), Macbeth altered from Shakspeare (pronounced by Taylor,-no good judge of Shakspeare,-in some respects superior to the original), Munehatisen's Travels; Translations (of the six first books of the Iliad, and some others); Papers philological and political. His fame rests chiefly on three ballads, The Wild Hunter, the Parson's Daughter, and Lenore. The powerful diction and admirable harmony,rhythm, sound, rhyme of these compositions Mr. Taylor describes as the result of laborious art; it strikes me, from the outline which he has given of BiWrger's history, that the violent feelings, the life-like expression of which constitutes their power and value, may have been partly the reflex of the poet's own mind. His seems to have been a life of mismanagement from youth till middle age. Like Milton, he lost a beloved second wife by childbed in the first year of marriage: like him, he married a third time, but without his special necessity-blindness and unkind daughters. He wedded a lady who had fallen in love with his poetry, or perhaps his poetical reputation: an union founded, as it appears, in vanity, ended in vexa SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 549 moral author in the first place, and next, as deficient in power. At Vienna, said he, they are transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of Vienna either the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany. He said Wieland was a charming author, and a sovereign master of his own language; that in this respect Goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could anybody else. He said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance. I told him the OBERON had just been translated into English. He asked me if I was not delighted with the poem. I answered, that I thought the story began to flag about the seventh or eighth book; and observed, that it was unworthy of a man of genius to make the interest of a long poem turn entirely upon animal gratification. He seemed at first disposed to excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered, that I thought the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing to fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere app?etite. Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every body. I answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work like the OBErON. He spoke in raptures of WVieland's style, and pointed out the passage where Rtetzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely beautiful.A* I said tion of spirit: and as Death, which had deprived him of two wives, did not release him from a third, he obtained his freedom, at the end of little more than three years, from a court of justice. Why did Klopstock undervalue, by preference of such a poet, the lofty-minded Schiller-the dearest to England of all German bards? Perhaps because the author of Wallenstein was a philosopher, and had many things in his philosophy which the author of The Messiah could not find in his heaven and earth.-S. C.] * [Oberon, Canto viii. stanzas 69-80. The little touch about the new born babe's returning its mother's kiss is very romantic: though put modestly in the form of a query: -Und scheint nicht jeden Kuss Sein kleiner mund dem ihren zu entsaugen? The word entsauzgen (suck qos) is expressive-it very naturally characterizes the kiss of an infant five minutes of age. Wieland had great nursery experience. " My sweetest hours," says he, in a letter quoted in the Survey, 550 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. that I did not perceive any very striking passages; but that I made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. Of the thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that the greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He considered the books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the ancient mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was free to take whatever he could make a good use of. An Englishman had presented him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with pleasure. He knew little or nothing of Gray, except his ELEGY written in a country CI-UTCI-Tr-ARD. He complained of the fool in LEAR. I observed that he seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress; but still he complained. He asked whether it wras not allowed, that Pope had written rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our writers-I said I preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater variety in their movement. He thought my reason a good one; but asked whether the rhyme of Pope were not more exact. This question I understood as applying to the final terminations, and observed to him that I believed it was the case; but that I thought it was easy to excuse some inaccuracy in the final sounds, if the general sweep of the verse was superior. I told him that we were not so exact with regard to the final endings of lines as the French. He did not seem to know that we made no distinction between masculine and feminine (i. e. single or double) rhymes: at least he put inquiries to me on this subject. He seemed to think, that no language could be so far formed as that it mlight not be enriched by idioms borrowed from another tongte. I said this was a very dangerous practice; and added, that I thought Milton had often injured both his prose and verse by taking this liberty too firequently. I recommended to him the prose works of Dryden as models of pure and native English. I was treading upon tender ground, as I have reason to suppose that he has himself liberally indulged in the practice. The same day I dined at Mr. Klopstock's, where I had the pleasure of a third interview with the poet. We talked principally about indifferent things. I asked him what he thought of -' are those in which I see about me, in all their glee of childhood, my whole posse of little half-way things between apes and angels." Mr. Sotheby's translation of the Oberon made the poem popular in this country. The original first appeared in 1780.-S. C.] SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 551 Kant. He said that his reputation was much on the decline in Germany. That for his own part he was not surprised to find it so, as the works of Kant were to him utterly incomprehensiblethat he had often been pestered by the Kanteans; but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. His custom was to produce the book, open it and point to a passage, and beg they would explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do by substituting their own ideas. I do not want, I say, an explanation of your own ideas, but of the passage which is before us. In this way I generally bring the dispute to an immediate conclusion. He spoke of'Wolfe as the first Metaphysician they had in Germany. Wolfe had followers; but they could hardly be called a sect, and luckily till the appearance of Kant, about fifteen years ago, Germany had not been pestered by any sect of philosophers whatsoever; but that each man had separately pursued his inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a master. Kant had appeared ambitious to be the founder of a sect; that he had succeeded: but that the Germans were now coming to their senses again. That Nicolai and Engel had in different ways contributed to disenchant the nation;* but above all the incomprehensibility of the philosopher and his philosophy. He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet Kant's doctrines had not met with many admirers in Englanddid not doubt but that we had too much wisdom to be duped by a writer who set at defiance the common sense and common understandings of men. We talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate highly the power of exciting' tears-I said that nothing was more easy than to deluge an audience, that it was done every day by the meanest writers. I must remind you, my friend, first that these notes are not intended as specimens of' Klopstock's intellectual power, or even " colloquial bprowess," to judge of which by an accidental conversation, and this with strangers, and those too foreigners, would be not only unreasonable, but calumnious. Secondly, I attribute little other interest to the remarks than what is derived from the celebrity of the person who made them. Lastly, if you ask me, whether I have read ThE MESSIAH, and what I think of it? I answer-as yet the first four books only: and a.s to my opinion(the reasons of which hereafter)-you may guess it from what I could not help muttering to myself, when the good pastor this * rSee note at the end of the letter —S, C.] 552 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. morning told me, that Klopstock was the German Milton - " a very German Milton indeed!!" — Heaven preserve you, and S. T. COLEIRIDGE. [These disenrchanters put one in mind of the ratcatchers, who are said and supposed to rid houses of rats, and yet the rats, somehow or other, continue to swarm. The Kantean rats were not aware, I believe, when Klopstock spoke thus, of the extermination that had befallen them: and even to this day those acute animlals infest the old house, and steal away the daily bread of the ehildren,-if the old notions of Space and Time, and the old proofs of religious verities by way of the undlerstandi?.g, and speculative reason, must be called such. Whether or no these are their true spiritual sustenance, or the necessary guard and vehicle of it, is perhaps a question. But who were Nicolai and Engel, and what did they against the famous enchanter? The former was born in 1733, at Berlin, where he carried on his father's business of book-selling, pursued literature with marked success, and attained to old age, full of literary honors. By means of three critical journals (the Literatur-Brie fe, the Bibliothek der Schiben IVissenschaftern, and the Allgemseine deutsche Bibliothek-), which he conducted with the powerful co-operation of Lessing, and of his intimate friend Mendelssohn, and to which he contributed largely himself, he became verly considerable in the German world of letters, and so continued for the space of twenty years. Jdrdens, in his Lexicon, speaks highly of the effect of Nicolai's writings in promoting freedom of thought, enlightened views in theology and philosophy, and a sound taste in fine literature-describes him as a brave battler with intolerance, hypocrisy, and confused conceptions in religion; with empty subtleties, obscurities, and terminologies, that can but issue in vain fantasies, in his controversial writings on the "so-named critical philosophy." He engaged with the KTritik der reinen Vernauft, on its appearance in 1781, in the Allgemneine deutsche Bibliothek; first explained his objections to it in the lth vol. of his tReisebesch-reibuzng (Description of a Journey through Germany and Switzerland in the year 1181), and afterwards, in his romance enitled, The Life and Opinions of Sempronius Gundibert, a German Philosopher, sought to set forth the childish crotchets and abuses imputable to many disciples of this philosophy in their native absurdity. The ratsbone alluded to by Klopstock, was doubtless contained in the above-named romance, which the old poet probably esteemed more than Nicolai's more serious polemics. Gundibert has had its day, but in a fiction destined to a day of longer duration,-Goethe's Faust,-the Satirist is himself most effectively satirized. There he is, in that strange yet beautiful temple, pinned to the wall in a ridiculous attitude, to be laughed at as long as the temple itself is visited and admired. This doom came upon him, not so much for his campaign against the Kanteans, as for his Joys of ilWerter,-because he had dared to ridicule a book, which certainly offered no small temptations to the parodist. SATYRANE'S LETTERS. 553 Indeed he seems to have been engaged in a series of hostilities with Fichte, Lavater, Wieiand, Herder, and Goethe.* In the Walpurgisnacht of the Faust he thus addresses the goblin dancers: Ihr seyd noch immer da! Nein das ist unerh6rt! Verschewindet doch! Wir haben ja aufgekldrt I " Fly! Vanish! Unheard of impudence! What, still there I In this enlightened age too, when you have been Proved not to exist?"-Shelley's Translation. Do we not see the doughty reviewer before us magisterially waving his hand, and commanding the apparitions to vanish?-then with despondent astonishment exclaiming: Das Teufelspack es fragt nach keiner Regel. Wir sind so klug und dennoch spukt's in Tegel. So wise we are i yet what fantastic fooleries still stream forth from my contemporary's brains; how are we still haunted! The speech of Faust concerning him is mis-translated by Shelley, who understood the humor of the piece, as well as the poetry, but not the particular humors of it. Nothing can be more expressive of a conceited, narrow-minded reviewer. " Oh he! -he is absolutely everywhere,-What others dance, he must decide upon. If he can't chatter about every step,'tis as good as not made at all..Yothing provokes him so much as when we go forward. If you'd turn round and round in a circle, as he does in his old mill, he'd approve of that perhaps; especially if you'd consult him about it." "A man of such spirited habitudes," says Mr. Carlyle, after affirming that Nicolai wrote against Kant's philosophy without comprehending it, and judged of poetry, as of Brunswick Mum, by its utility, "is now by the Germans called a Philister. Nicolai earned for himself the painful preeminence of being Erz Philister, Arch Philistine." "He, an old enemy of Goethe's," says Mr. Hill, in explanation of the title in which he appears in the Walpurgisnacht, " had published an account of his phantasmal illusions, pointing them against Fichte's system of idealism, which he evidently confounded with what Coleridge would have called Subjective Idolism." Such was this wondrous disenchanter in the eyes of later critics than Klopstock: a man strong enough to maintain a long fight against genius, not wise enough to believe in it and befriend it. How many a controversialist seems a mighty giant to those who' are prediposed to his opinions, while, in the eyes of others, he is but a blind floundering Polyphemus, who knows not how to direct his heavy blows; if not a menacing scarecrow, with a stake in his hand, which he has no power to drive home! I remember reading a thin volume in which all metaphysicians that had ever left their * [See Mr. Hayward's excellent translation of Faust, of which I have heard a literary German say that it gave a better notion of the original than any other which he had seen.] VOT, IIT, 2 A 554, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. thoughts behind them were declared utterly in the wrong-all up to, but not including, the valiant author himself. The world had lain in darkness till he appeared, like a new Phcebus, on the scene. This great man dispatched Kant's system-(never having read a syllable of any work of Kant's) -in a page and a quarter; and the exploit had its celebraters and admirers. Yet strange to say, the metaphysical world went on just as if nothing had happened!-after the sun was up, it went groping about, as if it had never been enlightened, and actually ever since has continued to talk as if Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and other metaphysicians understood the nature of the things they wrote about rather more than the mass of mankind, instead of less! Verschwindet doch! might this author say, as Nicolai said to the spectres of the Brocken and the phantoms of literature, Verschwindet doch! I li? lhaben jc aufgeklirt. Engel opposed Kant in philosophical treatises, one of which is entitled. Zwei Gerpriche den lVerth der'Kritilk betreffend. He too occupied a considerable space in literature —his works fill twelve volumes, besides a few other pieces. " To him," says J6rdens, "the criticism of taste and of art, speculative, practical, and popular philosophy, owe many of their later advances in Germany." Jlrdens pronounces his romance, entitled Lorenz,Stark, a masterpiece in its way, and says of his plays, that they deserve a place beside the best of Lessing's. He was the author of a miscellaneous work, entitled The Philosopher of the World, and is praised by Cousin as a meritorious anthropologist. Engel was born September 11, 1741, at Parchim, of which his father was pastor, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin; died June 28, 1802. Neither Nicolai nor Engel is noticed by Cousin among the adversaries of Kant's doctrine: the intelligent adversaries, —who assailed it with skill and knowledge, rather proved its strength than discovered its weakness. Fortins acri ridicullu; but this applies only to transient triumphs, where the object of attack, though it furnishes occasion for ridicule, affords no just cause for it.-S. C.) CHAPTER XXIII. Quid quod prafatione precmunierim libellz m, quc conzar onanere offendiculi ausanm prvecidere. Neque quicqucca addlbi o, qutin ea cadidis omsibus faciat satis. Qu*id autem f.acias istis, qui vel ob inRenii pertineaciam sibi satislferi nolint, vel stupidiores sint, qzuamn st sati.Sfactionzem intelligant? _7Nama quemadmoduzn Simoniles dixit,'leessalos hebetiores esse, quamn ut possint a se decipi, ita quosdlam videas stupidiores, quam ut placari queant. Adhcec, non nmirum est invenire quod calhznnietur, qui nihil aliud qucerit, nisi quod calumnietur. ERASAIUS ad Dorpiumz, Theologum. IN the rifacinzento of THE FRIEND, I have ilnserted extracts from the CONCIONES AD POPULUM, printed, though scarcely published, in the year 1795, in the very heat and height of my antiministerial enthusiasm; these in proof that my principles of politics have sustained no change.-In the present chapter, I have annexed to my Letters from Germany, with particular reference to that, which contains a disquisition on the modern drama, a critique on the Tragedy of BERTRAM, written within the last twelve months: in proof, that I have been as falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of taste.-The letter was written to a friend: and the apparent abruptness with which it begins, is owing to the omission of the introductory sentences. You remember,.my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before his death, proposed to the assembled subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, that the concern should be farmed to some responsible individual under certain conditions and limitations: and that his proposal was rejected, not without indignation, as subversive of the main object, for the attainment of which the enlightened and patriotic assemblage of philo-dramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. Now this object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the British stage not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like zoological rarities, but also from the moro pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals and taste. * Prccludere caluminiam, in the original. j56 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Drury Lane was to be restored to its former classical renown; Shakspeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the expurgated muses of Vanbrugh, Congreve, and. Wycherley, were to be re-inaugurated in their rightful dominion over British audiences;* and the Herculean process was to commence, by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks of the Danube, compared with which their mute relations, the emigrants from Exeter'Change, and Polito (late Pidcock's) show-carts, were tame and inoffensive. Could an heroic project, at once so refined and so arduous, be consistently intrusted to, could its success be rationally expected from, a mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the Itucri bonZs odor0 would conciliate a bill of health to the plague in person? No! As the work proposed, such must be the workmasters. Rank, fortune, liberal education, and (their natural accompaniments, or consequences) critical discernment, delicate tact, disinterestedness, unsuspected morals, notorious patriotism, and tried Maecenasship, these were the recommendations that influenced the votes of the proprietary subscribers of Drury-Lane Theatre, these the motives that occasioned the election of its Supreme Committee of Management. This circumstance alone would have excited a strong interest in the public mind, respect- [My eldest brother says of Congreve's comedies, after declaring them "'considerably more decorous than those of his predecessors," "They are too cold to be mischievous: they keep the brain in too incessant action to allow the passions to kindle. For those who search into the powers of intellect, the combinations of thought which may be produced by volition, the plays of Congreve may form a profitable study. But their time is fled -on the stage they will be received no more; and of the devotees of lightreading such as could read them without disgust would probably peruse them with little pleasure."-Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire, by Hartley Coleridge, p. 693. My father says, in a marginal note on the Life from which I quote, "Wickedness is no subject for Comedy. This was Congreve's great error, and almost peculiar to him. The Dramatis Persone of Dryden, Wycherley and others, are often vicious, indecent, but, not like Congreve's, iwicked." Speaking of The Tay of tile 1World, my brother says, " It has no moral interest. Vice may be, and too often has been, made interesting; but coldhearted, unprincipled villany, never can.-It is impossible to read this comedy without wonder and admiration; but it is an admiration altogether intellectual, by which no man is made better." My father remarks, in the margin, "Virtue and Wickedness are not sub eodem genere. The absence of Virtue is no deficiency in a genuine comedy: but the presence of Wickedness a great defect." —S. C.] CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 657 ing the first production of the Tragic Muse which had been announced under such auspices, and had passed the ordeal of such judgments: and the tragedy, on which you have requested my judgment, was the work on which the great expectations, justified by so many causes, were doomed at length to settle. But before I enter on the examination of BERTRAM, or THE CASTLE OF ST. ALDOB3RAND, I shall interpose a few words, on the phrase German Dqr-ama, which I hold to be altogether a misnomer. At the time of Lessing, the German stage, such as it was, appears to have been a flat and servile copy of the French. It was Lessing who first introduced the name and the works of Shakspeare to the admiration of the Germans; and I should not perhaps go too far, if I add, that it was Lessing who first proved to all thinking men, even to Shakspeare's own countrymen, the true nature of his apparent irregularities. These, he demonstrated, were deviations only from the accidents of the Greek tragedy; and from such accidents as hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Greek poets, and narrowed their flight within the limits of what we may call the heroic opgera. He proved, that, in all the essentials of art, no less than in the truth of nature, the Plays of Shaklspeare were incomparably more coincident with the principles of Aristotle, than the productions of Corneille and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter.* Under these convictions were Lessing's own dramatic works composed. Their deficiency is in depth and imagination: their excellence is in the construction of the plot; the good sense of the sentiments; the sobriety of the morals; and the high polish of the diction and dialogue. In short, his dramas are the very antipodes of all those which it has been the fashion of late years at once to abuse and enjoy, under the name of the German drama. Of this latter, Schiller's ROBBERS was the earliest specimnen; the first fruits of his youth (I had almost said of his boyhood), and as such, the pledge, and promise of no ordinary genius. Only as such, did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the Play. During his whole life he expressed himself concerning this production with more than needful asperity, as a monster not less offensive to good taste, than to sound morals; and, in his latter years, his indignation at the unwonted popularity of the ROBBERS * [See his Hamburgiscehe lDramaturgie, especially vol. ii. Works, 1841, vol. vii.-S. C.] t55;8 iBIOGRAPHIA - LITERARIA. seduced him into the contc'rary extremes, viz. a studied feebleness of interest (as far as the interest was to be derived fiom incidents and the excitement of curiosity); a diction elaborately metrical; the affectation of rhymes; and the pedantry of the chorus. But to understand the true character of the ROBBEns, and of the countless imitations which were its spawn, I must inform you, or at least call to your recollection, that, about that time, and for some years before it, three of the most popular books in the German language were, the translations of YOUNG'S NIGHT THOUGHTS, HERVEY'S MEDITATIONS, and RICHAR)s ONS's CLARISSA HARLOW.* * [Night I. of The Complaint: or N7iqght Thoghts, Twas before the world in 1742: Hervey's Meditations airong tle Tomnls, and Reflection,s in a Flower Garden, appeared in 1746: the first two vols. of Clarissa in 1748. This work of Richardson's and his Pamela were written purposely to guard the morals of the young, and of the latter it was said, Pamela is like suow: she covers all things with her whiteness. Snow, v-hen much trodden under a warm sun, is soon converted into slop-which coalesces ere long into mud and mire; in this respect the moral lessons of Pamela and Clarissa do indeed resemble snow; they seem fitter to stir up the mud of the soul —"the earthly mire" of its nature,-than permanently to cleanse and whiten it.See Comparison of Richardson with Fielding, Works. IV. p. 380. Young's great peem is a notable instance of the want of reserve and poetical economy. In the poetry of Cowper, Burns, Crabbe, we have abundance of sadness, and it is all the more truly and deeply sad, because it seems to come unsought, nay, rather shunned. The poet's soul appears to crave the sunshine: he " does not love the shower nor seek the cold," but only yields to mournful reflections because they force themselves upon him in a world of woe. But when Young so resolutely makes love to Gloom and sets his cap at Melancholy, we suspect that both are in masquerade, and that blooming forms are beneath the sable stole; when he surrounds his head with cypress, we imagine a snug velvet cap under the dusky wreath; when he " sits by a lamp at mid-day, and has skulls, bones, and instruments of death for the ornaments of his study," we feel disposed to think that he makes sin, death, and sorrow a poetical amusement, and takes up these topics because they offer facilities for impressive writing more than to relieve their pressure on a burdened heart. I would not say the same of Hervey's piety, though it has such an air of what, in a colloquial not philosophical sense, may be called determinism. The author of The Doctor says that some styles are fowery, but that the Meditationist's is a weedy style: alluding, I suppose, to its luxuriant common-place, and vulgar showiness, as of corn-poppies and wild mustard. But Hervey seems to have been a simple earnest clergyman, with his heart in his parish: whereas it is difficult not to look upon Young as a solemn worldling; though, as many a mountainbrow looks from a distance a sheer precipice, yet, when we approach, appears passable to the foot of man; so many a life viewed afar off seems CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 559 Now we have only to combine the bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Hervey, which is poetic only on account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as appropriately be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry; we have only, I repeat, to combine these Herveyisms with the strained thoughts, the figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on the one hand; and with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind, in short the self-involution and dreamlike continuity of Richardson on the other hand; and then to add the horrific incidents, and mysterious villains (geniuses of supernatural intellect, if you will take the authors' words for it, but on a level with the meanest ruffians of the condemned cells, if we are to judge by their actions and contrivances)-to add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-andblood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author (themselves the literary brood of the CASTLE OF OTRANTO,# the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their originals were making in England),-and as the compound of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called German drama. The olla; podrida thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best critics in Germany, as the mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a sickly imagination on the part of the author, and the lowest provocation of torpid feeling on that of the readers. The old blunder, however, concerning the irregularity and wildness of Shakspeare, in which the German did but echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own critics, was still in vogue, and Shakspeare was quoted as authority for the most anti-Shaksperean drama. We have indeed two poets who wrote as one, near the age of Shalkspeare, to whom (as the worst characteristic of their writings), the Coryphmus of the present drama may challenge the honor of being a poor relation, or impoverished descendant. For if we would charitably consent to forget the comic humor, the wit, the.felicities of style, in other words, all the poetry, and nine tenths of all hard and worldly, but shows its humanity and Christianity to those who see it closely.-S. C.] * [This tale, by Horace Walpole, afterwards Earl of Oxford, was published in 1765.-S. C.] 560 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. the genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, that which would remain becomes a Kotzebue. The so-called Ge,.iran'z dramla, therefore, is English] in its origin, Enrglish in its nmaterials, and Eng'lish7 by re-adoption; and till we can prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whet'her dramatists or romantic writers, or writers of romantic dramas, wvTere ever admritted to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were occupied by their originals, and apes' apes in their rnotllher country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own. shoulders; or rather consider it as a lack-grace returned friom transportation with such improvements only in growth and manners as yolng transported convicts usually come home with. I know nothing that contributes more to a clear insight into the true nature of any literary pbhmFnomenon, than the comparison of it with some elder production, the likeness of which is striking, yet only apparent, while the difIerence is real. In the present case this opportunity is furnished us, by the old Spanish play, entitled Atheista Iz/minzato, forimlcey, 1and perhaps still, acted in the churches and monasteries of Spain, and lwhich, uinder various names (Dofnf Jzlaaz, the LibenQi7ze, q-c.) hn,'s tad ils day of favor in every country throughout Europe. A popularity so extensive, and of a work so grotesque and extravagant, claims and merits philosophical attention and inlvestiogation. The first point to be noticed is, that the play is throughout irntainative. Nothing of it belongs to the real world, but the names of the places and persons. The comic parts, equally with the tragic; the living, equally with the defunct characters, are creatures of the brain; as little amenable to the rules of ordinary probability, as the Satan of PARADISE LOST, or the Calibanl of THIE TEMIPEST, and therefore to be understood and judged of as impersonated abstractions. Rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health, and constitutional hardihood,-all these advantages, elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and national character, are supposed to have combined in D]on Juan, so as to give him the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts, sensations, impulses and actions. Obedience to nature CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 561 is the only virtue: the gratification of the passions and appetites her only dictate: each individual's self-will the sole organ through which nature utters her commands, and "Self-contradiction is the only wrong i For, by the laws of spirit, in the right Is every individual character That acts in strict consistence with itself."* That speculative opinions, however impious and daring they may be, are not always followed by correspondent conduct, is most true, as well as that they can scarcely in any instance be systematically realized, on account of their unsuitableness to human nature and to the institutions of society. It can be hell, only where it is all hell: and a separate world of devils is necessary for the existence of any one complete devil. But on the other hand it is no less clear, nor, with the biography of Carriert and his fellow-atheists before us, can it be denied without wilful blindness, that the (so called) system of nature (that is, materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility, of a pres* [First Part of Wallenstein, translated from Schiller. Coleridge's Poet. Worls, p. 570.-S. C.] ~t [This man figured in that last and worst state of the French Revolution, that state of sevenfold possession, when Jacobinism, having borne down its rival opponents, was riding in triumph through the land, like Death in the Revelations. In this drama of dream-like horrors Carrier sustained his part so as to be " famous forever." Mr. Carlyle, in that chapter of the French Revolution which is headed Destruction, gives an awful account of Representative Carrier's proceedings in La Vendee, and of his horrid bon-mots, worthy of a laughing hywena possessed by the spirit of cruelty. " Sentence of Deportation," writes Carrier, "was executed vertically." That is, a gabarre with ninety priests under hatches, was sunk in the Loire, on signal given. "This was the first of the Noyades, which we may call lDrownages, of Carrier." -— "By degrees daylight itself witnesses Noyades; women and men are tied together, feet and feet, hands and hands: and flung in; this they call llariage R]publicain, Republican Marriage.-Dumb, out of suffering now, as pale swoln corpses, the victims tumble confusedly seaward along the Loire stream: the tide rolling them back: clouds of ravens darken the river: wolves prowl on the shoal places: Carrier writes,' Quel torrent revolutionnaire. What a torrent of Revolution!' For the man is rabid and the time is rabid. These are the Noyades of Carrier, twenty-five by the tale." Mr. Carlyle calls this "the blackest aspect of the consummation of Sansculottism." The worst part of his account is too dreadful to quote. See also Revolutionary Plutarch, vol. iii. p. 106.-S. C.] 562 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ent Providence, and of both present and future retribution) may influence the characters and actions of individuals, and even of communities, to a degree that almost does away the distinction between men and devils, and will make the page of the future historian resemble the narration of a madman's dreams. It is not the wickedness of Don Juan, therefore, which constitutes the character an abstraction, and removes it from the rules of probability; but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities, as co-existent with entire wickedness in one and the same person. But this likewise is the very circumstance which gives to this strange play its charm and universal interest. Don Juan is, from beginning to end, an intelligible character: as much so as the Satan of Milton. The poet asks only of the reader, what, as a poet, he is privileged to ask: namely, that sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being, which we willingly give to productions professedly ideal, and a disposition to the same state of feeling, as that with which we contemplate the idealized figures of the Apollo Belvidere, and the Farnese Hercules. What the Hercules is to the eye in corporeal strength, Don Juan is to the mind in strength of character. The ideal consists in the happy balance of the generic with the individual. The former makes the character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive; because, nzutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men. The latter gives its living interest; for nothing lives and is real, but as definite and individual. To understand this completely, the reader need only recollect the specific state of his feelings, when in looking at a picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or heroic) class, he objects to a particular figure as being too much of a portrait; and this interruption of his complacency he feels without the least reference to, or the least acquaintance with, any person in real life whom he might recognize in this figure. It is enough that such a figure is not ideal; and therefore not ideal, because one of the two factors or elements of the ideal is in excess. A similar and more powerful objection he would feel towards a set of figures which were mere abstractions, like those of Cipriani, and what have been called Greek forms and faces, that is, outlines drawn according to a recipe. These again are not ideal; because in these the other element is in excess. CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 563 " Forma formans per forman formatam translucens,"* is the definition and perfection of ideal art. This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don Juan, that it is capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in our pantomime of that name. We see clearly how the character is formed; and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the superhuman entireness of Don Juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from shocking our minds to any painful degree. We -do not believe it enough for this effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and negative belief or acquiescence which I have described above. Meantime the qualities of his character are too desirable, too flattering to our pride and our wishes, not to make up on this side as much additional faith as was lost on the other. There is no danger (thinks the spectator or reader) of my becoming such a monster of iniquity as Don Juan! I never shall be an atheist! I shall never disallow all distinction between right and wrong-! I have not the least inclination to be so outrageous a drawcansir in my love affairs But to possess such a power of captivating and enchanting the affections of the other sex!-to be capable of inspiring in a charming and even virtuous woman a love so deep, and so entirely personal to me! —that even my worst vices (if I were vicious), even my cruelty and perfidy (if I were cruel and perfidious), could not eradicate the passion! —to be so loved for my owzn self, that even with a distinct knowledge of my character, she.yet died to save me!-this, sir, takes hold of two sides of our nature, the better and the worse. For the heroic disinterestedness to which love can transport a woman, can not be contemplated without an honorable emotion of reverence towards womanhood: and, on the other hand, it is among the miseries, and abides in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward confirmation of that somet/hing within us, which is our very self, that something, not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the supporter and substantial basis of all these. Love me, and not my qualities, may be a vicious and an insane wish, but it is not a wish wholly without a meaning, * Better thus: Forma specifica per formam individualem translucens: or better yet —Species individualizata, sive Individuum cuilibet Speciei determinata in omni parte correspondens et quasi versione quadam eam interpretans et repetens. 564 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing its being. It would resemble the magic transformation of Tasso's heroine into a tree, in which she could only groan and bleed.* Hence power is necessarily an object of our desire and of our admiration. But of all power, that of the mind is, on every account, the grand desidereatztn of human ambition. W~e shall be as Gods in knowledge, was and must have been the fi)rst temptation: and the co-existence of great intellectual lordship with guilt has never been adequately represented without exciting the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in this bad and heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the intellect of man more exclusively as a separate selfLsubsistence, than in its proper state of subordination to his own conscience, or to the will of an infinitely superior being. This is the sacred charm of' Shalspeare's male characters in general. They are all cast in the mould of Shaklspeare's own gigantic intellect; and this is the open attraction of his Richard, Iago, Edmund, and others in particular. But again; of all intellectual power, that of superiority to the fear of the invisible world is the most dazzling. Its influence is abundantly proved by the one circumstance, that it can bribe us into a voluntary submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all our judgment derived from constant experience, and enable us to peruse with the liveliest interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards, genii, and secret talismans. On this propensity, so deeply rooted in our nature, a specific dramcgatic probability may be raised by a true poet, if the whole of his work be in harmony; a dria-,matic probability, sufficient for dramatic pleasure, even when the component characters and incidents border on impossibility. The poet does not require us to be awake and believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream; and this too with our eyes open, and with our judgment pegrdue behind the curtain, ready to awaken us at the first motion of our will: and meantime, only, not to disbelieve. And in such a state of mind, who but must be impressed with the cool intrepidity of Don John on the appearance of his father's ghost: "GnHosT.-Monster! behold these wounds! D. JoN. —I do! They were well meant and well performed, I see. * [Gerusalemme Liberata. Canto xiii. st. 38, et seq. —S. C.] CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 565 GHOST. -- Repent, repent of all thy villanies. My clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries, Heaven will pour out his judgments on you all. Hell gapes for you, for you each fiend doth call, And hourly waits your unrepenting fall. You with eternal horrors they'll tornlment, Except of all your crimes you suddenly repent. (Ghost sinks.) D. JOHN.-Farewell, thou art a foolish ghost. Repent, quoth he! what could this mean? Our senses are all in a mist, sure. D. ANTONIO.-(one of 1). Juan's reprobate companions.) They are not'Twas a ghost. D. LorPEZ.-(another reprobate.) I ne'er believed those foolish tales before. D. JoHN.-Come!'Tis no matter. Let it be what it will, it must be natural. D. ANT.-And nature is unalterable in us too. D. JOHN. —'Tis true I The nature of a ghost can not change ours." Who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous consistency with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like a second Prometheus? " Chorus of Devils. STATUE-GHOST.-Will you not relent and feel remorse D. JOHN.-Could'st thou bestow another heart on me I might. But with this heart I have, I can not. D. LoPEz.-These things are prodigious. D. ANTON. —I have a sort of grudging to relent, but something holds me back. D. Lor.-If we could,'tis now too late. I will not. D. ANT.-We defy thee! GHosT.-Perish, ye impious wretches, go and find the punishments laid up in store for you! (Thunder and lightning. D. Lop. and D. Ant. are swallowed up.) GHOST to D. JOHN.-Behold their dreadful fates, and know that thy last moment's come! D. JoHN. —Think not to fright me, foolish ghost; I'll break your marble body in pieces and pull down your horse. (T7hunder and lightning-chorus of devils, &c.) D: JoHN.-These things I see with wonder, but no fear. Were all the elements to be confounded, And shuffled all into their former chaos; Were seas of sulphur flaming round about me, And all mankind roaring within those fires, I could not fear, or feel the least remorse. To the last instant I would dare thy power. Here I stand firm, and all thy threats contemn. 566 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Thy murderer (to the ghost of one whoim he had murdered) Stands here! Now do thy worst!" (He is swallowed up in a cloud of fire.) In fine the character of Don John consists in the union of every thing desirable to human nature, as means, and which therefore by the well-known law of association become at length desirable on their own account. On their own account, and, in their own dignity, they are here displayed, as being employed to ends so unhuman, that in the effect, they appear almost as means without an end. The ingredients too are mixed in the happiest proportion, so as to uphold and relieve each other-more especially in that constant interpoise of wit, gaiety and social generosity, which prevents the criminal, even in his most atrocious moments, from sinking into the mere ruffian, as far at least, as our imagination sits in judgment. Above all, the fine suffusion through the whole, with the characteristic manners and feelings of a highly bred gentleman gives life to the drama. Thus having invited the statue-ghost of the governor, whom he had murdered, to supper, which invitation the marble ghost accepted by a nod of the head, Don John has prepared a banquet. " D. JoHN.-Some wine, sirrah! Here's to Don Pedro's ghost-he should have been welcome. D. Lor. —The rascal is afraid of you after death. [ One knocks hard at the door.) D. JOHN. —(to the servant)-Rise and do your duty. " SEav. —Oh the devil, the devil! (Marble ghost enters.) " D. JoIIN.-Ha!'tis the ghost! Let's rise and receive him! Come, Governor, you are welcome, sit there; if we had thought you would have come, we would have stayed for you. Here, Governor, your health! Friends, put it about! Here's excellent meat, taste of this ragout. Come, I'll help you, come eat, and let old quarrels be forgotten. (The Ghost threatens him with vengeance.) D. JoaN.-We are too much confirmed-curse on this dry discourse. Come, here's to your mistress, you had one when you were living: not forgetting your sweet sister. (Devils enter.) D. JoaN. —Are these some of your retinue? Devils, say you? I'm sorry I have no burnt brandy to treat'em with, that's drink fit for devils," &tc. Nor is the scene from which we quote interesting, in dramatic CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 567 probability alone; it is susceptible likewise of a sound moral; of a moral that has more than common claims on the notice of a too numerous class, who are ready to receive the qualities of gentlemanly courage, and scrupulous honor (in all the recognized laws of honor) as the substitutes of virtue, instead of its ornaments. This, indeed, is the moral value of the play at large, and that which places it at a world's distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism. The latter introduces to us clumsy copies of these showy instrumental qualities, in order to r'econcile us to vice and want of principle; while the Atheista Ful.tlminzato presents an exquisite portraiture of the same qualities, in all their gloss and glow, but presents them for the sole purpose of displaying their hollowness, and in order to put us on our guard by demonstrating their utter indifference to vice and virtue, whenever these and the like accomplishments are contemplated for themselves alone. Eighteen years ago I observed, that the whole secret of the modern jacobinical drama (which, and not the German, is its appropriate designation) and of all its popularity, consists in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things in their causes and effects: namely, in the excitement of surprise by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honor (those things rather which pass amongst us for such) in persons and in classes where experience teaches us least to expect them; and by rewarding with all the sympathies which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated firom our esteem. This of itself would lead me back to BERTRAM, or the CASTLE OF ST. ALDOBRLAND; but, in my own mind, this tragedy was * [" Before the tra-.edy of Bertramn was produced at Drury Lane," says a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine of Jan. 1825, " and received with such distinguished approbation, Mr. Maturin was the humble, unknown, and unnoticed Curate of St. Peter's, Dublin." The play was performed through the influence of Lord Byron, who is said to have sent the author ~500 in consequence of an unfavorable review of one of his works-(probably this very critique of Mr. Coleridge's) —with a note, " that he was better qualified to review his reviewers than they him." He gained perhaps more than a thousand pounds by this performance (besides the five hundred which the censure of it procured him). A few months after the success of Bertram he produced a second tragedy, which failed. He had pLblished one or two novels before he becamue famous: in his later years he composed works of 568 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. brought into connection with THE LIBERTINE (Shadwell's adaptation of the Atheista Flminato to the English stage in the reign of Charles the Second) by the fact, that our modern drama is taken, is the substance of it, from the first scene of the third act of THE LIBERTINE. But with what palpable superiority of judgment in the original! Earth and hell, men and spirits are up in arms against Don John; the two former acts of the play have not only prepared us for the supernatural, but accustomed us to the prodigious. It is, therefore, neither more nor less than we anticipate when the Captain exclaims: " In all the dangers I have been, such horrors I never knew. I am quite unmanned:" and when the Hermit says, that he had " beheld the ocean in wildest rage, yet ne'er before saw a storm so dreadful, such horrid flashes of lightning, and such claps of thunder, were never in my remembrance." And Don John's burst of startling impiety is equally intelligible in its motive, as dramatic in its effect. But what is there to account for the prodigy of the tempest at Bertram's shipwreck? It is a mere supernatural effect, without even a hint of any supernatural agency; a prodigy, without any circumstance mentioned that is prodigious; and a miracle introduced without a ground, and ending without a result. Every event and every scene of the play might have taken place as well as if Bertram and his vessel had been driven in by a common hard gale, or from want of provisions. The first act would have indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous picture; a scene for the sake of a scene, without a word spoken; as such, thereromance, which evinced "great powers of imagination and fecundity of language, with lamentable carelessness in the application of both;" and, writing "for money not for fame," drew a " considerable revenue from the sale of his productions." In 1821 he brought out a poem in blank verse called T/e Universe. The writer, from whose account these notices are taken, speaks most highly of Mr. Maturin's merits and popularity as a preacher. "His six controversial sermons," says he, "preached during last Lent, show the author to have been a profound scholar and an acute reasoner; never since Dean Kirwan's time were such crowds attracted to the Parish Church as during the delivery of these sermons; neither rain nor storm could subdue the anxiety of all classes and all persuasions to hear them; and did he leave no other monuments whereon to rest his fame, these sermons alone would be sufficient." The Rev. R. Charles Maturin died Oct. 30, 1824. It was said that Sir Walter Scott offered his editorial services to Mr. Maturin's widow, with respect to somine of his unpublished manuscripts. —S. C.] CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM,. 69 fore (a rarity without a precedent) we must take it, and be thankful! In the opinion of not a few, it was, in every sense of the word, the best scene in the play. I am quite certain it was the most innocent: and the steady, quiet uprightness of the flame of the wax-candles, which the monks held over the roaring billows amid the storm of wind and rain, was really miraculous. The Sicilian sea-coast: a convent of monks: night: a most portentous, unearthly storm: a vessel is wrecked: contrary to all human expectation, one man saves himself by his prodigious powers as a swimmer, aided by the peculiarity of his destination" PRIon. ---- All, all did perishFIRST MONK. —Change, change those drenched weeds — PRIOR.-I wist not of them-every soul did perishEater third lfonAk hastily. TaIRD MONK.-No, there was one did battle with the storm With careless desperate force; fall many times His life was won and lost, as tho' he recked notNo hand did aid him, and he aided noneAlone he breasted the broad wave, alone That man was saved." Well! This man is led in by the monks, supposed dripping wet, and to very natural inquiries he either remains silent, or gives most brief and surly answers, and after three or four of these half-line courtesies, " dashing off the monks" who had saved him, he exclaims in the true sublimity of our modern misanthropic heroism" Off! ye are men-there's poison in your touch. But I must yield, for this" (what?) "hath left me strengthless." So end the three first scenes. In the next (the Castle of St. Aldobrand), we find the servants there equally frightened with this unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms we are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9"PIEr.-Hugo, well met. Does e'en thy age bear Memory of so terrible a storm? HuGo.-They have been frequent lately. PIET -They are ever so in Sicily. HuGo.-So it is said. But storms when I was young Would still pass o'er like Nature's fitful fevers, And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage 570 ]BIOGRAPHIA LITERtARIA. Sent thus unseasonable and profitless, Speaks like the threats of heaven." A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo! and what is very remarkable, not apparently founded on any great familiarity of his own with this troublesome article. For when Pietro asserts the " ever more frequency" of tempests in Sicily, the old man professes to know nothing more of the fact, but by hearsay. " So it is said." —But why he assumed this storm to be unseasonable, and on what he grounded his prophecy (for the storm is still in full fury), that it would be profitless, and without the physical powers common to all other violent seawinds in purifying the atmosphere, we are left in the dark; as well concerning the particular points in which he knew it, during its continuance, to differ from those that he had been acquainted with in his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady Inmogine, who, we learn, had not rested " througlh" the night; not on account of the tempest, for " Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep." Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she informs usFirst, that portrait-painters may male a portrait firom memory"The limner's art may trace the absent feature." For surely these words could never mean, that a painter may have a person sit to him who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the country? Secondly, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the portrait-painter can not, and who shall" Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?" The natural answer would have been-Why the scene-painter, to be sure! But this unreasonable lady requires in addition sundry things to be painted that have neither lines nor colors"The thoughts, the recollections, sweet and bitter, Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved." Which last sentence must be supposed to mean; when they were present, and making love to each other. Then, if' this portrait could speak, it -would " acquit the faith of worankind." -How? Had she remained constant? No, she has been married CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 571 to another -man, whose wife she now is. How then? Why, that, in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to yearn and crave for her former lover"This has her body, that her mind: Which has the better bargain?"* The lover, however, was not contented with this precious arrangement, as we shall soon find. The lady proceeds to inform us, that during the many years of their separation, there have happened in the dififerent parts of the world, a number of " such, t/ings;" even such, as in a course of years always have, and till the Millennium, doubtless always will happen somewhere or other. Yet this passage, both in language and in metre, is perhaps among the best parts of the play. The lady's loved corn-' panion and most esteemed attendant, Clotilda, now enters and explains this love and esteem by proving herself a most passive and dispassionate listener, as well as a brief and lucky querist, who asks by chance, questions that we should have thought made for the very sake of' the answers. In short, she very much reminds us of those puppet-heroines, for whom the showman contrives to dialogue without any skill in ventriloquism. This, notwithstanding, is the best scene in the Play, and though crowded with solecisms, corrupt diction, and olfences against metre, would possess merits sufficient to outweigh them, if we could suspend the moral sense during the perusal. It tells well and passionately the preliminary circumstances, and thus overcomes the main difficulty of most first acts, to wit, that of retrospective narration. It tells us of her having been honorably addressed by a noble youth, of rank and fortune vastly superior to her own: of their mutual love, heightened on her part by gratitude; of his loss of his sovereign's favor; his disgrace; attainder; and flight; that he (thus degraded) sank into a vile ruffian, the chieftain of a murderous banditti; and that from the habitual indulgence of the most reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he had become so changed, even in appearance and features, "That she who bore him had recoiled from him, Nor known the alien visage of her child, Yet still she (Imogine) lov'd him." * [Altered from the last lines of a Song in Congreve's Poems on Several Occasions. Works, vol. ii. p. 168.-S. C.] 5a2 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. She is compelled by the silent entreaties of a father, perishing with " bitter shameful want on the cold earth," to give her hand, with a heart thus irrevocably pre-engaged, to Lord Aldobrand, the enemy of her lover, even to the very man who had baffled his ambitious schemes, and was, at the present time, intrusted with the execution of the sentence of death which had been passed on Bertram. Now, the proof of " woman's love," so industriously held forth for the sympathy, if not the esteem of the audience, consists in this, that, though Bertram had become a robber and a murderer by trade, a ruffian in manners, yea, with form and features at which his own mother could not but I" recoil," yet she (Lady Imogine), " the wife of a most noble, honored Lord," estimable as a man, exemplary and affectionate as a husband, and the fond father of her only child-that she, notwithstanding all this, striking her heart, dares to say to it"But thou art Bertram's still, and Bertram's ever." A Monk now enters, and entreats in his Prior's name for the wonted hospitality, and " free noble usage" of the Castle of St. Aldobrand for some wretched shipwrecked souls, and from this we learn, for the first time, to our infinite surprise, that notwithstanding the supernaturalness of the storm aforesaid, not only Bertram, but the whole of his gang, had been saved, by what means we are left to conjecture, and can only conclude that they had all the same desperate swimming powers, and the same saving destiny as the hero, Bertram himself. So ends the first act, and with it the tale of the events, both those with which the tragedy begins, and those which had occurred previous to the date of its commencement. The second displays Bertram in disturbed sleep, which the Prior,- who hangs over him, prefers calling a " starting trance," and with a strained voice, that would have awakened one of the seven sleepers, observes to the audience"How the lip works! How the bare teeth do grind! And beaded drops course* down his writhen brow!" The dramatic effect of which passage we not only concede to the X -"The big round tears Cours'd one another down his innocent nose In piteous chase,"' 1 [As you like it. Act ii. so. 1.-S. C.] CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 573 admirers of this tragedy, but acknowledge the further advantage of preparing the audience for the most surprising series of wry faces, proflated mouths, and lunatic gestures that were ever "lanched" on an audience to " sear the sense."* "PRIoR.-I will awake him from this horrid trance. This is no natural sleep! Ho, wake thee, stranger!" This is rather a whimsical application of the verb reflex we must confess, though we remember a similar transfer of the agent to the patient in a manuscript tragedy, in which the Bertram of the piece, prostrating a man with a single blow of his fist, exclaims-" Knock me thee down, then ask thee if thou liv'st." Well; the stranger obeys, and whatever his sleep might have. been, his waking was perfectly natural; for lethargy itself could not withstand the scolding Stentorship of Mr. Holland, the Prior We next learn from the best authority, his own confession, that the misanthropic hero, whose destiny was incompatible with drowning, is Count Bertram, who not only reveals his past fortunes, but avows with open atrocity, his Satanic hatred of Imogine's lord, and his frantic thirst of revenge; and so the raving character raves, and the scolding character scolds —and what else? Does not the Prior act? Does he not send for a posse of constables or thief-takers to handcuff the villain, or take him either to Bedlam or NewgaEte? Nothing of the kind; the author preserves the unity of character, and the scolding Prior from first to last does nothing but scold, with the exception indeed of the Says Shakspeare of a wounded stag hanging its head over a stream: naturally, from the position of the head, and most beautifully, from the association of the preceding image, of the chase, in which "the poor sequester'd stag from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt." In the supposed position of Bertram, the metaphor, if not false, loses all the propriety of the original. * Among a number of other instances of words chosen without reason, Imogine in the first act declares, that thunder-storms were not able to intercept her prayers for "the desperate man, in desperate qways who dealt" — "Yea, when the lanched bolt did sear her sense, Her soul's deep orisons were breathed for him;" that is, when a red-hot bolt, lanched at her from a thunder-cloud, had cauterized her sense, in plain English, burnt her eyes out of her head, she kept still praying on.'Was not this love? Yea, thus doth woman love!" 574: BIGGRAPHIA LITERARIA. last scene of the last act, in which, with a most surprising revolution, he whines, weeps, and kneels to the condemned blaspheming assassin out of pure affection to the high-hearted man, the sublimity of whose angel-sin rivals the star-bright apostate (that is, who was as proud as Lucifer, and as wicked as the Devil), and, " had thrilled him" (Prior Holland aforesaid), with wild admiration. Accordingly in the very next scene, we have this tragic Macheath, with his whole gang, in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, without any attempt on the Prior's part either to prevent him, os to put the mistress and servants of the Castle on their guard against their new inmates; though he (the Prior) knew, and confesses that he knew, that Bertram's "' fearful mates" were assassins so habituated and naturalized to guilt, that — "When their drenched hold forsook both gold and gear, They griped their daggers with a murderer's instinct;" and though he also knew, that Bertram was the leader of a band whose trade was blood., To the Castle however he goes, thus with the holy Prior's consent, if not with his assistance; and thither let us follow him. No sooner is our hero safely housed in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, than he attracts the notice of the lady and her confidante, by his " wild and terrible dark eyes," " muffled form," " fearful form,"* " darkly wild," " proudly stern," and the like commonplace indefinites, seasoned by merely verbal antitheses, and at best, copied with very slight change, from the Conrade of Southey's JOAN OF ARC. The lady Imogine, who has been (as is the case, she tells us, with all soft and solemn spirits) worshipping the * This sort of repetition is one of this writer's peculiarities, and there is scarce a page which does not furnish one or more instances-Ex. gr. in the first page or two. Act i. line 7th, "And deemed that I might sleep."-Line 10, "Did rock and quiver in the bickering glare."-Lines' 14, 15, 16, "But by the momently gleams of sheeted blue, Did the pale marbles glare so sternly on me, I almost deemed they lived."-Line 37, "The glare of Hell." -Line 35, "0 holy Prior, this is no earthly storm." —Line 38, "This is no earthly storm." —Line 42, " Dealing with us."-Line 43, " Deal thus sternly." -Line 44, " Speak! thou hast something seen?'-" A fearful sight!"-Line 45, "What hast thou seen? A piteous,fearful sight."-Line 48," Quivering gleams."-Line 50, "In the hollow pauses of the storm." —Line 61, "The pauses of the storm, &c." CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 575 moon on a terrace or rampart within view of the Castle, insists on having an interview with our hero, and this too tete-J-tete. Would the reader learn why and wherefore the confidante is excluded, who very properly remonstrates against such " conference, alone, at night, with one who bears such fearful form;" the reason follows —" why, therefore send him!" I say, follows, because the next line, "all things of fear have lost their power over me," is separated from the former by a break or pause, and besides that it is a very poor answer to the danger, is no answer at all to the gross indelicacy of this wilful exposure. We must therefore regard it as a mere after-thought, that a little softens the rudeness, but adds nothing to the weight, of that exquisite woman's reason aforesaid. And so exit Clotilda and enter Bertram, who " stands without looking at her," that is, with his lower limbs forked, his arms ahimbo, his side to the lady's front, the whole figure resembling an inverted Y. He is soon however roused from the state frantic, and then follow raving, yelling, cursing, she fainting, he relenting, in runs Imogine's child, squeaks "mother!" He snatches it up, and with a " God bless thee, child! Bertram has kissed thy child,"-the curtain drops. The third act is short, and short be our account of it. It introduces Lord St. Aldobrand on his road homeward, and next Imogine in the convent, confessing the foulness of her heart to the Prior, who first indulges his old humor with a fit of senseless scolding, then leaves her alone with her ruffian paramour, with whom she makes at once an infamous appointment, and the curtain drops, that it may be carried into act and consummation. I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with which I witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind. The shocking spirit of jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. The familiarity with atrocious events and characters appeared to have poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorganized the moral principles, and left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants. The very fact then present to our senses, that a British audience could remain passive under such an insult to common decency, nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a human being supposed to have come. reeking from the consummation of this complex foulness and baseness, these and the like t;V6:BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. reflections so pressed as with the weight of lead upon my heart, that actor, author, and tragedy would hlave been forgotten, had it not been for a plain elderly man sitting beside me, who, with a very serious face, that at once expressed surprise and aversion, touched my elbow, and, pointing to the actor, said to me in a half-whisper —" Do you see that little fellow there? he has just been committing adultery!" Somewhat relieved by the laugh which this droll address occasioned, I forced back my attention to the stage sufficiently to learn, that Bertram is recovered from a transient fit of remorse by the information, that St. Aldobrand was commissioned (to do, what every honest man must have done without commission, if he did his duty) to seize him and deliver him to the just vengeance of the law; an information which (as he had loing known himself to be an attainted traitor and proclaimed outlaw, and not only a trader in blood himself, but notoriously the Captain of a gang of thieves, pirates and assassins), assuredly could not have been new to him. It is this, however, which alone and instantly restores him to his accustomed state of raving, blasphemy, and nonsense. Next follows Imogine's constrained interview with her injured husband, and his sudden departure again, all in love and kindness, in order to attend the feast of St. Anselmn at the convent. This was, it must be owned, a very strange engagement for so tender a husband to make within a few minutes after so long an absence. But first his lady has told him that she has " a vow on her," and wishes "that black perdition may gulf her perjured soul,"-(Note: she is lying at the very time)-if she ascends his bed, till her penance is accomplished. How, therefore, is the poor husband to amuse himself in this interval of her penance? But do not be distressed, reader, on account of the St. Aldobrand's absence As the author has contrived to send him out of the house, when a husband would be in his, and the lover's way, so he will doubtless not be at a loss to bring him back again as soon as he is wanted. Well! the husband gone in on the one side, out pops the lover from the other, and for the fiendish purpose of harrowing up the soul of his wretched accomplice in guilt, by announcing to her, with most brutal and blasphemous execrations, his fixed and deliberate resolve to assassinate her husband; all this too is for no discoverable purpose on the part of the author, but that of introducing a series of super-tragic starts, pauses, screams, CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 577 struggling, dagger-throwing, falling on the ground, starting up again wildly, swearing, outcries for help, falling again on the ground, rising again, faintly tottering towards the door, and, to end the scene, a most convenient fainting fit of our lady's, just in time to give Bertram an opportunity of seeking the object of his hatred, before she alarms the house, which indeed she has had full time to have done before, but that the author rather chose she should amuse herself and the audience by the above-described ravings and startings. She recovers slowly, and to her enter Clotilda, the confidante and mother-confessor; then commences, what in theatrical language is called the madness, but which the author more accurately entitles, delirium, it appearing indeed a sort of intermittent fever with fits of light-headedness off and on, whenever occasion and stage effect happen to call for it. A convenient return of the storm (we told the reader beforehand how it would be), had changed"The rivulet, that bathed the convent walls, Into a foaming flood: upon its brink The Lord and his small train do stand appalled. With torch and bell fronm their high battlements The monks do summon to the pass in vain; He must return to-night." — Talk of the Devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb: and sure enough, within ten lines of the exit of the messenger, sent to stop him, the arrival of Lord St. Aldobrand is announced. Bertram's ruffian band now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh cause for Imogine's screams and madness. St. Aldobrand, having received his mortal wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die at the feet of this double-damned adultress. Of her, as far as she is concerned in this fourth act, we have two additional points to notice: first, the low cunning and Jesuitical trick with which she deludes her husband into words of forgiveness, which he himself does not understand; and secondly, that everywhere she is made the object of interest and sympathy, and it is not the author's fault, if, at any moment, she excites feelings less gentle, than those we are accustomed to associate with the self-accusations of a sincere religious penitent. And did a British audience endure all this?-They received it with plaudits, which, but for the rivalry of the carts and hackney coaches, VOL. III. 2 B 5'78 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. might have disturbed the evening prayers of scanty week-day congregation at St. Paul's cathedral. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Of the fifth act, the only thing noticeable (for rant and nonsense, though abundant as ever, have long before the last act become things of course) is the profane representation of the high altar in a chapel, with all the vessels and other preparations for the holy sacrament. A hymn is actually sung on the stage by the chorister boys! For the rest, Imogine, who now and then talks deliriously, but who is always light-headed as far as her gown and hair' can make her so, wanders about in dark woods with cavern-rocks and precipices in the back-scene; and a number of mute dranzatis personce move in and out continually, for whose presence, there is always at least this reason, that they afford something to be seen, by that very large part of a Drury Lane audience who have small chance of hearcing a word. She had, it appears, taken her child with her, but what becomes of the child, whether she murdered it or not, nobody can tell, nobody can learn; it was a riddle at the representation, and after a most attentive perusal of the Play, a riddle it remains. " No more I know, I wish I did, And I would tell it all to you; For what became of this poor child There's none that ever knew."' Our whole informationt is derived from the following words — " PaIoR.-Where is thy child? CLOTIL.-(Pointing to the cavern into which she has looked) Oh he lies cold within his cavern-tomb! Why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme? PaioR.-(who will not, the reader may observe, be disappointed of his dose of scolding) It was to make (query wake) one living cord o' th' heart, And I will try, the' my own breaks at it. Where is thy child? IMOG.-(with afrantic laugh) * (Wordsworth's Thorn, P. W. ii. p. 131.-S. C.] F The child is an important personage, for I see not by what possible means the author could have ended the second and third acts but for its timely appearance. How ungrateful then not further to notice its fate I CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 679 The forest fiend hath snatched himHe (who? the fiend or the child?) rides the night-mare thro' the wizard woods." Now these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism from the counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear, who, in imitation of the gipsy incantations, puns on the old word mair, a hag; and the no less senseless adoption of Dryden's forest fiend,* and the wizard stream by which Milton, in his Lycidas, so finely characterizes the spreading Deva, fabulosus amnis.l Observe too these images stand unique in the speeches of Imogine, without the slightest resemblance to any thing she says before or after. But we are weary. The characters in this act frisk about, here, there, and everywhere, as teasingly as the Jack o'Lantern-lights which mischievous boys, from across a narrow street, throw with a lookingglass on the faces of their opposite neighbors. Bertram disarmed, out-heroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces the collected knights of St. Anselm (all in complete armor), and so, by pure dint of black looks, he outdares them into passive poltroons. The sudden revolution in the Prior's manners we have before noticed, and it is indeed so ozutrS, that a number of the audience imagined a great secret was to come out, viz.: that the Prior was one of the many instances of a youthful sinner metamorphosed into an old scold, and that this Bertram would appear at last to be his son. Imogine re-appears at the convent, and dies of her own accord. Bertram stabs himself, and dies by her side, and that the play may conclude as it began, to wit, in a superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, because he had snatched a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in terror when it is pointed -towards him in sport; this felo de se, and thief-captain-this loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and cowardly assassination,-this monster, whose best deed is, the having saved his betters from the degradation of hanging him, by turning Jack Ketch to himself; first recommends the charitable Monks and holy Prior to pray for his soul, and then has the folly and impudence to exclaim — " I die no felon's death, A warrior's weapon freed a warrior's soul 1"* [Theodore and Honoria. —S. C.] f 1" Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream." i. 55.-S. C.] 680 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. [Great displeasure was excited among the patrons of Mr. Maturin by this review of his tragedy, and to those who deemed such a production worthy of patronage it must naturally have appeared an unwarrantable piece of violence. I have even heard a friend of Mr. Coleridge object to it., not as unjust, but as having been called forth by an occasion unworthy to occupy his thoughts. For my own part, I feel some dislike to the literary censures which accompany the moral exposure, because I think they tend to weaken its effect:-though a corrupt taste is often so intricated with a corrupt morality that it is difficult to exhibit either separately;-the moral exposure itself I do not consider unworthy of one, who never wanted generosity to point out what was noble and admirable, at the risk of throwing his own performances into shade, and who never lacked courage openly to denounce what he knew to be wrong and injurious,-especially in his own province of literature,-by which the public might be affected. It appears in the Life of Sir Walter Scott, that a fierce attack upon Mr. Coleridge, in consequence of these strictures, had been prepared by the author of Bertram, and that this -was suppressed by the advice of the author of Waverley, who admonished his- correspondent, that the world might not sympathize with his indignation to the extent in which he had poured it forth; and also that it might injure the effect of his forthcoming romance, into some part of which the tirade had been introduced-that such an outburst of rage in such a place would be like a stream of lava rushing from the side of a peaceful green hill. Some of the hills which were raised in those days by writers of the Satanic school would have been little the worse for a volcanic eruption,-so flamy and sulphureous were they in their own nature. This, from Sir Walter's description, must have been of a milder sort. As far as Mr. Coleridge was concerned, he could not have been materially the worse had one more fiery libel, designed for the blasting of his credit, been sent off to whiz and blaze and burn blue for a moment. Could Mr. Maturin have justified his play? Could he have washed it white in its moral complexion a Any thing to that effect ought not to have been suppressed. Whether the Public would have sympathized with his natural anger I know not, but of this I am sure, that he could not have blackened my father's reputation as a writer with the unprejudiced part of it, or on any point in which the Public had any concern. But in default of other weapons of adequate force Mr. Maturin may have snatched up in his haste the dagger of personality; indeed it may be conjectured that he did so, because, Sir Walter Scott, in a spirit of conciliation, alludes to Mr. Coleridge's bad habits. At that very time my father was taking measures and making efforts to break the chain of those habits; he had never abandoned himself wholly to their effects, but had still striven, in one way or other, to labor usefully to the public and profitably for his family, to whose use he had devoted the annuity spoken of in these pages. Could the noble-hearted man, who thus aided him, have looked into the future and there beheld all that his friend was to do in his vocation, and all that his doing would be really worth, he would, I am confident, have been well satisfied with this disposal of a part of his worldly wealth, though CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 581 the performance might not have been exactly in the form that he anticipated. Did any private fallt disqualify my father for pronouncing censures on what he considered to be public wrongs committed, whether blindly or no, yet deliberately? Thoughtful persons will rather say that his strong sense of evil and fearless denunciation of it, from whatever quarter it came, whether from Statesman or Judge or Reviewer, Imperial Despot or popular Dramatist, together with his free confession of what he called his " sin," and earnest endeavor to save others from falling into the same snare by the darkest representation of its nature and consequences, go a great way toward expiating that error of his course, so far as aught of expiation can be imputed to the humnan will itself, apart from the Redemptive power by which it is filled and actuated, in all that it does and is, in conformity to the Divine Will and Reason. The unworthy thoughts which Lord Byron entertained on this subject, unworthy of his own better mind, found no entrance, I trust, into that of Sir Walter Scott, whether he was or was not aware of the warm admiration which my father felt and expressed for his genius, attended as the fruits of it had been, by a popularity and a success unspeakably more enviable than any that was enjoyed by the author of [Bertram. The critique lays to the charge of the play a spirit of immorality, not in the way of direct inculcation, but in the only way in which a modern British audience would have endured it, the only way in which it could have been insidiously pernicious. Now this is a charge that could have no effect except just so far as it was substantiated by the play itself and the moral sense of its auditors. When a man is accused publicly of private faults he may find it painful and difficult to clear away the cloud from his character; he must unveil his private life in order to justify it, and such a necessity is in itself a grievance. If his poetry is ridiculed it may be made the laughingstock of the public for a season, though destined to be held in esteem ever after; if his religious writings are accused of false doctrine on subtle points, -and all theology is subtle,-he may have to bear the stigma of heresy during his whole life-time: Pantheism, Pelagianism, Socinianism, denial of Objective Religion or of the Inspiration of Scripture-all these fundamental errors may be plausibly though falsely imputed, and the accusations will, in certain cases, be more readily and generally admitted than the defence, because grounded on ordinary and popular modes of thought and expression, while the accused views presuppose a corrected and re-adjusted philosophy. But the charge against Bertram had nothing subtle in the nature of it, and the sentiments which it involves have since been adopted and brought to bear on the French stage in the Quarterly Review.* Englishmen have denounced the French dramatists for polluting the public mind by a stimulant display of atrocities and vilenesses "in all their odious details," though they admit such things to be abominable, and show that the end of them is destruction; shall they shelter and encourage any approachl to such Jacobinism in literature at home? "We do not forget," says the article on the French Drama to which I refer, "that crime and the * [Quarterly Review of March, 1834, p. 211.] 582 3BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. worst cause (sort?) of crime, has been in all ages the domain of tragedy. We do not forget the families of Atreus and Laius, and the whole tribe of mythological and historical tragedies, in all languages-but most of these inculcate moral lessons-none of them offend decency-none of them inf ame criminal passions." The distinction between the ancient dramas and the vicious modern class, which my father stigmatized, is clear and broad. In the former guilty passion is not the immediate subject of the piece, or that in which the auditors are to be interested, but the consequences and punishment of criminal acts. They do not deal with low emotions at all, much less present them to advantage. They represent sin, not as it appears to the sinner in its rise and progress, its true lineaments and colors lost amid the glow of excited feeling; but as it appears after its consummation, livid, ghastly, and appalling. Sin seemed beautiful to Lucifer, when she was bringing about his fall; hideous and detestable after his fall, when he finds her at Hellgate and fails to recognize her features. The ancient drama presents her in the latter aspcct,-not as she showed herself in the courts above. In the Orestean trilogy we are led to regard with awful interest the workings of Divine retribution; we sympathize with Clytemnestra not as the paramour of.zEgisthus, who seems only the tool of her stern designs, but as the avenger of the bloody sacrifice of a child; we sympathize with Orestes as the avenger of a father's murder. (Edipns and Jocasta are the victims of fate; to the latter not one light feeling or evil passion is imputed; and it is impossible to conceive a more dignified demeanor under humiliating circumstances than is assigned her in the play of Sophocles. We are interested for the former because his misfortunes exceed the measure of his crimes, so far as they were voluntary. In the Medea of Euripides it is the just punishment of Jason to which attention is directed; the Sorceress appears an avenging Fury in human form. These ancient dramas are staid and solemn in their procedure; they present to the mind awfully significant events, stern thoughts, and elevating reflections; they have no tendency to enervate and lower the tone of feeling. The corrupt drama, on the other hand, exhibits what is essentially base in a form as interesting as it can be made to assume; things in themselves "rank and gross," mean and contemptible, it arrays in a glittering veil of sentiment; its power consists in the force with which it appeals to the lowest and most easily excitable parts of man's nature. How far this injurious character is fairly imputable to the play of Bertram readers will judge for themselves. That the author erred, if it be admitted that he did err, unconsciously, and considered his choice of subject to be quite within the legitimate range of tragedy, and justified by precedent, may be easily conceived; that he had talents, both as a writer and a man, is not impugned either by the critique itself or these remarks upon it.-S. C.] CHAPTER XXIV. CONCLUSION. IT sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by incidents, in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this I have always felt the severest punishment. The wound indeed is of the same dimensions; but the edges are jagged, and there is a dull underpain that survives the smart which it had aggravated. For there is always a consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense of a proportion between antecedents and consequents. The sense of Before and After becomes both intelligible and intellectual when, and only when, we contemplate the succession in the relations of Cause and Effect, which, like the two poles of the magnet, manifest the being and unity of the one power by relative opposites, and give, as it were, a su6stratum of permanence, of identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy flux of Time. It is Eternity revealing itself in the phcenomena of Time: and the perception and acknowledgment of the proportionality and appropriateness of the Present to the Past, prove to the afflicted Soul, that it has not yet been deprived of the sight of God, that it can still recognize the effective presence of a Father, though through a darkened glass and a turbid atmosphere, though of a Father that is chastising it. And for this cause, doubtless, are we so framed in mind, and even so organized in brain and nerve, that all confusion is painful. It is within the experience of many medical practitioners, that a patient, with strange and unusual symptoms of disease, has been more distressed in mind, more wretched, from the fact of being unintelligible to himself and others, than from the pain or danger of the disease: nay, that the patient has received the most solid comfort, and resumed a genial and enduring cheerfulness, from some new symptom or product, that had at once determined the name and nature of his complaint, and rendered it an intelligible effect of an in 5t84 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. telligible cause: even though the discovery did at the same moment preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the mystic theologians, whose delusions we may more confidently hope to separate from their actual intuitions, when we condescend to read their works without the presumption that whatever our fancy (always the ape, and too often the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory) has not made or can not make a picture of, must be nonsense,- hence, I say, the Mystics have joined in representing the state of the reprobate spirits as a dreadful dream in which there is no sense of reality, not even of the pangs they are enduring-an eternity without time, and as it were below it-God present without manifestation of his presence. But these are depths, which we dare not linger over. Let us turn to an instance more on a level with the ordinary sympathies of mankind. Here then, and in this same healing influence of Lig'ht and distinct Beholding, we may detect the final cause of that instinct which, in the great majority of instances, leads, and almost compels the Afflicted to communicate their sorrows. Hence too flows the alleviation that results fiiom " opening out our griefs:" which are thus presented in distinguislhable forms instead of the mist, through which whatever is shapeless becomes magnified and (literally) enormwous. Casimir, in the fifth Ode of his third Book. has happily' expressed this thought. HlMe longus silendi Edit amor, facilesque luctus Hausit medullas. Fugerit ocyus, Simul negantem visere jusseris Aures amicorum, et loquacem Questibus evacuaris iram. * Classically. too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy of the modern, that still striving to project the inward, contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease -wNith which the poetry of the ancients refects the world without. Casirnir affords, perhaps, the most striking instance of this characteristic difference. —For his style and diction, are really classical: while Cowley, who resembles Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his Latinity, and even his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts. That Dr. Johnson should have passed a contrary judgment, and have even preferred Cowley's Latin Poems to Mlilton's, is a caprice that has, if I mistake not, excited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused last summer with the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet perused a page of Cowley's Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm with which he first ran through, and then read aloud, Milton's WMansus and Ad Patrein. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 185; Olim querendo desinimus queri, Ipsoque fletu lacryma perditur: Nee fortis* seque, si per omnes Cura volat residetque ramos. Vires amicis perdit in auribus, Minorque semper dividitur dolor, Per multa permissus vagari Pectora.I shall not make this an excuse, however, for troubling my readers with any complaints or explanations, with which, as readers, they have little or no concern. It may suffice (for the present at least) to declare, that the causes that have delayed the publication of these volumes for so long a period after they had been printed off, were not connected with any neglect of my own; and that they would form an instructive comment on the chapter concerning authorship as a tr'ade, addressed to young men of genius in the first volume of this work. I remember the ludicrous effect produced on my mind by the first sentence of an auto-biography, which, happily for the writer, was as meagre in incidents as it is well possible for the life of an individual to be —" The eventful life which I am about to record, from the hour in which I rose into existence on this planet, &c." Yet when, notwithstanding this warning example of self-importance before me, I review my own life, I can not refrain from applying the same epithet to it, and with more than ordinary emphasis-and no private feeling, that affected myself only, should prevent me from pzubfishing the same (for vwrite it I assuredly shall, should life and leisure be granted me), if continued reflection should strengthen my present belief, that my history would add its contingent to the enforcement of one important truth, to wit, that we must not only love our neighbors as ourselves, but ourselves likewise as our neighbors; and that we can do neither unless we love God above both. Who lives, that's not Depraved or depraves? Who dies, that bears Not one spurn to the grave —of theirfriends' gift?f * Flectit, or if the metre had allowed, premit would have supported the metaphor better. f [Timon of Athens. Act i. sc. ii. "Their graves" in Shakspeaxe.S. C.] 2 B* 586 3BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Strange as the delusion may appear, yet it is most true, that three years ago I did not know or believe that I had an enemy in the world: and now even my strongest sensations of gratitude are mingled with fear, and I reproach myself for being too often disposed to ask,-Have I one friend?-During the many years which intervened between the composition and the publication of the CHRISTABEL, it became almost as well known among literary men as if it had been on common sale; the same references were made to it, and the same liberties taken with it, even to the very names of the imaginary persons in the poem. From almost all of our most celebrated poets, and from some with whom I had no personal acquaintance, I either received or heard of expressions of admiration that (I can truly say) appeared to myself utterly disproportionate to a work, that pretended to be nothing more than a common Fairy Tale. Many, who had allowed no merit to my other poems, whether printed or manuscript, and who have frankly told me as much, uniformly made an exception in favor of the CHRLISTABEL and the poem entitled LOVE. Year after year, and in societies of the most different kinds, I had been entreated to recite it: and the result was still the same in all, and altogether different in this respect from the effect produced by the occasional recitation of any other poems I had composed. -'This before the publication. And since then, with very few exceptions, I have heard nothing but abuse, and this too in a spirit of bitterness at least as disproportionate to the pretensions of the poem, had it been the most pitiably below mediocrity, as the previous eulogies, and far more inexplicable. This may serve as a warning to authors, that in their calculations on the probable reception of a poem, they must subtract to a large amount from the panegyric, which may have encouraged them to publish it, however unsuspicious and however various the sources of this panegyric may have been. And, first, allowances must be made for private enmity, of the very existence of which they had perhaps entertained no suspicion-for personal enmity behind the mask of anonymous criticism; secondly for the necessity of a certain proportion of abuse and ridicule in a Review, in order to make it salable, in consequence of which, if they have no friends behind the scenes, the chance must needs be against them; but lastly and chiefly, for the excitement and temporary sympathy of feeling, which the recitation of the poem by an admirer, especially if he be at once BIOGRAPIHIA LITERARIA. 587 a warm admirer and a man of acknowledged celebrity, calls forth in the audience. For this is really a species of animal magnetism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual comment of looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to his auditors. They live for the time within the dilated sphere of his intellectual being. It is equally possible, though not equally common, that a reader left to himself should sink below the poem, as that the poem left to itself should flag beneath the feelings of the reader.-But, in my own instance, I had the additional misfortune of having been gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics, and worse than all, to a system incomparably nearer to the visionary flights of Plato, and even to the jargon of the Mystics, than to the established tenets of Locke. Whatever therefore appeared with my name was condemned beforehand, as predestined metaphysics. In a dramatic poem, which had been submitted by me to a gentleman of great influence in the theatrical world, occurred the following passage:" O we are querulous creatures! Little less Than all things can suffice to make us happy: And little more than nothing is enough To make us wretched." Aye, here now! (exclaimed the critic) here come Coleridge's nzetaphysics And the very same motive (that is, not that the lines were unfit for the present state of our immense theatres; but that they were mzetaphysicst) was assigned elsewhere for the rejection of the two following passages. The first is spoken in answer to a usurper, who had rested his plea on the circumstance, that he had been chosen by the acclamations of.the people."What people How convened? or, if convened, Must not the magic power that charms together Millions of men in council, needs have power * [Coleridge's Poetical Works, p. 414.-S. C.] t Poor unlucky Metaphysics! and what are they? A single sentence expresses the object, and thereby the contents of this science. rv.i.O aeavrov:.Nosce te ipsum, Tuque Deum, quantum licet, inque Deo omnia, noscas. Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to a creature, and in God all things.-Surely, there is a strange-nay, rather a too natural-aversion in many to know themselves. 588 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. To win or wield them? Rather, 0 far rather Shout forth thy titles to yon circling mountains, And with a thousand-fold reverberation Make the rocks flatter thee, and the volleying air, Unbribed, shout back to thee, King Emerick! By wholesome laws to embank the sovereign power, To deepen by restraint, and by prevention Of lawless will to amass and guide the flood In its majestic channel, as man's task And the true patriot's glory! In all else Men safelier trust to Heaven, than to themselves When least themselves: even in those whirling crowds Where folly is contagious, and too oft Even wise men leave their better sense at home, To chide and wonder at them, when returned." The second passage is in the mouth of an old and experienced courtier, betrayed by the man in whom he had most trusted. "And yet Sarolta, simple, inexperienced, Could see him as he was, and often warned me. Whence learned she this?-O she was innocent! And to be innocent is Nature's wisdom! The fledge-dove knows the prowlers of the air, Feared soon as seen, and flutters back to shelter. And the young steed recoils upon his haunches, The never-yet-seen adder's hiss first heard. O surer than suspicion's hundred eyes Is that fine sense, which to the pure in heart, By mere oppugnancy of their own goodness, Reveals the approach of evil."j As therefore my character as a writer could not easily be more injured by an overt act than it was already in consequence of the report, I published a work, a large portion of which was professedly metaphysical. A long delay occurred between its first annunciation and its appearance; it was reviewed therefore by anticipation with a malignity, so avowedly and exclusively personal, as is, I believe, unprecedented even in the present contempt of all common humanity that disgraces and endangers the liberty of the press.i After its appearance, the author of this [Coleridge's Poetical Works, p. 403.-S. C.] f [Ib. p. 450.-S. C.]: [Political Essays by William Hazlitt, p. 118 et seq. " It may be proper to notice," says a note to the Essay on the Lay Sermon, "that this article was written before the Discourse, which it professes to criticize, had appeared in print." There is some wit in this libel caricature: it is unlike BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 589 lampoon undertook to review it in the Edinburgh Review; and under the single condition, that he should have written what he himself really thought, and have criticized the work as he would have done had its author been indifferent to him, I should have chosen that man myself, both from the vigor and the originality those portraits of my Father, scrawled in the dark, by enemies, who had no sense of his character and genius; but looks like a minute study from life curiously distorted in every part, and with every distortion enormously magnified. Many of these distortions are injurious falsehoods: as for instance. " IIe takes his notions of religion from the'sublime piety' of Gliordano Bruno, and considers a belief in God as a very subordinate question to the worship of the three persons of the Trinity. The Thirty-nine Articles and Athanasius's creed are, upon the same principle, much more fundamental parts of the Christian religion than the miracles or Gospel of Christ. He makes the essence of devotion to consist in Atheism, the perfection of morality in a total disregard of consequences. He defines Jacobinism to be an abstract attachment to liberty, truth, and justice; and finding that this principle has been abused and carried to excess, he argues that Anti-Jacobinism, or the abstract principles of despotism, superstition, and oppression, are the safe, sure, and undeniable remedy for the former, and the only means of restoring liberty, truth, and justice in the world." (The italics are mine.) Any one who compares this rhapsody and the review of the Lay Sermon after its appearance, in the Political Essays, with the article on that production in the Edinburgh Review, must see that they are by the same hand; only that the Scorner of the Edinboro' is a degree more cold, hard, and unrelenting, than the lampooner of the Essays: to the latter, " even as it is," S. T. Coleridge "hardly appears Less than arch-angel ruined and the excess Of glory obscured;" -the former keeps his glory well muffled up in clouds of affected contempt and genuine political hatred: yet it beams through a little in spite of him, and such abuse is more complimentary than many a panegyric. The review of Christabel (two sentences relating to the supposed authorship of which are removed from the text) shows its political animus at the end. After declaring that the poem exhibits " not a ray of genius," that no other productions of the Lake school, except the White Doe and some of the laureate odes, is so devoid of any "gleam of feeling or of fancy," the writer indignantly exclaims, "Must we then be doomed to hear such a mixture of raving and driv'ling, extolled as the work of a' wild and original genius,' simply because Mr. 0. has now and then written fine verses, and a brother poet chooses, in his milder mood, to laud him from courtesy or from interest 8 Are such panegyrics to be echoed by the mean tools of a political faction, because they relate to one whose daily prose is understood to be dedicated to the support of all that courtiers think should be supported?" 590 BIOGRAPtHIA LITERARIA. of his mind, and from his particular acuteness in speculative reasoning, before all others. —I remembered Catullus's lines, Desine de quoquamn quicquam bene velle mereri, Aut aliquem fieri posse putare plum. Omnia sunt ingrata: nihil fecisse benigne est: Immo, etiam taedet, tadet obestque mlagis; Ut mihi, quem nemo gravius nee acerbius urget, Quam modo qui me unum atque unicum amicum habuit. But I can truly say, that the grief with which I read this rhapsody of predetermined insult, had the rhapsodist himself for its whole and sole object.* Who the partisans were that exerted themselves to cram my Father's nonsense and bad poetry "down the throats of all the loyal and well affected," it would be hard to discover, And much like Samson's riddle, in one day Or seven, though one should musing sit. Many a fierce article may be taken for an ordinary wild ass of criticism, till it lifts up the beak and claws of the political satirist, and thus shows itself to be a sort of hippogriff.-S. C.] * " Mr. Coleridge's Description of a Green Field," [With these words the Edinburgh Reviewer announces and holds up to ridicule the following passage from the notes to the Lay Sermon. After the quotation he concludes with: "This will do. It is well observed by Hobbes, that'it is by words only that a man becometh excellently wise or excellently foolish.'" "I have at this moment before me, in the flowery meadow, on which my eye is now reposing, one of its most soothing chapters, in which there is no lamenting word, no one character of guilt or anguish. For never can I look and meditate on the vegetable creation without a feeling similar to that with which we gaze at a beautiful infant that has fed itself asleep at its mother's bosom, and smiles in its strange dream of obscure yet happy sensations. The same tender and genial pleasure takes possession of me, and this pleasure is checked and drawn inward by the like aching melancholy, by the same whispered remonstrance, and made restless by a similar impulse of aspiration. It seems as if the soul said to herself: From this state hast thou fallen! Such shouldst thou still become, thy self all permeable to a holier power! thy self at once hidden and glorified by its own transparency, as the accidental and dividuous in this quiet and harmonious object is subjected to the life and light of nature; to that life and light of nature, I say, which shines in every plant and flower, even as the transmitted power, love and wisdom of God over all fills, and shines through, nature! But what the plant is by an act not its own and unconsciouslythat must thou make thyself to become-must by prayer and by a watch BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 591 * Z x # -* * I refer to this review at present in consequence of information having been given me, that the innuendo of my "potential infidelity," grounded on one passage of my first Lay Sermon, has been received and propagated with a degree of credence, of which I can safely acquit the originator of the calumny. I give the sentences as they:stand in the sermon, premising only that I was speaking exclusively of miracles worked for the outward senses of niren. " It was only to overthrow the usurpation exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were miraculously appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE. The natural sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he calls up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapors of the night-season, and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its own purification; not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to prevent its interception." "' Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances co-exist with the same moral causes, the principles revealed,- and the examples recorded, in the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous; and if we neglect to apply truths in expectation of wonders, or under ful and unresisting spirit, join at least with the preventive and assisting grace to make thyself, in that light of conscience which infliameth not, and with that knowledge which puffeth not up!" pp. 267-8.-ed. 1839. I can- not help thinking how Mr. Hazlitt (if Mri. C. was right in ascribing the review of the Lay Sermon in the Edinburgh Review to his pen) must have smiled to himself, as he thus concluded his article, at the anticipated gullibility of his readers, who, if the Northern Oracle had cried out in derision at the Cupid of Praxiteles, would straightway have begun to throw stones at the statue. For he in his heart admired, as he has eloquently described, the poetic fervor of my Father's mind,: so characteristically: displayed in this excerpt, which seems to me as emblematic of the soft, rich, radiant imagination of its author as the red-hot cones of the city of Dis are emblematic of the fiery genius of Dante. And in him only the will was wanting to appreciate the sense of the passage; for surely it conveys sound sense, as trite poetry ever does, and teaches the highest doctrine of the spirit in language not unworthy of such a theme. True enough it is that by words a man becometh excellently wise or excellently foolish; and perhaps there is no one thing in which the power:of folly in words is more thoroughly manifested, than in that sort of designing.shallowness and clever, crafty superficiality, assumed for the sake of sneering depreciation, and even of insidious defamation, of which this review of the Lay Sermon is a notable specimen.-S. C.] 592 BIOOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. pretext of the cessation of the latter, we tempt God, and merit the same reply which our Lord gave to the Pharisees on a like occasion."* In the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the necessity of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted. " The testimony of books of history (that is, relatively to the signs and wonders, with which Christ came) is one of the strong and statelypillars of the church; but it is not the foundation!."t Instead, therefore, of defending myself, which I could easily effect by a series of passages, expressing the same opinion, from the Fathers and the most eminent Protestant Divines, from the Reformation to the Revolution, I shall merely state what my belief is, concerning the true evidences of Christianity. 1. Its consistency with right Reason, I consider as the outer court of the temple-the common area, within which it stands. 2. The miracles, with and through which that Religion was first revealed and attested, I regard as the steps, the vestibule, and the portal of the temple. 3. The sense, the inward feeling, in the soul of each believer of its exceeding desirableness-the experience, that he needs something, joined with the strong foretokening, that the redemption and the graces propounded to us in Christ are what he needs-this I hold to be the true foundation of the spiritual Edifice. With the strong c priori probability that flows in from 1 and 3 on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man can refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. But, 4, it is the experience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions of the Gospel —it is the opening eye; the dawning light; the terrors and the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving God as God, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of attaining to either without Christ; it is the sorrow that still rises up from beneath, and the consolation that meets it from above; the bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare and the exceeding faithfulness and long-suffering of the uninterested ally;-in a word, it is the actual trial of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is the completing key-stone. In order to an efficient belief in Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argu* [First Lay Sermon, I. pp. 441, 442.-S. C.] 1 [Note A, to first L. S., I. p. 471.-S. C.] B3IOGRAPIIIIA LITER tARIA. 593 mentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths, to every subject not presentable under the forms of Time and Space, as long as we attempt to master by the reflex acts of the Understanding what we can only know by the act of 6ecoming. IDo the will of my Fathler, and ye shall know whether I am of God.* These four evidences I believe to have been and still to be, for the world, for the whole Church, all necessary, all equally necessary: but at present, and for the majority of Christians born in Christian countries, I believe the third and the fourth evidences to be the most operative, not as superseding but as involving a glad, undoubting faith in the two former. C}redidi, ideoque intellexi, appears to me the dictate equally of Philosophy and Religion, even as I believe Redemption to be the antecedent of Sanctification, and not its consequent. All spiritual predicates may be construed indifferently as modes of Action or as states of Being. Thus Holiness and Blessedness are the same idea, now seen in relation to act and now to existence. The ready belief which has been yielded to the slander of my " potential infidelity," I attribute in part to the openness with which I have avowed my doubts, whether the heavy interdict, under which the name of Benedict Spinoza lies, is merited on the whole or to the whole extent. Be this as it may, I wish, however, that I could find in the books of philosophy, theoretical or moral, which are alone recommended to the present students of theology in our established schools, a few passages as thoroughly Pauline, as completely accordant with the doctrines of the Established Church, as the following sentences in the concluding page of Spinoza's Ethics. Deinde quo mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine magis gaudet, eo plus intelligit, hoc est, eo mnajorem in acffectus habet potentiam, et eo minus ab affectibus, qui mali sunt, patitur; atque adeo ex eo, quod mnens hoc amore divino, se, beatitudine gaudet, potestaten, habet libidines, codrcendi; et quia humana potentia ad co&rcendos afNectus in solo intellectu consistit; ergo nemo beatitudine gaudet, quia affectus coercuit, sed contra potestas li6idines codrcendi ex ipsa beatitudine oritur-.t With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted that I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For how should I know, what the piety of the heart may be, or what * [John vii. 17.-S. C.] I [Ethices Pars v. De Libertate umnana.-S. C.] 594 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. quanturm of error in the understanding may consist with a saving faith in the intentions and actual dispositions of the whole moral being in any one individual? Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves him: be his speculative opinions what they may: and whether in any given instance certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief; are compatible with a sincere love of God, God can only know.-But this I have said, and shall continue to say: that if the doctrines, the sum of which I believe to constitute the truth in Christ, be Christianity, then Unitarianism is not, and vice versa: and that, in speaking theologically and impersonally, i. e. of Psilanthropism and Theanthropism as schemes of belief, without reference to individuals, who profess either the one or the other, it will be absurd to use a different language as long as it is the dictate of common sense, that two opposites can not properly be called by the same name. I should feel no offence if a Unitarian applied the same to me, any more than if he were to say, that two and two being four, four and four must be eight. dcbZxa pporSv rov uyv KceveSopovec aZixat ef dyatOv fia2ov' rov 6' a Kavrt/e/araeurvr' ayav c XvOv oiKe)csv,rapE aaev rcadl)v, XEtpiOf EtaCOv wrtaCC6, Ovyt8 aro70poC E&v.* This has been my object, and this alone can be my defenceand 0! that with this my personal as well as my LITERARa LIFE might conclude!-the unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having earnestly endeavored to kindle young minds, and to guard them against the temptations of scorners, by showing that the scheme of Christianity, as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our Church, though not discoverable by human reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the day softens away into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the darkness. It is night, sacred night! the upraised eye views only the starry heaven which manifests itself alone: and the outward beholding is fixed * [Pindar, Nem. Carm. xi. 1. 87.-S. C.] BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 595 on the sparks twinkling in the awful depth, though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the soul steady and collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from eternity to eternity, whose choral echo is the universe. OEJ2c MONJSe aO1T$A. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT TO THE BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. BY THE LATE H. N. COLERIDGE, ESQ., M.A. CHAPTER I. [1772 to 1791.] While here, thou fed'st upon ethereal beams, As if thou had'st not a terrestrial birth;Beyond material objects was thy sight; In the clouds woven was thy lucid robe! Alt! woho can tell how little for this sphere That frame was fitted of empy-real fire!* SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was the youngest child of the Reverend John Coleridge, Chaplain-Priest and Vicar of the Parish of Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devon, and Master of the Free Grammar, or King's School, as it is called, founded by Henry VIII. in that town. His mother's maiden name was Ann Bowdon. He was born at Ottery on the 21st of October, 1772, "about eleven o'clock in the forenoon," as his father, the Vicar, has, with rather unusual particularity, entered it in the register. John Coleridge, who was born in 1719, and finished his education at Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge,t was a country clergyman and schoolmaster of no ordinary kind. He was a good Greek and Latin scholar, a profound Hebraist, and, according to the measure of his day, an accomplished mathematician. He was on terms of literary friendship with Samuel Badcock, and, by his knowledge of Hebrew, rendered material assistance to Dr. Kennicott, in his well-known critical works. Some curious papers on theological and antiquarian subjects appear with his signature in the early numbers of The Gentleman's Magazine, between the years 1745 and 1780; almost all of * [From a Sonnet To Coleridge by Sir Egerton Bridges-written 16th Feb. 1837.-S. C.] t [He was matriculated at Sidney a sizar on the 18th of March, 1748, but does not appear to have taken any degree at the University.-S. C 600 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. which have been inserted in the interesting volumes of Selections made several years ago from that work. In 1768 he published miscellaneous Dissertations arising from the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges; in which a very learned and ingenious attempt is made to relieve the character of Mb]icah from the charge of idolatry ordinarily brought against it; and in 1772 appeared a "Critical Latin Grammar," which his son called " his best work," and which is not wholly unknown even now to the inquisitive by the proposed substitution of the terms " prior, possessive, attributive, posterior, interjective, and quale-quare-quidditive," for the vulgar names of the cases. This little Grammar, however, deserves a philologer's perusal, and is indeed in many respects a very valuable work in its kind. He also published a Latin Exercise Book, and a Sermon. His school was celebrated, and most of the country gentlemen of that generation, belonging to the south and east parts of Devon, had been his pupils. Judge Buller was one. The amiable character and personal eccentricities of this excellent mlan are not yet forgotten amongst some of the elders of the parish and neighborhood, and the latter, as is usual in such cases, have been greatly exaggerated. He died suddenly in the month of October, 1781, after riding to Ottery from Plymouth, to which latter place le had gone for the purpose of embarking his son Francis, as a midshipman, for India. Many years afterwards, in 1797, S. T. Coleridge commenced a series of Letters to his friend Thomas Poole, of Nether Stowey, in the county of Somerset, in which he proposed to give an account of his life up to that time. Five only were written, and unfortunately they stop short of his residence at Cambridge. This series will properly find a place here. TO MR. POOLE. "M ]Y DEAR POOLE, "I coild inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book. Let him relate the events of his own life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them. I never yet read even a Methodist's'Experience' in the Gospel Magazine without receiving instruction and amusement; and I should almost despair of that man who cotild peruse the Life of John Woolman without an amelioration of heart. As to my Life, it has all the charms of variety,-high life and low life, vices and virtues, great folly and: some wavisdom. However, what I am depends on what I have been; and you, my best friend, have a right to the narration. To me the task will be a useful one. It will renew and deepen my reflections on the past; and it will perhaps make you behold with no unforgiving BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 601 or impatient eye those weaknesses and defects in my character, which so many untoward circumstances.have concurred in planting there. " My family on my MBother's side can be traced up, I know not how far. The Bowdons inherited a good farm and house thereon in the Exinoor country, in the reign of Elizabeth, as I have been told; and to my knowledge they have inherited nothing better since that time. My Grandfather was in the reign of George I. a considerable woollen trader in Southmolton; so that I suppose, when the time comes, I shall be allowed to pass as a Sans-culotte without much opposition. My Father received a better education than the rest of his family in consequence of his own exertions, not of his superior advantages. When he was not quite sixteen years of age, my Grandfather, by a series of misfortunes, was reduced to great distress. My Father received the half of his last crown and his blessing, and walked off to seek his fortune. After he had proceeded a few miles, he sate him down on the side of the road, so overwhelmed with painful thoughts that he wept audibly. A gentleman passed by who knew him, and, inquiring into his sorrow, took him home and gave him the means of maintaining himself by placing him in a school. At this time he commenced being a severe and ardent student. He married his first wife by whom he had three daughters, all now alive. While his first wife lived, having scraped up money enough, he at the age of twenty walked to Cambridge, entered himself at Sidney College, distinguished himself in Hebrew and Mathematics, and might have had a fellowship if he had not been married. lie returned and settled as a schoolmaster in Southampton, where his wife died. In 1760 he was appointed Chaplain-Priest and Master of the School at Ottery St. Mary, and removed to that place; and in August, 1760, Mr. Buller, the father of the present Judge, procured for him the living from Lord Chancellor Bathurst. By my Mother, his second wife, he had ten children, of whom I am the youngest, born October 20th,* 1772. "These facts I received from my Mother; but I am utterly unable to fill them up by any further particulars of times, or places, or names. Here I shalt conclude my first Letter, because I can not pledge myself for the accuracy of the accounts, and I will not therefore mingle it with that for the truth of which, in the muin-atest parts, I shall hold myself responsible. You must regard this Letter as a first chapter devoted to dim traditions of times too remote to be pierced by the eye of investigation. " Yours affectionately, "Feb. 1797. Monday. "S. T. COLERIDGE." * A mistake. V6L. III. 2 C 602 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. I. TO MR. POOLE. "MY DEAR POOLE, "My Father (Vicar of, and Schoolmaster at, Ottery St. Mary, Devon) was a good mathematician, and well versed in the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew languages. He published, or rather attempted to publish, several works:-1st, Miscellaneous Dissertations arising from the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges; 2d, Sententice Excerptce, for the use of his own School; and 3d, his best work, a Critical Latin Grammar, in the Preface to which he proposes a bold innovation in the names of the cases. My Father's new nomenclature was not likely to become popular, although it must be allowed to be both sonorous and expressive. Exemzpli gratica, he calls the ablative case'the quare-quale-quidditive case!' Hie made the world his confidant with respect to his learning and ingenuity, and the world seems to have kept the secret very faithfully. His various works, uncut, unthumbed, were preserved friee friom all pollution in the family archives, where they may still be for any thing that I know. This piece of good luck promises to be hereditary; for all my compositions have the same amiable home-staying propensity. The truth is, my Father was not a first-rate genius; he was, however, a first-rate Christian, which is much better. I need not detain you with his character. In learning, good-heartedness, absentness of mind, and excessive ignorance of the world, he was a perfect Parson Adams. "My Mother was an admirable economist, and managed exclusively. My eldest brother's name was John. He was a Captain in the East India Company's service; a successful officer aad a brave one, as I have heard. -He died in India in 1786. My second brother, William, went to Pernbroke College, Oxford. He died a clergyman in 1780, just on the eve of his intended marriage. My brother James has been in the army since the age of fifteen, and has married a woman of fortune, one of the old Dule famlily of' Otterton in Devon. Edward, the wit of the family, went to Pembroke College, and is now a clergyman. George also went to Pembroke. He is in orders likewise, and now has the same School, a very flourishing one, which my Father had. He is a man of reflective mind and elegant talent. He possesses learning in a greater degree than any of the family, excepting myself. His manners are grave, and hued over with a tender sadness. In his moral character he approaches every way nearer to perfection than any man I ever yet knew. HIe is worth us all. Luke Herman was a surgeon, a severe student, and a good man. He died in 1790, leav BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 603 ing one child, a lovely boy, still alive.* My only sister, Ann, died at twenty-one, a little after my brother Luke:Rest, gentle Shade! and wait thy Maker's will; Then rise unchang'd, and be an angel still! Francis-Syndercombe went out to India as a midshipman, under Admiral Graves. tHe accidentally met his brother John on board ship abroad, who took him ashore, and procured him a commission in the Company's army. He died in 1792, aged twenty-one, a Lieutenant, in consequence of a fever brought on by excessive fatigue at and after the siege of Seringapatam, and the storming of a hill fort, during all which his conduct had been so gallant that his Commanding Officer particularly noticed him, and presented him with a gold watch, which my Mother now has. All my brothers are remarkably handsome; but they were as inferior to Francis as I am to them. He went by the name of' the handsome Coleridge.' The tenth and last child was Samuel Taylor, the subject and author of these Epistles. " From October, 1772 to October, 1773. Baptized Samuel Taylor, my Godfather's name being Samuel Taylor, Esquire. I had another called Evans, and two Godmothers, both named MAlunday. "From October, 1773 to October, 1774. In this year I was carelessly left by my nurse, ran to the fire, and pulled out a live coal, and burned myself dreadfully. While my hand was being drest by Ir. Young, I spoke for the first time (so my Mother informs me) and said, "Nasty Dr. Young!" The snatching at fire, and the circumstance of my first words expressing hatred to professional men-are they at all ominous? This year I went to school. My Schoolmistress, the very image of Shenstone's, was named Old Dame Key. She was nearly related to Sir Joshua Reynolds. " From October, 1774 to 1775. I was inoculated; which I mention, because I distinctly remember it, and that my eyes were bound; at which I manifested so much obstinate indignation, that at last they removed the bandage, and unaffrighted I looked at the lancet, and suffered the scratch. At the close of this year I could read a chapter in the Bible. " Here I shall end, because the remaining years of my life all assisted to form my particular mind;-the first three years had nothing in them that seems to relate to it.:" God bless you and your sincere "Sunday, March, 1797." " S. T. COLERoDGE." A letter from Francis S. Coleridge to his sister has been preserved * William Hart Coleridge, the present Bishop of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands. [He was appointed to that See in 1824, retired from it in 184'2; has lately accepted the Wardenship of St. Augustine's College, Canterbury.-S. C.] 604 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. in the family, in which a particular account is given of the chance meeting of the two brothers in India, mentioned shortly in the preceding Letter. There is something so touching and romantic in the incident that the Reader will, it is hoped, pardon the insertion of the original narrative here. "DEAR NANCY, "You are very right, I have neglected my absent friends, but do not think I have forgot them, and indeed it would be ungrateful in me if I did not write to them. "You may be sure, Nancy, I thank Providence for bringing about that meeting, which has been. the cause of all my good fortune and happiness, which I now in fulness enjoy. It was an affectionate meeting, and I will inform you of the particulars. There was in our ship one Captain AMordaunt, who had been in India before, when we came to Bombay. Finding a number of his friends there he went often ashore. The day before the Fleet sailed he desired one Captain Welsh to go aboard with him, who was an intimate friend of your brother's. "I will," said Welsh, "and will write a note to Coleridge to go with us." Upon this Captain Afordaunt, recollecting me. said there was a young midshipman, a favorite of Captain Hicks, of that name on board. Upon that they agreed to inform my brother of it, which they (lid soon aftel, and all three came on board. I was then in the lower deck, and, though you won't believe it, I was sitting on a gun and thinking of my brother, that is, whether I should ever see or hear any thing of him; when seeing a Lieutenant, who had been sent to inform me of my brother's being on board, I got up off the gun: but instead of telling me about my brother, he told me that Captain Hicks was very angry with me, and wanted to see me. Captain Hicks had always been a Father to me, andloved me as if I had been his own child. I therefore went up shaking like an aspen leaf to the Lieutenant's apartments, when a gentleman took hold of my hand. I did not mind him at first, but looked round for the Captain; but the gentleiman still holding my hand, I looked, and what was my surprise, when I saw him too full to speak, and his eyes full of tears. Whether crying is catching I know not, but I began a crying too, though I did not know the reason, till he caught me in his arms, and told me he was my brother, and then I found I was paying nature her tribute, for I believe I never cried so much in my life. There is a saying in Robinson Crusoe, I remember very well, viz.-sudden joy, like grief, confounds at first. We directly went ashore, having got my discharge, and having took a most affectionate leave of Captain Hicks, I left the ship for good and all." " My situation in the army is that I am one of the oldest Ensigns, and before you get this must in all probability be a Lieutenant. How BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 605 many changes there have been in my life, and what lucky ones they have been, and how young I am still! I must be seven years older before I can properly style myself a man, and what a number of officers do I command, who are old enough to be my Father already!"' * * * * * III. TO MR. POOLE. "( MY DEAIEST POOLE, Octo7er 9th, 1797. " From March to October-a long silence! But it is possible that I may have been preparing materials for future Letters, and the time can not be considered as altogether subtracted from you. "From October, 1775, to October, 1778. These three years I continued at the Reading School, because I was too little to be trusted among my Father's school-boys. After breakfast I had a halfpenny given me, with which I bought three cakes at the baker's shop close by the school of my old mistress; and these were my dinner every day except Saturday and Sunday, when I used to dine at home, and wallowed in a beef and pudding dinner. I am remarkably fond of beans and bacon: and this fondness I attribute to my Father's giving me a penny for having eaten a large quantity of beans on Saturday. For the other boys did not like them, and, as it was an economic food, my Father thought my attachment to it ought to be encouraged. He was very fond of me, and I was my Mother's darling: in consequence whereof I was very miserable. For Molly, who had nursed my brother Francis, and was immoderately fond of him, hated me because my Mother took more notice of me than of Frank; and Frank hated me because my Mother gave me now and then a bit of cake when he had none,-quite forgetting that for one bit of cake which I had, and he had not, he had twenty sops in the pan, and pieces of bread and butter, with sugar on them, from Molly, from whom I received only thumps and ill names. "So I became fretful, and timorous, and a tell-tale; and the schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me. And hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly. I read through all gilt-cover little books that could be had at that time, and likewise all the uncovered tales of Tom Hickathrift, Jack the Giant-Killer, and the like. And I used to lie by the wall, and mope; and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, and in a flood; —and then I was accustomed to run up and down the churchyard, and act over again all I had been reading on the docks, the nettles, and the rank grass. At six years of age I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarles; and then I found the Arabian 606 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Nights' Entertainments, one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin), made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening, while my mother was at her needle), that I was haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark: and I distinctly recollect the anxious and fearful eagerness, with which I used to watch the window where the book lay, and when the sun came upon it, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read. My father found out the effect which these books had produced, and burned them. " So I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity; and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate; and as I could not play at any thing, and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys: and because I could read and spell, and had, I maty truly say, a memory and understanding forced into almost unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was a character. Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were even then prominent and manifest. " From October, 1778, to 1779. That which I began to be from three to six, I continued to be from six to nine. In this year I was admitted into the Grammar School, and soon outstripped all of my age. I had a dangerous putrid fever this year. My brother George lay ill of the same fever in the next room. My poor brother, Francis, I remember, stole up in spite of orders to the contrary, and sat by my bedside, and read Pope's Homer to me. Frank had a violent love of beating me; but whenever that was superseded by any humor or circumstances, he was always very fond of me, and used to regard me with a strange mixture of admiration and contempt. Strange it was not, for he had books, and loved climbing, fighting, playing, and robbing orchards, to distraction. "M y Mother relates a story of me, which I repeat here, because it must be reckoned as my first piece of wit.-During my fever, I asked why Lady Northcote, our neighbor, did not come and see me. My Mother said she was afraid of catching the fever. I was piqued, and answered,' Ah! Mamma! the four Angels round my bed a'n't afraid of catching it!' I suppose you know the old prayer:-' Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Bless the bed that I lie on!Four good Angels round me spread, Two at my feet and two at my head.' This prayer I said nightly, and most firmly believed the truth of it. Frequently have I (half-awake and half-asleep; my body diseased, BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 607 and fevered by my imagination)-seen armies of ugly things bursting in upon me, and these four Angels keeping them off. " In my next I shall carry on my life to my Father's death. "God bless you, my dear Poole, i' And your affectionate, " S. T. COLERIDGE." In a note written in after-life Mr. Coleridge speaks of this period of his life in the following terms: "Being the youngest child, I possibly inherited the weakly state of health of my Father, who died, at the age of sixty-two, before I had reached my ninth year; and from certain jealousies of old Molly, my brother Frank's dotingly fond nurse —and if ever child by beauty and loveliness deserved to be doted on, my brother Francis was that child-and by the infusion of her jealousies into my brother's mind, I was in earliest childhood huffed away from the enjoyments of muscular activity in play, to take refuge at my Mother's side on my little stool, to read my little book, and to listen to the talk of my elders. I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation. I never played except by myself, and then only acted over what I had been reading or fancying, or half one, half the other, with a stick cutting down weeds and nettles, as one of the'Seven champions of Christendom.' Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the child's habits. I never thought as a child, never had the language of a child." IV. TO MR. POOLE. " DEAR POOLE, "From October, 1779, to 1781. I had asked my Mother one evening to cut my cheese entire, so that I might toast it. This was no easy matter, it being a crumbly cheese. My Mother, however, did it. I went into the garden for something or other, and in the mean time my brother Frank minced my cheese, to' disappoint the favorite.' I returned, saw the exploit, and in an agony of passion flew at Frank. He pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow, flung himself on the ground, and there lay with outstretched limbs. I hung over him mourning and in a great fright; he leaped up, and with a horse-laugh gave me a severe blow in the face. I seized a knife, and was running at him, when my mother came in and took me by the arm. I expected a flogging, and, struggling from her, I ran away to a little hill or slope, at the bottom of which the Otter flows, about a mile from Ottery. There I stayed; my rage died away, but my ob 608 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. stinacy vanquished my fears, aud taking out a shilling book, which had at the end morning and evening prayers, I very devoutly repeated them-thinking at the same time with a gloomy inward satisfaction-how miserable my MIother must be! I distinctly remember my feelings, when I saw a Mr. Vaughan pass over the bridge at about a furlong's distance, and how T watched the calves in the fields beyond the river. It grew dark, and I fell asleep. It was towards the end of October, and it proved a stormy night. I felt the cold in my sleep, and dreamed that I was pulling the blanket over me, and actually pulled over me a dry thorn-bush which lay on the ground near me. In my sleep I had rolled friom the top of the hill till within three yards of the river, which flowed by the unfenced edge of the bottom. I awoke several times, and finding myself wet, and cold, and stiff, closed my eyes again that I might forget it. " In the mean time Iy imMother waited about half an hour, expecting my return when the szulks had evaporated. I not returning, she sent into the churchyard, and round the town. Not found! Several men and all the boys were sent out to ramble about and seek me. In vain! MIy Mother was almost distracted; and at ten o'clock at night I was cried by the crier in Ottery, and in two villages near it, with a reward offered for me. No one went to bed; —indeed I believe half the town were up all the night. To return to -myself. About five in the morning, or a little after, I was biroad awvake,.an(1d attempted to get up, and walk; but I could not move. I saw the shepherds and workmen at a distance, and cried, but so faintly, that it was impossible to hear me thirty yards off. And thlere I might have lain and died;-for I was now almost given over, the ponds and even the river, near which I was lying, having been drag'ged. But providentially Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all nig-lt, resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that lhe heard me crying. He carried me in his arms for nearly a quarter of a mile, when we met my father and Sir Stafford Northcote's servants. I remember, and shall never forget, my Father's face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant's arms-so calmn, and the tears stealing down his face; for I was the child of his old age. MAy Mrother, as you may suppose, was outrageous with joy. Mleantime in rushed a young lady, crying out-' I hope you'll whip him, Mrs. Coleridge.' This woman still lives at Ottery; and neither philosophy nor religion has been able to conquer the antipathy which I feel towards her, whenever I see her. I was put to bed, and recovered in a day or so. But I was certainly injured; for I was weakly and subject to agile for many years after. "My Father-who had so little parental ambition in him, that, but for my mother's pride and spirit, he would certainly have brought up his other sons to trades-had nevertheless resolved that I should be a parson. I read every book that came in my way without distinc BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 609 tion; and my Father was fond of me, and used to take me on his knee, and hold long conversations with me. I remember, when eight years old, walking with him one winter evening from a farmer's house, a mile from Ottery; and he then told me the names of the stars, and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world, and that the other twinkling stars were suns that had worlds rolling round them; and when I came home, lie showed me how they rolled round. I heard him with a profound delight and admiration, but without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of fairy tales and about genii, and the like, my mind had been habituated to the Vast; and I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Ou ght children to be permitted to read romances and stories of giants, magicians, and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole. Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess. They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little, and the universe to them is but a mass of little things. It is true, the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former method;-but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favor? I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became a blank, and they saw nothing, and denied that any thing could be seen, and uniformly put the negative of a power for the possession of a power, and called the want of imagination judgment, and the never being moved to rapture philosophy. "Towards the latter end of September, 1781, my Father went to Plymouth with my brother Francis, who was to go out as midshipman under Admiral Graves, who was a friend of my Father's. He settled Frank as he wished, and returned on the 4th of October, 1781. He arrived at Exeter about six o'clock, and was pressed to take a bed there by the friendly family of the Harts; but he refused; and to avoid their entreaties he told them that he had never been superstitious, but that the night before he had had a dream, which had made a deep impression on him. He dreamed that Death had appeared to him, as he is commonly painted, and had touched him with his dart. Well, he returned home; and all his family, I excepted, were up. He told my Mother his dream; but he was in high health and good spirits; and there was a bowl of punch made, and my 610 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Father gave a long and particular account of his travel, and that he had placed Frank under a religious Captain, and so forth. At length he went to bed, very well and in high spirits. A short time after he had lain down, he complained of a pain in his bowels, to which he was subject, from wind. My Mother got him some peppermint water, which he took, and after a pause, he said,' I am much better now, my dear!'-and lay down again. In a minute my Mother heard a noise in his throat, and spoke to him, but he did not answer; and she spoke repeatedly in vain. Her shriek awaked me, and I said-' Papa is dead!' I did not know my Father's return; but I knew that he was expected. IHow I came to think of his death, I can not tell; but so it was. Dead he was. Some said it was gout in the heart;probably it was a fit of apoplexy. He was an Israelite without guile, simple, generous, and, taking solme Scripture texts in their literal sense, he was conscientiously indifferent to the good and the evil of this world. God love you and "S. T. COLERIDGE!" He was buried at Ottery on the 10th of October, 1781. " O! that I might so pass away," said Coleridge, thirty years afterwards, "if, like him, I were an Israelite without guile! The image of my Father, my revered, kind, learned, simple-hearted Father is a religion to me." At his Father's death Coleridge was nearly nine years old. He continued with his Mother at Ottery till the spring of 1782, when he was sent to London to wait the appointed time for admission into Christ's Hospital, to which a presentation had been procured from Mr. John Way through the influence of his father's old pupil Sir Francis Buller. Ten weeks he lived in London with an Uncle, and was entered in the books on the 8th of July, 1782. V. TO MR. POOLE. "From October, 1781 to October, 1782. After the death of my Father, we, of course, changed houses, and I remained with my Mother till the spring of 1782, and was a day scholar to Parson Warren, my Father's successor. He was not very deep, I believe; and I used to delight my poor Mother by relating little instances of his deficiency in grammar knowledge-every detraction from his merits seeming an oblation to the memory of my Father, especially as Warren did certainly pulpitize much better. Somewhere I think about April, 1782, Judge Buller, who had been educated by my Father, sent for me, having procured a Christ's Hospital presentation. I accordingly went to London, and was received and entertained by my BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 611 Mother's brother, Mr. Bowdon. He was generous as the air, and a man of very considerable talents, but he was fond, as others have been, of his bottle. He received me with great affection, and I stayed ten weeks at his house, during which I went occasionally to Judge Buller's. My Uncle was very proud of me, and used to carry me from coffee-house to coffee-house, and tavern to tavern, where I drank, and talked, and disputed as if I had been a man. Nothing was more common than for a large party to exclaim in my hearing, that I was a prodigy, and so forth; so that while I remained at my Uncle's, I was most completely spoilt and pampered, both mind and body. "At length the time came, and I donned the blue coat and yellow stockings, and was sent down to Hertford, a town twenty miles from London, where there are about three hundred of the younger Bluecoat boys. At Hertford I was very happy on the whole, for I had plenty to eat and drink, and we had pudding and vegetables almost every day. I remained there six weeks, and then was drafted up to the great school in London, where I arrived in September, 1782, and was placed in the second ward, then called Jefferies' Ward, and in the Under Grammar School. There are twelve walrds, or dormitories, of unequal sizes, beside the sick ward, in the great school; and they contained altogether seven hundred boys, of whom I think nearly one third were the sons of clergymen. There are five schools,-mathematical, grammar, drawing, reading, and writing-all very large buildings. When a boy is admitted, if lie reads very badly, he is either sent to Hertford, or to the reading school. Boys are admissible from seven to twelve years of age. If lie learns to read tolerably well before nine, he is drafted into the Lower Grammar School, if not, into the Writing School, as having given proof of unfitness for classical studies. If, before he is eleven, he climbs up to the first form of the Lower Grammar School, he is drafted into the Head Grammar School. If not, at eleven years of age, he is sent into the Writing School, where he continues till fourteen or fifteen, and is then either apprenticed or articled as a clerk, or whatever else his turn of mind or of fortune shall have provided for him. Two or three times a year the Mathematical Master beats up for recruits for the King's boys, as they are called; and all, who like the navy, are drafted into the Mathematical and Drawing Schools, where they continue till sixteen or seventeen years of age, and go out as midshipmen, and schoolmasters in the Navy. The boys who are drafted into the Head Grammar School, remain there till thirteen; and then, if not chosen for the University, go into the Writing School. " Each dormitory has a nurse or matron, and there is a head matron to superintend all these nurses. The boys were, when I was admitted, under excessive subordination to each other according to rank in school; and every ward was governed by four Monitors,-appointed 612 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. by the Steward, who was the supreme governor out of schoolour temporal lord, —and by four IMarkers, who wore silver medals, and were appointed by the head Grammar Master, who was our supreme spiritual lord. The same boys were commonly both Monitors and Markers. We read in classes on Sundays to our [Markers, and were catechized by them, and under their sole authority during prayers, &c. All other authority was in the Monitors; but, as I said, the same boys were ordinarily both the one and the other. Our diet was very scanty. Every morning a bit of dry bread and some bad small beer. Every evening a larger piece of bread, and cheese or butter, whichever we liked. For ldinner,-on Sunday, boiled beef and broth; Mlonday, bread and butter, and milk and water; Tuesday, roast mutton; Wednesday, bread and butter, and rice milk; Thursday, boiled beef and broth; Friday, boiled mutton and broth; Saturday, bread and butter, and pease-porridge. Our food was portioned; and, excepting on Wednesdays, I never had a belly full. Our appetites were damped, never satisfied; and we had no vegetables." "S. T. CoLERIDGE." "0! what a change!" he writes in another note; "depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved; at that time the portion of food to the Blue-coats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them." And he afterwards says: — When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my birth-place and family, at the death of my dear Father, whose revered image has ever survived in my mind to lmakle ime know what the emotions and affections of a son are, and how ill a father's place is likely to be supplied by any other relation, Providence (it has often occurred to me) gave me the first intimation that it was my lot, and that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a detached individual, a terrce.filiss, who was to ask love or service of no one on any more specific relation than that of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free charities of humianity." Coleridge continued eight years at Christ's Hospital. It was a very curious and important part of his life, giving him Bowyer for his teacher, and Lamb for his friend.* Numerous retrospective notices by himself and others exist of this period; but none of his really boyish letters have been preserved. The exquisite Essay intituled, " Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty years ago,"t by Lamb, is principally founded on that delightful writer's recollections of the boy Coleridge, and that boy's own subsequent descriptions of his school-days. Coleridge is Lamb's " poor friendless boy."-" My parents and those who * [See note at the end of the chapter.-S. C.] t Prose Works ii. p. 26. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 613 should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough; and, one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates. O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have toward it in those unfledged years! How, in my dreams would my native town, far in the west, come back with its church, its trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire i" Yet it must not be supposed that Coleridge was an unhappy boy. He was naturally of a joyous temperament, and in one amusement, swimming, he excelled and took singular delight. Indeed he believed, and probably with truth, that his health was seriously injured by his excess in bathing, coupled with such tricks as swimming across the New River in his clothes, and drying them on his back, and the like. But reading was a perpetual feast to him. "From eight to fourteen," he writes, "I was a playless day-dreamer, a helluo libro~rtv, my appetite for which was indulged by a singular incident; a stranger, who was struck by my conversation, made me free of a circulating library in King-street, Cheapside."-" Here," he proceeds, "I read through the catalogue, folios and all, whether I understood them, or did not understand them, running all risks in skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to have daily. Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual low fever. MAy whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read-fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of plum-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs —hunger and fancy!"-" My talents and superiority," he continues, "made me forever at the head in my routine of study, though utterly without the desire to be so; without a spark of ambition; and as to emulation, it had no meaning for me; but the difference between me and my form-fellows, in our lessons and exercises, bore no proportion to the measureless difference between me and them in the wide, wild wilderness of useless, unarranged book knowledge and book thoughts. Thank Heaven! it was not the age for getting up prodigies; but at twelve or fourteen I should have made as pretty a juvenile prodigy as was ever emasculated and ruined by fond and idle wonderlnent. Thank Heaven! I was flogged instead of being flattered. However, as I climbed up the school, my lot was somewhat alleviated." 614 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. "' Chlrist's Hospital gave him Lamb for his friend," p. 612. A few particulars of this " most remarkable and amiable man," the well-known author of Essays by Elia, Rosamund Gray, Poems, and other worlks, will interest most readers of the Biographia. He was born on the 18th of February, 1775, in the Inner Temple; died 27th December, 1834, about five months after his friend Coleridge, who continued in habits of intimacy with him from their first acquaintance till his death in July of the same year. In " one of the most exquisite of all the Essays of Elia," The Old Benchers of the JIiddle Temple (Works, vol. ii. p. 188), Lamb has given the characters of his father, and.of his father's master, Samuel Salt. The few touches descriptive of this gentleman's "unrelenting bachelorhood"-which aprpears in the sequel to have been a persistent mournerhood-and the forty years' hopeless passion of mild Susan P.-which very permanence redeems and almost dignifies-is in the author's sweetest vein of mingled humor and pathos, wherein the latter, as the stronger ingredient, predominates. Mr. Lamb never married, for, as is recorded in the Memoir, " on the death of his parents he felt himself called upon by duty to repay to his sister* the solicitude with which she had watched over his infancy. To her, from the age of twenty-one, he devoted his existence, seeking thenceforth no connection which could interfere with her supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain or to comfort her." Mr. Coleridge speaks of Miss Lamb, to whom he continued greatly attached, in these verses, addressed to her brother: " Cheerily, dear Charles! Thou thy best friend shalt cherish many a year; Such warm presages feel I of high hope! For not uninterested the dear maid I've viewed-her soul affectionate yet wise, Her polished wit as mild as lambent glories That play around a sainted infant's head." Mr. Lamb has himself described his dear and only sister, whose proper name is Mary Anne, under the title of " Cousin Bridget," in the Essay called Mackery End, a continuation of that entitled JMy Relations, in Which he has drawn the portrait of his elder brother. " Bridget Elia," so he commences the former, "has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that l, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy."-(Works, vol. ii. p. 171.) He describes her intellectual tastes in this essay, but does not refer to her literary abilities. She wrote Mrs. Leicester's School, which Mr. C. used warmly to praise for delicacy of taste and tenderness of feeling. Miss Lamb still survives, in the words of Mr. Talfourd, "to mourn the severance of a life-long association, as free from every alloy of selfishiness, as remarkable for moral beauty, as this world ever witnessed in brother and sister." I have felt desirous to place in relief, as far as might be, such an interesting union-to show how blest a fraternal marriage may be, and what sufficient helpmates a brother and sister have been to each other. Marriages of this kind would perhaps be more frequent but for the want of some pledge or solid warranty of continuance equivalent to that which rivets wedlock between husband and wife. Without the vow and the bond, formal or virtual, no society, from the least to the greatest, will hold together. Many persons are so constituted that they can not feel rest or satisfaction of spirit without a single supreme object of tender affection, in whose heart they are conscious of holding a like supremacy,-who has common hopes, loves, and interests with themselves. Without this the breezes do not refiresh nor the sunbeams gladden them. A share in ever so many kind hearts does not " A word Timidly uttered, for she lives, the meek, The self restraining, the ever kind." From Mr. Wordsworth's memorial poem to her brother. P. W. v. p. 333. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 615 suffice to their happiness; they must have the whole of one, as no one else has any part of it, whatever love of another kind that heart may still reserve for others. There is no reason why a brother and sister might not be to each other this second-self-this dearer half-though such an attachment is beyond mere fraternal love, and must have something in it " of choice and election," superadded to the natural tie: but it is seldom found to exist, because the durable cement is wanting-the sense of security and permanence, without which the body of affection can not be consolidated, nor the heart commit itself to its whole capacity of emotion. I believe that many a brother and sister spend their days in uncongenial wedlock, or in a restless, faintly expectant-singlehood, who might form a " comfortable couple" could they but make up their minds early to take each other for better for worse. Two other poems of Mr. C. besides the one in which his sister is mentioned, are addressed to Mr. Lamb-This Linmetree-bower my Priso7, and the lines To a Friend, who had declared his intention of writing no more Poetry. (Poet. Works, p. 155. & p. 157.) In a letter to the author (Letters, i. p. 150), Lamb inveighs against the soft epithet applied to him in the first of these. He hoped his " virtues had done sucking" —and declared such praise fit only to be a " cordial to some green-sick sonnetteer." Yes! they wander on In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad, My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pilled And hungered after nature, many a year, In the great city pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul through evil and pain And strlnge calamity. In the next poem he is called "wild-eyed boy." The two epithets, "wild-eyed" and " gentle-hearted," will recall Charles Lamb to the minds of all who knew him personally. Mr. Talfourd seems to think that the special delight ill the country, ascribed to him by my father, was a distinction scarcely merited. I rather imagine that his indifference to it was a sotrt of " mock apparel" in which it was his humor at times to invest himself, I have been told that, when visiting the Lakes, he took as much delight in the natural beauties of the region as might be expected friom a man of his taste and sensibility.* Mr. Coleridge's expression, recorded in the Table Talk, that he "looked on the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, that shines and takes no pollution," partly alludes to that tolerance of moral evil, both in men and books, which was so much remarked in Charles Lamb, and was, in so good a man, really remarkable. His toleration of it in books is conspicuous in the view he takes of the writings of Congreve and Wycherley, in his essay on the artificial comedy of the last century (Works, vol. ii. p. 322), and in many of his other literary criticisms. His toleration of it in menat least his faculty of merging some kinds and degrees of it in concomitant good, or even beholding certain errors rather as objects of interest, or of a meditative pity and tenderness, than of pure aversion and condemnation, Mr. Talfourd has feelingly described in his Memoir (vol. ii. pp. 326-9), " Not only to opposite opinions," he says, "' and devious habits of thought was Lamb indulgent; he discovered the soul of goodness in things evil so vividly, that the surrounding evil disappeared from his mental vision." This characteristic of his mind is not to be identified with the idolizing propensity common to many arldent and imaginative spirits. He "not only loved his friends in spite of their errors," as MrI. Talfourd observes, " but loved them, errors and all;" which implies that he was not unconscious of their existence. He saw the failings as plainly as ally one else, nay, fixed his gentle but discerning eye upon tihem; whereas the idolizers behold certain objects in a bedarking blaze of light, or rather of light-confoundicfg brightness, the multiplied and heightened reflection of whatever is best in them, te, the obscurity or transmutation of all their defects. Whence it necessarily follows that the world presents itself to their eyes divided, like a chess-board, into black tlad white compartments-a "Thou wert a scorner of the field, my Friend, But more in show than truth." From Mr. W.'s poem To a good man of most dear memory, quoted in p. 331. 616 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. moral and intellectual chequer-work; not that they love to make darkness, but that they luxuriate too eagerly in light: and their "' over-muchness" toward some men involves an over-littloness toward others, whom they involuntarily contrast, in all their poor and peccant reality, with gorgeous idealisms. The larger half of mankind is exiled from them into a hemisphere (,f shadow, as dim, cold, and negative as the unlit portion of the crescent moon. Lamb's general tendency, though he too could warmly admire, was in a different direction; he was ever introducing streaks and gleams of light into darkness, rather than drowning certain objects in floods of it; and this, I think, proceeded in him from indulgence toward human nature rather than firom indifference to evil. To his friend the disposition to exalL and glorify co-existed, in a very remarkable manner, with a power of severe analysis of character anrd poignant exhibition of it,-a power which few possess without exercising it some time or other to their own sorrow and injury. The consequence to Mr. Coleridge was that he sometimes seemed untrue to himself, when he had but brought forward, one after another, perlectly real and sincere moods of his mind. In his fine poem commemorating the deaths of several poets, Mr. Wordsworth thus joins my Father's name with that of his almost life-long friend: Nor has the rolling year twice measured, From sigll to sign, its steadfast course, Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source; The rapt one of the godlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth; And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth. S. C. CHAPTER II. (1791 to 1795.) " Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with HIope like a fiery column before thee-the dark pillar not yet turned-Samuel Taylor Coleridge -Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!-" "S. T. COLERIDGE entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, the 5th of February, 1791. He gained Sir William Brown's gold medal for the Greek Ode in the summer of that year. It was on the Slave Trade. The poetic force and originality of this Ode were, as he said himself, much beyond the language in which they were conveyed. In the winter of 1792 3 he stood for the University (Craven) Scholarship with Dr. Keate, the late head-master of Eton, )Mr. Bethell (of Yorkshire) and Bishop Butler, who was the successful candidate. In 1793 he wrote without success for the Greek Ode on Astronomy, the prize for which was gained by Dr. Keate. The original is not known to exist, but the reader may see what is probably a very free version of it by Mr. Southey in his Minor Poems (Poetical Works, vol. ii. p. 170). "Coleridge"-says a school-fellow of his who followed him to Cambridge in 1792, "was very studious, but his reading was desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake of exer BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 617 cise: but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in conversation; and, for the sake of this, his room (the ground-floor room on the right hand of the staircase facing the great gate) was a constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call them loungers, for they did not call to kill time, but to enjoy it. What evenings have I spent in those rooms! What little suppers, or sizings, as they were called, have I enjoyed; when JEschylus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons and the like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon a pamphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us;- Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would repeat whole pages verbacti."- College Reminiscences, Gentleman's 3fag.. Dec. 1834. In Maly and June, 1793, Frend's trial took place in the Vice-Cllancellor's Court, and in the Court of Delegates, at Cambridge. Frend was a Fellow of Jesus, and a slight acquaintance had existed between him and Coleridge, who however soon became his partisan. Mr. C. used to relate a remarkable incident, which is thus preserved by MJr. Gillman:-" The trial was observed by Coleridge to be going against Frend, when some observation or speech was made in his favor;-a dying hope thrown out, as it appeared, to Coleridge, who in the midst of the Senate I-louse, whilst sitting on one of the benches, extended his hands and clapped them. The Proctor in a loud voice demanded who had committed this indecorum. Silence ensued. The Proctor, in an elevated tone, said to a young man sitting near Coleridge, "'Twas you, Sir!" The reply was as prompt as the accusation; for, immediately holding out the stump of his right arnm, it appeared that he had lost his hand; —"I would, Sir," said he, "that I had the power!" That no innocent person should incur blame, Coleridge went directly afterwards to the Proctor, who told him that le saw him clap his hands, but fixed on this person, who he knew had not the power. "You have had," said he, "a narrow escape!"-(Life of S. T. C. i. p. 55.) Coleridge passed the summer of 1793 at Ottery, and whilst there wrote his Songs of the Pixies (Poeticacl ITorkscs, p. 24), and some other little pieces. He returned to Cambridge in October, but, in the following month, in a moment of despondency and vexation of spirit, occasioned principally by some debts not amounting to ~100, he suddenly left his college and went to London. In a few days he was reduced to want, and observing a recruiting advertisement he resolved to get bread and overcome a prejudice at the same time by becoming a soldier. He accordingly applied to the sergeant, and after some'delay was marched down to Reading, where he regularly enlisted as a private in the 15th Light Dragoons on the 3d of December, 1793. He kept his initials under the names of Silas Titus Comberbacke. 618 BIOGRAPEIA LITERARIA. "I sometimes," he writes in a letter, "compare my own life with that of Steele (yet O! how unlike!)-led to this from having myself also for a brief time borne arms, and written'private' after my name, or rather another name; for, being at a loss when suddenly asked my name, I answered CioumberbcccIc, and verily my habits were so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion." Coleridge continued four months a light dragoon, during which time he saw and suffered much. IHe rode his horse ill, and groomed him worse; but he made amends by nursing the sick, and writing letters for the sound. His education was detected by one of his officers, Captain Nathaniel Ogle, who observed the words, —Ehe! gquam7 infortunii miserrimum estfuissefelicer!-freshly written in pencil on the stable-wall or door, and ascertained that Comberbacke was the writer. But the termination of his military career was brought about by a chance recognition in the street: his family was apprized of his situation, and after some difficulty he was duly discharged on the 10th of April, 1794, at Hounslow. Coleridge now returned to Cambridge, and remained there till the commencement of the summer vacation. But the adventures of the preceding six months had broken the continuity of his academic life, and given birth to new views of future exertion. His acquaintance with Frenud had materially contributed to his adoption of the system called Unitarianism, which he now openly professed, and this alone made it imperative on his conscience to decline availing himself of any advantages dependent on his entering into holy orders, or subscribing the Articles of the English Church. He lived, nevertheless, to see and renounce his error, and to leave on record his deep and solemn faith in the catholic doctrine of Trinal Unity, and the Redemption of man through the sacrifice of Christ, both God and Man. Indeed his Unitarianism, such as it was, was not of the ordinary quality. "I can truly say"-were Coleridge's words in after-life-" that I never falsified the Scripture. I always told the Unitarians that their interpretations of the Scripture were intolerable upon any principles of sound criticism; and that if they were to offer to construe the will of a neighbor as they did that of their Maker, they would be scouted out of society. I said then plainly and openly that it was clear enough that John and Paul were not Unitarians. But at that time I had a strong sense of the repugnancy of the doctrine of vicarious atonement to the moral being, and I thought nothing could counterbalance that.'What care I,' I said,'for the Platonisms of John, or the Rabbinisms of Paul?-My conscience revolts!' That was the ground of my Unitarianism." (Tacble Tcalk, VI. p. 517.) At the commencement of the Long Vacation, in June, 1794, Coleridge went to Oxford on a visit to an old school-fellow, intending probably to proceed afterwards to his mother at Ottery. But an ac BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 619 cidental introduction to Robert Southey, then an under-graduate at BTalliol College, first delayed, and ultimately prevented, the completion of this design, and became, in its consequences, the hinge on which a large part of Coleridge's after-life was destined to turn. Upon the present occasion, however, he left Oxford with an acquaintance, Mr. Hucks, for a pedestrian tour in Wales.* Two other friends, Brookes and Berdmore, joined them in the course of their ramble; and at Caernarvon Mr. Coleridge wrote the following letter to Mr. Masters, of Jesus College. "DEAR {MASTERS,;July 22d, 1794. "From Oxford to Gloucester,* to Ross,* to Hereford, to Leominster, to Bishop's Castle,* to Montgomery, to Welshpool, Llanvelling,* Llangunnog, Bafla,* Druid House,* Llangollin, Wrexham,** Ruthin, Denbigh,* St. Asaph, Holywell,* Rudland, Abergeley,* Aberconway,* Abher,* over a ferry to Beaumaris* (Anglesea), Amlock,* Copper Mines, Gwindu, Moeldon, over a ferry to Caernarvon, have I journeyed, now philosophizing with hacks, now melancholizing by myself, or else indulging those day-dreams of fancy, that make realities more gloomy. To whatever place I have affixed the mark *, there we slept. The first part of our tour was intensely hot-the roads, white and dazzling, seemed to undulate with heat-and the country, bare and unhedged, presented nothing but stone fences, dreary to the eye and scorching to the touch. At Ross we took up our quarters at the King's Arms, once the house of Mr. Kyle, the celebrated Man of Ross. I gave the window-shutter a few verses, which I shall add to the end of the letter. The walk from Llangunnog to Bala over the mountains was most wild and romantic; there are immense and rugged clefts in the mountains, which in winter must form cataracts most tremendous; now there is just enough sun-glittering water dashed down over them to soothe, not disturb the ear. I climbed up a precipice on which was a large thorn-tree, and slept by the side of one of them near two hours. "At Bala I was apprehensive that I had caught the itch from a Welsh democrat, who was charmed with my sentiments; he bruised my hand with a grasp of ardor, and I trembled lest some discontented citizens of the animalctlcar republic might have emigrated. Shortly after, in came a clergymnan well dressed, and with him four other gentlemlen. I was asked for a public character; I gave Dr. Priestley. The clergyman whispered his neighbor, who it seems is the apothecary of the parish —" Republicans!" Accordingly when the doctor, * It is to this tour that he refers in TableTalk, VI. p.325. —' I took the thought of grintniong for joy in that poem (The Ancient Mariner), from my companion's (Berdmore's) remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Penmaenmaur, and were nearly (lead with thirst. We could( not speak frlom the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me,-' You grinned like an idiot.' He had done the same." 620 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. as they call apothecaries, was to have given a name, " I gives a sentiment, gemmen! Mlay all republicans be gulloteened!" Up starts the democrat; " May all fools be gulloteened, and then you will be thte first!" Fool, rogue, traitor, liar, &c., flew in each other's faces in hailstorms of vociferation. This is nothing in Wales-they make it necessary vent-holes for the sulphureous fumes of their temper! I endeavored to calm the tempest by observing that however different our political opinions might be, the appearance of a clergyman assured me that we were all Christians, though I found it rather difficult to reconcile the last sentiment with the spirit of Christianity! " Pho!" quoth the clergyman; "Christianity! Why we a'nt at church now, are we? The gentleman's sentiment was a very good one, because it shows him to be sincere in his principles." Welsh politics, however, could not prevail over Welsh hospitality; they all shook hands with me (except the parson), and said I was an open-speaking, honesthearted fellow, though I was a bit of a democrat. "On our road from Bala to Druid House, we met Brookes and Berdmore. Our rival pedestrians, a Gemini of Powells, were vigorously marching onward, in a post-chaise! Berdmore had been ill. We were not a little glad to see each other. Llangollen is a village most romantically situated; but the weather was so intensely hot that eve saw only what was to be admired-we could not admire. " At Wrexham the tower is most magnificent; and in the church is a white marble monument of Lady Middleton, superior, meac quidem sententia, to any thing in Westminster Abbey. It had entirely escaped my memory, that Wrexham was the residence of a Miss E. Evans, a young lady with whom in happier days I had been in habits of fraternal correspondence; she lives with her grandmother. As I was standing at the window of the inn, she passed by, and with her, to my utter astonishment, her sister, Mary Evans, quam aeffictim et perdite amabam,-yea, even to anguish. They both started, and gave a short cry, almost a faint shriek; I sickened and well nigh fainted, but instantly retired. Had I appeared to recognize her, my fortitude would not have supported me:Vivit, sed mihi non vivit-nova forte marita..dh, dolor! alterius nunc a cervice pependit. Vos, malefida valete accenste insomnia mentis, Littora amata valete; vale ahl! formosa J1Maria. Hucks informed me that the two sisters walked by the window four or five times, as if anxiously. Doubtless they think themselves deceived by some face strikingly like me. God bless her! Her image is in the sanctuary of my bosom, and never can it be torn from thence, but by the strings that grapple my heart to life! This circumstance made me quite ill. I had been wandering among the wild-wood scenery and terrible graces of the Welsh mountains to wear away, not BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 621 to revive, the images of the past; —but love is a local anguish; I am fifty miles distant, and am not half so miserable. " At Denbigh is the finest ruined castle in the kingdom; it surpassed every thing I could have conceived. I wandered there two hours in a still evening, feeding upon melancholy. Two well-dressed young men were roaming there.' I will play my flute here,' said the first;' it will have a romantic effect.'' Bless thee, man of genius and sensibility,' I silently exclaimed. He sate down amid the most awful part of the ruins; the moon just began to make her rays predominant over the lingering daylight; I pre-attuned my feelings to emotion; -and the romantic youth instantly struck up the sadly pleasing tunes of liss Carey-The British Lion is mny sign-A roaring trade Idrive on, &c. " Three miles from Denbigh, on the road to St. Asaph, is a fine bridge, with one arch of great, great grandeur. Stand at a little distance, and through it you see the woods waving on the hill-bank of the river in a most lovely point of view. A beautiful prospect is always more picturesque when seen at some little distance through an arch. I have frequently thought of Mlichael Taylor's way of viewing a landscape between his thighs. Under the arch was the most perfect echo I ever heard. Hucks sang Sweet Echo with great effect. "At Holywell I bathed in the famous St. Winifred's Well. It is an excellent cold bath. At Rutland is a fine ruined castle. Abergeley is a large village on the sea-coast. Walking on the sea sands I was surprised to see a number of fine women bathing promiscuously with men and boys perfectly naked. Doubtless the citadels of their chastity are so impregnably strong, that they need not the ornamental bulwarks of modesty; but, seriously speaking, where sexual distinctions are least observed, men and women live together in the greatest purity. Concealment sets the imagination a-working, and as it were ccantharadizes our desires. "Just before I quitted Cambridge, I met a countryman with a strange walking-stick, five feet in length. I eagerly bought it, and a most faithful servant it has proved to me. Mly sudden affection for it has mellowed into settled friendship. On the morning of our leaving Abergeley, just before our final departure, I looked for my stick in the place in which I had left it over night. It was gone. I alarmed the house; no one knew any thing of it. In the flurry of anxiety I sent for the Crier of the town and gave him the following to cry about the town and the beach, which he did with a gravity for which I am indebted to his stupidity. "':Missing from the Bee Inn, Abergeley, a curious walking-stick. On one side it displays the head of an eagle, the eyes of which represent rising suns, and the ears Turkish crescents; on the other is the 622 BIOGRAPHIA LITERAiRIA. portrait of the owner in wood-work. Beneath the head of the eagle is a Welsh wig, and around the neck of the stick is a Queen Elizabeth's ruff in tin. All down it waves the line of beauty in very ugly carving. If any gentleman (or lady) has fallen in love with the above described stick, and secretly carried off the same, he (or she) is hereby earnestly admonished to conquer a passion, the continuance of which must prove fatal to his (or her) honesty. And if the said stick has slipped into such gentleman's (or lady's) hand through inadvertence, he (or she) is required to rectify the mistake with all convenient speed. God save the king.' "' Abergeley is a fashionable Welsh watering-place, and so singular a proclamation excited no small crowd on the beach, among the rest a lame old gentleman, in whose hands was descried my dear stick. The old gentleman, who lodged at our inn, felt great confusion, and walked homewards, the solemn Crier before him, and a various cavalcade behind him. I kept the muscles of my face in tolerable subjection. He made his lameness an apology for borrowing my stick, supposed he should have returned before I had wanted it, &c. &c. Thus it ended, except that a very handsome young lady put her head out of a coach-window, and begged my permission to have the bill which I had delivered to the Crier. I acceded to the request with a compliment, that lighted up a blush on her cheek, and a smile on her lip. " We passed over a ferry to Aberconway. We had scarcely left the boat ere we descried Brookes and Berdmore, with whom we have joined parties, nor do we mean to separate. Our tour through Anglesea to Caernarvon has been repaid by scarcely one object worth seeing. To-morrow we visit Snowdon. Brookes, Berdmore, and myself, at the imminent hazard of our lives, scaled the very summit of Penmaenmaur. It was a most dreadful expedition. I will give you the account in some future letter. " I sent for Bowles's Works while at Oxford. How was I shocked! Every omission and every alteration disgusted taste, and mangled sensibility. Surely some Oxford toad had been squatting at the poet's ear, and spitting into it the cold venom of dulness. It is not Bowles; he is still the same (the added poems will prove it), descriptive, dignified, tender, sublime. The sonnets added are exquisite. Abba Thule has marked beauties, and the little poem at Southampton is a diamond: in whatever light you place it, it reflects beauty and splendor. The'Shakspeare' is sadly unequal to the rest. Yet in whose poems, except those of Bowles, would it not have been excellent? Direct to me, to be left at the Post Office, Bristol, and tell me every thing about yourself, how you have spent the vacation, &c. " Believe me, with gratitude and fraternal friendship, "Your obliged "S. T. COLIRIDGE." BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 623 On his return from this excursion Coleridge went, by appointment, to Bristol, for the purpose of meeting Southey, whose person and conversation had excited in him the most lively admiration. This was at the end of August or beginning of September. Southey, whose mother then lived at Bath, came over to Bristol accordingly to receive his new friend, who had left as deep an impression on him, and in that city introduced Coleridge to Robert Lovell, a young Quaker, then recently married to Mary Fricker, and residing in the Old Market. After a short stay at Bristol, where he first saw Sarah Fricker, Mrs. Lovell's elder sister, Coleridge accompanied Southey on his return to Bath. There he remained for some weeks, principally engaged in making love, and in maturing, with his friend, the plan, which he had for some time cherished, of a social community to be established in America upon what he termed a pantisocratical basis. The following letter written at this time by Coleridge to Mr. Charles Heath, of Monmnouth, is a curious evidence of his earnestness upon this subject:" SIn, " Your brother has introduced my name to you; I shall therefore offer no apology for this letter. A small but liberalized party have formed a scheme of emigration on the principles of an abolition of individual property. Of their political creed, and the arguments by which they support and elucidate it, they are preparing a few copies-not as meaning to publish them, but for private distribution. In this work they will have endeavored to prove the exclusive justice of the system and its practicability; nor will they have omitted to sketch out the code of contracts necessary for the internal regulation of the Society; all of which will of course be submitted to the improvements and approbation of each component member. As soon as the work is printed, one or more copies shall be transmitted to you. Of the characters of the individuals who compose the party I find it embarrassing to speak; yet, vanity apart, I may assert with truth that they have each a sufficient strength of head to make the virtues of the heart respectable, and that they are all highly charged with that enthusiasm which results from strong perceptions of moral rectitude, called into life and action by ardent feelings. With regard to pecuniary matters it is found necessary, if twelve men with their families emigrate on this system, that ~2,000 should be the aggregate of their contributions-but infer not from hence that each man's quota is to be settled with the littleness of arithmetical accuracy. No; all will strain every nerve; and then, I trust, the surplus money of some will supply the deficiencies of others. The ininuttiwe of topographical information we are daily endeavoring to acquire; at present our plan is, to settle at a distance, but at a convenient distance, from 624 iBIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Cooper's Town, on the banks of the Susquehanna. This, however, will be the object of future investigation. For the time of emigration we have fixed on next March. In the course of the winter those of us whose bodies, from habits of sedentary study or academic indolence, have not acquired their full tone and strength, intend to learn the theory and practice of agriculture and carpentry, according as situation and circumstances make one or the other convenient. " Your fellow-citizen, "S. T. COLERIDGE." The members of the society at that time were Coleridge himself, Southey, Lovell, and George Burnet, a Somersetshire youth and fellow-collegian with Southey. Toward the beginning of September, Coleridge left Bath, and went, for the last time, as a student, to Cambridge, apparently with the view of taking his degree of B.A. after the ensuing Christmas. Here he published The lFall of Robespierre (Literary Remains), of which the first act was written by himself, and the second and third by Mlr. Southey, and the particulars of the origin and authorship of which may be found stated in an extract from a letter of M r. Southey's there printed. The dedication to Mr. Martin is dated at Jesus College, 22d of September, 1794. In January, 1795, he was to return-and then with Spring breezes to repair to the banks of the Susquehanna! But his fate withstood; -he took no degree, nor ever crossed the Atlantic. Michaelmas Term 1794 was the last he kept at Calnbridge; the vacation following was passed in London with Charles Lamb, and in the beginning of 1795, he returned with Southey to Bristol, and there commenced man. The whole spring and summer. of this year he devoted to public Lectures at Bristol, making in the intervals several excursions in Somersetshire, one memorial of which remains in the Lines composed schile climbing Brocleley Combe (Poet. Works, p. 63). It was in one of these excursions that Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth first met at the house of Mr. Pinney. The first six of those Lectures constituted a course presenting a comparative view of the Civil War under Charles I. and the French Revolution. Three of them, or probably the substance of four or five, were published at Bristol in the latter end of 1795, the first two together, with the title of (onciones ad PopulZum, and the third with that of The Plot discovered. The eloquent passage in conclusion of the first of these Addresses was written by Mr. Southey. The tone throughout them all is vehemently hostile to the policy of the great minister of that day; but it is equally opposed to the spirit and maxims of Jacobinisml. It was late in life that, after a perusal of these Conciones, Coleridge wrote on a blank page of one of them the following words:-" Except the two or BIOG:RAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 625 three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity and Unitarianism, I see little or nothing in these outbursts of my youthful zeal to retract; and with the exception of some flame-colored epithets applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, or rather to personifications-(for such they really were to ine)-as little to regret." Another course of six Lectures followed, " On Revealed Religion, its corruptions, and its political views." The Prospectus states-" that these Lectures are intended for two classes of men, Christians and Infidels; —the former that they may be able to give a reason for the hol2e that is in them;-the latter, that they may not determine against Christianity firom arguiments applicable to its corruptions only." Nothing remains of these Addresses, nor of two detached Lectures on the Slave Trade and the Hair Powder Tax, which were delivered in the interval between the two principal courses. They were all very popular amongst the opponents of the Government; and those on religion in particular were highly applauded by his Unitarian auditors, amongst whom Dr. and Mrs. Estlin, and Mr. Hort were always remembered by Coleridge with regard and esteem. The Transatlantic scheme, though still a favorite subject of conversation, was now in effect abandoned by these young Pantisocrats. Mr. C. was married at St. Mary, Redeliff church, to Sarah Fricker, on the 4th of October, 1795, and went to reside in a cottage at Clevedon, on the Bristol Channel; and six weeks afterwards Mr. Southey was also married to Edith Fricker, and left Bristol on the same day on his route to Portugal. At C]levedon Mr. and Mrs. Coleridge resided with one of Mrs. C.'s unmarried sisters and Burnet until the beginning of December. C HAPT E R I II. [1i95 to 1796.] Ah! quiet dell! dear cot, and mount sublime! I was constrained to quit you. Was it right, While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled, That I should dream away th' intrusted hours On rose-leaf beds pampering the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use? I therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand, Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight Of science, freedom, and the truth in Christ." CozERIDGaE had, in the course of the summer of 1795, become acquainted with that excellent and remarkable man, the late Thomas voL, Il. 2 626 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Poole, of Nether Stowey, Somerset. In a letter written to him on the 7th of October, C. speaks of the prospect from his cottage, and of his future plans in the following way:"MY DEAR SIn, "God bless you-or rather God be praised for that he has blessed you! On Sunday morning I was married at St. Mary's, Redclifffrom Chatterton's church. The thought gave a tinge of melancholy to the solemn joy which I felt, united to the woman, whom I love best of all created beings. We are settled, nay, quite domesticated, at Clevedon,-our comfortable cot! * * * The prospect around is perhaps more various than any in the kingdom: mine eye gluttonizes. The sea, the distant islands, the opposite coast!-I shall assuredly write rhymes, let the nine Muses prevent it if they can. * * * I have given up all thoughts of the Magazine for various reasons. It is a thing of monthly anxiety and quotidian bustle. To publish a Magazine for one year would be nonsense, and, if I pursue what I mean to pursue, my school-plan, I could not publish it for more than one year. In the course of half a year I mean to return to Cambridge —having previously taken mly lnamle off fiom the University's control-and, hiring lodgings there for mnyself and wife, finish my great work of Imitactionis in two volumes. My former works may, I hope, prove somewlhat of genius and of elrudition; this will be better; it will show great industry and mainly consistency. At the end of it I shall publish proposals for a school * * * My next letter will be long and full of something;-this is inanity and egotism. * * * Believe me, dear Poole, your affectionate and nmindful —friend, shall I so soon have to say? Believe nme my heart prompts it. "S. T. COLEnIDG.." The monthly anxiety of a ~Magazine justly alarmed Coleridge on the 7th of October; yet in the December following he courageously engaged to conduct a weekly political Miscellany. This was The Watchman, of which the following Prospectus was in that month printed and circulated. " To supply at once the places of a Review, Newspaper, and Annual Register. "On Tuesday, the 1st of March, 1790, will be published No. I. price fourpence, of a Miscellany, to be continued every eighth day, under the name of The Watchmlan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This MBiscellany will be comprised in two sheets, or thirty-two pages, closely printed in 8vo.; the type, long primer. Its contents, 1:-A history of the domestic and foreign policy of the preceding days. 2:-The speeches in both H-Iouses of Parliament; and, during the recess, select parliamentary speeches from the commencement of the BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 627 reign of Charles I. to the present tara, with notes historical and biographical. 3:-Original essays and poetry. 4: —Review of interesting and important publications. Its advantages. 1. There being no advertisements, a greater quantity of original matter will be given, and the speeches in Parliament will be less abridged. 2. From its form it may be bound up at the end; of a year, and become an Annual Register. 3. This last circumstance may induce men of letters to prefer this Miscellany to more perishable publications as the vehicle of their effusions. 4. Whenever the Ministerial and Opposition prints differ in their accounts of occurrences, &c. such difference will always be faithfully stated." Mr. C. went to Bristol in the beginning of December for the purpose of arranging the prelilmintlries of this undertalking, and at tile close of the month he set off upon1 the tour mentioned in Chap. X. of this Work, to collect subscribers. It will be remembered that he was at this time a professed Unitarian; and the project of becoming a minister of that persuasion seems to have passed through his head. He had previously preached, for the first time, two sermons at Mir. Jardine's Chapel in Bath, the subjects being the Corn Laws and the Hair Powder Tax. He appeared in the pulpit in a blue coat and white waistcoat, and, according to Mir. Cottle's testimony, who was present, Coleridge delivered himlself languidly, and disappointed every one. But there is no doubt that he subsequently preached upon many occasions with very remarkable effect. The following extracts are from letters written by Mr. C. in the month of January, 1796, during his tour, to his early and lasting friend Mr. Josiah Wade of Bristol, and may serve as a commentary on parts of the accounts given of the same tour in this work. " MY ADR WADE, " Worcester, January, 1796. "We were five in number, and twenty-five in quantity. Tile moment I entered the coach, I stumbled on a huge projection, which might be called a belly with the same propriety that you might name Mount Atlas a mole-hill. Heavens! that a man should be unconscionable enough to enter a stage-coach, who would want elbow room if he were walking on Salisbury Plain. "The said citizen was a most violent aristocrat, but a pleasant humorous fellow in other respects, and remarkably well-informed in agricultural science; so that the time passed pleasantly enough. We arrived at Worcester at half-past two: I, of course, dined at the inn, where I met Mr. Stevens. After dinner, I christianized myself, that is, washed and changed, and marched in finery and clean linen to High Street. With regard to business, there is no chance of doing any thing at Worcester. The aristocrats are so numerous, and the 628 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. influence of the clergy so extensive, that Mr. Barr thinks no bookseller will venture to publish The aYctchzam n. * * * "S. T. COLERIDGE." " MY DEAR FmIEND, " Birminham, January, 1796. * * * * " My exertions here have been incessant, for in whatever company I go, I am obliged to be the figurante of the circle. Yesterday I preached twice, and, indeed, performed the whole service, morning and afternoon. There were about 1,400 persons present, and imy sermons (great part extempore), were preciously peppered with politics. I have here at least double the number of subscribers I had expected." * * * "MY DEARl FRIENDU, " Nottingham, January, 1796. "You will perceive by this letter I have changed my route. Fromn Birminghaml on Friday last (four o'clock in the morning), I proceeded to Derby, stayed there till Monday morning, and am now at Nottingha7m1. From Nottingham I go to Sheffield; from Sheffield to Manchester; fiom Manchester to Liverpool; from Liverpool to London; from London to Bristol. Ah, what a weary way! Mly poor crazy ark has been tossed to and fro on an ocean of business, and I long for the Mount Ararat on which it is to rest. At Birminghamn I was extremely unwell; a violent cold in my head and limbs confined me for two days. Business succeeded very well;-about a hundred subscribers I think. "At Derby, also, I succeeded tolerably well. MIr. (Joseph) Strutt, the successor of Sir Richard Arkwright, tells me I may count on forty or fifty in Derby. Derby is full of curiosities; —the cotton and silk mills; Wright the painter, and Dr. Darwin, the every thing but Cllhristian. Dr. Darwin possesses, perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical ien. He thinks in a new train on all subjects but religion. He bantered me on the subject of religion. I heard all his arguments, and told him it was infinitely consoling to me, to find that the arguments of so great a man, adduced against the existence of a God, and the evidences of revealed religion, were such as had startled me at fifteen, but had become the objects of my smile at twenty. Not one new objection-not even an ingenious one! He boasted'that he had never read one book in favor of such stuff, but that he had read all the works of Infidels!' "What would you think, Mr. Wade, of a man who, having abused and ridiculed you, should openly declare that he had heard all that your enemies had to say against you, but had scorned to inquire the truth from any one of your friends? Would you think him an honest BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 629 man? I am sure you would not. Yet such are all the Infidels whom I have known. They talk of a subject, yet are found to confess themselves profoundly ignorant of it. Dr. Darwin would have been ashamed to reject Hutton's theory of the Earth without having minutely examined it;-yet what is it to us, how the earth was made, a thing impossible to be known? This system the Doctor did not reject without having severely studied it; but all at once he makes up his mind on such important subjects, as whether we be the outcasts of a blind idiot called Nature, or the children of an all-wise and infinitely good God!-whether we spend a few miserable years on this earth, and then sink into a clod of the valley; or endure the anxiety of mortal life, only to fit us for the enjoyment of immortal happiness I These subjects are unworthy a philosopher's investigation! He deems that there is a certain self-evidence in Infidelity, and becomes an Atheist by intuition. Well did St. Paul say, ye have an. evil heart of unbelief. * * * "What lovely children Mr. Barr of Worcester has! After church, in the evening, they sat round and sang hymns so sweetly that they overpowered me. It was with great difficulty that I abstained from weeping aloud; and the infant in Mrs. B.'s arms leaned forward, and stretched his little arms, and stared, and smiled. It seemed a picture of heaven, where the different orders of the blessed join different voices in one melodious hallelujahll; and the babe looked like a young spirit just that moment arrived in heaven, startled at the seraphic songs, and seized at once with wonder and rapture. * * * " From your affectionate friend, " S. T. COLERIDGE." "MvY vERY DEAR FRIEND, " Sheffield, January, 1796. "I arrived at this place late last night by the mail from Nottingham, where I have been treated with kindness and friendship, of which I can give you but a faint idea. I preached a charity sermon there last Sunday. I preached in colored clothes. With regard to the gown at Birmingham (of which you inquire), I suffered myself to be over-persuaded. First of all, my sermon being of so political a tendency, had I worn my blue coat, it would have impugned Edwards. They would have said, he stuck a political lecturer in his pulpit. Secondly, the society is of all sorts,-Socinians, Arians, Trinitarians, &c., and I must have shocked a multitude of prejudices. And thirdly, there is a difference between an inn and a place of residence. In the first, your example is of little consequence; in a single instance only, it ceases to operate as example; and my refusal would have been imnputed to affectation, or an unaccommodating spirit. Assuredly I would not do it where I intended to preach often. And even in the 630 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. vestry at Birmingham, when they at last persuaded me, I told them I was acting against my better knowledge, and should possibly feel uneasy afterwards. So these accounts of the matter you must consider as reasons and palliations, concluding,'I plead guilty, my Lord!' Indeed I want firmness; I perceive I do. I have that within me which makes it difficult to say, No, repeatedly to a number of persons who seem uneasy and anxious. * * * "My kind remembrances to Mrs. Wade. God bless her and you, and (like a bad shilling slipped in between two guineas) your faithful and affectionate friend, S. T. CoLEnIDGE." "[MY DEAR FtRIEND, "Ianchester, January, 1796. ": I arrived at Manchester last night from Sheffield, to which place I shall only send about thirty numbers. I might have succeeded there, at least equally well with the former towns, but I should injure the sale of the Iris, the editor of which (a very amiable and ingenious young man of the name of Jam-es Montgomery), is now in prison for a libel onil a bloody-minded magistrate there. Of course I declined publicly advertising or disposing of ThAe Wactchman in that town. " This morning I called on Mr. with H.'s letter. Mr. received me as a rider, and treated me with insolence that was really amusing from its novelty.' Overstocked with these articles.''People always setting up some new thing or other.'' I read the Star and another paper: what could I want with this paper, which is nothing more?''WVell, well, I'll consider of it.' To these entertaining bons mnots I returned the following repartee —' Good morning, Sir.' * * * "God bless you, S. T. C." Mr. C. went to Liverpool and was as successful there as elsewhere generally in procuring subscribers to The Wcatchman. The late Dr. Crompton found him out, and became his friend and patron. His exertions, however, at Liverpool were suddenly stopped by news of the critical state of Mrs. C.'s health, and a pressing request that he would immediately return to Bristol, whither Mrs. C. had now gone from Clevedon. Coleridge accordingly gave up his plan of visiting London, and left Liverpool on his homeward trip. From Lichfield he wrote to Mr. Wade the following letter"MY DEAR FRIEND, "Lichfield, January, 1786. * * * " I have succeeded very well here at Lichfield. Belcher, bookseller, Birmingham; Sutton, Nottingham; Pritchard, Derby; and Thomson, Manchester; are the publishers. In every number of BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 631 The Watchman there will be printed these words, "Published in Bristolby the Author, S. T. Coleridge, and sold, &c." " I verily believeno poor fellow's idea-pot ever bubbled up so vehemently with fears, doubts, and difficulties, as mine does at present. Heaven grant it may not boil over, and put out the fire? I am almost heartless. My past life seems to ame like a dream, a feverish dreamall one gloomy huddle of strange actions and dim-discovered motives;-friendships lost by indolence, and happiness murdered by mnismanaged sensibility. The present hour I seem in a quick-set hedge of embarrassments. For shame! I ought not to mistrust God: but, indeed, to hope is far more difficult than to fear. Bulls have horns, lions have talons:"The fa)x and statesman subtle wiles insure, The cit and polecat stink and ate secure; Toads with their venom, doctors with their drug, The priest and hedgehog in their robes are snug. Oh, Nature! cruel step-mother and hard To thy poor naked, fenceless child, the bard! No horns but those by luckless Hymen worn, And thuse, alas! not Amalthtea's horn! WVith aching feelings, and with aching pride, He beairs the unbroken blast on every side, Vampire booksellers drain him to the heart, And scorpion critics ctreless venom dart." S. T. C. Coleridge on his return to Bristol resided for a short time on Redcliff Hill, in a house occupied by Mrs. C.'s mother. He had procur ed upwards of a thousand subscribers' names to The Wctcechmace, and had certainly somne ground for confidence in his future success. I-is tour had been a triumph; and the impression made by his personal demeanor and extraordinary eloquence was unprecedented, and such as was never effaced f;om the recollection of those who met with hitm at this period. He seems to have employed the interval between his arrival in Bristol and the 1st of March —the day fixed for the appearance of T;he Watchman —in preparing for that work, and also in getting ready the materials of his first volumrre of poems, the copyright of which was purchased by Mr. Cottle for thirty guineas. Coleridge was a student all his life; he was very rarely indeed idle in the common sense of the term; but he was constitutionally indolent, averse from continuous exertion externally directed, and consequently the victim of a procrastinating habit, the occasion of innumerable distresses to himself and of endless solicitude to his friends, and which materially impaired, though it could not destroy, the operation and influence of his wonderful abilities. Hence, also, the fits of deep melancholy which from time to time, seized his whole soul, during which he seemed an imprisoned man without hope of liberty. In February, 1796, whilst his volume was in the press, he wrote the following letter to Mr. Cottle: 632 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. " MY DEAR COTTLE, "I have this night and to-mlorrow for you, being alone, and my spirits calm. I shall consult my poetic honor, and of course your interest, more by staying at home tlian by drinking tea with you. I should be happy to see my poems out even by next week, and I shall continue in stirrups, that is, shall not dismount my Pegasus, till Monday morning, at which time you will have to thank God for having done with your affectionate friend always, but author evanescent, " S. T. C." Shortly afterwards, mistaking thle olbject of a message from Mr. Cottle for an application for copy for the press, Coleridge wrote the following letter with reference to the painful subject:" My DEAR SIR, Pedcliff I-ll, February 22, 1796. I' t is my duty and business to thank God for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible; but, indeed, I think I should have been more thankful, if Hie lhad made me a journeymnan shoemaker, instead of an author by trade. I lhave left my friends; I have left plenty; I have left that ease which would leave secured a literary immortality, and have enabled Ime to give to the public wvolrks conceived in moiments of inspiration, and polislied wit h leisurely solicitude; and, alas! for what have I lef't, theln For-vwho deserted me in the hour of distress, and for a scheme of virtue iplracticable and romantic! So I am forced to write for bread-write the flights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I aml hearing a groan fiom my wife! Groans, and complaints, and sickness! The present hour I am in a quick-set hedge of embarrassmlent, and, whichever way I turn, a thorn runs into me. T'he future is cloud and thlick darkness. Poverty, perhaps, and the thin faces of themn that want bread looking up to m-e! Nor is this all. My happiest moments for composition are broken in upon by the reflection tha-t I must make haste.' I am too late.'' I am already months behind.''I have received my pay beforehand.'- O wayward and desultory spirit of Genius, ill can'st thou brook a taskmaster! The tenderest touch from the hand of oh: ligation wounds thee like a scourge of scorpions! " I have been composing in the fields this morning, and came home to write down the first side of my Preface, when I heard that your man had brought a note fromn you. I have not seen it, but I guess its contents. I am writing as fast as I can. Depend on it, you shall not be out of pocket for me. I feel what I owe you, and, independently of this, I love you as a friend,-indeed so much that I regret, seriously regret, that you have been my copyholder. "If I have written petulantly, forgive me. God knows I am sore all over. God bless you! and believe me that, setting gratitude BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 633 aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as much as my own. "S. T. COLERIDGE." On the 1st of March, 1796, The Watchman was published; it ended with the tenth number on the 13th of May following. Further remarks concerning that Work will be found in the notes to the tenth chapter of this volume.* In March Mr. C. removed to a house in Oxford Street in Kingsdown, and thence wrote the following letter to Mr. Poole: "MY DEAR POOLE, "80th March, 1796. "lFor the neglect in the transmission of The WatchmrLan, you must blame George Burnet, who undertook the business. I however will myself see it sent this week with the preceding Numbers. I am greatly obliged to you for your communication-(on the Slave Trade in No. V.); —it appears in this Number. I am anxious to receive more from you, and likewise to know what you dislike in The Watchman, and what you like, but particularly the former. You have not given me your opinion of The Plot Discovered. "Since you last saw me, I have been well nigh distracted. The repeated and most injurious blunders of my printer out of doors, and Mrs. Coleridge's danger at home-added to the gloomy prospect of so many mouths to open and shut; like puppets, as I move the string in the eating and drinking way;-but why complain to you? Misery is an article with which every market is so glutted that it can answer no one's purpose to export it. "I have received many abusive letters, post-paid, thanks to the friendly malignants! But I am perfectly callous to disapprobation, except when it tends to lessen profit. Then indeed I am all one tremble of sensibility, marriage having taught me the wonderful uses of that vulgar commodity, yclept Bread. The Watchman succeeds so as to yield a bread-and-cheesish profit. Mrs. Coleridge is recovering apace, and deeply regrets that she was deprived of the pleasure of seeing you. We are in our new house, where there is a bed at your service whenever you will please to delight us with a visit. Surely in Spring you might force a few days into a sojourning with us. "Dear Poole, you have borne yourself towards me most kindly with respect to my epistolatory ingratitude. But I know that you forbade yourself to feel resentment towards me, -because you had previously made my neglect ingratitude. A generous temper endures a great deal from one whom it has obliged deeply. " My poems are finished. I will send you two copies the moment they are published. In No. III. of The Watchman there are a few * These Notes I never found. Probably they were but designed.-S. C. 2 D* 634- BIOGRAPIIIA LITE RARIA. lines entitled,'The Hour when we shall meet again' ('Dim Hour! that sleep'st on pillowing clouds afar,') which I think you will like. I have received two or three letters from different Anonymi, requesting me to give more poetry. One of them writes thus:"'Sir, I detest your principles; your prose I think very so so; but your poetry is so beautiful that I take in your Watchman solely on account of it. In justice therefore to ine and some others of my stamp, I entreat you to give us more verse, and less democratic scurrility. Your Admirer, —not Esteemer.' " Have you read over Dr. Lardner on the Logos? It is, I think, scarcely possible to read it, and not be convinced. I find that The Watchma]n comes more easy to me, so that I shall begin about my Christian Lectures," (meaning a publication of the course given in the preceding year). " I will immediately order for you, unless you immediately countermand it, Count Rumiford's Essays; in No. V. of The Wcatchman you will see why." (That number contained a critique on the Essays.) " I have inclosed Dr. Beddoes's late pamphlets, neither of them as yet published. The Doctor sent them to me. * * * My dutiful love to your excellent Mother, whom, believe me, I think of frequently and with a pang of affection. God bless you. I'll try and contrive to scribble a line and a half every time the man goes with The TVatchmaan to you. "N.B. The Essay on Fasting I am ashamed of" —(in No. II. of The Watchman); —" but it is one of my misfortunes that I am obliged to publish ex tempore as well as compose. God bless you. " S. T. COLEnIDGE." Two days afterwards Mr. Coleridge wrote to Mr. B. Flower, then the editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, with whom he had been acquainted at the University: "DEAR Sin, "April 1, 1796. "I transmitted to you by M[r. B-3 a copy of my Conciones ad Populum, and of an Address against the Bills," (meaning The Plot Discovered). "I have taken the liberty of inclosing ten of each, carriage paid, which you may perhaps have an opportunity of disposing of for me; —if not, give them away. The one is an eighteen-penny affair; —the other ninepence. I have likewise inclosed the Numbers which have been hitherto published of The Watchman; —some of the Poetry may perhaps be serviceable to you in your paper. That sonnet on the rejection of Mr. Wilberforce's Bill in your Chronicle the week before last was written by Southey, author of Joan of Are, a BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 685 year and a half ago, and sent to me per letter;-how it appeared with the late signature, let the plagiarist answer. * * I have sent a copy of my Poems" —(they were not yet published): —" will you send them to Lunn and Deighton, and ask of them whether they would cl-hose to have their names on the title page as publishers; and would you permit ime to lhave yours? Robinson and, I believe, Cadell, will be the London jIblishers. Be so kind as to send an immediate answer. "Please to present one of each of my pamphlets to Mr. Hall"(the late Robert Hall, the Baptist). "I wish I could reach the perfection of his style. I think his style the best in the English language; if he have a rival, it is Mrs. Barbauld. "You have, of course, seen Bishop Watson's Apology for the Bible. It is a complete confutation of Paine; but that was no difficult matter. The most formidable Infidel is Lessing, the author of Emitic Galotti;-I ought to have written, wcas, for he is dead. His book is not yet translated, and it is entitled, in German,'Fragments of an Anonymous Author.' It unites the wit of Voltaire with the subtlety of Hume and the profound erudition of our Lardner. I had some thoughts of translating it with an Answer, but gave it up, lest men, whose tempers and hearts incline them to disbelief, should get hold of it; and, though the answers arle satisfactory to my own mind, they may not be equally so to the minds of others. "I suppose you have heard that I am mllarried. I was married on the 4th of October. " I rest all my poetical credit on the IReligious Musings. Farewell; with high esteem, yours sincerely, S. T. COLErIDGE." TO MR. POOLE. "MY DEAR, VERY DEAR FRIEND, "11th April, 1796. " I have sent the 5th, 6th, and part of the 7th Number-all as yet printed. Your censures are all right; I wish your praises were equally so. The Essay on Fasts I am ashamed of. It was conceived in the spirit, and clothed in the harsh scoffing, of an Infidel. You wish to have one long essay;-so should I wish; but so do not mly subscribers wish. I feel the perplexities of my undertaking increase daily. In London and Bristol The ra'tchne/can is read for its original matter,the news and debates barely tolerated. The people of Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, &c., take it as a newspaper, and regard the essays and poems as intruders unwished for and unwelcome. In short, each subscriber, instead of regarding himself as a point in the circumference entitled to some one diverging ray, considers me as the circumference, and himself as the centre to which all the rays ought to converge. To tell you the truth, I do not think The Watchman 636 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. will succeed. Hitherto I- have scarcely sold enough to pay the expenses;-no wonder, when I tell you that on the 200 which Parsons in Paternoster Row sells weekly, lie gains eight shillings more than I do. Nay, I am convinced that at the end of the half-year he will have cleared considerably mlore by his 200 than I by the proprietorship of the whole work. " Colson has been indefatigable in my service, and writes with such zeal for my interests, and such warmth of sorrow for my sufferings, as if he wrote with fire and tears. God bless him! I wish above all things to realize a school. I could be well content to plod fromn morning to night, if only I could secure a secure competence; but to toil incessantly for uncertain bread weighs me down to earth. " Your Night-dreanim has been greatly admired. Dr. Beddoes spoke in high commnendation of it. Your thoughts on Elections I will insert whenever Parliament is dissolved. I will insert them as the opinions of a sensible correspondent, entering my individual protest against giving a vote in any way or for any person. If you had an estate in the swamps of Essex, you could not prudently send an aguish man there to be your manager, —he would be unfit for it; —you could not honestly send a lhale hearty man there, for the situation would to a moral certainty give him the ague. So with the Parliament:-I will not send a rogue there; and I would not send an honest man, for it is twenty to one that lie will become a rogue. " Count Rumford's Essays you shall have by the next parcel. I thank you for your kind permission with respect to books. I have sent down to you Elegiae Stanzats by Bowles; they were given to me, but are altogether unwortlhy of Bowles. I have sent you Beddoes's Essay on the merits of WAilliann Pitt; you may either keep it, and I will get another for nmyself on your account, or if you see nothing in it to library-ize it, send it me back next Thursdtay, or whenever you have read it. MIy own Poems you will welcome. I pin all my poetical credit on the Religious Musings. In the poem you so much admired in The Watchmeai, for' Now life and joy,' read'New life and joy.'" (From T-he flouvr zchenz ee shall rmeet again.) " Chatterton shall appear moldernized, Dr.. Beddoes intends, I believe, to give a course of Chellistlry in a most elem~entary manner,-the price, two guineas. I wish, ardently wvish, you could possibly attend them, and live with me. Iv house is most beautifully situated; an excellent room and bed are at your service. If you had any scruple about putting me to additional expense, you should pay me seven shillings a week, and I should gain by you. M"Mrs. Coleridge is remarkably well, and sends her kind love. Pray, my dear Poole, do not neglect to write to me every week. Your critique on Joan of Are and the Religious Musings I expect. Your dear mother I long to see. Tell her I love her with filial re BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 687 spectfulness. Excellent woman! Farewell; God bless you and your grateful and affectionate S. T. COLERIDGE." Mr. C.'s first volume of poems was published by Mr. Cottle in the beginning of April, 1796, and his sense of the kind conduct of the latter to him throughout the whole affair was expressed in the folloiwing manner in a blank leaf in a copy of the work:" DEAR COTTLE, " On the blank leaf of my Poems I can most appropriately write my acknowledgments to you for your too disinterested conduct in the purchase of them. Indeed, if ever they should acquire a name and character, it might be truly said the world owed them to you. Had it not been for you, none perhaps of them would have been published, and some not written. "Your obliged and affectionate friend, "Bristol, April 15, 1798. S. T. COLERIDGE." TO MR. COTTLE. "MY EVER DEAR COTTLE, (Ap1ril) 1796. "I will wait on you this evening at nine o'clock, till which hour I am on'Watch.' Your Wednesday's invitation I of course accept, but I am rather sorry that you should add this expense to former liabilities. " Two editions of my Poems would barely repay you. Is it not possible to get 25 or 30 of the Poems ready by to-morrow, as Parsons, of Paternoster Row, has written to me pressingly about them?'People are perpetually asking after them. All admire the poetry in the Watchman,' he says. I can send them with 100 of the first number, which he has written for. I think if you were to send half a dozen Joans of Arc (4to. ~1 is. Od.) on sale or return, it would not be amiss. To all the places in the North we will send my Poems, -my Conciones, and the Joans of Are together, per wagon. You shall pay the carriage for the London and Birmingham parcels; I for the Sheffield, Derby, Nottingham, Manchester, and Liverpool.," With regard to the Poems I mean to give away, I wish to make it a common interest; that is, I will give away a sheet full of Sonnets. One to Mrs. Barbauld; one to Wakefield; one to Dr. Beddoes; one to Wrangham-a college acquaintance of mine-an admirer of me, and a pitier of my principles;-one to George Augustus Pollen, Esq.; one to C. Lamb; one to Wordsworth; one to my brother George; and one to Dr. Parr. These Sonnets I mean to write on the blank leaf, respectively, of each copy. * * * " God bless you, and S. T. COLERIDGE." "The Sonnets," says Mr. Cottle, "never arrived." 638 BIOGRAPIIIA LITERARIA. TO MR. POOLE. " My VERYn DEAR FRIEND, 6tt7b lIay, 1796. " The heart is a little relieved, when vexation converts itself into anger. But from this privilege I am utterly precluded by my own epistolary sins and negligences. Yet in very truth thou must be a hard-hearted fellow to let me trot for four weeks together every Thursday to the Bear Inn —to receive no letter. I have sometimes thought that Milton the carrier did not deliver my last parcel, but he assures me he did. " This morning I received a truly fraternal letter from your brother Richard, of Sherborn, containing good and acceptable advice. He deems my Religious MIusings'too metaphysical for common readers.' I answer-the poem was not written for common readers. In so miscellaneous a collection as I have presented to the Public, singula cinque should be the motto. There are, however, instances of vicious affectation in the phraseology of that poem;-unshudder'd, unaghasted, for example." (Not in the poem now.) " Good writing is prodi-iced more effectually by rapidly glancing the language as it already exists than by a hasty recourse to the mint of invention. The Religious Musings has more mind than the Introduction of B. ii. of Joan of Arc (Destiny of Nations, Poet. W. p. 83), but its versification is not equally rich. It has more passages of sublimity, but it has not that diffused air of severe dignity which characterizes my epic slice. Have I estimated my own performances rightly? * * * " With regard to my own affairs they are as bad as the most rampant philo-despot could wish in the moment of cursing. After No. XII. I shall cease to cry the state of the political atmosphere. It is not pleasant, Thomas Poole, to have worked fourteen weeks for nothing-for nothing; nay, to have given to the Public in addition to that toil, 45?. When I began the Watchman I had 401. worth of paper given to me; yet with this I shall not have received a farthing at the end of the quarter. To be sure I have been somewhat fleeced and over-reached by my London publisher. In short, my tradesmen's bills for The Wattchman, including what paper I have bought since the seventh number, the printing, &c., amount exactly to 51. more than the whole of my receipts. 0 WVatchman, thou hast watched in vain!-said the Prophet Ezekiel, when, I suppose, he was taking a prophetic glimpse of my sorrow-sallowed cheeks. "My plans are reduced to two;-the first unpracticable, —the second not likely to succeed. " Plan I. I am studying German, and in about six weeks shall be able to read that language with tolerable fluency. Now I have some thoughts of making a proposal to Robinson, the great London book BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 689 seller, of translating all the works of Schiller, which would make a portly quarto, on condition that he should paymy journey and my wife's to and from Jena, a cheap German University where Schiller resides, and allow me two guineas each quarto sheet, which would maintain me. If I could realize this scheme, I should there study chemistry and anatomy, and bring over with me all the works of Semler and 3Michaelis, the German theologians, and of Kant, the great German metaphysician. On my return I would commence a school for eight young men at 1051. each, proposing to perfect them in the following studies in this order:-1. Man as an Animal; —including the complete knowledge of anatomy, chemistry, mechanics, and optics:-2. Man as an Intellectual Being;-including the ancient metaphysics, the system of Locke and Hartley-of the Scotch philosophers -and the new Kantean system:-8. Man as a Religious Being;-including an historic summary of all religions, and of the arguments for and against natural and revealed religion. Then proceeding from the individual to the aggregate of individuals, and disregarding all chronology, except that of mind, I should perfect them: 1-in the history of savage tribes; 2-of semi-barbarous nations; 3 —of nations emerging from semi-barbarism; 4-of civilized states; 5-of luxurious states; 6-of revolutionary states; 7 —of colonies. During these studies I should intermix the knowledge of languages, and instruct my scholars in belles lettrcs, and the principles of composition. " Now, seriously, do you think that one of my scholars, thus perfected, would make a better senator than perhaps any one member in either of our Houses?-Bright bubbles of the age —ebullient brain! Gracious Heaven! that a scheme so big with advantage to this kingdom-therefore to Europe-therefore to the world —should' be:demolishable by one monosyllable from a bookseller's mouth!'" My second plan is to become a Dissenting Minister, and abjure politics and casual literature. Preaching for hire is not right; because it must prove a strong temptation to continue to profess what I may have ceased to believe, if ever maturer judgment with wider and deeper reading should lessen or destroy my faith in Christianity. But, though not right in itself, it may become right by the greater wrongness of the only alternative-the remaining in neediness and uncertainty. That in the one case I should be exposed to temptation is a mere contingency; that under necessitous circumstances I am exposed to great and frequent temptations is a melancholy certainty. "Write, muy dear Poole! or I will crimp all the rampant Billingsgate of Burke to abuse you. Count Rumford is being reprinted. "God bless you and S. T. COLERIDGE." On Friday, the 13th of May, 1796, the tenth and last number of The Watchman appeared-the author hasving wisely accelerated the 640 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. termination of a hopeless undertaking, the plan of which was as injudicious as the execution of it by him for any length of time inpracticable. Of the 324 pages, of which The Watchman consists, not more than a hundred contain original matter by Coleridge, and this is perhaps more remarkable as a test of the marvellous spring of his mind almost immediately afterwards than for any very striking merit of its own. Still, however, the nascent philosopher may be discovered in parts; and the Essay on the Slave-Trade, in the fourth number, may be justly distinguished as comprising a perfect summary of the arguments applicable on either side of that question. In the mean time Mr. Poole had been engaged in circulating a proposal amongst a few common friends for purchasing a small annuity and presenting it to Mr. Coleridge. The plan was not in fact carried into execution; but it was communicated to M1. C. by Mr. Poole, and the following letter refers to it:TO MR. POOLE. " 12th May, 1796. "PooLE! —The Spirit, who counts the throbbings of the solitary heart, knows that what my feelings ought to be, such they are. If it were in my power to give you any thing, which I have not already given, I should be oppressed by the letter now before me. But no! I feel myself rich in being poor; and because I have nothing to bestow, I know how much I have bestowed. Perhaps I shall not make myself intelligible; but the strong and unmixed affection which I bear to you, seems to exclude all emotions of gratitude, and renders even the principle of esteem latent and inert. Its presence is not perceptible, though its absence could not be endured. "' Concerning the scheme itself I am undetermined. Not that I am ashamed to receive; —God forbid! I will make every possible exertion;' my industry shall be at least commensurate with my learning and talents; —if these do not procure for me and mine the necessary comforts of life, I can receive as I would bestow, and, in either casereceiving or bestowing-be equally grateful to my Almighty Benefactor. I am undetermined therefore-not because I receive with pain and reluctance, but-because I suspect that you attribute to others your own enthusiasm of benevolence; as if the sun should say-'With how rich a purple those opposite windows are burning!' But with God's permission I shall talk with you on this subject. By the last page of No. X., you will perceive that I have this day dropped The Watchman. On Monday morning I will go per caravan to Bridgewater, where, if you have a horse of tolerable meekness unemployed, you will let him meet me. " I should blame you for the exaggerated terms in which you have spoken of me in the Proposal, did I not perceive the motive. You BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 641 wished to make it appear an offering-not a favor-and in excess of delicacy have, I fear, fallen into some grossness of flattery. " God bless you, my dear, very dear Friend. The widow is calm, and amused with her beautiful infant.* We are all become more religious than we were. God be ever praised for all things! Mrs. Coleridge begs her kind love to you. To your dear Mother my filial respects. " S. T. COLERIDGE." The visit to Mr. Poole at Stowey was paid, and Mr. C. returned to Bristol on the 20th of May, 1796. On his way back he wrote the following letter to Mr. Poole from Bridgewater: — "MvY DEAR POOLE, " 29th May, 1796. "This said caravan does not leave Bridgewater till nine. In the market-place stand the hustings. I mounted, and pacing the boards, mused on bribery, false-swearing, and other foibles of election times. I have wandered too by the river Parret, which looks as filthy as if all the parrots in the House of Commons had been washing their consciences therein. Dear Gutter of Stowey! Were I transported to Italian plains, and lying by the side of a streamlet which murmured through an orange grove, I would think of thee, dear Gutter of Stowey, and wish that I were poring on thee! " So mucll by way of rant. I have eaten three eggs, swallowed sundries of tea and bread and butter, purely for the purpose of amusing myself, and I have seen the horse fed. When at Cross, where I shall dine, I shall think of your happy dinner celebrated under the auspices of humble independence, supported by brotherly love. I am writing, you understand, for no other purpose but that of avoiding anxious thoughts. Apropos of honey-pie:-Caligula or Heliogabalus (I forget which), had a dish of nightingales' tongues served up. What think you of the stings of bees? God bless you. lMy filial love to your mother, and firaternity to your sister. Tell Ellen Cruikshanks, that in my next parcel to you I will send my Haleswood Poem to her. Heaven protect her, and you, and Sara, and your Mother, and-like a bad shilling passed off in a handful of guineas-your affectionate friend lwd brother, "S. T. COLEnID UE. "P.S. Don't forget to send by Milton my old clothes and linen that once was clean-a pretty periphrasis that i" The Inonth of June, 1796, was spent in Bristol, and some negotiation took place as to Mr. C.'s settling in Nottingham, the particulars' Mrs. Robert Lovell, whose husband had been carried off by a fever, about two years after his marriage with my Aunt.-S. C. 642 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. of which the Editor is unable to state. On the 4th of July Mr. Coleridge writes to Mr. Poole. TO MR. POOLE. "M Y VERY DEAR POOLE, " 4th July, 1796. "Do not attribute it to indolence that I have not written to you. Suspense has been the real cause of my silence. Day after day I have confidently expected some decisive letter, and as often have been disappointed.' Certainly I shall have one to-morrow noon, and then I will write.' Thus I contemplated the time of my silence in its small component parts, forgetful into what a sum total they were swelling. As I have heard nothing from Nottingham notwithstanding I have written a pressing letter, I have, by the advice of Cottle and Dr. Boddoes, accepted a proposal of iMr. Perry's, the Editor of the Morning. Chronicle,-accepted it with a heavy and reluctant heart. On Thursday Perry was at Bristol for a few hours, just time enough to attend the dying moments of his associate in the editorship, IMr. Grey, whom Dr. Beddoes attended. Perry desired Dr. B. to inform me that,' if I would come up to London and write for him, he would make me a regular compensation adequate to the maintenance of myself and Mrs. Coleridge, and requested an immediate answer by the post. Mir. Estlin, and Charles Danvers, and NMr. Wade, are or were all out of town; —I had no one to advise with except Dr. Beddoes and Cottle. Dr. B. thinks it a good opening on account of Grey's death; but I rather think that the intention is to employ me as a mere hackney without any share of the profits. However, as I am doing nothing, and in the prospect of doing nothing settled, I was afraid to give way to the omnenings of my heart; and accordingly I accepted his proposal in general terms, requesting a line from him expressing the particulars both of my proposed occupation and stipend. This I shall receive to-morrow, I suppose; and if I do, I think of hiring a horse for a couple of days, and galloping down to you to have all your,' advice: which, indeed, if it should be for rejecting the proposals, I might receive by post; but if for finally accepting them, we could not interchange letters in a time sufficiently short for Perry's needs, and so he might procure another person possibly. At all events I should not like to leave this part of England-perhaps forever-without seeing you once more. I am very sad about it, for I love Bristol, and I do not love London; and besides, local and temporary politics have become my aversion. They narrow the understanding, and at least acidulate the heart; but those two giants, yelept Bread and Cheese, bend me in compliance. I must do something. If I go, farewell, Philosophy! farewell, the Mluse! farewell, my literar&Farme! BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 643 "My Poems have been reviewed. The!Monthly has cataracted panegyric on me; the Critical cascaded it, and the Analytical dribbled it with civility. As to the British Critic, they durst not condemn, and they would not praise-so contented themselves with commending me as a poet, and allowed me'tenderness of sentiment and elegance of fiction.' I am so anxious and uneasy that I really can not write any further. iMy kind and fraternal love to your Sister, and my filial respects to your dear Mothel, and believe me to be in my head, heart, and soul, yours most sincerely, " S. T. COLERIDGE." The Editor can find no further trace of the proposed connection with the Morning Chronicle; but almost immediately after the date of the preceding letter, Mr. Coleridge received an invitation from, YMrs. Evans, then of Darley, near Derby, to visit her with a view to his undertaking the education of her sons. He and Mrs. C. accordingly went to Darley, where the matter was arranged to the satisfaction of both parties; and Mr. C. returned to Bristol alone with the intention of visiting his Mother and Brother at Ottery before leaving the south of England for what promised to be a long absence. But this project, like others, ended in nothing. The other guardians of AMrs. E.'s sons considered a public education proper for them, and the announcement of this resolution to MlIr. C. at Bristol stopped his further progress, and recalled him to Darley. After a stay of some ten days he left Dalley with AMrs. C., and visited Mr. Thomas Hawkes at Mosely, near Birmingham, and thence he wrote to Mr. Poole:TO IMR. POOLE. "lMY BELOVED FIEND, "August, 1796. " I was at Matlock, the place monodized by Bowles, when your letter arrived at Darley, and I did not receive it till near a week afterwards. My very dear Poole, I wrote to you the whole truth. After the first moment I was perfectly composed, and from that moment to the present have continued calmn and light-hearted. I had just quitted you, and I felt myself rich in your love and esteem; and you do not know how rich I feel myself. O ever found the same, and trusted and beloved i "The last sentences of your letter affected me more than I can well describe. Words and phrases which might perhaps have adequately expressed my feelings, the cold-blooded children of this world have anticipated and exhausted in their unmeaning gabble of flattery. I use comnmon expressions, but they do not convey common feelings. lIMy heart has thanked you. I preached on Faith yesterday. I said that Faith was infinitely better than Good Works, as the cause is greater than the effect, —as a fruitful tree is better than its fruits, and 644 BIOGRIAPIIA LITERARIA. as a friendly heart is of far higher value than the kindnesses which it naturally and necessarily prompts. It is for that friendly heart that I now have thanked you, and which I so eagerly accept; for with regard to settlement, I am likely to be better off now than before, as I shall proceed to tell you. "I arrived at Darley on the Sunday. * * * * * Monday I spent at Darley. On the Tuesday Mrs. Coleridge, Miss Willett, and I went in Mrs. Evans's carriage to Matlock, where we stayed till Saturday. * * * Sunday we spent at Darley, and on Monday Sara, Mrs. Evans, and myself visited Oakover, a seat famous for a few firstrates of Raffael and Titian; thence to Ilam, a quiet vale hung round with wood, beautiful beyond expression, and thence to Dovedale, a place beyond expression tremendously sublime. Here, in a cavern at the head of a divine little fountain, we dined on cold meat, and returned to Darley, quite worn out with the succession of sweet sensations. On Tuesday we were employed in packing up, and on Wednesday we were to have set off. * * * But on the Wednes(lay Dr. Crompton, who had just returned from Liverpool, called on me, and made me the following proposal:-that if I would take a house in Derby and open a day-school, confining my number to twelve scholars, he would send three of his children on these terms -till my number should be completed, he would allow me ~100 a year for them;-when the number should be complete, he would give ~21 a year for each of them: —the children to be with me from nine to twelve, and from two to five-the last two hours to be employed with their writing or drawing-master, who would be paid by the parents. He has no doubt but that I shall complete my number almost instantly. Now 12X21 guineas = ~252, and my mornings and evenings at my own disposal = good things. So I accepted the offer, it being understood that if any thing better offered, I should accept it. There was not a house to be got in Derby; but I engaged with a man for a house now building, and which is to be completed by the 8th of October, for ~12 a year, and the landlord to pay all the taxes except the Poor Rates. The landlord is rather an intelligent fellow, and has promised me to Rumfordize the chimneys. The plan is to commence in November; the intermediate time I spend at Bristol, at which place I shall arrive, by the blessing of God, on Monday night next. This week I spend with Mr. Hawkes, at Mosely, near Birmingham; in whose shrubbery I now write. I arrived here on Friday, having left Derby on Friday. I preached here yesterday. " If Sara will let me, I shall see you for a few days in the course of a month. Direct your next letter to S. T. C., Oxford Street, Bristol. My love to your dear Mnother and Sister, and believe me affectionately your ever faithful friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. "I shall write to my Mother and Brothers to-morrow." BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 645 At the same time Mr. C. wrote to Mr. Wade in terms similar to the above, adding that at Matlock the time was completely filled up with seeing the country, eating, concerts, &c. "I was the first fiddle; — not in the concerts-but everywhere else, and the company would not spare me twenty minutes together. Sunday I dedicated to the drawing up my sketch of education, which I meant to publish, to try to get a school!" He speaks of "the thrice lovely valley of Ilam; a vale hung with beautiful woods all round, except just at its entrance, where, as you stand at the other end of the valley, you see a bare bleak mountain standing as it were to guard the entrance. It is without exception the most beautiful place I ever visited." * * * He concludes:-" I have seen a letter from Mr. William Roscoe, author of the Life of Lorenzo the Magnificent; a work in two 4to. volumes (of which the whole first edition sold in a month); it was addressed to iMr. Edwards, the minister here, and entirely related to me. Of me and my compositions he writes in terms of high admiration, and concludes by desiring Mr. Edwards to let him know my situation and prospects, and saying that if I would come and settle at Liverpool, he thought a comfortable situation might be procured for me. This day Edwards will write to him." Whilst at Birmingham, on The IWatchrnctn tour, Mr. C. had been introduced to Mr. Charles Lloyd, the eldest son of M/r. Lloyd, an eminent banker of that place. At 3Mosely they met again, and the result of an intercourse for a few days together was an ardent desire on the part of Lloyd to domesticate himself permanently with a man whose conversation was to him-a revelation from Heaven. Nothing, however, was settled on this occasion, and Mr. and Mrs. C. returned to Bristol in the beginning of September. On the 24th of September he writes to Mr. Poole:TO MR. POOLE. "MY DEAR, VERY DEAR POOLE, " 24th September, 1796. "The heart, thoroughly penetrated with the flame of virtuous friendship is in a state of glory; but lest it should be exalted above measure, there is given to it a thorn in the flesh. I mean that where the friendship of any person forms an essential part of a man's happiness, he will at times be pestered with the little jealousies and solicitudes of imbecile humanity. Since we last parted I have been gloomily dreaming that you did not leave me so affectionately as you were wont to do. Pardon this littleness of heart, and do not think the worse of me for it. Indeed my soul seems so mantled and wrapped round with your love and esteem, that even a dream of losing but the smallest fragment of it makes me shiver, as if some tender part of my nature were left uncovered and in nakedness. 646 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. L'; ast week I received a letter from Lloyd, informing me that his parents had given their joyful concurrence to his residence with me, but that, if it were possible that I could be absent from home for three or four days, his father wished particularly to see me. I consulted Mrs. Coleridge, who advised me to go. * * Accordingly on Saturday night I went by the mail to Birmingham, and was introduced to the father, who is a mild man, very liberal in his ideas, and in religion an allegorizing Quaker. I mean that all the apparently irrational parts of his sect he allegorizes into significations, which for the most part you or I might assent to. We became well'acquainted, and he expressed himself thankful to Heaven,' that his son was about to be with me.' He said he would write to me concerning money matters, after his son had been some time under my roof. " On Tuesday morning I was surprised by a letter from M3r. Maurice, our medical attendant, informing me that iMrs. C. was delivered on Monday, 19th September, 1796, half-past two in the morning, of a son, and that both she and the child were uncommonly well. I was quite annihilated with the suddenness of the information, and retired to my room to address myself to my Maker, but I could only offer up to Him the silence of stupefied feelings. I hastened home, and Charles Lloyd returned with me. When I first saw the child, I did not feel that thrill and overflowing of affection which I expected. I looked on it with a melancholy gaze; my mind was intensely contemplative, and my heart only sad. But when two hours after, I saw it at the bosom of its mother-on her arm-and her eye tearful and watching its little features-then I was thrilled and melted, and gave it the kiss of a father. * * * * The baby seems strong, and the old nurse has over-persuaded my wife to discover a likeness to me in its face,-no great compliment to me; for in truth I have seen handsomer babies in my life-time. Its name is David Hartley Coleridge. I hope that ere he be a man, if God destines him for continuance in this life, his head will be convinced of, and his heart saturated with, the truths so ably supported by that great master of Christian Philosophy. "Charles Lloyd wins upon me hourly; his heart is uncommonly pure, his affections delicate, and his benevolence enlivened, but not sicklied, by sensibility. He is assuredly a man of great genius; but it must be in a tete-a-tete with one whom he loves and esteems that his colloquial powers open: —and this arises not from reserve or want of simplicity, but from having been placed in situations, where for years together he met with no congenial minds, and where the contrariety of his thoughts and notions to the thoughts and notions of those around him induced the necessity of habitually suppressing his feelings. tHis joy and gratitude to Heaven for the circumstance of his domestication with me, I can scarcely describe to you; and I be BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 647 lieve his fixed plans are of being always with me. His father told me, that if he saw that his son had formeed habits of severe economy, he should not insist upon his adopting any profession; as then his fair share of his (the father's) wealth would be sufficient for him. "My dearest Poole, can you conveniently receive Lloyd and me in the course of a week? I have much, very much, to say to you, and to consult with you about; for my heart is heavy respecting Derby; and my feelings are so dim and huddled, that though I can, I am sure, communicate them to you by my looks and broken sentences, I scarcely know how to convey them in a letter. C. Lloyd also wishes much to know you personally. I shall write on the other side of the paper two of his sonnets composed by him in one evening at Birmingham. The latter of them alludes to the conviction of the truth of Christianity, which he had received from me. Let me hear from you by post immediately, and give my kind love to your sister and dear mother, and likewise my love to that young man with the soulbeaming face, which I recollect much better than I do his name." (A1r. George'W[ard of Over Stowey.) " God bless you, my dear friend, and believe me with deep affection yours, "S. T. COLEERIDGE." The reader of Coleridge's Poems will remember the beautiful lines To a young Friend, on his proposing to domesticate with the Author. (P. W., p. 186.) They were written at this time and addressed to Lloyd; and it may be easily conceived what a deep impression of delight they would inake on a mind and temperament so refined and enthusiastic as his. The Sonnet To ca Friend who asked how I felt,when the NuVrse first presented my infant to mne-(p. 190) is the metrical version of a passage in the foregoing letter. A short time before the birth of little Hartley C., fMr. Southey had returned to Bristol fiom Portugal, and was in lodgings nearly opposite to M[r. Coleridge's house in Oxford Street.- There had been a quarrel between them on the occasion of the abandonment of the American scheme, which was first announced by M1r. Southey, and he and Coleridge had ceased to have any intercourse. But a year's absence had dissipated all angry feelings, and after Mr. C.'s return from Birmingham in the end of September, Southey took the first step, and sent over a slip of paper with a word or two of conciliation.* This was immediately followed by an interview, and in an I-lour's time these two extraordinary youths were arm in arm again. They were indeed of essentially opposite tempers, powers, and habits; yet each well knew and appreciated the * The paper-contained a sentence in English fiom Schiller's Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa. Fiesko! Fiesko! du?raenmst einen Platz in meiner Brust, den das Jlfenschengeschlecht, dreifach renlommen, nicht mehr besctzen woird. Fiesco! Fiesco! thou leavest a void in my bosom, which the human race, thrice told, will never fill up. Act v. sc. 16.-. C. 648 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. other,-perhaps even the more deeply from the contrast between them. Circumstances separated them in after-life; but Mr. Coleridge recorded his testimony to Southey's character in this work,* and in his Will referred to it as expressive of his latest convictions. On the 1st of November, 1796, Coleridge wrote the following letter to his friend: " TMY BELOVED POOLE, " November 1, 1796. "M Many causes have concurred to prevent my writing to you, but all together they do not amount to a reason. I have seen a narrownecked bottle, so full of water, that when turned upside down not a drop has fallen out-something like this has been the case with me. My heart has been full, yea, crammed with anxieties about my residence near you. I so ardently desire it, that any disappointment would chill all my faculties, like the fingers of death. And entertaining wishes so irrationally strong, I necessarily have day-mair dreams that something will prevent it-so that since I quitted you, I have been gloomy as the month which even now has begun to lower and rave on us. I verily believe, or rather I have no doubt that I should have written to you within the period of mly promise, if I had not pledged myself for a certain gift of my Muse to poor Tommy: and alas! she has been too'sunk on the ground in dimmest heaviness' to permit me to trifle. Yet intending it hourly I deferred my letter ed la mnode the procrastinator! Ah! me. I wonder not that the hours fly so sweetly by me-for they pass unfreighted with the duties which they came to demand! * * * * * * * * " * * * I wrote a long letter to Dr. Crompton, and received from hin a very kind letter, which I will send you in the parcel I am about to convey by Milton. " My Poems are come to a second edition, that is the first edition is sold. I shall alter the lines of the Joan of Arc, and make one poem entitled Progress of Europearn Liberty, a Vision;-the first line "1 Auspicious Reverence! hush all meaner song," &c. and begin the volume with it. Then the Chatterton,-Pixies' Parlor, —ffusions 27 and 28-To a young Ass —Tell one on what holy ground-The Sigh-Epitaph on ac Infant-The lan?, of Ross-Spring in a Village-Edmund-? Lines with a poem on the French Revolution-Seven Sonnets, namely, those at pp. 45, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66 Shurton Bars —iy pensive Sara-Low was our pretty Cot-Religious Niusings;-these in the order I have placed them. Then another titlepage with Juvenilia on it, and an advertisement signifying that the Poems were retained by the desire of some friends, but that they are to be considered as being in the Author's own opinion of very in* Chap. iii. pp. 182 —90.-S. C. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 64:9 ferior merit. In this sheet will be Absence-L-a Fayette-Gfenevieve — Koscius7co —Autunmnal Joon —To the Nightingale-Imitation of Spenser-A Poem written in early youth. All the others will be finally and totally omitted. It is strange that in the Sonnet to Schiller I should have written-' that hour I would have wished to dieLest-aught more mean might stamp me mortal;' —the bull never struck me till Charles Lloyd mentioned it. The sense is evident enough, but the word is ridiculously ambiguous. " Lloyd is a very good fellow, and most certainly a young man of great genius. He desires his kindest love to you. I will write again by MIilton, for I really can write no more now-I am so depressed. But I will fill up the letter with poetry of mine, or Lloyd's or Southey's. Is your Sister married? May the Almighty bless her!-may he enable her to make all her new friends as pure, and mild, and amiable as herself!- I pray in the fervency of my soul. Is your dear Mother wvell? Ay filial respects to her. Remember me to Ward. David Hartley Coleridge is stout, healthy, and handsome. He is the very miniature of me. Your grateful and affectionate friend and brother, S. To COLERmIDGE." Speaking of lines by Mr. Southey, called, Inscr.i2ptionfor the Cenotaph at Ermenonville,* written in his letter, Mr. C. says, ". This is beautiful, but instead of Ermenonville and Rousseau put Valchiusa and Petrarch. I do not particularly admire Rousseau. Bishop Taylor, old Baxter, David Hartley, and the Bishop of Cloyne are my men." The following Sonnet, transcribed in the foregoing Letter, has not been printed.' It puts in,' he says,'no claim to poetry, but it is a most faithful picture of my feelings on a very interesting event.' See the Letter to M1r. Poole of 24th September, 1796. This Sonnet shows in a remarkable way how little the Unitarianisrn, which IMr, C. professed at this time, operated on his fundamentalfeelings as a catholic Christian. Orn receivinzg a Letter informinig ile of the birth of c Son. When they did greet me Father, sudden awe Weigh'd down my spilit: I retir'd andi( knelt Seeking the throne of grace, but inly folt No heavenly visitation upwards draw My feeble mind, nor cheering ray impart. Ah me! before the Eternal Sire I brought Th' unquiet silence of confused tho)ught And hopeless feelings: my o'erwhelmed heart Trembled, and vacan-t tears stream'd down my face. And now once Umore, O Lord! to thee I bend, * Afterwards included among the JIin or Poem7s of Mr. S-.S C. VOL. In, 2 E (;O650 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Lover of souls! and groan for future grace, That, ere my babe youth's perilous maze have trod, Thy overshadowing Spirit may descend, And he be born again, a child of God! It was not till the summer of 1797 that the second edition of AMr. C.'s Poems actually appeared, before which time he had seen occasion to make many alterations ill the proposed arrangement of, and had added some of his most beautiful coinpositions to, the collection. It is curious, however, that lie never varied the diction of the Sonnet to Schiller in the particular to which lie refers in the preceding Letter. TO MR. POOLE.' 5, November, 1796. "Thanks, my heart's warm thanks to you, my beloved lFriend, for your tender letter! Indeed I did not deserve so kind a one; but by this time you have received my last. To live in a beautiful country, and to inure myself as mnuch as possible to the labors of the field, have been for this year past mry drealrm of the day, my sigh at midnight. But to enjoy these blessings near you, to see you daily, to tell you all my thoughts in their first birth, and to hear yours, to be mingling identities withll ou, as it were!-the vision-weaving Fancy has indeed often pictured such things, but -lope never dared whisper a promise. Disappointment! Disappointment! dash not from my trembling hand this bowl, which ahlrnost touches my lips. Envy me not this immortal draughlt, and I will forgive thee all thy persecutions! Forgive thee! Inpious! I will bless thee, black-vested minister of Optimism, stern pioneer of happinessf Thou hast been the cloud before me from the day that I left the flesh-pots of Egypt, and was led through the way of a wilderness-the cloud that had been guiding me to a land flowwilg with milk and honey-t-,he milk of innocence, the honey of friendship! "I wanted such a letter as y ourls, for I am very unwell. On Wed? nesday night I was seized with an intolerable pain from my right temple to the tip of my right shoulder, including my right eye, cheek, jaw, and that side of the thront. I was nearly frantic, and ran about the house alrmost naked, endeacvo ing by every means to excite sensation in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creating a division. It continued froln one in the morning till halfpast five, and left mo pale and fainty, It came on fitfully, but rnot so violently, several times on Thursday. and began severer threats towards night; but I took betweeoi 6Q and 70 drops of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth bean to open, On Friday it ofnly niggled, as if the Chief had departed, as from a conqnered place% BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 651 and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he had evacuated the Corrica, and a few straggling pains only remained. But this morning he returned in full force, and his name is Legion. Giant-Fiend of a hundred hands, with a shower of arrowy death pangs he transpierced me, and then he became a Wolf and lay gnawing my bones l —I am not mad, most noble Festus! but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the focus of some invisible burning-glass, which concentrated all the rays of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it originates either in severe application, or excessive anxiety. My beloved Poole, in excessive anxiety I believe it might originate. I have a blister under my right ear, land I take 25 drops of laudanum every five houirs, the ease and spirits gained by which have enabled me to write to you this flighty, but not exaggerating, account. With a gloomy wantonness of imagination I had been coquetting with the hideous possibles of disappointment. I drank fears like wormwood-yea-made myself drunken with bitterness; for my ever-shaping and distrustful mind still mlingled gall-drops, till out of the cup of Hope I almost poisoned myself with Despair. " Your letter is dated 2d November; I wrote to you on the 1 st. Your Sister was married on that day; and on that day I several times felt my heart overflowed with such tendernesses for her, as made me repeatedly ejaculate prayers in her behalf. Such things are strange. It may be superstition to think about such correspondences; but it is a superstition which softens the heart, and leads to no evil. We will call on your clear Sister as soon as I am quite well, and in the mealintime I will write a few lines to her. " I am anxious beyond measure to be in the country as soon as possible.'I would it were possible to get a temporary residence till Adscome is ready for us. I wish we could have three rooms in Williamr Poole's large house for the winter. Will you try to look out for a fit servant for us, —simple of heart, physiognomically handsome, and scientific in vaccimulgence. That last word is a new one, but soft in sound, and full of expression. Vaccimulgence! I am pleased with the word. Write to me all things about yourself; where I can not advise, I can console; and communication, which doubles joy, halves sorrow. "Tell me whether you think it at all possible to make any terms with --. You know, I would not wish to touch with the edge of the nail of my great toe the line which should be but half a barley-corn out of the circle ofthe most trembling delicacy! I will write to Cruikshanks to-morrow, if God permit me. God bless and protect you, Friend! Brother! Beloved! Sarah's best love and Lloyd's. 606 2 BIOGRAPIIIA LITERARIA. David Hartley is well. My filial love to your dear Mother. Love to Ward. Little Tommy! I often think of thee! s' S. T. COLERIDGE." Charles Lloyd, spoken of in a letter of my Father's in the last chapter as " a young man of great genius," was born Feb. 12th, 1775, died at Versailles Jan. 1.5th, 1839. He published sonnets and other poems in conjunction with my Father and Mr. Lamb, in 1797, and these and Mr. Lamb's were published together, apart from my Father's, the year aftelrwards. "W hile Lamb," says Serjeant Talfourd, "was enjoying habits of the closest intimacy with Coleridge in I.ondon, he was introduced by him to a young poet, whose name has often been associated with hiis-Charles Lbyd —the son of a wealthy banker at tBirtninghaLn, who had recently cast off the tramilmels of the Society of Friends, and, smitten xwith the love of' poetry, had becoime a studeni at the University of Cambridge. There he hlad been attracted to Coleridge by the fascination of his discourse; and, having been admitted to his regard, was initrodluced by hiurn to Lamb. Lloyd was endeared both to Lamb aniid Coleridge by a very amiable disposition and a pensive cast of thought; but his intellect had little resemblance to that of either. He wrote, indeed, pleasing verses, and with great facility,-a facility fatal to excellence; but his minhd was chiefly remarkable for the file power of analysis which distinguishes his Losdon, and other of his later compositions. In this power of discriminating and distinguishing-carried to a pitch almost of painfulness-L!oyd has scarcely ever been equalled, and his poems, though rugged in point of versification, will be found by those who will read them with the calm attention they require, replete with critical land moral suggestions of the highest value." Beside three orfour volumes of poetry, Mr. Lloyd wrote novels:-Edmi.nd Oliver, published soon after he became acquainted with my Father, and Isabel, of later date. After his mlarrlilge he settled at the lakes. "' At Brathay" (the beautiful river Brathay near Ambleside), says MIr. Deqatincey, " lived Charles Lloyd, and he could not in candor be csiisidered a common man. I-e was somewhat too Rousseauish, but he had in conversation very extraordinary powers for analysis of a certain kind, applied to the philosophy of manners, and the most delicate nuances of social life; and his TranLslationis of Alflieri, togetlier with his own poems, show him to have been an accomplished scholar." Mly Mother has often told me how amiable Mr. Lloyd was as a youth; how kind to her little Hartley; how well content with cottage accomimodation; how painfully sensitive ii all thalt related to.the affections. I remember him myself, as he was in middle life, when lie and his texcellent wife were most fr'iendly to my brothers, who were school-fellows with their sons. I did not at that time fully appreciate Mr. Lloyd's intellectual character, but was deeply impressed by the exceeding refinement and sensibility marked in his countenance and mainers-(for he was a gentleman of the old school without its formality),by the fluent elegance of his discourse, and, above all, by the eloquent pathos, with which he described his painful mental experiences and wild waking dreams, caused by a derainged state of the nervous system. Le ciel ious vesnd tosjozLrs les biens qiLt' il?otis prod/tli. Nervous deraingement is a dear price to pay even for genius and sensibility. Too often, even if not the direct effect of these privileges, it is the accompanying drawback; hypochondria may almost be called the intellectual man's malady. The Dke e d'Ormond, which was written 24 years before its publication in 1822, that is in 1798, soon after Mr. Lloyd's residence at Stowey, has great merit as a dramatic poem, in the delineation of character and states of mind; the plot is forced and unnatural; not only that., but what is worse, in point of effect, it is tediously subjective; and we feel the actions of the piece to be improbable while the feelings are true to nature; yet there is tragic effsct inl the scenes of the denouement. I understand what it was in Lloyd's mind which 3Mr. Dequincey calls IRo2sseaeish. He dwelt a good deal on the temptations to which human nature is subject, when passions, not in themselves unworthy, become, from circumstances, sills if indulged, and the source of sin and misery; but the effect of this piece is altogether aivorable to virtue, and to the parent and nurse of virtue, a pious conlviction of the moral government of the world. The play contains an anatomy of passion, not a picture~ of it in a concrete form, such as the works of Richardson and of Rous BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 653 seau present, a picture fitted to excitefeelings of baneful effect upon the mind, rather than to awaken thought, which counteracts all such mischief. Indeed I think no man would have sought my Father's daily society who was not predominantly given to reflection. What is very striking in this play is the character of the heroine, whose earnest and scrupulous devotion to her mother occasions the partial estranigerment of her lover, d'Ormond, and, in its consequences, an overwhelming misery, which overturns her lreason, and causes her death, and thus, through remorse, works the conversion of those guilty persons of the drama, who have been slaves to passion, but are not all " enslaved, nor wholly vile." Strong is the contrast which this play presents, in its exhibition of the feinalo character, with that of the celebrated French and German writers, who have treated similar subjects. Men write,- I have heard a painter say, men even paint,-as they feel and as they are. Goethe's Margaret has been thought equal to Shalkspeare's Ophelia and Desdemona; in some respects it is so; but it is like a pot of sweet ointment into which some tainting matter has fallen. I think no Englishman of Goethe's genius and sensibility would have described a maiden, whom it was his intention to represent, though fiail on one point, yet lovely and gentle-hearted, as capable of being induced to give her poor old mother a sleeping potion. "It will do her no harm." But the risk!-affection gives the wisdom of the serpent where there would else be but the simplicity of the dove. A true Englishman would have felt that such an act, so bold and undaughterly, blighted at once the lily flower, making it "' put on darkness" and " fall into the portion of weeds anld out-worn faces." In Mr. Lloyd's youthful drama even the dissipated Marchioness, who tempts and yields to temptation, is made to play a noble part in the end, won back from sin by generous feeling and strong sense: and the description of Jullia Villeneuve's tender care of her mother is so characteristic of the author, that I can not help quoting a part of it here, though it is not among the powerful parts of the play. Describing how her aged parent's extreme infirmity rendered her incapable, without a sacrifice, of leaving the small dwelling to which she had been accustomed, and how this had prevented her even from hinting her lover's proposal for their union, Julia says,:" Though blind She loved this little spot. A happy wife There lived she with her lord. It was a home In which an only brother, long since dead, And I, were educated:'twas to her As the whole world. Its scanty garden plot, The hum of bees hived there, which still she heard On a warm summer's day, the scent of flowers, The honey-suckle which trailed rouild its porch, Its orchard, field, and trees, her universe!I knew she could not long be spared to me. Her sufferings, wvhen alleviated best, Were most acute: and I could best perform That sacred task. I wished to lengthen out,By consecrating to her every moment,Her being to myself! &c." "Could I leave her?I might have seen her,-such was D'Ormond's pleaEach day. But who her evening hours could cheer? Her long and solitary evening hours?Talk her, or haply sing her, to her sleep? Read to her? Smooth her pillow? Lastly make Morning seem morning with a daughter's welcome? For morning's light ne'er visited her eyes!WVell! I refused to quit her! D'Ormond grew Absent, reserved, nay splenetic and petulant! He left the Province, nor has he once sent A kind inquiry so t' alleviate His heavy absence."' Beritola is Italian in form, as much as Wieland's Oberon, but the spirit is that of the Englishman, Charles Lloyd; it contains the same vivid descriptions of mental suffering, 654 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. the same reflective display of the lover's'passion, the same sentiments of deep domestic tenderness, uttered as froml tie heart and with a special air of reality, as The Duke D'Ornotnd and the author's productions in general. Tile versification is rather better than that of his earlier poems, but the want of ease and harmony in the flow of the verse is a prevailing defect in Mr. Lloyd's poetry, and often makes it appear prosaic, even where the thought is not so. This pathetic sonnet is one of a very interesting set, on the death of Priscilla Farmer, the author's maternal grandmother, included in the joint volume: "Oh, She was almost speechless! nor could hold Awakening converse with me! (I shall bless No more the modulated tenderness Of that dear voice!) Alas,'twas shrunk and cold HIer honor'd face! yet, when I sought to speak, Through her half-open'd eyelids She did send Faint looks, that said, " I would be yet thy friend!" And (O my chok'd breast!) e'en on that shrunk cheek I saw one slow tear roll! my hand She took, Placing it on her heart-I heard her sigh "'Tis too, too much!"'Twas Love's last agony! I tore me from Her!'Twas her latest look, Her latest accents-O my heart, retain That look, those accents, till we meet again!"-S. C. CHAPTER IV. (From Mr. Wordsworth's Stanzas, written in my Pocket-copy of Thomson's Castle of Inedolence.) "With him there often walked in friendly guise, Or lay n upon the moss by brook or tree, A noticeable AMan with large gray eyes, And a pale face that seemed undoubtedly As if a blooming face it ought to be; Heavy his low-hung lip did oft appear, Deprest by weight of musing Phanltasy; Profound his forehead was, though not severe; Yet some did think that he had little business here: " Sweet heaven forefend! his was a lawful right: Noisy he was, and gamesome as a boy; His limbs would toss about hitn with delight, Like branches when strong winds the trees annoy. Nor lacked his calmer hours device or toy To banish listlessness and irksome care; He would have taught you how you might employ Yourself; and many did to him repair,And certes not in vain; he had inventions rare." Fon Josiah Wade, the gentleman to whom the letters, placed at the beginning of the last chapter, were written, the fine portrait of Mr. Coleridge by Allston (nearly full length, in oils), was painted at Rome in 1806, —I believe in the spring of that year. BMr. Allston himself spoke of it, as in his opinion faithfully representing his friend's features and expression, such as they commonly appeared. His coun BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 655 tenance, he added, in his high poetic mood, was quite beyond tho painter's art: "it was indeed spirit made visible." Mr. Coleridge was thirty-three years old when this portrait was painted, but it would be taken for that of a man of forty. The youthful, even boyish look, which the original retained for some years after boyhood, must rather suddenly have given place, to a premature appearance, first of middle-agedness, then of old age, at least in his general aspect, though in some points of personal appearance,-his fair smooth skin and "large gray eyes,' "at once the clearest and the deepest"-so a friend lately described them to me, -"that I ever saw," he grew not old to the last. Serjeant Talfourd thus speaks of what he was at three or four and forty. " Lamb used to say that he was inferior to what hlie had been in his youth; but I can scarcely believe it; at least there is nothing in his early writing which gives any idea of the richness of his mind so lavishly poured out at this time in his happiest moods. Although he looked much older than he was, his hair being silvered all over, and his person tending to corpulency, there was about him no trace of bodily sickness or mental decay, but rather an air of voluptuous repose. His benignity of manner placed his auditors entirely at their ease; and inclined them to listen delighted to the sweet low tone in which he began to discourse on some high theme. At first his tones were conversational: he seemed to dally with the shallows of the subject and with fantastic images which bordered it: but gradually the thought grew deeper, and the voice deepened with the thought; the stream gathering strength, seemed to bear along with it all things which opposed its progress, and blended them with its current; and stretching away among regions tinted with ethereal colors, was lost at airy distance in the horizon of fancy. Coleridge was sometimes induced to repeat portions of Christabel, then enshrined in manuscript from eyes profane, and gave a bewitching effect to its wizard lines. But more peculiar in its beauty than this was his recitation of Kubla Khan. As he repeated the passageA damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played Singing of Mount Abora! his voice seemed to mount and melt into air, as the images grew more visionary, and the suggested associations more remote." Mr. Dequincey thus describes him at thirty-four, in the summer season of 1807, about a year and a half after the date of Mr. Allston's portrait. " I had received directions for finding out the house where Cole-,idge was visiting; and in riding down a main street of Bridgewater, 656 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. I noticed a gateway corresponding to the description given me. Under this was standing, and gazing allont him, a mlan whom I shall describe. -In height he rnight seem to be above five feet eight (lle was in reality about an inch anda half taller, but his figure was of an order which drowns the height); his person was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence: his complexion was fair, though not what painters technically style fail, because it was associated with black hair: his eyes were large and soft in their expression: and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess, which mixed with their light, that I recognized my object. This was Coleridge. I examined hin steadfastly f'or a mlinute or inore: and it struck me that lie saw neither myself nor any other object in the street. IIe was in a deep reverie, for I had dismounted, made two or three trifling arrangements at an inn door, and advanced close to hin, before he had apparently become conscious of nmy presence. The sound of my voice, announcing my own name, first awoke him; he started, and for a moment, seemed at a loss to understand my purpose or his own situation; for he repeated rapidly a numlber of wtords which had no relation to either of us. There xwas no Inaceuzzise honte in his manner, but simple perplexity, and an applrent difficulty in recovering his position among dayliglht realities. Tlli little scene over, he re — ceived me with a kiindness of mlianler so marlked that it might be called gracious. "Coleridge led me to a drawing-roomns iid rng tln e bell for refieshments, and omitted no point of a courteous reception. He told me that there would be a very large dinner-party on that day, which perhaps might' be disagreeable to a perfect stranger; but, if not, he could assure me of a most hospitable welcome from the family. I was too anxious to see him, under all aspects, to think of declining this invitation. And these little points of business being settled, Coleridge, lieke some great river, the Orellana, or thle St. Lawrence, that had been checked and fietted by rocks or thwarting islands, and suddenly recovers its volume of wasters, and its mighty nmusic, swept, at once, as if returning to his natural business, into a continuous strain of eloquent dissertation, certainly tlle most novel, the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought, by transitions, the most just and logz;icall, that it was possible to conceive." I will now present him as he appeared to William Hazlitt in the February of 1798, when lie was little more than five-and-twenty; and this brings himn back to the period of his life at whlich the present MIemoir concludes. "It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 657 I~ y a des imjpressions que ni le temps ni les circonstances peuvuet effacer. Dusse-je vivre des silees entiers, le doux temp]s de ma jeunesse ne peut renaitre pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans ma me'moire. When I got there, the organ was playing the hundredth psalm, and when it was done, ~Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text.'He departed again into a mountain himself alone.' As he gave out this text his voice' rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumles;' and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed fioro the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my mind, of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey. The preacher then lanched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war-upon church and state-not their alliance, but their separation-on the spirit of the world, and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore. He made a poetical and pastoral excursion,- and to show the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his teamn afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though he should. never be old, and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the finery of the profession of blood. "' Such were the notes our once loved poet sung:' and for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres.. Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still laboring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause; and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them." A glowing dawn was his, but noon's full blaze Of perfect day ne'er flll'd his heav'l with radiance. Scarce were the flow'lets on their stems upraised When sudden shadows cast an evening gloom O'er those bright skies!-yet still those skies were lovely; The roses of the morn yet lingered there When stars began to peep,-nor yet exhaled, Fresh dew-drops glittered near the glow-worm's lamp, And many a snatch of lark-like melody Birds of the shade trilled forth'mid plaintive warbling. 658 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. CHAPTER V. "Learning, power, and time, (Too much of all) thus wasting in vain war Of fervid coiloquy. Sickness,'tis true, Wzholce years of weary days, besieged him close, Even to the gates and inlets of his life! But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm, Alnd with a natural gladness, he maintained The citadel unconquered, and in joy Was strong to follow the delightful Muse." WITH the letter of November 5, which concludes Chapter iii. the biographical sketch left by Mr. Coleridge's late Editor comes to an end, and at the present time I can carry it no further than to add, that in January, 1798, my Father removed with his wife and child, the latter then four months old, to a cottage at Stowey, which was his home for three years; that from that home, in company with Mr. and Miss W~ordsworth, he went, in September, 1798, to Germany, and that he spent fourteen months in that country, during which period the Letters called Satyrane's were written. Here, however, at the end of this brief personal record, I may best introduce the, remarks which have been made, and details which have been given, respecting Mr. Coleridge's services to The Morning Post and The Courier, spoken of by him in Chap. x. That representation has been excepted against by Mr. Stuart, who was Editor of the former Paper when my Father wrote for it, and half proprietor of the other. The view which he takes of the case he has already made public;* he seems to be of opinion, that the language used by Mr. Coleridge in this work is calculated to give an impression of the amount of his actual performances on behalf of those papers beyond what the facts warrant; I have not thought it necessary or proper to withdraw that portion of Chapter x. of which he complains, nor do I see that it must necessarily bear a construction at variance with his own statements: but neither would I republish it without giving Mr. Stuart's account of matters to which it refers, extracted from letters written by him to Mr. Coleridge's late Editor. He writes as follows from Wykham Park, on the 7th of October, 1835. "' In August, 1795, I began to conduct The TfNorning Post, the sale of which was so low, only 350 per day, that a gentleman at that time made a bet with me that the Paper was actually extinct. "At Christmas, 1797, on the recommendation of Mr. Mackintosh, * In articles on JMr. Coleridge, the Poet, and his.Jewspaper 2ritings, &-c., in the Gens. 6leman's Magazine of May, June, July, August, of 1838. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 659 Coleridge sent me several pieces of poetry; up to the time of his going to Germany, about 12 pieces.* Prose writing I never expected from him at that time. He went to Germany in the summer of 1798. " He returned, I believe, about the end of 1799,t and proposed to me to come to London to reside near me, and write daily for the paper. I took lodgings for himn in King Street, Covent Garden. A/he liowrning Post then selling 2,000 daily. Coleridge wrote some things, particularly, I remember, Commllents on Lord Grenville's reply to Bonaparte's Overtures of Peace, in January, 1800. But he totally failed in the plan he proposed of writing daily on the daily occurrences." bMr. Stuart then gives three short letters of Mr. C.'s, showing how often he was ill and incapable of writing for the paper, and the beginning of a long one, dated Greta Hall, Keswick, 19th July, 1800, in which he promises a second part of Pitt and Bonaparte, but speaks of it as uncertain whether or no he should be able to continue any regular species of employment for Mr. S.'s paper. After noting that Mr. C. left, London at the end of his first halfyear's engagement, Mr. S. brings forward more letters, containing excuses on account of illness, but pro-rising a number of essays: two on the war, as respecting agriculture; one on the raising of rents; one on the riots (corn riots in 1800); and one on the countenance by Government of calumnies on the King;- promising also a second part of Pitt and Bonaparte, which Mr. S. supposes he was constantly dunning for, the Character of Pitt, published in The b. P. early in 1800, having made a great sensation; proposing a letter to Sir F. Burdett on solitary imprisonment, and that all these should be published in pamphlets, after they had been divided into pieces, and published in the M. P., he doubting whether they were of value for a newspaper. Some of these essays appear to have been sent; it is not specified which or how many. "Early in 1807," Mr. S. sayvs, "I was confined by a violent fever. Several weeks I was delirious, and to my astonishment, when I recovered, Pitt was out of place, and Horne Tooke in Parliament. I did not resume the conduct of the Paper till the spring. The Papel suffered loss." The next letter, dated -ay, 1801, Keswick, speaks of ill health, and "the habits of irresolution which are its worst consequences," forbidding him to rely on himself. Mr. S. had solicited him to write, and offered terms, and it appears that he did form a new engagement for * " Short pieces," Mr. Stuart calls them in the Gent's. MAag. But among them was France, an ode, which was first published in the M. P. in the beginning of 1798, and republished in the same Paper some years afterwards, and must have helped to give it a decent poetical reputation, I think. t Nov. 27, 1799. 660 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. the Paper about that time. In a letter of Sept. 1801, he says, "I am not so blinded by authorship as to believe that what I have done is at all adequate to the money I have received." iMr. Stuart then produces a letter with tile postmark Bridgewater, of Jan. 19, 1802. These letters show, he says, that in July and October 1800, in MAay 1801, on the 30th of September 1801, Coleridge was at Keswick, that in January 1802, he was at Stowey, that he could not therefore have materially contributed to the success of The 3iorniniy2 Post. " In this last year," says Mr. Stuart, " hlis Letters to Judge Fletcher, and on AMr. Fox, at Paris, were published." The foirmer iwere not published till 1814. The six letters )ppearled in The Cou rier on Sept. 20th, 29th, Oct. 21st, Nov. 2d, Dec. 8d, 6tlh, 9th and 10th. The latter appeared on the 4th and 9th of Nov. 1802. Mr. Stuart speaks of it as a imistake in those who hlave supposed that the coolness of Fox to Sir James MIackintosh was occasioned by his ascribing this "violent philippic," as Lamb called it, to him (Sir James). " On those to Judge Fletcher," he says, " and many other such essays, as being rather fit for pamphlets than newspapers, I did not set much value. On this subject hear Coleridge himself in a letter dated June 4th, 1811, when lie was engaged with Mr. Street. "Freshness of effect belongs to a newspaper and distinguishes it fr'om a literary book: the former being the Zenith and the latter the Nadir, with a number of intermediate degrees, occupied by pamphlets, magazines, reviews, &c. Besides, in a daily paper, with advertisements proportioned to its large sale, what is deferred inmust four times in five be extinguished. A newspaper is a nlarket for flowers and vegetables, rather than a granary or conservatory; and the drawer of its Editor a common burial ground, not a catacomb for emlbained mullmies, in which the defunct ar1e preserved to serve in after-times as medicines for the living." This fireshness of effect Coleridge scarcely ever gave to either The Ilfor'ninZZ Post or The Courier. Hee was occasionally in London during my time, in The 3orninyg2 Post it is true, but he never gave the daily bread. Ile was mostly at Keswick. * * * * A few months in 1800, and a few weeks in 1802, that was all the time he ever wasted on Thce iio'rning Post, and as for The Courier, it accepted his proffered services as a favor done to him," &c. After speaking again of the former paper, he says, "I could give many more reasons for its rise than those I gave in my former letter, and among others I would include Coleridge's occasional writings, though to them I would not set down more than one hundredth part of the cause of success, mluch as I esteemed his writings and much as I would have given for a regular daily assistance by him. But he never wrote a thing I requested, and, I think I may add, he never wrote a thing I expected. In proof of this he promised me at my earnest and endless request, the character of Bonaparte, which he BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 661 himself, at first of his own mere motion, had promised; he promised it letter after letter, year after year, for ten years (last for The Courier), yet never wrote it. Could Coleridge and I place ourselves thirtyeight years back, and he be so far a man of business as to write three or four hours a day, there is nothing I would not pay for his assistance. I would take him into partnership," (which, I think, my Father would have declined,) " and I would enable him to make a large fortune. To write the leading paragraph of a newspaper I would prefer him to M]fackintosh, Burke, or any man I ever heard of. His observations not only were confirmed by good sense, but displayed extensive knowledge, deep thought and well-grounded foresight; they were so brilliantly ornamented, so classically delightful. They were the writings of a scholar, a gentleman and a statesman, without personal sarcasm or illiberality of any kind. But when Coleridge wrote in his study without being pressed, he wandered and lost himself. He should always have had the printer's devil at his elbow witl' Sir, the printers want copy.' " So far then with regard to The MLorning Post, which I finally left in August, 1803. Throughout the last year, during my most rapid success, Coleridge did not, I believe, write a line for me. Seven months afterwards I find Coleridge at Portsmouth, on his way to Malta." MIr. Stuart proceeds to state that Mr. C. returned to England in the summer of 1806, that in 1807 he was engaged with his Play at Drury Lane Theatre, early in 1808 gave his lectures a't the Royal Institution, at the end of that year began his plan of The Frien.d, which took him up till towards the end of 1809-in 1811 proposed to write for The Courier on a salary. Mr. Stuart mentions that the Essays on the Spaniards were sent in the end of 1809 by MAir. Coleridge, as some return for sums he had expended on his account, not on his (Mr. Stuart's) solicitation. He says that Mr. C. wrote in The Courier for his own convenience, his other literary projects having failed, and that he wrote for it against the will of Mr. Street, the Editor, who, in accepting his services, only yielded to his (Mr. S.'s) suggestion. " The Courier," he says, "required no assistance. It was, and had long been, the evening paper of the highest circulation." In another letter, dated 7th September, 1835, he speaks thus: "T/he Courier indeed sold 8000 daily for some years, but when Street and I purchased it at a good price in June, 1799, it sold nearly 2000, and had the reputation of selling more. It: was the apostasy of The Sun in 1803, Street's good management, its early intelligence, and the importance of public events, that raised The Courier." In the same letter he says, " Could Coleridge have written the leading paragraph daily his services would have been invaluable, but an occasional essay or two could produce little effect. It was early and ample accounts of domestic occurrences, as Trials, Executions, &c., &c., exclusively 662 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. early Irish news; the earliest French news; full Parliamentary Debates; Corn Riots in 1800; Procession proclaiming Peace; the attack on the King by Hatfield at the Theatre; the arrest of Arthur O'Connor, respecting which I was examined at the Privy Council: it was the earliest and fullest accounts of such things as these, while the other papers were negligent, that raised The MHorning Post from 350, when I took it in August, 1795, to 4500, when I sold it in August, 1803, and then no other daily morning paper sold above 3000. It was unremitting attention and success in giving the best and earliest accounts of occurrences that made The Morning Post, and not the writings of any one, though good writing is always an important feature. I have known the Paper served more by a minute, picturesque, lively account of the ascension of a balloon than ever it was by any piece of writing. There is a great difference among newspapers in this respect. Most of the Sunday Papers, calling themselves Newspapers, have no news, only political essays, which are read by the working-classes, and which in those papers produce astonishing success." In other letters he says: "The reputation of the writings of any man, the mere reputation of them, would not serve, or in the very slightest degree serve, any daily newspaper." "Mackintosh's reputation as a political writer was then much higher than that of Coleridge, and he was my brother-in-law, known to have written for the Paper, especially during one year (1795-6), and to be on good terms with me, yet I must confess that even to the reputation of his writing for the Paper I never ascribed any part of its success." It does not appear from Mr. Stuart how many essays in all Mr. Coleridge contributed to the Morning Post and the Courier. Mr. C. himself mentions several in the tenth chapter of this work. All these have been copied, and will be republished hereafter. I happen to possess also his contributions to The Courier in 1811. They are numerous, though not daily; if what I have form the complete set forthat year, which I have now no means of ascertaining. The Critique on Bertram first appeared in that Paper, I believe in 1816. Mr. Stuart admits that some of the poems published by Mr. C. in The iorning Post before his going to Germany made a " great impression:" that on Mr. C.'s proposing "personally on the spot and by daily exertion to assist him in the conduct of the Paper," he "grasped at the engagement," and " no doubt solicited" him "in the most earnest manner to enter upon it;" that his " writings produced a greater effect in The Morning Post than any others." In his letter of September 19, 1835, Mr. S. says, "The most remarkable things Coleridge published in The Horning Post were The Devil's Thoughts and the Character of Pitt. Each of these made a sensation, which any writings unconnected with the news of the day rarely did." Elsewhere he says, " Several hundred sheets extra were sold by them, BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 663 and the paper was in demand for days and weeks afterwards. Coleridge promised a pair of portraits, Pitt and Bonaparte. I could not walk a hundred yards in the streets but I was stopped by inquiries,' When shall we have Bonaparte?' One of the most eager of these inquirers was Dr. Moore, author of Zeluco." In the letter mentioned just above he says, " At one time Coleridge engaged to write daily for The Courier on the news of the day, and he did attend very regularly and wrote; but as it was in the spring, when the Paper was overwhelmed with debates and advertisements (and Street always preferring news, and a short notice of it in a leading paragraph to any writing however brilliant), little or nothing that he wrote was inserted from want of room. Of this he repeatedly complained to me, saying that he would not continue to receive a salary without rendering services. I answered,' Wait till Parliament is up; we shall then have ample room, and shall be obliged to you for all you can give us.' When Parliament rose Coleridge disappeared, or at least discontinued his services." The time here spoken of was in June, 1811. In April he had proposed to Mr. Stuart a particular plan of writing for The Courier, and on May 5, he writes to that gentleman, that he had stated and particularized this proposal to Mr. Street, and " found a full and in all appearance a warm assent." Mr. Street, he says, " expressed himself highly pleased both at the thought of my assistance in general, and with the specific plan of assistance. There was no doubt, he said, that it would be of great service to the Paper." Mr. Stuart has been offended by Mr. Coleridge's saying that lie "employed the prime and manhood of his intellect in these labors," namely for the Papers; that they "added nothing to his fortune or reputation;" that the " industry of the week supplied the necessities of the week." This he has considered as a reproach to himself, and an unjust one. It was not —Mr. Stuart himself saw that it was notso intended; Mr. Coleridge's only object was to show that he had not altogether suffered his talents to "rust away without any efficient exertion for his own good or that of his fellow-creatures;" that he had labored more than would appear from the number and size of the books he had produced, and in whatever he wrote had aimed not merely to supply his own temporal wants, but to benefit his readers by bringing high principles in view. "For, while cabbage-stalks rot in dunghills," says he, in a letter to the late Editor of The Mlforning Post, " I will never write what, or for what, I do not think right. All that prudence can justify is not to write what at certain times one may yet think." But Mr. Stuart thought that the Public would draw inferences from Mr. C.'s language injurious to himself, though it was not meant of himm; and hence he gave the details which I have thought it right to bring forward. I have no doubt that Mr. Coleridge had an ex 6604 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. aggerated impression of the amount of his labors for The lliorning Post and The courier, and that when he said that he had raised the sale of the former from a low number to 7000 daily, he mistook the sale of the latter, which, Mr. Stuart admits, may have been 7000 per day in 1811, when he wrote for it constantly, with that of The Morning Post, which never sold above 4500. Mr. Stuart says truly, " Coleridge had a defective memory, from want of interest in common things;" and of this he brings forward a strong instance. I think my Father's example and experience go to prove that Newspaper reading must ever be more or less injurious to the public mind; high and careful writing for the daily journal will never answer: who could furnish noble views and a refined moral commentary on public events and occurrences every day of the week, or even every other day, and obtain a proportionate recompense? On the other hand, a coarse or low sort of writing on the important subjects, with which the journal deals, must do mischief. No one will deny that the character of Mr. C..'s articles was such as he has described; he would naturally be more alive to marks of the impression made by what he wrote in particular than any one else, even the Editor; and men are apt to judge of their labors by intensity as much as by quantity. He perhaps expended more thought on some of those essays, of which Mr. Street and even Mr. Stuart thought lightly, than would have served to furnish a large amount of ordinary serviceable matter. Mr. Stuart obperves, " He never had a prime and manhood of intellect in the sense in which he speaks of it in the Lit. BiYgraphy. He had indeed the great mind, the great powers, but he could not use them for the press with regularity and vigor.* He was always ill." This may have been true; yet it was during what ought to have been the best years of his life that he wrote for the Papers, and doubtless what he did produce helped to exhaust his scanty stock of bodily power, and to prevent him from writing as many books as he might have done, had circumstances permitted him to use his pen, not for procuring " the necessities of the week," but in the manner most congenial to his own mind, and ultimately most useful to the public.'"Such things as The Jforning Post and money," says Mr. S., in the Gentleman's liagazine," never settled upon his mind." I believe that such things unsettled his mind, and made him, as the lampooner said, with a somewhat different allusion, "Like to a man on double business bound, who both neglects." This was a trouble to himself and all connected with him. Le ciel nous vend tozjours les biens gu'il nous prodigue, may be applied to my poor Father emphatically. * "He never could write a thing that was immediately required of him," says Mr. S., in the Gentleman's Magazine, of May, 1838. " The thought of compulsion disarmed him. I could name other able literary men in this unfortunate plight." One of the many grounds of argument against the sole profession of literature. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 665 In regard to the remuneration he received, I do not bring forward the pcarticlcars given by Mr. Stuart of his liberal dealings with Mr. Coleridge, simply because the rehearsal of them would be tedious, and could answer no end. Such details may be superseded by the general declaration, that I believe my Father to have received from Mr. Stuart far more than the market value of his contributions to the Papers which that gentleman was concerned in. Mr. Stuart says that le "paid at the time as highly as such writings were paid for," and to Mr. Coleridge's satisfaction, which my Father's own letters certainly testify; and concludes the account of sums advanced by him to MIr. C., when he was not writing for the paper, by saying that he had " at least 7001. of him beside many acts of kindness." A considerable part of this was spent on stamps and paper for Thie _Friend; two hundred of it was given after the publication of the Biogracphia Litercaria. MBr. Coleridge expressed his esteem for Mr. Stuart and sense of his kindness very strongly in letters to himself, but not more strongly than to others. I-e speaks of him in a letter written about the beginning of 1809, addressed to a gentleman of the Quaker persuasion at Leeds, as " a man of the most consummate knowledge of the world, managed by a thorough strong and sound judgment, and rendered innocuous by a good heart"-as a " most wise, disinterested, kind, and constant friend." In a letter to my Mother, written on his return from Malta, he says, "Stuart is a friend, and a friend indeed." I lhave thoughllt it right to bring forward these particulars-(I and those equally concerned with myself)-not only out of a regard to truth and openness, that the language of this work respecting The fornzing Post and'he Courier may not be interpreted in any way contrary to fact, which, I think, it need not be; but also in gratitude to a man who was serviceable and friendly to my Father during many years of his life; who appreciated his merits as a prose writer when they were not generally known and acknowledged; and by whose aid his principal prose work, The 7Friend, was brought before the public. I do not complain in the least of his stating the facts of my Father's newspaper writings; in the mcanner in which this was done-as was pointed out at the time —there wcas something to complain of. Let me add that I consider his representation of my Father's feelings on certain occasions altogether incredible, and deeply regret these pieces of bad construing, dictated by resentment, in one who was once so truly his friend. My Father certainly does not assert, as MIr. Stuart represents him as having asserted in the Literary Biogracphy, that he "made the fortunes of The iJoorning Post and The Caourier, and was inadequately paid." He speaks of his writings as having been in furtherance of Government. I have no doubt he thought that they were serviceable 666 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. to Government and to his country, and that while they brought upon inim the enmity of the anti-nlinisterial and Bonapartean party, and every possible hindrance to his literary career which the most hostile and contemptuous criticism of a leading journal could effect, they were unrewarded in any other quarter. There was truth in one half of Hazlitt's sarcasm, " His politics turned-but not to account." " From Government, or the friends of Government!" says lMr. Stuart, "Why Coleridge was attacking Pitt and Lord Grenville in 1800, who were at the head of the Government. In 1801, when the Addingtons came into power, he wrote little or nothing in The iMorning Post; in the autumn of 1802, he wrote one or two able essays against Bonaparte in relation to the Peace of Amiens, and he published in that paper, at that time, a letter or two to Judge Fletcher." This last sentence is a double mistake, as I have already shown. "At that time the newspaper press generally condemned the conduct of Bonaparte in the severest manner; and no part of it more severely than The ilforning Post by my own writings. Cobbett attacked Fox, &c., but 7The Morningy Post was the most distinguished on this subject, and the increase of its circulation wias great. The qualified opposition to Government was not given to Pitt's ministry, but to Addington's. To Pitt The Hlorning Post was always, in my time, decidedly opposed. I supported Addington against Bonaparte, during the Peace of Amiens, with all my power, and in the summer of 1803 Mr. Estcourt came to me with a message of thanks from the prime minister, Mlr. A. offering any thing I wished. I declined the offer. It was not till the summer of 1804, a year after I had finally left The Morning Post that, in The Courier, I supported Pitt against Bonaparte, on the same grounds I had supported Mr. Addington, Pitt having become again prime minister, to protect Lord Melville against the fifth clause. Coleridge confuses things. The qualified support of the ministry, he alludes to, applies wholly to The Courier." I do not see the material discrepancy between this statement and my Father's, when he says that The Morning Post was " anti-ministerial, indeed, but with far greater earnestness and zeal, both anti-jacobin and anti-gallican," and that it proved a far more useful ally to the Government in its most important objects, in consequence of its being generally considered moderately anti-Ministerial, than if it had been the avowed eulogist of Mr. Pitt; " that the rapid increase in the sale of The Morning Post is a pledge that genuine impartiality with a respectable portion of literary talent will secure the success of a newspaper without misnisterial patronage," and that from " the commencement of the Addington admninistration" whatever he himself had written " in The.Morning Post or Courier was in defence of Government." In the preceding paragraph he argues that neither Mr. Percival nor " the present administration" pursued the plans of Mr. Pitt. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 667 In what degree my Fathler's writings contributed to the reputation and success of The Morning Post can not at this distanlce of time be precisely settled. It must indeed be difficult to say what occasions success in such enterprises, if Mr. Stuart's own brother could attribute that of The ltfor)ing Post to Sir James Mackintosh, " though with less reason even than if he had ascribed it to Coleridge." The long story told to show that booksellers were not aware of AMr. C.'s having produced any effect on the paper, and when they'set up a rival journal, never cared to obtain his services, but eagerly secured those of Mr. Stuart's assistant, George Lane, does not quite decide the question; for booksellers, though, as Mr. Stuart says, "knowing men" in such matters, are not omniscient even in what concerns their own business. If the anti-gallican policy of The XJorning Post "increased its circulation," I can not but think that the influence of my Father's writings, though not numerous, and indirectly of his intercourse with the Editor, —who rates his conversational powers as highly as it is usual to rate them —in directing the tone and deterIinirng tle principles of the paper, must have served it materially. I believe him to have been the anti-gallican spirit that governed Tlie ilforning Post, though he may not have performed as mulnch of the letter as he fancied. I shall conclude this subject with quoting part of a letter of my Fatller's on the subject of The Courier, to which lMr. Stuart, to whom it was addressed, declares himself to have replied, that ": as long as he actively interfered, the Paper was conducted on the independent principles alluded to by Coleridge, " but that, for reasons which he states, he found it best, from the year 1811, to "' leave Street entirely to his own course;" and " so it gradually slid into a mere ministerial journal-an instrument of the Treasury:" " acquired a high character for being the organ of Governmlent, and obtained a great circulation; but became odious to the mob-excited by the falsehoods of the weekly journals." wk Wednesday, 8th May, 1816. "James Gillman's, Esq., Surgeon, "T M DEAR STUART, Highgate. " Since you left me, I have been reflecting a great deal on the subject of the Catholic question, and somewhat on The Cour~ier in general. With all my weight of faults (and no one is less likely to underrate them than myself), a tendency to be influenced by selfish motives in my friendships, or even in the cultivation of my acquaintance, will not, I am sure, be by yout placed among them. When we first knew each other, it was perlhaps the most interesting period of both our lives, at the very turn of the flood; and I can never cease to reflect with affectionate delight on the steadiness and independence of your conduct and principles, and how, for so many years, with 668 BIOGRAPIIA LITERARIA. little assistance from others, and with one main guide, a sympathizing tact for the real sense, feeling, and impulses of the respectable part of the English nation, you went on so auspiciously, and likewise so effectively. It is far, very far, from being an hyperbole to affirm, that you did more against the French scheme of Continental domination than the Duke of Wellington has done; or rather, Wellington could neither have been supplied by the ]Ministers, nor the Ministers supported by the nation, but for the tone first given, and then constantly kept up by the plain, nn-ministerial, anti-opposition, anti-Jacobin, anti-Gallican, anti-Napoleon spirit of your writings, aided by a colloquial style and evident good sense, in which, as acting on an immense mass of knowledge of existing men and existing circumstances, you are superior to any man I ever met with in my life-time. Indeed you are the only human being, of whom I can say with severe truth, that I never conversed with you for an hour without rememberable instruction; and with the same simplicity I dare affirm my belief, that my greater knowledge of inan has been useful to you, though, from the nature of things, not so useful as your knowledge of mien has been to me." "a Now, with such convictions, my dear Stuart, how is it possible that I can look back on the conduct of The Courier, from the period of the Duke of York's restoration, without some pain? You can not be seriously offended or affronted with me, if, in this deep confidence and in a letter, which, or its contents, can meet no eye but your own, I venture to declare, that though since then much has been done, very much of high utility to the country, by and under Mr. Street, yet The Cour;9ier itself has gradually lost that sanctifying spirit which was the life of its life, and without which, even the best and soundest principles lose half their effect on the human mind; I mean, the faith in the faith of the person and paper which brings them forward. They are attributed to the accident of their happening to be for such a side, or for such a party. In short, there is no longer any root in the paper, out of which all the various branches and fruits, and even fluttering leaves, are seen or believed to grow. But it is the old tree, barked round above the root, though the circular decortication is so small and so neatly filled up and colored as to be scarcely visible but in its effects, excellent fruit still hanging on the boughs, but they are tied on by threads and hairs." " In all this I am well aware, that you are no otherwise to be blamed than in permitting that which, without disturbance to your heart and tranquillity, you could not, perhaps, have prevented or effectively modified. But the whole plan of Street seems to me to have been motiveless from the beginning, or at least affected by the grossest miscalculations, in respect even of pecuniary interests. For, had the paper maintained and asserted not only its independence, but its ap BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 669 pearance of it; —it is true that Mr. Street might not have had Mr. A. to dine with him, or received as many nods and shakes of the hand from Lord this or that; but at least equally true, that the ministry would have been far more effectively served, and that (I speak from facts) both the paper and its conductor would have been held by the adherents of ministers in far higher respect; and after all, ministers do not love newspapers in their hearts, not even those that support them; indeed it seems epidemic among Parliament men in general to affect to look down upon and despise newspapers, to which they owe 99 0 of their influence and character, and at least 3ths of their knowledge and phraseology. Enough! burn the letter, and forgive the writer, for the purity and affectionateness of his motive."-Quoted froma the Gentleman's Magazine of June, 1838. One other point connected with Mr. C.'s writing for public journals I must advert to before concluding this chapter. Mr. Cottle finds want of memory in some part of the narrative, contained in this work, respecting the publication of The Wkatchma'cn; it is as well to let him tell the story in his own way, which he does as follows:-" The plain fact is, I purchased the whole of the paper for The Wactch7mcan, allowing Mr. C. to have it at prime cost, and receiving small sums from Mr. C. occasionally, in liquidation. I became responsible, also, with Mr. B. for printing the work, by which means, I reduced the price per sheet, as a bookseller, (1000) from fifty shillings to thirty-five shillings. Mr. C. paid me for the paper in fractions, as he found it convenient, but from the imperfection of lMr. Coleridg'e's own receipts, I never received the whole. It was a losing concern altogether, and I was willing, and did bear, uncomplaining, imy portion of the loss. There is some difference between this statement, and that of Coleridge, in his Biogqaphi7a Literaric. A defect of memory must have existed, arising out of the lapse of twenty-two years; but my notices, made at the time, did not admit of mistake. There were but twenty sheets in the whole ten numbers of The Watchman, which, at thirty-five shillings per sheet, came to only thirty-five pounds. The paper amounted to much more than the printing. "I can not refrain from observing further, that my loss was augmented from another cause. Mr. C. states in the above work, that his London publisher never paid him'one farthing,' but'set him at defiance.' I also was more than his equal companion in this misfortune. The thirty copies of Mr. C.'s poems, and the six'Joans of Arc' (referred to in the preceding letter) found a ready sale, by this said'indefatigable London publisher,' and large and fresh orders were received, so that Mr. Coleridge and myself successively participated in two very opposite sets of feeling; the one of exultation that our publications had found so good a sale; and the other of depression, that the time of payment never arrived!" 670 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. I take this opportunity of expressing my sense of many kind acts and much friendly conduct of Mr. Cottle towards my Father, often spoken of to me by my dear departed Mother, into whose heart all benefits sunk deep, and by whom he was ever remembered with respect and affection. If I still regard with any disapproval his publication of letters exposing his friend's unhappy bondage to opium and consequent embarrassments and deep distress of mind, it is not that I would have wished a broad influencive fact in the history of one, whose peculiar gifts had made him in some degree an object of public interest, to be finally concealed, supposing it to be attested, as this has been, by clear unambiguous documents. I agree with M r. Cottle in thinking that he would himself have desired, even to the last, that whatever benefit the world might obtain by the knowledge of his sufferings from opiuln,-the calamity which the inregulated use of this drug had been to him —into which he first fell ignorantly and innocently-(not as Mr. Dequincey has said, to restore the " riot of his animal spirits," when "youthful blood no longer sustained it," but as a relief from bodily pain and nervous irritation)-'that others might avoid the rock, on which so great a part of his happiness for so long a time was wrecked; and this from the same benevolent feeling, which prompted him earnestly to desire that his body should be opened after his death, in the hope that some cause of his life-long pains in the region of the bowels mnight be discovered, and that the knowledge thus obtained might lead to the invention of a remedy for like afflictions. Such a wish indeed, on the former point, as well as afterwards on the latter, he once strongly expressed; but I believe myself to be speaking equally in his spirit when I say, that all such considerations of advantage to the public should be subordinated to the prior claims of private and natural interests. My own opinion is, that it is the wiser and better plan for persons connected with those, whose feats of extraordinary strength have drawn the public gaze upon them, to endure patiently that their frailties should be gazed and wondered at too; and even if they think, that any reflection to them of such celebrity, on such conditions, is far more to be deprecated than desired, still to consider that they are not permitted to determine their lot, in this respect, but are to take it as it has been determined for them, independently of their will, with its peculiar pains and privileges annexed to it. I believe that most of them would be like the sickly queen in the fairy tale of Peronella, who repented when she had obtained the country maiden's youth, and health at the loss of rank and riches. Be this as it may, they have not a choice of evils, nor can exchange the aches and pains of their portion, or its wrinkles and blemishes,-for a fair and painless obscurity. These remarks, however, refer only to the feeling and conduct of parties privately affected by such exposures. Others are bound to care for them as BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 671 they are not bound to care for themselves. If a finished portrait of one, in whom they are nearly concerned, is due to the world, they alone can be the debtors, for the property by inheritance is in them. Other persons, without their leave, should not undertake to give any such portrait; their duties move on a different plane; nor can they rightfully feel themselves "entitled" (to borrow the language of Mr. Dequincey, while I venture to dissent from his judgment), "to notice the most striking aspects of his character, of his disposition and his manners, as so many reflex indications of his intellectual constitution," if this involves the publication of letters on private subjects, the relation of domestic circumstances and other such personalities affecting the living. I am sure at least that conscience would prohibit me from any such course. I should never think the public good a sufficient apology for publishing the secret history of any man or woman whatever, who had connections remaining upon earth; but if I were possessed of private notices respecting one in whom the world takes an interest, should think it right to place them in the hands of his nearest relations, leaving it to them to deal with such documents, as a sense of what is due to the public, and what belongs to openness and lonesty, may demand. Of all the censors of Mr. Coleridge, Mr. Dequincey is the one whose remarks are most worthy of attention; those of the rest in general are but views taken from a distance, and filled up by conjecture, views taken by a medium so thick with opinion, even if not clouded with vanity and self-love, that it resembles a horn more than glass or the transpicuous air;-The Opium-eater, as he haws called himself, had sufficient inward sympathy with the subject of his criticism to be capable in some degree of beholding his mind, as it actually existed, in all the intermingling shades of individual reality; and in few minds have these shades been more subtly intermingled than in my Father's. But Mr. Dequincey's portrait of Coleridge is not the man himself; for besides that his knowledge of what concerned him outwardly was imperfect, the inward sympathy of which I have spoken was far firom entire, and he has written as if it were greater than it really was. I can not but conjecture, from what he has disclosed concerning himnself, that on some points-he has seen Mir. Coleridge's mind too much in the mirror of his own. His sketches of my Father's life and character are, like all that he writes, so finely written, that the blots on,;the narrative are the more to be deplored. One of these blots is the,passage to which I referred at the beginning of the last paragraph:;"I believe it to be notorious that he first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or nervous irritations-for his constitution was strong and excellent-but as a source of luxurious sen 67a BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. sations. It is a great misfortune, at least it is a great pain, to have tasted the enchanted cup of youthful rapture incident to the poetic temperament. Coleridge, to speak in the words of Cervantes, wanted better bread than was made with wheat." Mr. Dequincey mistook a constitution. that hlad vigor in it for a vigorous constitution. His body was originally full.of life, but it was full of death also fiom the first; there was in him a slow poison, which gradually leavened the whole lump, and by which his muscular frame was prematurely slackened and stupefied. Mr. Stuart says that his letters are "one continued flow of complaint of ill health and incapacity fiom ill health." This is true of all his letters —(all the sets of them)-which have come under mly eye, even those written before he went to Malta, where his opium habits were confirmed. Indeed it was in search of health that he visited the Mediterranean,-for one in his condition of nerves a most ill-advised measure,-I believe that the climate of South Italy is poison to Inost persons who suffer from relaxation and tendency to low fever. If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the i-medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping the jangled strings of some shattered lyre,-that he might once more lightly flash along "Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore, On winding lakes and rivers wide, That ask no aid of sail or oar, That fear no spite of wind or tide," — released, for a time at least, from the tyranny of ailments, which, bya spell of wretchedness, fix the thoughts upon themselves, perpetually drawing them inwards, as into a stifling gulf. A letter of his has been given in this Supplement, which records his first experience of opium': he had recourse to it in that instance for violent pain in the face, afterwards he sought relief in the same way from the sufferings of rheumatism. I shall conclude this chapter with a poetical sketch drawn fiom my Father by a friend, who knew him during the latter years of his life, after spending a few days with him at Bath, in the year 1815.* "' Proud lot is his, whose comprehensive soul Keen for the parts, capacious for the whole, * The passage belongs to him, as far as " heart's deep fervency.' It concluded, when first written, with a reference to the unhappy thraldom of his powers, of which I hare been speaking; for, at that time, says the writer, in a private communication, " he was not so well regulated in his habits and labors afterwards." The verses are fiom a Rhtsymed Plea for Tolerance: in two dialogues, by John Kenyon. I wish that I had space to quote the sweet lines that follow, relating to the author's own character and feelings, and his childhood passed "in our Carib isle." They do justice to Mr. Kenyon's humility and cheerfulness, in what they say of himself, but not to his powers. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 678 Thought's mingled hues can separate, dark from bright, Like the fine lens that sifts the solar light; Then recompose again th' harmonious rays, And pour them powerful in collected blazeWakening, where' er they glance, creations new, In beauty steeped, nor less to nature true; With eloquence that hurls from reason's throne A voice of might, or pleads in pity's'tone: To agitate, to melt, to win, to soothe, Yet kindling evor on the side of truth; Or swerved, by no base interest warped awry, But erring in his heart's deep fervency; Genius for him asserts the unthwarted claim, With these to mate —the sacred Few of fameEFxplore, like them, new regions for mankind, And leave, like theirs, a deathless name behind." CHAPTER -V.I. " By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellow-men; what I could have done is a question for my own conscience."-S. T. C. As the Biographiica Literaria does not mention all Mr. Coleridge's writings, it will be proper, in conclusion, to give some account of them here. The Poetical Works in three volumes include the Juzvenile Poems, Sibylline Leaves, Ancient'zariner, Christcbel, Remorse, Zap)olya, and tWallenstein. The first volume of Juvenile Poems was published in the Spring of 1796. It contains three sonnets by Charles Lamb, and a poetical Epistle which he called "Sara's," but of which my Mother told me she wrote but little. Indeed it is not very like some simple affecting verses, which wes wholly by herself, on the death of her beautiful infant, Berkeley, in 1799. In'lay, 1797, Mr. C. put forth a collection of poems, containing all that were in his first edition, with the exception of twenty pieces and the addition of ten new ones and a considerable number by his friends, Lloyd and Lamb. The Ancient farvinerl Love, The Nightingale, The Foster.2lother's Tale first appeared with the Lyrical Ballads of Mr. Wordsworth in the summer of 1798. There was a third edition of the Juvenile Poemns by themselves in 1803, with the original motto firom Statius, Felix curarvtum, &C. Silo. Lzb. iv. A spirit of almost childlike sociability seemed to reign among these young poets-they were fond of joint publications. Wallenstein, a Play translated from the German of Schiller, appeared in 1800. Christabel was not published till April, 1816, but written, the first part at Stowey in 1797, the second at Keswick in VOL. III. 2 F 674 BIOGRAPIIA LITERARIA. 1800. It went into a third edition in the first year. The fragment called Kubla Khan, composed in 1797, and the Pains of Sleep, which was annexed to the former by way of contrast, were published with the first edition of Christabel, in 1816. The Tragedy called Remorse was written in the summer and autumn of 1797, but not represented on the stage till 1813, when it was performed at Drury Lane-on the authority of an old play-bill of the Calne Theatre, " with unbounded applause thirty successive nights." On "the success of the Remorse," Mr. Coleridge wrote thus to his fiiend -Mr. Poole, on the 14th of February, 1813: "The receipt of your heart-engendered lines were sweeter than an unexpected strain of sweetest music;- or in humbler phrase, it was the only pleasurable sensation which the success of the Remorse has given me. I have read of, or perhaps only imagined, a punishment in Arabia, in which the culprit was so bricked up as to be unable to turn his eyes to the right or to the left, while in front was placed a high heap of barren sand glittering under the vertical sun. Some slight analogue of this, I have myself suffered from the mere unusualness of having my attention forcibly directed to a subject which permitted neither sequence of imagery, nor series of reasoning. No grocer's apprentice, after his first month's l)ermitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins than I of hearing about the Remorse. The endless rat-a-tat-tat at our black-and-blue bruised door, and my three master fiends, proof-sheets, letters (for I have a raging epistolophobia), and worse than these-invitations to large dinners, which I can not refuse without offence and imputation of pride, nor accept without disturbance of temper the day before, and a sick aching stomach for two days after-oppress me so that my spirits quite sink under it. " I have never seen the Play since the first night. It has been a good thing for the Theatre. They will get ~8,000 or ~10,000 by it, and I shall get more than all my literary labors put together, nay, thrice as much, subtracting my heavy losses inThee Watchman and lhe Friend, including the copyright." The manuscript of the Remorse, immediately after it was written, was shown to Mr. Sheridan, "who," says my Father, in the Preface to the first Edition, " by a twice conveyed recommendation (in the year 1797) had urged me to write a Tragedy for his theatre, who, on my objection that I was utterly ignorant of all stage tactics, had promised that he would himself make the necessary alterations, if the piece should be at all representable." lie, however, neither gave him any answer, nor returned him the manuscript, which he suffered to wander about the town from his house, and my Father goes on to say, "not only asserted that the Play was rejected because I would not submit to the alteration of one ludicrous line, but finally, in the year 71806, amused and delighted (as who was ever in his society, if I may BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 675 trust the universal report, without being amused and delighted?) a large company at the house of a highly respectable Member of Parliament, with the ridicule of the Tragedy, as a fair specimen of the whole of which he adduced a line:'Drip! drip! drip! there's nothing here but dripping.'* "In the original copy of the Play, in the first scene of the fourth act, Isidore had commenced his soliloquy in the cavern with the words:'Drip! drip! a ceaseless sound of water-drops,'as far as I can at present recollect: for, on the possible ludicrous association being pointed out to me, I instantly and thankfully struck out the line." I repeat this story as told by Mr. C. himself, because it has been otherwise told by others. I have little doubt that it was more pointedly than faithfully told to him, and can never believe that Mr. S. represented a ludicrous line as a fair specimen of the whole Play, or his tenacious adherence to it as the reason for its rejection. I dare say he thought it, as Lord Byron afterwards thought Zapolya, " beautiful but not practicable." Mr. Coleridge felt that he had some claim to a friendly spirit of criticism in that quarter, because he had "devoted the firstlings of his talents," as he says in a marginal note, "to the celebration of Sheridan's genius,"t and after the treatment described " not only never spoke unkindly or resentfully of it, but actually was zealous and frequent in defending and praising his public principles and conduct in the Morning Post"-of which, perhaps, Mr. S. knew nothing. However, in lighter moods, my Father laughed at Sheridan's joke as much as any of his auditors could have done in 1806, and repeated with great effect and mock solemnity, "Drip!Drip!-Drip! —nothing but dripping." I suppose it was at this time — the winter of 1806-7-that he made an unsuccessful attempt to bring out the Tragedy at Drury Lane. When first written this Play had been called Osorio, from the principal character, whose name my Father afterwards improved into Ordonio. I believe he in some degree altered, if he did not absolutely * A certain fair poetess, encore resplendissante de beautd, if she ever casts her eye on this page, will take no offence at its contents, nor will her filial feelings quarrel angrily with mine. The " dripping," whatever its unction may once have been, is stale enough now; but the story has frieshness in it yet. Such neglects as that of Mr. S. in not retulrn ing the M.S. of Remorse are always excusable in public men of great and various occupation; but the lesson to the literary aspirant is just the same as if he had been ever so blamable. My Father's whole history is a lesson to the professors of literature, and that which relates to the Remorse is a small but significant part of it, teaching patience and hope, while it may serve to repress the expectation, that money and credit can soon and certainly be obtained, even by writers possessed of genius not wholly unaccomnpanied with popular ability, and who have been favored with an introduction to some of the leaders and guides of the public, men of taste and talent and general influence. t See his Sonnet to Sheridan. Poet. Works, VII, p. 60. 676 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. recast, the three last acts after the failure with Mr. Sheridan, who probably led him to see their unfitness for theatrical representation. But of this point I have not certain knowledge. It was when Drury Lane was under the management of Lord Byron and Mr. Whitbread, and through the influence of the former, that it was produced upon tile stage. Mr. Gillman says, "Although Mr. Whitbread did not give it the advantage of a single new scene, yet the popularity of the Play was such, that the principal actor (Mr. Roe), who had performed in it with great success, made choice of it for his benefit night, and it brought an overflowing house." This was some time after Mr. Coleridge took up his residence at Highgate, in April, 1816. After all I am happy to think that this drama is a strain of poetry, and like all, not only dramatic poems, but highly poetic dranmas, not to be fully appreciated on the stage. Zac2olyce came before the public in 1817. The stage fate of this piece is alluded to in the B. L. Mr. Gillman mentions that it was Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, then the critic for Drury Lane, who rejected the Play, and complained of its " Inetaphysies"-a term which is not, upon all occasions, to be strictly construed, but, when used in familiar tallk, seems merely to denote whatever is too fine-spun, in the texture of thought and speech, for common wear; whatever is not readily apprehensible and generally acceptable. School-boys call every thing inl books or discourse, which is graver or tenderer than they like, 6' metaphysics." Mr. Kinnaird may have judged quite rightly that the Play was too metaphysical for our theatres in their present state, though certainly plays as metaphysical were once well received on the stage. Zacpolyc, however, had a favorable audience from the public as a dlramatic poem. Mr. Gillman says this Christmas Tale, which the author "' nevel sat down to write, but dictated while walking up and down the room, became so immediately popular that 2,000 copies were sold in six weeks." The collection of poems entitled Sibylline Leaves, "in allusion to the firagnentary and widely scattered state in which they had been long suffered to remain," appeared in 1817, about the same time with Zapolya, the ]Biograc)hia2 Literria, and the first Lay Sermon. The 2lfJiscellaneous Poems were composed at different periods of the author's life, many of themn in his later years. I believe that Youth and Age was written before he left the North of England in 1810, when he was about seven or eight-and-thirty,-early indeed, for the poet to say of himself " I see these locks in silvery slips, This drooping gait, this altered size: But spring-tide blossoms on thy lips, And tears take sunshine from thine eyes." BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 677 The whole of the Poetical Works, with the exception of a few which must be incorporated in a future edition, are contained in that in three volumes. The Fall of Robespierre, an Historic drama, of which the first act was written by Mr. Coleridge, and published September 22, 1794, is printed in the first vol. of the Lit. Remzains. This first act contains the Song on D)ozestic Peace. In the blank verse there are some faint dawnings of his maturer style, as in thece lines: " The winged hours that scatter'd roses roundl me, Languid and sad, drag their slow course along, And shake big gall-drops from their heavy wings"and in these:" Why, thou hast been the mouth-piece of all horrors, And, like a blood-hound, crouch'd for murder! Now Aloof thou standest froin the tottering pillar, Or, like a frightened child behind its mother, Hlidest thy pale face in the skirts of —JliMcy!" but it contains scarcely any thing of his peculiar original powers, and some of the lines are in school-boy taste; for instance, " While sorrow sad, like the dank willow near her, Hangs o'er the troubled fountain of her eye." Yet three years after the date of this composition, in 1797, which has been called his Annus lfirabilis, he had reached his poetical zenith. But perhaps it may be said that, from original temperament, and the excitement of circumstances, my Father lived fast. He had four poetical epochs, which represented, in some sort, boyhood, youthful manhood, middle age, and the decline of life. The first commenced a little on this side childhood, when he wrote Time real and Imaginary, and ended in 1796. This period embraces the Juvenile Poems, concluding with Religious Mlusings, written on the Christlnas Eve of 1794, a few months after The Fall of -Robespierre: The Destiny of Nations was composed a little earlier. Lewoti, written in 1795, The zolian Harp, and Reflection on having left a place of Retirement, written soon after, are more finished poems, and exhibit more of his peculiar vein than any which he wrote before them; though one poet, Mr. Bowles, has said that he never surpassed the Religious Mfusings! Fire, _Famine, and Slaughter belongs to 1796. The: Lines to a Friend (Charles Lamb) who had declared his intention of writing no more poetry, and those To a Young Friend (Charles Lloyd), were composed in the same year. These poems of 1794-5-6 may be considered intermediate in power as in time, and so forming a link between the first epoch and the next. 678 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Then came his poetic prime, which commenced with the Ode to the Departing Year, composed at the end of December, 1796. The year following, the five-and-twentieth of his life, produced The Ancient Mariner, Love, and The Dark Ladie, the first part of Christabel, Kubla Khan, Remorse, in its original cast, France, and This Lime-tree bower. Tears in Solitude, The Nightiengale, and The Wanderings of Cain were written in 1798. Frost at Midnight, The Picture, the Lines to the Rev. G. Coleridge, and those To W. Wordsworth, are all of this same Stowey period. It was in June, 1797, that my Father began to be intimate with Mr. Wordsworth, and this doubtless gave an impulse to his mind. The Hymn before Sunrise, and other strains produced in Germany, link this period to the next. The Hexameters written during a temporary blindness, and the Catullian flendecosyllables (which are freely translated from Matthisson's Milesisches Mihrchen), Mr. Cottle seenls to place in 1797, but the Author has marked the former as produced in 1799, and I believe that the latter are of the same date. The Night Scene, Myrtle leaf that ill besped, Maiden that with sullen brow, are of this period, and so I believe are Lines composed in a concertroom, and some others. The poems which succeed are distinguished from those of my Father's Stowey life by a less buoyant spirit. Poetic fire they have, but not the clear, bright mountain flame of his earlier poetry. Their meditative vein is graver, and they seem tinged with the sombre hues of middle age; though some of them were written before the Author was thirty-five years old. A characteristic poem of this period is Dejection, an Ode: composed at Keswick, April 4, 1802. Wallenstein had been written in London in 1800. The Three Graves was composed in 1805 or 6; the second part of Christabel* soon after the Author's settling in the Lake country (in 1801); Youth and Age not long before he'quitted it as a residence forever (in 1810). Recollections of Love must have been written on his return to Keswick from Malta in 1806: The Happy Husband at that time, or earlier. The small fragment called The Knight's Tomb probably belongs to the North. The Devil's Thoughts appeared in The Morning Post in 1800. This production certainly has in it more of youthful sprightliness than of middle-aged soberness; still it is less fantastic, and has more of worldwisdom in its satire than the War Eclogue of 1796. The Complaint * Christabel was condemned by the Edinburgh Review in good company, that of The White Doe. The two poems might be compared to Sa]m's two Leonoras, which seem the beautiful personification of sunshine and of pensive shadow. None of my Uncle (Mr. Southey's) Laureate Odes, not even that beautiful one on the death of the Princess Charlotte, shall form a third with these, but let Thalaba come to join the lovely pair, and then we shall have the three Graces. It is curious to look at critical articles, full of furious ridicule and buffoonery, in any old reviewing journal; they remind one so of fossil porcupines, with quills fixed in rigidity, or harlequin snakes in bottles. —N.B. Most of these snakes are of the blind worm species. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 679 and Reply first appeared in 1802. The Ode to Tranquillity was published in The Friend, March, 1809. The poems of his after-years, even when sad, are calmer in their melancholy than those produced while he was ceasing to be young. We are less heavy-hearted when youth is out of sight than when it is taking its leave. Duty surviving Self-Love, The Pang mnore sharp than all, Love's Apparition and Evanishment, The Blossoming of the solitary Date-tree, and some other poems of his latter years, have this character of resigned and subdued sadness. Work without Hope was written at fifty-six. The Visionary HEope and The Pains of Sleep, which express more agitation and severer suffering, are of earlier date. These and all in the Sibylline Leaves were written before the end of 1817, when he had completed his forty-fifth year. The productions of the fourth epoch, looked at as works of imagination, are tender, graceful, exquisitely finished, but less bold and animated than those of his earlier day. This may be said of Zapolya, Alice du Clos, The Garden of Boccaccio, The two Founts, Lines suggested by the last Words of Berengarius, Sancti Dominici Pallium, and other poems written, I believe, when the poet was past forty, the four last named after he was fifty years old. Love, Hope, and Patience in Education was, I think, one of his latest poetical efforts, if not the very last. The' following prose compositions are included in the poetical volumes, and the Apologetic Preface to Fire, Famdine, and Slaughter, containing a comparison between Milton and Jeremy Taylor, is placed at p. 206: An Allegorical Vision, first published in The Courier in 1811, and New Thoughts on Old Subjects, which first appeared in The Keepsake, are inserted at p. The whole of the Poetical Works, except a few which have been reprinted in the Literary PRemains, are contained in the stereotyped edition in three volumes. The Poems without the Dramas have been collected in a single volume, from which some of the Juvenile Poems, and two or three of later date are excluded, and which includes a few not contained in the three vol. edition. I now proceed to Mr. Coleridge's compositions in Prose. Conciones ad Populum, are two addresses to the People, delivered at the latter end of February, and then thrown into a small pamphlet. "After this," says Mr. Cottle, "hle consolidated two other of his lectures, and published them under the title of The Plot Discovered." A moral and political Lecture delivered at Bristol by Mr. C. was published in the same year. I do not know whether he printed any of his other Bristol orations of the year ninety-five. The Watchman was carried on in 1796. The first number appeared March 1; the tenth and last, May 13. These were youthful immature productions. Whatever was valuable and of a permanent nature in them was transferred into his later productions, or included in later publications. 680 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. The Friend, a Literary, Moral, and Political Weekly Paper, excluding personal and party politics and the events of the day, was written and published at Grasmere. The first number appeared on Thursday, June 1st, 1809, the 27th and last of that edition, MIarch 15, 1810. The Fr~iend next appeared before the public in 3 vols. in 1818. This was "rather a rifacinento," as the Author said, " than a new edition, the additions forming so large a proportion of the whole work, and the arrangement being altogether new." (Essays V-XIII. pp. 98-151, treat of the D)uty of communicating truth, and the conditions under which it may be safebly communicated; Essay V. is on the inexpediency of pious frauds, &c.) The third edition of 1837 gave the Author's last corrections, an appendix containing the parts thrown out in the recast, with some other misceilanea, and a synoptical table of the contents by the Editor. There is now a fourth edition. The two Lay Sermons were published, the one in 1816, the other in 1817. The first is entitled The Statesman's fTJanual, or The Bible the best Guide to Political sC ill and foresight: a Lay Sermon addressed to the higher classes of society, with an Appendix, containing comments and essays connected with the study of the inspired writings:-the second A Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes, on the existing distresses and discontents. Mr. Gillman says he " had the intention of addressing a third to the lower classes."'The iBiographiea Lite~raria was published in 1817,-but parts of the first volume must have been composed somle years earlier. The Edinburgh Review in its. August number of that year was as favorable to the book as coeld be exr2ected.* The Aids to IReflection first appeared in 1825. The original title was Aids to Reflection in the formationf of a manly character on the several grounds of Prudence,!Morality, and Religion; illustrated by select passages from our elder divines, especially fiom Archbishop Leighton. In-an advertisement to the first edition, the author mentions that the work was proposed and begun as a mere selection from the writings of Leighton, with a few notes and a biographical preface by the selector, but underwent a revolution of plan and object. " It would, indeed," he adds, "be more correct to say, that the present * The remarks in that article upon my Father's remarks on poetic diction I have vainly tried to understand:-" A paste of rich and honeyed words, like the candied coat of the auricula, a glittering tissue of quaint conceits and sparkling metaphors, crusting over the rough stalk of homely thoughts, &c.; such is the style of Pope and Gray; such very often is that of Shakspeare and Milton; and, notwithstanding Mr. Coleridge's decision to the contrary, of Spenser's Faiir-y Queen." Holiely thoughts clothed in a glittering tissue of poetic diction are but pseudo-poetry; and the powder on the auricula would be nothing if the coat itself were not of velvet. MIr. C.'s decision respecting the fl'aory Queen is equally misrepresented, for he maintains that Spenser's language is distinct from that of prose, such language being required by his thoughts and in harmony with them. To say that he decided " the contrary," as if he had denied poetic diction to Spenser, is not like the auricula's coat, candid. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEM[ENT. 681 volume owed its accidental origin to the intention of compiling one of a different description than to speak of it as the same work."'" Still, however, the selections from Leighton, which will be found in the fundamental and moral sections of this work, and which I could retain consistently with its present form and matter, will, both from the intrinsic excellence and from the characteristic beauty of the passages, suffice to answer two prominent purposes of the original plan; that of placing in a clear light the principle which pervades all Leighton's writings-his sublime view, I mean, of Religion and 3Morality as the means of reforming the human soul in the Divine Imnage (Idel); and that of exciting an interest in the works, and an affectionate reverence for the name and memory of this severely tried and truly primitive Churchman." Neither Hume nor Clarendon, I believe, mentions the persecution of Archbishop Leighton's father by the Prelatical party of his day; and yet it was one of their worst acts, and that which most excited wrath and indignation against the Primate-so faithfnl is their portrait of those times! Never can I read Mr. Wordsworth's sublime sonnet to Laud, especially the lines, Prejudged by foes determined not to spalre, An old weak man for vengeance laid aside, without thinking of another "' old weak man for vengeance laid (aside" -of Land in the day of his power pulling off his hat and thanking God for the inhuman sentence that had been passed upon the already wasted victim* —of the miserable den to which the mangled man was committed for life after that sentence had been executed in all its multiplication and precision of barbarity-then calling to mind the words of our Saviour, They that take the sword shall perish with the stord, and Blessed are the vmerciful for they shall obtain mercy. It was not mercy alone that was violated by these acts-but law and justice; and if he who instigated and rejoiced in them received neither justice nor mercy in his turn, is he worthy of the sacred name of Aliartyr? May we not say that the vengeance which fell upon this persecutor was the Lord's vengeance, even if it came to pass by evil instruments, and fell upon a head already bowed down, and in some respects a noble one? Can the glory and honor of meeting death with firmness-nay, even with sublilne piety, cast its beams backward and bathe in one. pure luminous flood a life darkened with such deep * The particulars of this instance of Star Chamber tyranny I read in Aikman's Life of Archbishop Laud, prefixed to his works. It is said that when he was taken out of the wretched cell in Newgate in which he was confined before his sentence, " the skin and hair had almost wholly come off his body." This was for writing against Prelacy, not against Christianity. Any man may do the like now, and not a hair of his head can be touched; yet moral offences, public or private, have far less chance of escaping with impunity than they had then. 2 Fe 682 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. shadows, as those that chequer the sunshine of Laud's career?-the parts really brightened with the light of heaven? Plainness, sincerity, integrity, learning, munificence to a cause*-can virtues like these outweigh or neutralize such faults of head, heart, and temper, as lie to the charge of this Bishop in the Church of Christ? As well might we set the cold bright morning dews, that rest on the stony crown of Vesuvius, against the burning lava that bursts from its crater, and expect them to quench the fire or reduce it to a moderate beat. Some abatement must be made from the guilt of his violences from consideration of the times; but to subtract the whole on that account, or even to make light of it, is surely too much to make moral good and evil dependent on circumstance. What? Have Arundel, Bonner, Gardiner, little or nothing to answer for? Was there ever yet a persecutor that persecuted from mere speculative inhumanity? Even through Clarendon's account we may discern, I think, that Laud's private passions, in part at least, engaged him in the cause of Intolerance. He had been exasperated, before he attained power, by Puritan molestations and oppositions,-he became the persecutor of Puritans after he attained it; as school-boys that have been tormented while they were in a low form, torment in their turn when they get into a high one-not their tormentors, but unfortunates who represent them to their imagination. An eminently good and wise man is above his times, if not in all, yet in many things; but Laud was the very impersonation of his times-the impersonated spirit of his age and his party. (Compare his over-ceremonious consecration of St. Catherine's Church, gloated over by Hume, with Archdeacon Hare's remarks on his neglect of his diocese, in The Mlission of the Comforter.) They who are of that party still, who would still swathe religion by way of supporting it, and dizen by way of dressing it, and gaze with fond regretful admiration upon the giant forms of Spiritual Despotism and Exaggerated Externalism, as they loom shadowy and magnificent through the vapory vista of ages, to them no wonder that he is a giant too. And there are others, far above that or any other party, who, in their love and zeal for the Church, abstract the how and the why of Laud's public warfare, and see him abstractedly as the Champion of the Church of England. " God knows my heart," says Mr. Coleridge (in a marginal note on Mr. Southey's article on the History of Dissenters, in the Quarterly Review of October, 1813), "how bitterly I abhor allintolerance, how deeply I pity the actors when there is reason to suppose them deluded; but is it not clear that this theatrical scene of Laud's death, who was the victim of almost national indignation, is not to be compared with'bloody sentences' in the coolness of secure power? As well might you palliate the horrible atrocities of the Inquisition, every one of which might be jus* Clarendon, passim, especially his summary of Laud's character. BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 683 tified on the same grounds that Southey has here defended Laud, by detailing the vengeance taken on some of the Inquisitors." I do not see that here my honored Uncle defends the Primate: he says, " We are not the apologists of Laud; in some things he was erroneous, in some imprudent, in others culpable. Evil, which upon the great scale is ever made conducive to good, produces evil to those by whom it comes." And how wise and beautiful is this sentiment a little further on! " It especially behooves the historian to inculcate charity, and take part with the oppressed, whoever may have been the oppressors." As some excuse for my Father's expression, "theatrical scene," I allege that sentence of Lauld's: "Never did man put off mortality with a better courage, nor look upon his bloody and malicious enemies with more Christian clarity." My Father adds: " I know well how imprudent and unworldly these my opinions are. The Dissenters will give me no thanks, because I prefer and extol the present Church of England, and the partisans of the Church will calumniate me, because I condemn particular members, and regret particular eoras, of the former Church of England. Would that Southey had written the whole of his review in the spirit of this beautiful page." (Page 102.) In that very interesting collection of meditative Sonnets by the late Sir Aubrey de Vere, is one upon Laud, against which I ventured to write, "If any thing done in the name of principle must needs be righteous, then the tortures and long languishing of Leighton are no impeachment of Laud's righteousness." There was a second edition of the Aids in 1831, a fifth in 1843. The little work On the Constitution of the Church and State,* according to the Idea of each, first appeared in 1830, and went into a second edition in the same year. It is now joined with the Lay Sernmons in one volume. To the Church an<d State are appended Notes on Taytor's History of Enthusiasm, and tA Dialogue between -Demosius and llfystes. After Mr. Coleridge's death in July, 1834, four volumes of his Literary Remains were published by his late Editor. Vols. i. and ii. appeared in 1836, Vol. iii. in 1838, Vol. iv. in 1839. Vol. i. contains The Fall of Robespierre and other poems, and poetical fragments, Notes of a Course of Lectures delivered in 1818, Marginal Notes on several books, Fragments of Essays, Mr. C.'s Contributions to the Omnianaeof Mr. Southey, published in 1812, and fifty-six other short articles on various subjects. Vol. ii. contains snore Notes of Lectures on Shakspeare, including criticism on each of his Plays, with Introductory Matter on Poetry, the Drama, and the Stage, prefaced by extracts of letters relating to these Lectures: Notes on Ben Jonson, on * The inaccurate report of NiebUhr's opinion of this work, which appeared in a letter of Dr. Arnold, published in his Life, has been corrected, I am told, in a new edition. 684: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Beaumont and Fletcher, on Fuller, on Sir Thomas Browne, an Essay on the Prometheus of iEschylus, and other miscellaneous writings. Vol. iii. contains Formula Fidei de S. Trinitate, A Nightly Prayer, Notes on the Book of Common Prayer, on Hooker, Field, Donne, Henry Mlore, Heinrichs, I-Iacket, Jeremy Taylor, The Pilgrim's Progress, and John Smith, and a Letter to a Godchild. Vol. iv. contains Notes on Luther, St. Theresa, Bedell, Baxter, Leighton, Sherlock, Waterland, Shelton, Andrew Fuller, Whitaker, Oxlee, A Barrister's Hints, Davison, Irving, and Noble, and an Essay on Faith. The present edition of the Literary Remains is nearly exhausted. In a fresh edition new matter will be added from marginal notes, probably in a fifth volume. Archdeacon HI-are speaks of The _Remains in the preface to his Vfission of the Comforter in a passage which may fitly be produced here. " Of recent English writers, the one with whose sanction I have chiefly desired, whenever I could, to strengthen my opinions, is the great religious philosopher to whom the mind of oar generation in England owes more than to any other man. MIy gratitude to him I have endeavored to express by dedicating the following Sermons to his memory; and the offering is so far at least appropriate, in that the main work of his life was to spiritualize, not only our philosophy, but our theology, to raise them both above the empiricism into which they had long been dwindling, and to set them free from the technical trammels of logical systems. Whether he is as much studied by the genial young men of the present day, as he was twenty or thirty years ago, I have no adequate means of judging; but our theological literature teems with errors, such as could hardly have been committed by persons whose minds had been disciplined by his philosophical method, and had rightly apprlopriated his principles. So far too as my observation has extended, the third and fourth volumes of his Remaains, though they were hailed with delight by Arnold on their first appearance, have not yet produced their proper effect on the intellect of the age. It may be that the rich store of profound and beautiful tlhought contained in them has been weighed down, from being mixt with a few opinions on points of Biblical criticism, likely to be very offensive to persons who know nothing about the history of the Canon. Some of these opinions, to which Coleridge himself ascribed a good deal of importance, seem to me of little worth; some, to be decidedly erroneous. Philological criticism, indeed, all matters requiring a laborious and accurate investigation of details, were alien from the bent and habits of his mind; and his exegetical studies, such as they were, took place at a period when he had little better than the meagre Rationalism of Eichhorn and Bertholdt to help him. Of the opinions which he imbibed from them, some abode with him through life. These, however, along with every thing else that can justly be BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 685 objected to in the Remains, do not form a twentieth part of the whole, and may easily be separated from the remainder. Nor do they detract, in any way, from the sterling sense, the clear and far-sighted discernment, the power of tracing principles in their remotest operations, and of referring all things to their first principles which are manifested in almost every page, and from which we might learn so mnlch." The last posthumous work of Mr. Coleridge, published September, 1840, is entitled Confessions of an ignqirinzg Spirit, and consists of seven letters on the Inspiration of the Scriptures. It should be understood that this work is intended not to;undermzine the belief that the Bible is the }Word of God, or in any degree to lessen the deep reverence with which it is regarded by Christians, but to put that belief on a better foundation than it commonly rests upon. " Let it be distinctly understood," the author says, " that my arguments and objections apply exclusively to the following Doctrine or Dogma. To the opinions which individual divines have advanced in lieu of this doctrine,"-for instance, I suppose, the strange fancy that the seords of the Bible are not divinely dictated, that the language is human and yet exempt, by divine power, fiom any possible admixture of human error, —" my only objection, as far as I object, is-that I do not understand them. —-— I said that in the Bible there is more that finls me than I have experienced in all other books put together; that the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being; and that whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its hav-. ing proceeded from the Holy Spirit. But the Doctrine in question requires me to believe, that not only what finds me, but that all that exists in the sacred volume, which I am bound to find therein, was not alone inspired by, that is, composed by men under the actuating influence of the HIoly Spirit, but likewise-dictated by an infallible intelligence;-that the writers, each and all, were divinely informed as well as inspired. --- - I can conceive no softenings here which would not nullify the Doctrine, and convert it to a cloud for each man's fancy to shape and shift at will. And thLis doctrine, I confess, plants the vineyard of the word with thorns for me, and places snares in its pathways." He proceeds to show how the doctrine in question injures the true idea of the spirituality and divinity of the sacred volume, and directly or indirectly tends to alienate men from the outward Revelation. A second edition of this little work will soon be prepared. The book has been denounced in strange style by some who do not profess to have it. These reasoners assume in the first place that both the tendency and object of it is to overthrow Christianity — whereas any one who reads it, and not merely what a hostile spirit has predetermined to find in it, can not fail to perceive that at least 686 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. the writer's object is to guard and exalt the religion of Christ. But, secondly, forgetting that the book is intended to overthrow Christianity, they urge that Christianity has done very well hitherto without such views as it propounds, and that very great thinkers and good men have lived and died, in the faith and fear of the Lord, without the knowledge of them;-as if the wants of the Church were in all ages exactly alike; or as if there had not been in all ages clouds over the sunshine of faith, occasioned by the difficulties which the writer seeks to remove; or as if it were not true that the more light men obtain on one side of the region of thought the more they need on other sides; as if greatness and goodness, in their application to men, were not relative terms, and the best and wisest of mortals, that have appeared upon earth, had ever been free from error and imperfection! I should think there is hardly a foolish or evil notion onany subject which might not be screened from attack by such arguments as these. And, even were they not such mere weakness, of what force can they be with those, who take for their motto, as Mr. Coleridge did from first to last: that all men may knowo the truth and that the truth may set themfree? Religious truth and religion are identified in Scripture, or at least represented as one and inseparable; and how can a man obey the truth or minister to it, except by setting forth, what, after the widest survey of the subject which he is capable of taking, he believes to be the truth? The suggestion that no man should examine such subjects or call in question prevailing views in religion save one who starts from a high station of holiness and spiritual light, can be of little value unless accompanied by a criterion of holiness, both as to kind and degree, admitted by all men. Prevailing notions are often utterly erroneous, and if none might expose what they believe in their hearts to be wrong and injurious views, till it was proved, even to their adversaries' satisfaction, that they were far advanced in true sanctity, wrong views would be the prevailing ones till the end of time. Providence works by finer means than enter into this sort of philosophy, making imperfection minister to the perfecting of what is good and purifying of what is evil. Whether or no the views of St. Jerome and other ancient Fathers concerning Inspiration are, as has been affirmed, something far deeper and higher than we, in our inferior state of spirituality, can conceive, I do not presume to decide; but yet I would suggest, that high and spiritual views in general are capable of being set forth in words, and of gradually raising men up to some apprehension of them. They do not remain a light to lighten the possessor and mere darkness, or a light that closely resembles a shade, to the rest of the world. Things that pertain to reason and the spirit appeal to the rational and spiritual in mankind at large; they tend to elicit the BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 687 reason and expand the understandings of men; deep calleth unto deep; and if the teaching of Paul and John is now in a wonderful manner apprehended by peasants and children, who hear the Gospel habitually, St. Jerome's notions of Inspiration, if truly divine and evangelical, would by this time be generally apprehended by Christians in the same way, and by the wise and learned would be comprehended more intellectually and systematically. Whereas, can it be denied, that no consistent scheme of Inspiration has ever been gathered from the teaching of those ancient Fathers? They who believe that such a scheme is contained in their writings, explicitly or implicitly, will do well to unfold it. Merely to talk about such a thing in a style of indefinite grandeur is but to conjure up a mist, by the spell of solemn sounding words, to mock the eyes of men with a cloud castle for a season-a very little season it is during which any such piece of mist-magnificence can remain undispersed in times like the present, except for those who had rather gaze on painted vapors than on realities of a hue to which their eyes are unaccustomed. I have not been able to obtain any exact account of all my Father's courses of lectures, given after his visit to Germany, but find, from letters and other sources of information, that he lectured in London, before going to Malta, in 1804; on his return from Malta, in 1807; again in 1808; in 1811; in 1814, in which year he also lectured at Bristol; in 1817; and, for the last time, I believe, in 1819. His early lectures at Bristol are mentioned in the biographical sketch. The poetic or imitative art, an ancient critic has observed, must needs describe persons either better than they are, at the present time, or worse, or as they are exactly. The fact is, however, that in literary fiction individuals can seldom be exhibited exactly such as they are, the subtle interminglings of good and evil, the finely balanced qualities that exist in the actual characters of men, even those in whom the colors are deepest and the lines most strongly traced, being too fine and subtle for dramatic effect. Indeed it is scarcely possible to present a man as he truly is except in plain narrative; his mind can not be properly manifested save in and through the very events and circumstances which give utterance to his individual being and which his peculiar character helped to mould and produce. When taken out of these and placed in the alien fiamework of the novelist or dramatist it becomes another thing; the reprefentation may convey truth of human nature in a broad way, and seem drawn to the life, if the writer have a lively wit, but as a portrait of a particular person it is often the more a falsehood the more natural it appears. To poetic descriptions these remarks do not apply. They are, for 688 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. the most part, mere views of a character in its elevated and poetic aspects-tributes of admiration to its beautiful qualities. Such are the fine stanzas, already quoted, in which the poet Coleridge is described by the great Poet, his Friend: and such are some less known, composed by a poet of a later generation, who never saw my Father face to face. Of these the last four will serve for a conclusion to this sketch. I give them here for the sake of their poetic truth and the earnest sympathy they manifest with the studious poetPhilosopher contemning wealth and death, Yet docile, childlike full of life and love — though they are not among the very finest parts of their author's thoughtful and beautiful poetry. No loftier, purer soul than his hath ever With awe revolved the planetary page (From infancy to age) Of knowledge: sedulous and proud to give her TIhe whole of his great heart for her owes sake; For what she is; not what she does, or what can make.* And mighty voices from afar came to him; Converse of trumpets held by cloudy forms, And speech of choral storms. Spirits of night and noontide bent to woo himHe stood the while, lonely and desolate As Adam when he ruled a world, yet found no mate. His loftiest Thoughts were but like palms uplifted; Aspiring, yet in supplicating guiseHis sweetest songs were sighs. Adown Lethean streams his spirit drifted, Under Elysian shades from poppied bank With Amaranths massed in dark luxuriance dank. Coleridge, farewell! The great and grave transition Which may not Priest or King or Conqueror spare, And yet a Babe can bear, Has come to thee. i Through life a goodly vision Was thine; and time it was thy rest to take. Soft be the sound ordained thy sleep to breakWhen thou art waking, wake me, for thy Master's sake!t * Here seems an allusion to an anti-utilitarian maxim of Bacon's, which is very expressive of my Father's turn of mind:-Et tamen quemadmodum luci magnam habemus gratiam, quod per eam vias inire, artes exercere, legere, nos invicem dignoscere possimus, et nihilominus ipsa visio lucis res prcestantior est et pulcthrior, quanm mulltiplex ejus usus; ita eerte ipsa contemplatio rerum, prout stunt, sine slperstitione ant impostura, errore act confusione, in se ipsa magis digna est, qutam universus inventorumn fructus. Novum Organum, Part of Aph. cxxix. t From a volume containing The Search after Proserpine. Recollections of Greece and other Poems by Aubrey de Vere, author of The Fall of Rora. A P P PE N D IX AP PEND IX. TImE following marginalia of Mr. Coleridge's, which were spoken of in a note to chap. ix. were transcribed for a new edition of the Biographia by Mr. C.'s late editor, with the passages referred to in the original German. These passages are here given upon the whole a little more at large, and in English, but with a clear understanding that entire justice can not in this way be done to the notions of Schelling, which, to be perfectly estimated, must be considered in the disquisitions to which they belong, as plants and flowers must be viewed in their native situations in order to be fully understood and admired.*-S. C. MS. note on Schelling's Philosoph. Untersuchungen iber das Wesen der menschlichen Freyheit und die damit Zusammenhdingenden Gegenstdinde. Phil. Schrift. p. 397. There are indeed many just and excellent observations in this work of Schelling's, and yet even more than usual over-meaning or unmeaning quid pro quos-thing-phrases, such as " Licht," " Finsterniss," "Feveer," "centre," "circumference," " ground," and the like-which seem to involve the dilemma, that either they are mere simniles, where that which they are meant to illustrate has never been stated, or that they are degrees of a kind, which kind has not been defined. Hence Schelling seems to be looking objectively at one thing, and imagining himself thinking of another; and after all this mysticism, what is the result? Still the old questions return, and I find none but the old answers. This ground to God's existence either lessens, or does not lessen, his power. In the first case it is, in effect, a co-existent God,evil, because the ground of all evil;-in the second it leaves us as before. With that "before" my understanding is perfectly satisfied; * I wish the reader to know before perusing these notes, on the authority of Archdeacon Hare, that " for the last twelve years Schelling has been strongly contending against Hiegel, and has made, or at all events professes to make, the idea of personality and of a personal God the central principle of his system." Quoted from the Archdeacon's admirable defence of Luther, Mission of the Comforter. Vol. ii. note 10, p. 800. 692 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. and, vehemently as Schelling condemns that theory of freedom, which makes it consist in the paramountcy of the Reason over the Will, wherein does his own solution differ from this, except in expressing with uncouth mysticism the very same notion? For what can be meant by the "individuality, or ichheit, becoming eccentric, and usurping the circumference," if not this? He himself plainly says that moral evil arises not from privation-much less negation,-but from the same constituents losing their proper ordination, that is, becoming C. B. A. instead of A. B. C. But wherein does this differ from the assertion, that the freedom of man consists in all the selfishness of his nature being subordinated to, and used as the instrument and materia of, his Reason, that is, his sense of the universal Wtill? In short nothing seems gained. To creation- Werden —he himself admits that we must resort; he himself admits it, in even a much higher sense, in the Logos, or the alter Deus et idem. Other creations were still possible, from the will of God, and not from His essence, and yet partaking of His goodness. A mere machine could be made happy, but not deserving of happiness; but if God created a Being with a power of choosing good, that Being must have been created with a power of choosing evil; otherwise there is no meaning in the word Choice. And thus we come round again to the necessity arising out of finiteness, with Leibnitz and Plato. For it is evident that by Matter Plato and Plotinus meant Finiteness; —or how else could they call it rob /i lov, without any qualities, and yet capable of all? The whole question of the origin of Evil resolves itself into one. Is the Holy Will good in and of itself, or only relative, that is, as a mean to pleasure, joy, happiness and the like? If the latter be the truth, no solution can be given of the origin of Evil compatible with the attributes of God; but (as in the problem of the squaring of the circle), we can demonstrate that it is impossible to be solved. If the former be true, as I more than believe, the solution is easy, and almost selfevident. Man can not be a moral being without having had the choice of good and evil, and he can not choose good without having been able to choose evil. God, as infinite and self-existing, is the alone One, in whom Freedom and Necessity can be one and the same from the beginning: in all finite beings it must have been arrived at by a primary act, as in Angels, or by a succession of acts as in Man. In addition it seems to me that Schelling unfairly represents Kant's system as the mere subjecting of the appetites to the Reason. Whereas Kant makes the enjoyment of freedom, not freedom itself, consist in the subjection of the particular to the universal Will, in order to their identification: and does not Schelling use Freedom often when he means no more than others mean by Life —that is, the power of originating motion.-S. T. C. APPENDIX. 693 Ibid. p. 403. " Through Freedom, a power is asserted, in principle unconditioned, without and by the side of the divine power, which according to those conceptions is inconceivable. As the sun in the Firmament extinguishes all heavenly lights, even so, and far more does the Infinite Might (extinguish) every finite, absolute Causality in one Being leaves to all others unconditioned Passibility as their only portion." Note. But is not this still a carrying of the physical Dynamic into the moral? Even admitting the incongruous predicate, Time, in the Deity, I can not see any absolute incompossibility of Foresight with Freedom.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 413.:" It is not absurd, says Leibnitz, that he who is God, should nevertheless be produced, or conversely: no more than it is contradictory that he who is the son of a Man should himself be Man." Note. I do not see the propriety of the instance; unless " God" is here assumed as an Ens generiicum even as " Man." If this be a mere nominalism it proves nothing;-if it be meant as a realism, it is a petitio principii sub lite; just as the following instance of the eye; but this is a far better illustration.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 421.'" But it will ever be remarkable, that Kant, when he had at first distinguished things in themselves from phcenomena only negatively, through independence of Time, and subsequently, in the metaphysical investigation of his Critique of the Practical Reason, had treated independence of Time and Freedom as really correlative conceptions, did not proceed to the thought of extending to the things also this only possible positive conception of the in themselves, whereby he would have raised himself-immediately to a higher standing-point of contemplation, and above the negativity, which is the character of his theoretic philosophy."-Schell. Note. But would not this have been opposite to Kant's aim? His purpose was a kacaprtCbv r7c bwvxKf. In order to effect this thoroughly, within this he, by an act of choice, confined himself.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 422. "' For whether there are single things conceived in an Absolute Substance, or just so many single wills, conceived in one Arch Will (or original will Urfwille), for Pantheism, as such, is all one." Note. The question is, do not these single wills, so included in the one" Uiwille" become " Things?" — S. T. C. Jbid. p. 424. " For, if Freedom is a power unto evil ( Vermagen zutn Bbsen), it must have a root independent of God." 694 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, Note. But God will not do impossibilities, and how can a Yermagen for moral good exist in a creature, which does not imply a Vermrgen zum Bbisen?-S. T. C. Ibid. pp. 437-8. "Man has, by reason of his arising out of the Ground (being creaturely), an independent principle in himself relatively to God; but by reason that even this principle-without on this account ceasing to be dark in respect of the Ground, —is illumined in Light, there arises in him at the same time a higher one, that is the Spirit.-Now, inasmuch as the soul is the living identity of both principles, it is Spirit, and Spirit is in God. Were the identity of both principles as indissoluble as in God, there would be no distinction, that is to say, God would not be revealed as Spirit. That unity which in God is inseparable, must therefore in man be separable,-and this is the possibility of good and evil." Note. But the problem was-how to prove this distinction, Unterschied; and here it is assumed as a ground of proof! How exactly does this seem to resemble Schelling's own objection to Fichte? " It must be so."-" Why?" — Because else my Theory would be false." —" Well! and what if it were?" In truth from p. 429 I find little but Behmenisms, which a reader must have previously understood in order to understand. And in the name of candor and common sense, where does this Zerti'ennlichkeit differ from the rejected Vermsigen zum Bbsen, involved in dem freyen VermSgen z um Guten?S. T. C. Ibid. p. 438. " The Principle raised up out of the ground of Nature, through which man is separate from God, is the selfness in him, but which, through its unity with the ideal principle, becomes Spirit." VNote. We will grant for a while, that the principle evolved or lifted up from this mysterious Ground of existence, which is and yet does not exist, is separate (geschieden) from God; yet how is it separate from the Ground itself? How is it individualized? Already the material phcenomenon of partibility seems to have stolen in. And at. last I can not see what advantage in reason this representation, this form of symbol, has over the old more reverential distinction of the Divine Will, relatively to the End, from the same Will, relatively to the Means; the latter of which we term his Wisdom, and to the former appropriate the name of the Divine Will Kar' k/4aatv. Schelling has more than once spoken of the necessity of a thorough study of Logic; and he has admitted that a logical work suited to the present state and necessities of scientific discipline does not exist. Would that he had prefixed to this work a canon of his own Logic, and, if he could, had taught us wherein his forms of thinking differ APPENDIX. 695 from the trans-realization of not Ideas alone, but more often-Abstractions and arbitrary general terms in Proclus!-S. T. C. Ibid. pp. 439-40. Note. It is difficult to conjecture what advantage Schelling proposed to himself in thus allegorizing, and yet so imperfectly. Whatever he might dream as to the hidden identity of darkness with the natural yearning, yet no one can avoid distinguishing daylight from the mere sense of daylight. In short, Light here means something: why not substitute that meaning?-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 442. Note. How can I explain Schelling's strange silence respecting Jacob Boehme? The identity of his system was exulted in by the Tiecks at Rome in 1805, to me; and these were Schelling's intimate fiiends. The coincidence in the expressions, illustrations, and even the mystical obscurities, is too glaring to be solved by mere independent coincidence in thought and intention. Probably prudential motives restrain Schelling for a while; for I will not think that pride or a dishonest lurking desire to appear not only an original, but the original can have influenced a man of genius like Schelling.-S. T. C. Ibid. quotation in a note. " An instructive illustration is here given by Fire (as wild, consuming, painful, glowing heat) in opposition to the so-named organic beneficent life-glow, since here Fire and Water enter into a Ground (of growth), or a conjunction, whilst there they go out of one another in discord." Note. Water is the great Nurse and ~Mediatrix of all growth; an Instrument of union-a marriage-of the comburent and combustible principles, oxygen and hydrogen. Fire, on the contrary, is the fierce combat of the two. This is better, as more accurate, than Feeuer und Wasser in Einem Grunde.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 445. " Leibnitz tries in every way to make it conceivable, how evil may arise out of a natural want or deficiency. The Will, says he, strives after the Good in general, and must desire Perfection, the highest measure of which is in God; but when it abides ensnared in the delights of the senses, with loss of higher goods, this very want of the counter-striving is the Privation, in which evil consists." Note. The modern English Unitarians contemplate the Deity as mere Mercy, or rather Good-nature, without reference to his Justice and Holiness; and to this Idol, the deification of a human passion, is their whole system confined. The Calvinists do the same with the Omnipotence of God, with as little reference to his Wisdom and his Love. S. T. C. Ibid. p. 449. " For the weakness or non-efficiency of the intelligent 696 BIOGRAPIIIA LITERARIA. Principle may certainly be a ground of the want of good and virtuous actions, but not a ground of actions positively bad and contrary to virtue." Note. Why not, if the inert/ia be voluntary? Suppose Heat to be a moral agent and voluntarily to withdraw itself; would not the splitting of the vessel by the'rozen water be a positive act? I find a confusion in Schelling of the visible with the conceivable. As well might I say, that when I tossed a child into the air, and wilfully did not catch it again-this, being a mere negation of motion, was no moral act.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 452. Note. Schelling puzzles me forever by his man made zup of two separable principles; and yet he (as a tertium aliguid), whose and not who these principles are, has the free power of separating them.-S. T. C. Ibid. pp. 455-6. " But there are in Nature accidental determinations, which are explicable only by an excitement of the irrational or dark principle of the creature that has taken place directly in the first creation-only by a selfness made active (aktivirter Selbstheit). Whence in Nature, beside the performed moral relationships, there are unmistakable foretokens of Evil, although the power thereof has first been excited through man; whence phaenomena, which, irrespectively of their being dangerous to man, excite a general natural abhorrence (Abschen). N2ote. Thus the close connection, in which the imagination of all people, especially all fables and religions of the East, place the serpent with evil, is certainly not gratuitous or unmeaning."Transl..Note. But some have supposed this to be the ape. The ape is the very opposite of the serpent. The eel, the trout, the salmon, these excite no Abschen. P.S. I doubt the truth of my own remark as to the eel and earthworm.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 459. Note. Why not have quoted all this from Boehme, as an extract raisonne'? But does the hypothesis, or hypopoiesis rather, explain the problem of evil? A nature-the ground, the substratum, of God, which is not Er Selbst God himself, but out of which God risen exists, and which yet is begotten by the self-existent, and yet is evil, morally evil-and yet the cause and parent, yea, the very essence of Freedom, without which, as antecedent, das B6se can not be -what is all this? P.S. The bookbinder has docked my former notes; but I understand enough to find that my first impressions were the same as my present are, after repeated perusal, and too strong a prepossession. It is a mere day-dream, somnium philosophans!-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 462. Note. But where after all, is the Evil as contra-dis APPENDIX. 697 tinguished from calamity and imperfection? How does this solve the diversity, the essential difference between regret and remorse? How does it concur even with the idea of Freedom? I own I am disappointed, and that, with respect to the system, I remain in the same state, with the same hurrying dimly and partially light-shotten mists before my eyes, as when I read the same things for the first time in Jacob Boehme.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 463. " Thence the universal necessity of sin and death, as the real destruction of all particularity (Eigenheit), through which every human will must pass, as through fire, in order to be purified." -Transl. Note. But is death to the wicked as to the better mortal? Shall we say that the redeemed die to the flesh, and therefore from it; but that the reprobate die in the flesh and therefore rwith it? —S. T. C. Ibid. p. 467. " For that is free which acts conformably to the laws of its own proper being, and is determined by nothing else, either within it or without it."-Tacnsl. Note. And is not this a confirmation of the old remark, that he who would snderstand Freedom, instead of knowing it by an act of Freedom (the mystery in the mystery), must either flee to Determinism (s priori or atb eZtra,-or to Fatalism, or the necessity ex essentcia propria. In either case how can we explain Remorse and Self-accusation other than as delusions, the necessity of which does not prove the necessity of knowing them to be delusions, and, consequently, renews the civil war between the Reason and the unconquerable Feeling, which it is the whole duty and promise of philosophy to reconcile?-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 468. "Mfan is in the original creation, as has been shown, an undivided being (which imay be mythically represented as a state of innocence and original blessedness anterior to this life): himself alone can divide himself. But this severance can not take place in Time; it takes place out of all Time, and thence together with the first creation, although, as I find, distinct firom it." — Trcnsl. NVote. But this makes it fall in time."-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 469. NYote. " So Luther in the Treatise De Servo Airbitrio; with justice, although he had not rightly conceived the union of such -an unfailing necessity with the Freedom of actions."-Tracsl. Note. Far better to have proved the possibility of Freedom, and to have left the mode untouched. The reality is sufficiently proved by the fact. Ibid. ibid. Note. I still feel myself dissatisfied with the argument against Freedom derived from the influence of motives, Yorstetlungen, vOLT, T, 2 G 698 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. &c. For are these things-and not rather mere general terms, signifying the mind determining itself? For what is a motive but a determining thought? and what is a thought but the mind acting on itself in some one direction? All that we want is to prove the possibility of Free-Will, or, what is really the same, a Will. Now this Kant had unanswerably proved by showing the distinction between phcenomena and noumena, and by demonstrating that Time and Space are laws of the former only (al oivOVercp at -rpWrat r77l aaOtOrewcF 6 Xpovoe REv, 8 rrpdrS7 KcaO' 2eov 6vOeltsf -r'f aloOl;eeOf rIf Ea' O &E XOSpo, Tf -Er.) and irrelative to the latter, to which class the Will must belong. In all cases of Sense the Reality proves the Possibility; but in this instance (which must be unique if it be at all), the proof of the Possibility only is wanting to effect the establishment of the Reality. Therefore I can not but object to p. 468-siefdillt ausser aller Zeit, utnd daher mit der erster Schopfung zusammen. (It takes place out of all Time and thence together with the first creation.) This has at least the appearance of a contradiction.-S. T. C. Ibid. pp. 469-70. "In the consciousness, so far as it is mere selfcomprehension and ideal only, doubtless that free deed which comnes to pass of necessity, can not take place; since it precedes it as existence (the deed precedes consciousness as actually existent)-first makes it; yet is it not therefore no deed of which the human being can ever take cognizance; since he who in soene way to excuse an unrighteous action, says,' Thus I amn unalterably,' is yet very well aware that he is thus through his own fault, however true it may be that it has been impossible for him to do otherwlise. —Transl. Nrote. I have long believed this; but surely it is no explanation beyond the simple idea of Free -Will itself.-S. T. C. (The remainder of this note is unfortunately lost.) Ib id. p. 472. "And it is worthy of notice how Kant, who had not raised himself in theory to a transcendental fact determinant of all human existence, was led, in his later inquiries, through mere true observation of the phenomena of the moral judgment, to a recognition of a subjective, as he expresses it, ground of human actions, preceding every deed that occurs to the senses, which yet itself again must be an act of freedom."-Tr cnsl. Note. But why this asserted superiority over Kant?. Where is the proof,-where the probability, that by mere faithful observation he could arrive-(he alone of all other philosophers)-at this awful conclusion? Lastly, what has Sclellinu added to Kant's notion?-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 478. Here also is a note of Mr. C.'s partly obliterated, in which he exclaims, "How unfair is this, to attribute to Kant a slowmotive making proenss, separate by intervals of time.. Most true, APPENDIX. 699 most reverently true is it that a Being imperfect does feel an awe as in the presence of a holier Self-alter et idemn, where the I distinguishable through imperfection, &c."-S. T. C. These remarks seem to be made in reference to those of Schelling aimed against unsre Empmfndungsphilosophen, "our sensation-philosophers." "To be conscientious," he affirms, "is for a man to act according as he knows, and not contradict in his deeds the light of knowledge. He is not conscientious, who, in any case that occurs, must first hold up to himself the law of duty, in order to decide upon right doing through respect to the same. Religiosity, according to the meaning of the word, leaves no choice between things opposedno equiligbrinr a'bitrii, the bane of all mlorality, but ouly the highest decidedness for that which is right, to the utter exclusion of choice." Ibid. p. 493. " Still the question recurs, does Evil end and how? -has Creation in general a final aim, and if this be so, why is this not reached immediately, —vwhy is not Perfection even from the beginning? To this there is no answer but what is alleady given: because God is a Life, not merely a Being. But all Life has a destiny, and is subject to suffering and becoming. Even to this then las God, of his own free will, subjected Himself, when even at first, in order to become personal, He divided the Light world and the world of Darkness."- Transl. Note. These are hard sayings. Is not the Father from all eternity the Living one? and yfreywillig sich unaterzcesfen um persbnlaich zu werden! (The rest is lost.)-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 495. - "Its state therefore is a state of not-being, a state of the continual becoming-consumed of the activity —(Verzehr twereidezs der Ak7tivitdt) or of that in it which strives to become active."Transl. Note. Then will not the darkness become again what it was before its union with the light, and of course the object of the same process repeated? Surely this has too much the appearance of subjecting the supersensual to the intuitions of the senses, and really looks like pushing in a thing merely to take it out again. And still tile question returns-Why not this in the fiFst place? What can the process have effected? Ibid. p. 502. _iNote. It seems to me that this whole work pre-supposes Des Cartes' "quod clare conceepimus, serum est." Philosophische Briefe Uber Dogzcatismus qund CZriticislmuls Philosoph. Sbchrift. P. 119. lVote. I have made repeated efforts, and all in vain, to understand this first Letter on Doqmatism and Cariticism. Substitute 700 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. the World, die Welt, for a moral God, what do I gain in der reinaisthetisclhenl Seite more than in any other point of view? How can I combat or fight up against that which I myself am? Is not the very impulse to contend or to resist one of the links in the chain of necessary causes, which I am supposed to struggle against? If we are told that God is in us both to will and to do, that is, as the sole actual agent, how much more must this apply to the World, or Fate, or whatever other phantom we substirute. I say how much more, because upon the admission of a supersensual being, this may possibly be, and we therefore, fi'om other reasons, do not doubt that it is really compatible with Free Will; but with a World-God this were a blank absurdity. Der Gedanlee mnich de, Welt enLtgegenzustellen,* not only chat niclhts grosses far mtich,f but seems mere pot-valiant nonsense, without the idea of a moral Power extrinsic to and above the World, -as much inconceivable by a sane mind, as that a single drop of the Falls of Niagara should fight up against the whole of the Cataract, of which itself is a minim! I-ow much more sublime, and in other points of view, how infinitely more beautiful, even in respect of Taste or testhetic judgment, is the Scriptural representation of the World as in enmnity with God, and of the continual warfare, which calls forth every energy, both of act and of endurance, from the necessary vividness of worldly impressions, and the sensuous dimness of Faith, in the first struggles Were the impulses and impresses frolm the faith in God equally vivid, as the sensuous stimnli, then indeed all combat must cease-and we should have Hallelujahs for Tragedies and Statues.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 122. XNote. I can not see the force of any of these argumnents. By theoretic, as opposed to practical Reason, Kant never meant two Persons or Beings; but only that what we could notprove by one train of argument, we might by another, in proportion to the purposes of knowledge. I can not theoretically demonstrate the existence of God, as a moral Creator and Governor, but I can theoretically adduce a multitude of inducements so strong as to be all but absolute demonstration; and I can demonstrate that not a word of sense ever was, or ever can be, brought against it. In this stage of the argument my conscience, with its categorical command, comes in and proves it to be my duty to choose to believe in a God —there being no obstacle to my power so to choose. With what consistency then can Scelelling contend, that the same mind, having on these grounds fixed its belief in a God, can then make its former speculative infirmities, as applied to the idea of God, a pretext for turning back to disbelieve it? * The thought of opposing myself to the world, t Has nothing great for me. APPENDIX. 701 IBid. pp. 123-4. "With what law would you reach unto that Will? With the moral law itself? This is just what we ask, how you arrive at the persuasion that the Will of that Being is agreeable to this law? It would be the shortest way to declare that Being himself the author of the Moral Law. But this is contrary to the spirit and letter of your philosophy. Or must the [Moral Law exist independently of all Will? Then we are in the domain of Fatalism; for a law, which is not to be explained by any Being that exists independently of it, which rules over the highest power as well as over the least, has no sanction, save that of necessity."-Tr-ansl. Note. Just as well might Schelling have asked concerning the Wisdom or any other attribute of God-and if we answered, they were essential-that is God himself-then object, that this was Fatalism. The proper answer is, that God is the originator of the ltoral Law; but not per arbitriumn (YWillkaih), but because he is essentially wise and holy and good-rather, Wisdom, Holiness, and Love.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 142. " It is indeed no such uncommon case in human life, that one takes the prospect of a future possession itself."-Transl. Note. Is there not some omission of the press here-that is far vde Besitz after Besitz-that we take the look out on a future possession for the possession itself?-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 152. (In a note.) " It is remarkable enough that language has distinguished so precisely between the Real-dem WJir7clichen (that which is present in the sensation or perception, which acts on me and whereon I react), the actually Existing, dem )Daseyenden (which, in general, is there present in Space and Time), and Being, den Seyenden, which is, through itself, quite independently of all conditions of Time."-Transl. Note. But how can we know that any thing is, except so far as it works on or in us; and what is that but Existence? Answer: —the means, by which we arrive at the consciousness of an idea, are not the idea itself.-S. T. 0. Ibid. p. 175. Note. It is clear to me that both Schelling and Fichte impose upon themselves the scheme of an expanding surface, and call it Freedom. I should say-where absolute Freedom is, there must be absolute Power, and therefore the Freedom and the Power are mutually intuitive. Strange that Fichte and Schelling both hold that the very object, which is the condition of Self-consciousness, is nothing but the Self itself by an act of Free Self-limitation. P.S.-The above I wrote a year ago: but the more I reflect, the more convinced am I of the gross materialism, which lies under the whole system. It all arises from the duplicity of human nature, or 702 BIOGRAPHIIA LITERARIA. rather perhaps the triplicity. Homo animal ti'ipeex. The facts stated are mere sensations, the corlpus morttuvm of the volatilized memory.S. T. C. Ibid. pp. 177. "Perhaps I should remind them of Lessing's confession, that with the idea of an infinite Existence he connected a representation of an infinitely tedious duration of Time, which was to him torment and misery; or even of that blasphemous exclamation:'I would not for all the world be (eternally) blessed.' "-TRansl. Xote. Surely this is childish-a mere confusion of Space with Intensity, of Time with Eternity. I can not think that by the word "adequate" Spinoza meant " commensurate," but simply "immediate." Abhanctzdlugen zur Erlcciiterznzg des Idealismus der Wissenschcsftslehre. Philosoph. Schrift. P. 219. "I have sometimes heard the question asked, how it was possible, that so absurd a system, as that of the so-named Critical Philosopher sllould not merely enter any human being's head-but take up its abode there."-Transl. NTote. I can not see the mystery. The man who is persuaded of the being of himself, seines Ichs, as a thing in itself, and that the bodily symbols of it are phcenomena~, Erscheinungen, by which it manifests its being to itself and others, easily, however unreasonably, conceives all other plhacnomena as manifestations of other consciousnesses-ass unseen, yet actually separate, powers, or Ichs, or monads. —S. T. C. Ibid. p. 221. " It is evident, that not only the possibility of a representation of outward things in us, but the necessity of the same must be explained. Further, not only, how we become conscious of a representation, but also why on this very account we are under the necessity of referring it to an outward object."- Transl. Note. I can not comprehend how it should be more difficult to assume a faculty of perception than of sensation, that is of self-perception. Ibid. p. 224. " Now that which is an object (originally) is, as such, necessarily finite. As then the spirit is not originally an object, it can not according to its nature be originally finite."-Transl. Note. That the Spirit is, in the modified sense here stated, infinite, may be proved by other reasons; but this is surely a strange twist of logic. If all Finites were necessarily objects, then indeed the Spirit, as far as it is no object, might be infinite. But that it is therefore infinite, by no means follows. The finite may be the common predicate of both-of the one essentially, of the other by the will of the Creator.-S. T. C. APPENDIX. 703 Ibid. pp. 228-9. "We can not abstract from the product of the inatuition without acting freely, that is, without freely repeating the original mode of action (of the Spirit) in the intuition, &c. &c. Now first through our abstracting the product of our action becomes an object." — Transl. Note. In spite of Schelling's contempt of psychology, the fact of outness is more clearly stated in psychology, as dependent on vividness. In a fever, yet retaining our understanding, we see objects as outward, yet well know that they are not real.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 237. " In the first place, the whole hypothesis (for more it is not), will explain nothing, for this reason, that, putting it at the highest, it does but make an impression on our receptivity conceivable, but not that we behold a real object. But no man will deny, that we not merely perceive (have a feeling of-ernpfinden), the outward object, but that we have an intuition of it. According to this hypothesis, we should never get further than the impression: for, though it be said that the impression is first referred to the outward object (as its cause), and that thereby arises the representation of the latter, it is not recollected that on occasion of the intuition, we are conscious of no such act, no such going forth from ourselves, no such opposition and relationship; also that the certainty of the presence of an object (which yet must be something distinct from the impression), can not rest on so uncertain a conclusion. In any case, therefore, the intuition must at least be considered as a free act, even though one that is occasioned by the impression."-TIXansl. Note. This is, methinks, all very weak. The Realist may surely affirm that an impression of a given force is what we call an object, as Schelling affirms, that the mere self-excitation of our own selfdirected operations are what we mean by objects. I always thought one of the difficulties attending the notion of cause was its co-instanteity with the effect. The heat and the fire for instance. In all things, the effect is the presence of some other thing than the cause.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 239. " In fine between the cause and its effect, continuity holds good, not only according to Time, but according to Space also."-Transl. Kant, justifying the logical possibility of attraction, as a cause acting at a distance, has shown the sophistry of this assertion in his Vermischte Schriften, and Schelling himself adopts and confirms the argument of Kant in his Systevn des Transscenexdextale, Idealismus.S. T. C. Notes written in Schelling's System des Transsc. Id. on or before the title page. 704: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Berkeley's scheme is mlerely an evolution of the positions-All perception is reducible to sensation, and All sensation is exclusively subjective (He who feels, feels him sef').-Ergo, all Perception is inerely subjective (" Percepituzi n percipi: or Dlrn percip)ituzr, est. The princin2izi cognoscelidi is raise(linto the 2rincipzium essendi.) Now I should commence my reply to Berkeley by denying both positionsor (what is tantamlount), the second. Sensation, I would say, is never merely subjective, but ought to be classed as a rinlimnum or lower degree of Perception. Sensation, I assert, is not exclusively subjective, but of all the lznotvn syntheses of Subject ~ Object it is the least objective; but for that reason still objective -or (to express my position in a somewhat more popular forim), Sensation is Perception within the narrowest sphere. But, this admitted, Berkeleyanism falls at once. Now the facts of zoology are all in favor of mly position, and the whole class of Protozoct so many instances of its Truth. Nay, as Extremes meet, Sensation, in its first manifistation, is eminently objective. The light, warmtht, and surrounding fluid are the brain and nerves of the polyp: even as tl-e true Olbjective (the corporeal world as it is) exists only subjecti':ely, tihat is, in tlhe qind of the Illilosopher, while the true Subjective (that is, thie laple'allces resulting from the position and mechanism of the Pc eipiient) exists for our common consciousness only as independent'nlid pumle Object.-S. T. C. lb. pp. 15, 16. "But with tlese tweo problemns -e see ourselves entangled in a contradiction. Accordin' to B. thlere is demanded a dominion of Thought (of the Ideal) over thle world of sense: but how is such a dominion conceivable, when (according to A.) the representation, in its origin, is the mnere slave of the Objective? Conversely, if the real world is something quite independent of us, according to which, as its archetype, our Representation (according to A.) must regulate itself, then it is inconceivable, how on the other hand the real world can regulate itself accordming to Representations in us. In a word, the practical certainty is lost to us by reason of the theoretical, the theoretical through the practical; it is impossible that there should be at the same time Truth in our Knowledge, and Reality in our will." —TIacnsl. Niote. Written at the end of the volurne. Ye Gods, annihilate both Space and Time, and then this paragraph may become cogent logic. But as it is, one might with equal plausibility from the fact of one man's lying on his back deduce the incompossibility of another man's standing on his feet; or from the incompossibility of both positions in the same man at the same time infer the impossibility of both positions successively. Besides the antithetc are not adequate opposites, much less contraries. A wheel presented to me generates, without apparent materials, the image of the wheel APPENDIX. 705 in my mind. Now if the preconception of a wheel in the artist's mind generated in like manner a corporeal wheel in outward space, or even in a mass of timber, then indeed (though even so I can see no contradiction in the two hypotheses) a problem would arise of which the equality or sameness of kind in the two generators might be the most natural solution. Yet even here there is a flaw in the antithesis: for, to make it perfectly correspondent, the mass of wood ought to generate the image, wheel. Where is the inconsistency between the reality (i. e. actual realizing power) of the Will in respect of the relative position of objects, and the reality of the objects themselves independent of the position? Is the marble of a statue less really marble than the marble in the quarry? What after all does the problem amount to more than the fact, that the Will is a vis mnot~rix, and the mind a directive power at one moment and in relation to the Will, and a Re or Per-cipient in relation to objects moving or at rest? Schelling seems at once to deny and yet suppose the objectivity-and on no other grounds than that he commences by giving objectivity to abstractions. A acting he calls Will; the same A acted on he calls Trruth; and then, because acting and being acted on, are Antitheses or opposite States, he first turns them into contrary thi/ngs, and then transfers this contrariety to the subject A. That A acts on B, and is itself acted on by C, is a fact, to the How } respecting which I may have no other answer than Nescio: but that my ignorance as to the How? makes any contradiction in the Fact, I can by no means admit, any more than that a mail coach moving ten miles an hour upon the road contradicts the fact of the same standing in a coach house the night following.-S. T. C. Written at the beginning of the volume. Pp. 15, 16. ~ C. The remarks on the blank leaves at the end of this volume are, I still think, valid: so far that all Schelling's " contradictions" are reducible to the one difficulty of comprehending the co-existence of the Attributes, Agere et Pati, in the same subject, and that the difficulty is diminished rather than increased by the Facts of human Art, in which the Pati, and the Agere take place in different relations and at different moments. Likewise that Schelling's position of Opposites, viz. Nature and Intelligence as the same with Object and Subject, already supposes Plurality, and this being supposed, the whole hypothesis becomes arbitrary, for the conception of Plurality once admitted, Object and Subject become mere relative terms, and no reason can be assigned why each existent should not be both Object and Subject. But if he begins at the beginning, then the objection applies-viz. that Schelling arbitrarily substantiates attributes. For, in the very act of opposing A to B, he supposes an X common to both, viz. Being, ofviaa; but this given, there is no necessary reason, 2 G* 706 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. why Objectivity and Subjectivity should not both be predicable of both-so namely that the Subject B is an Object to the Subject A, and the Subject A an Object to the Subject B; as in the instance of a lover and his mistress gazing at each other. Finally it is a suspicious Logic when no answer can be given to the question, " What do you mean? Give me an, instance." The fact is, that every instance, Schelling would have brought, would simply give an object as the base of the Subject; and his beiocsste'hditigh7eit ohne Beiezsstseyn I do not understand. At least if he mean the Will, it is a strange way of expressing himself; and at all events he should have previously explained the distinction between primary consciousness, ceasing on the coincidence of O. with S.-and the secondary, or consciousness of having been conscious, which is memory. It would be well to show, how much better Schelling's meaning might have been given in simple common-life words. —S. T. C. Ibid. p. 17. This argument grounds itself on the assertion "es ist allerdings eine productive Thatigheit, zcelche ins Wollen sich diussert," in the very same sense of the word " productive," in which Nature " imn prodttciren der WVelt productiv sey:" only that the one is " mit" the other " ohne Bewousstseyn productiv." Now this is merely asserted. I deny it, and for the reasons above stated.-S. T. C.-i. e. at this moment. A book I value, I reason and quarrel with as with myself when I am reasoning.-S. T. C. P.S. —Add to this, one scruple which always attacks my mind when I read Schelling or Fichte. Does Perception imply a greater mystery, or less justify a postulate, than the act of Self-consciousness, that is, Self-perception? Let Perception be demanded as an Act Specific of the mind, and how many of the grounds of Idealism become 0=- 0 No! I am wrong. For grant this mysterious Perception, yet ask yourself whactyou perceive and a contradiction ensues. (Therest lost.S. C.)-S. T. C. Transsc. Id. last parayraph. of p. 40-1. "l How we, in respect of those positions, in which a wholly heterogeneous Objective falls in with a Subjective-(and this takes place in every synthetical judgment A B; the Predicate, the conception here aolays represents the Subjective, the Subject the Objective)-can arrive at certainty, is inconceivable."- Transl. Note.-It seems to me that the Logician proceeds from the principles of Identity, Alterity and IMiultSity or Plurality, as already known: -that the Logical Iattributes its own Subjectivity to whatever really is, and takes for granted that a.Not-he really is-and that it is a Subject; and this he proceeds to make objective for himself by the APPENDIX. 707 predicate. N. B.-It does not follow, that the Logical Iattributes its Egdity, as well as its Subjectivity, to the not-itself, as far as it is. In other words, the Logical I seems to me to represent the individual I, which must indeed be this or that or some other, but without determining which it is-individuality, or singularity, in, genere, as when we say, every man is an individual. In the position, " Greeks are handsome," Schelling says, the Subject "Greeks" represents the Object, —the Predicate "handsome.'" the Subjective. Now I -would say "Greeks" is a Subject assumed by apposition with myself as a Subject. Now this Subject I render objective for myself by the Predicate. By becoming objective it does not cease to be a Subject. It follows of course that I look on Logic as essentially empirical in its pre-conditions and postulates, and posterior to Metaphysics; unless you would name these the higher Logic. N.B. The following remarks apply merely to the Logical form, not to the Substance of Sclhelling's Philosophy. Schelling finds the necessity of splitting, not alone Philosophy, but the Philosopher, twy-personal, at two several gates. This system may be represented by a straight road from B a to B b, with a gate at A, the massive door of which is barred on both sides: so that when he arrives at A from B a, he must return back, and go round by C to B b, in order to reach the same point from that direction. Now I appear to myself to obviate this inconvenience by simply reversing the assumption that Perception is a species, of which Sensation is the genus, or that Perception is only a more finely organized Sensation. With me, Perception is the essentic primca, and Sensation perceptio unitus; while Perception so called is perceptio pl2urium sirnaultanea. Or thus: single Intuition is Sensation, comparative and complex Intuition, Perception. The consequences of this position are wide and endless.-S. T. C. The whole difficulty lies in the co-existence of Agere et Pati as Predicates of the same subject.-S. T. C. (Written on a blank page before the title page of the Transsc. Id.S. C.) P. 54, and then pp. 59-62. The Spinozismn of Schelling's system 708 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. first betrays itself; though the very comparison des'einen Ichs zum geometrischen Raunme ought, by its inadequacy and only partial fitness, to have rescued him. Irn Rartme the materia and the limiting power are diverse.-S. T. C. Ibid. p. 118. (As I fear that these notes on the Transs. Id. will scarcely interest or be intelligible to any but leaders of that work, I do not give the long passage to which the following refers.-S. C.) But why, if there are many Ichheiten, should not No. 1 I act on No. 2 I? If Iact on itself, it is acted on, therefore actible on by an I. But to assert that it can be acted on by this and no other incomprehensibly-determined-in-its-cornprehensible-determinateness-I, is to assert, and no more. In short, the Attributes of the Absolute Synthesis, the I AM iln that I AM, are falsely transferred to the I AxM ilh that God is. Aye, replies Schelling, this would be seczldnin 2qnrincinpiunm essendi; but I speak only sectsdgum principiumn sciendi. True, I rejoin, but you assert that the twvo Principles are one; p. 18. 1. 17-18.* What is this but to admit that the I itself, even in its absolute synthesis, supposes an already perfected Intelligence, as the ground of the possibility of its existing as it does exist? And what is Sohelling's Begyridnztheit 0zberhctvpt but the acelgemeinerte abstraction from the bestimqnmten B3efyrinztheiten-a mere ens logicurn, like motion, f0111rm, color, &c.?-S. T. C. Note written in Schelling's Sys. des T;ranss. Id. p. 121, above the section headed-PP roble~m to explain hozo the I beholds itself as perceptive.-Transi. I more and more see the arbitrariness and inconveniences of using the same term, Anschaiten, for the productive and the contemplative Acts of the Intelligential Will, which Sclhelling calls das Ich. If thist were true, the I could never become self-conscious: for the same impossibility for the same reason will- ecur in the second act-and so in fact it is. We can no more pass without a saltus from mere Sensation to Perception, than from marble to Sensation. Whether it is better to assrune Sensation as a minimgumn of Perception, or to take them as originally diverse, and to contend, that in all Sensation a minor grade of Perception is coamprised, deserves consideration.-S. T. C. Transsc. Id. pp. 259-60.'"Since then Intelligence beholds the evo* The two things taken together, that the defined Limitation can not be defined throzgh the Limitation in general, and yet that it arises at the same time with this, and through one Rdct, makes that it is the Incomprehensible and Inexplicable of Philosophy.-Transl. t This Intuition (Z.nschauen) is an Activity, but the I can not at once behold, and behold itself, as beholding (anschauen) und sich anschauen, als anschauend). lb. p. 121. -- Transl. APPENDIX. 7O9 lution of the Universe, so far as it falls within its view (Anschauung), in an organization, it must consequently behold the same as identical with itself." Whether from acquired habit or no, I do not, and seem to myself never to have, regarded my body as identical with myself, my brain any more than my nails or hair, or my eyes than a pair of spectacles. -S. T. C. A few other notes of IMr. C. on Schelling have become partly illegible, or are too much interwoven with the text to be given here.-S. C. On a treatise in the Jcahrbecher dee r lfedicin clas Wissenschaft, entitled GPrundsdtze zu einer kianftigen, Seelenlehfre, Ground-positions for a future Doctrine of the Soul,-M r. Coleridge writes thus: Never surely was work written so utterly unsatisfactory for both head and heart. What we are or are to be; what the I is, is not even spoken of. But we are gravely told in the last paragraph, that, if we act virtuously, the soul will remember a something of which wce, while there was a We, had been likewise conscious: while our brother Nothings, who had not been virtuous, would be forgotten by this Soul!!-though how this unconscious Soul can be said to forget what, according to this hypothesis, she never knew any thing at all about, I can not even conjecture. And what is the basis of the whole system?-mere IpIse dixits grounded on the mere assumptions of the scheme of dead mechanical emanation.-S. T. C. At the end of Schelling's Denkmal der Schrift von den g6ttlichen Dingen, &c. des Herrn Friedr. Heinr. Jacobi, Mir-. Coleridge has written: Spite of all the superior airs of the _Nhatur-Philosophen, I confess that, in the perusal of Kant, I breathe the free air of Good Sense and Logical Understanding with the light of Reason shining in it and through it; while in the Physics of Schelling I am amused with happy conjectures, and in his Theology am bewildered by positions, which, in their first sense are transcendental (Rberfiiegend), in their literal sense scandalous.-S. T. C. In the blanko page at the beginning Air. Coleridge, after spea7cing of Schelling's great genius and intellectual vigor, objects to his "exaltation of the Understanding over the Reason." " What understanding?" he says, "That of which Jacobi had spoken? No such thing! but an Understanding enlightened;-in other words, the whole Man spiritually regenerated. There is doubtless much true and acute observation on the indefiniteness, the golden mists of Jacobi's scheme; but it is so steeped in gall as to repel one from it. And then the Fancy is unlithesome and wooden, jointed in the wilful open-eyed dream-and the wit, the would-be smile, sardonic throughout. Dry humor with a vengeance."-S. T. C. 710 fBIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. On a margin of Schelling's Philosophie und Religion, in which the author contends with a work of Eschenmeyer's, the aim of which is to reintegrate Philosophy with Faith, at p. 7, Mr. C. writes: Whatever St. Paul (the Apostle to and through the Understanding) may have done, yet Christ and John use the word Faith not as Eschenmeyer, &c. but as a total energy of the moral and intellectual being, destitute of all antithesis.-S. T. C. On 2. 5 Air. Coleridge writes: Here we have strikingly exemplified the ill effects of ambiguous (i. e. double meaning) words even on highest minds. The whole dispute between Schelling and Eschenmeyer arises out of this, that what Eschenineyer asserts of Faith (the fealty of the partial faculty, even of Reason itself, as merely speculative, to thefocal energy, i. e. Reason q- Will + Understanding = Spirit) Schelling understands of Belief, i. e. the substitution of the Will q- Imagination +- Sensibility for the Reason. -S. T. C. Philosophy and Religion, pp. 21-2. If I do not deceive myself; the truth, which Schelling here toils in and after, like the moon in the scud and cloudage of a breezy November night, is more intelligibly and adequately presented in my scheme or Tetraxy. 1. Absolute Prothesis. WILL absolutely and essentially causative of Reality. Therefore 2.'Absolute Thesis of its own reality. Alens-Pater. But the absolute Will self-realized is still absolutely creative of Reality. It has all Reality in itself; but it must likewise have all Reality in another. That is, all eternal relations are included in all Reality, and here there can be no difference but of relation, but this must be a real relation. 3. Absolute Antithesis. But the absolute of erens is Idea, absoluta adequata, Deus Filius. But where Alterity exists without difference of Attribute, the Father beholdeth himself in the only-begotten Son, and the Son acknowledgeth the Father in himself, an Act of absolute Unity is given, proceeding from the Father into the Son, from the Son into the Father-ireptXdpyctl, processio intercircularis. 4. Absolute Synthesis, Love, Deus Spiritus. From the beginning I avoid the false opposition of Real and Ideal, which embarrasses Schelling. Idea with me is contra-distinguished only from conception, notion, construction, impression, sensation.S. T. C. The Jahrrbcher der Aledicin als TYissenschaft and the Zeitschrift der APPENDIX. 711 Spekhulative Physik, edited by Schelling, contain writings by a disciple of his, Dr. Steffens. On pp. 21-2 of a Review by Steffens of the later natural-philosophical writings of the Editor in the latter, Mr. Coleridge says: The clear-headed perspicuous Steffens, whom I love and honor with heart and head, could not but feel the obscurity and limping of Schelling's theory of warmth, or the ground-work at least of the promised theory, as given in his Einleifttng: and nothing but his reverential sense of Schelling's genius, would, I am persuaded, have influenced him to adopt so implicitly his great master's dynamico-atomistic assumption of Simple Actions. As to Warmth, far more beautiful is Steffen's own doctrine, who regards it as the Indifference between Light and Gravity. And yet there must be a lower form of Light and Warmth, in which they stand in antagonism. Why not thus? Let the highest product of Light (N.B. not as the universal Antithesis to Gravity, including the power of sound, &ec., but) as Lux phcenomenon or Light commonly so called, be the outward pole or correspondent Excitant of Organization. A lower will be a chemical, or chemico-mechanical stuff, embodying the chemical powers of contraction, as Oxygen,while the Warmth will appear as the dilation in Hydrogen, the substance or magnetic product with which the one is combined and made latent being the metal y, the stuff representative of - Magnetism, and the other the metal x, the stuff representative of -- Magnetism, not improbably Nitrogen itself. The order would be thus: Lux phlsnomenon. Caloric. - Electricity. -+- Electricity. Oxygen. Hydrogen. Functions. Functions. 1. Distinction. 1. Diffusion. 2. Contraction. 2. Dilation. 3. Fixation.* 3. Vis fluidifica.t * i.e. When it acts on a Fluid,-for a Fluid is that which has no distinguishable parts: the oxygen acts therefore on the whole as at all and one. But for the same reason, when it acts on a Solid (=r'ectius, Rigid) it exerts the same fixive power by causing a retraction of each particle iinipon itself, as it were, and thus produces the phenomenon of pulverization or multeity, and the quality of positive hardness. The power exerted is the same in both, and differenced only by the subjects. t Hydrogen. Fluidumf uidissimum areunz.quidemprropter 7evitaejus relativam, haud vero aer. An Air. 712 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Jahrbicher der led. Dritt. Band, zweyt Heft. Ueber die Vegetation von H. Steffens. P. 197. Thou askest how we presume to say any thing about vegetation, without having spoken on the nature of light. Hast thou seen it, or is it not seeing itself? Steff. Transl. There is a quackery in passages like these, very unpleasant to my feelings. This [-erdaatog eif ctda2o yevof without notice! Dufragst: What do I ask?-or concerning what? Light as an object-that somewhat, in the absence of which vegetables blanch, &c. And Steffens answers me as if we had been conversing of subjective Light -and asks me, is it not the same as Light! Is not its esse in the videre? I see a herring,-I see milk,-I slice the fresh herring lengthways, and suspend the slips in a clear phial of milk,-all this is seeing. But in an hour or two I see the phial shining, I see a luminous apparition, and, if I darken the room, I can see other things by it within the sphere of a foot. Now it is this, we were talking of: and what sense is there in saying: Ist es nicht dcas Sehen selbst?-S. T. C. At the end of some remarks on a treatise by Franz Baader VTeber Starres und Fliessendes, immediately following that of Steffens on Vegetation, Mr. Coleridge says: The word matter, materia, v/2Z, is among the most obscure and unfixed in the whole nomenclature of metaphysics, and I am afraid that the knot must be cut, i. e. a fixed meaning must be arbitrarily imposed on the word, as I have done in defining. Matter as mere videri 3) (opposed to) spirit as quod agit et non apparet, the synthesis being body. At all events I would have preferred the terms Quantity and Quality; thus: 3Iateria q- Spiritus = Corpus. Ergo illateria est in corpore: spiritus agit per Corpus. Matter and Spirit are Body: then Spirit (2) reemerges in moments, as a property or function of Body, but in omni tempore and as the whole per totalitatemn immnconentem — it is QualitySpirituspotentialis. Again Materia ens in corpore = Quantity.-S. T. C. NOTE A. A. p. 163. It has been thought that this epigram was suggested by one in a book called Terrce-Filius, or The Secret History of the University of Oxford, London, 1726. I give the older epigram, though I think its paternal relationship to the later one by no means Hear on internal evidence, and know not that my father ever saw the volume which contains it. Upon some verses of Father William. " Thy verses are immortal, 0! my friend, For he who reads them, reads them to no end." No. xxvi. vol. i. p. 142. APPENDIX. 713 NOTE A. B. P. 186. Prefixed to'the works of Cowley is an Account of his Life and Writings by T. Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. Mr. Coleridge alludes to his suppression of Cowley's letters, on which subject Sprat says: "The truth is, the letters that pass between particular friends, if they are written as they ought to be, can scarce ever be fit to see the light. They should not consist of fulsome compliments, or tedious polities, or elaborate elegancies, or general fancies, bhut they should have a native clearness and shortness, a domestical plainness, and a peculiar kind of familiarity, which can only affect the humor of those to whom they were intended. The very same passages, which make writings of this nature delightful amongst friends, will lose all manner of taste, when they come to i5e read by those that are indifferent. In such letters the souls of men should appear undressed: and in that negligent habit, they may be fit to be seen by one or two in a chamber, but not to go abroad into the streets." There are many very delightful domestic letters, which are quite unfit for publication; and on the other hand, many letters fit for the public eye have been written to friends; as those of Cowper. In general it may be said that men of genius, especially if their intellectual powers have been cultivated, are apt to rise above mere homewit and wisdom even when they are speaking of home-matters; they seldom treat details and particulars merely as such, but quickly bring them into the light of principles and general truths, and even in their chamber are fit to go abroad into the streets,-nay, fitter sometimes than if they had dressed themselves for a public entertainment. Few will agree with Sprat that "nothing of this nature should be published," though care should be taken to publish nothing which really answers to his description in suiting only "the humor of those for whom it was intended." " Fulsome compliments and tedious polities" are fit neither for private nor public perusal.-S. C. NOTE A. c. p. 187. The illustration of St. Nepomuc occurs in Richter's Blitmen-Frucht-'and-Dornen-Sth2ccke (Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces) chap. v. The author says, " Since the tasters" (critics or reviewers), "seldom write books themselves, they have the more leisure for looking over and valuing those of others; occasionally indeed they write bad ones, and therefore know immediately the look of a bad book when one comes in their way." (Noel's Transl. p. 135.) They know the Zook of it certainly; they recognize in it the old familiar features, and conceive an affection for it at first sight. But they are far from knowing or declaring it to be bad. The same delusion that led them to write bad '714:BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. books under the impression that they were writing good ones, attends them when they enter upon the office of critic, and then they mistake bad for good and good for bad; but doubtless the remembrance that they themselves have been condemned as writers makes them eager to find writers whom they may condemn in their turn; as boys at school, though they can not retaliate upon their tormentors, yet feel it a compensation to inflict upon others what has been inflicted on them. But, as -Mr. Carlyle says, " all flesh, and reviewer-flesh too, is fallible and pardonable;" and they who have suffered from reviewers, though their depositions may be heard in evidence, are not to pronounce the final judgment on their merits and demerits.-S. C. NOTE A. D. p. 213. Since this was printed, being assured by a friend that the story contained in the author's note at p. 213, is told in one of Jeremy Taylor's Sermons, I sought again and found it in Sermon xii. of the Twentyseven preached at Golden Grove, entitled The AMercy of the Divine Judgments; or, God's method in curing sinners. But either M]r. Coleridge has added to the passage given by him as a quotation, as well as slightly altered it, or he must have found the story with a different comment in some other place. The words of Taylor are these: " St. Lewis the king having sent Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, on an embassy, the bishop met a woman on the way, grave, sad, fantastic, and melancholic, with fire in one hand, and water in the other. He asked what those symbols meant. She answered, My purpose is with fire to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God without the incentives of hope and fear, and purely for the love of God." He then proceeds, " But this woman began at the wrong end," &c.-S. C. NOTE A. p. 222. After the chapters which treat of Association of Ideas in this volume were printed, I met with the following remarks in The Life and Correspondence of David Hume, a new publication by J. H. Burton, Esq., Advocate. The author quotes the passage in the B. L. concerning Hume's probable obligations to Aquinas,-then Sir J. M.'s explanation, which disposes of the external evidence undoubtedly: then proceeds to say: "With regard to the internal evidence, the passage of Aquinas particularly referred to, which will be found below,* refers to memory, * " Quandoque reminiscitur aliquis incipiens ab aliqua re, cujus memoratur, a qua procedit ad aliam triplici ratione. Quandoque quidem ratione similitudinis, sicut quando APPENDIX. 715 not imagination, to the recall of images in the relation to each other in which they have once had a place in the mind, not to the formation of new associations, or aggregates of ideas there; nor will it bring the theories to an identity, that, according to Hume's doctrine, nothing can be recalled in the mind unless its elements have already been deposited there in the form of ideas, because the observations of Aquinas ap)ply altogether to the reminiscence of aggregate objects." [Neither Maasz nor Coleridge could have been unaware, that both text and commentary relate to Memory and Recollection. But what is lMemory? Stewart, so distinguished for psychological analysis, tells us, that the word "' always expresses some modification of that faculty which enables us to treasure up, and preserve for future use, the knowledge we acquire."* Locke says, " This laying up of our ideas in the repository of the iM5eemory, signifies no more but this, that the mind has a power in many cases to revive-perceptions which it has once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before."t Memory, then, as commonly understood, is the faculty of preserving and recalling mental representations, together with the consciousness that they have been presented to the mind before: and in this sense it is obviously a mode of the Imagination, which is in general " the faculty of representing an object without the presence of it in the intuition;" although likewise a modification of the Judgment, inasmuchln as it judges of present thoughts and images that they are the same as past ones. MAaasz observes indeed that, strictly taken, zMemory is simply the power of perceiving this identity of present with past representations, which Hobbes calls a " mixt sense, but internal;" but that, since this presupposes the recalling of former ones, and we may add, the retaining them to be recalled, the common use of speech mnakes a quid pro quo and ascribes the latter also to Memory.: Now it is certainly the broad popular sense of Memory which Aristotle and Aquinas treat of; in which sense it belongs in part to Imagination; and surely the principle whereby we recall ideas and preserve them in a certain order is the same as the general principle of the association of ideas, though Aristotle does not expressly say this because his object did not require it. " The observations of Aquinas apply to the reminiscence of aggregate objects."-True —but do they aliquis memoratur (le Socrate, et per hoc occurrit ei Plato, qui est similis ei in sapientia; quandoque vero ratione contrarietatis, sicut si aliquis memoretur Hectoris, et per hoc occurrit ei Achilles. Quandoque vero ratione propinquitatis cujuscunlque, sicut cumr aliquis memor est patris, et per hoc occurrit ei filius. Et eadem ratio est de quacumqiie alia propinquitate, vel societatis, vel loci, vel tempolis, et propter hoc fit reminiscentia, quiat motus horum se invicem consequuntur."-Commentary Lectio v. b. p. 26..ntow. Edit. -1612. * Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, chap. vi. s. 1, p. 306, t Hum. Understand. b. 11, cap. x. s. 2.: Vcrsuch der Einbildungskraft, pp. 16-17. 716 BIOGRAPIEIA LITERARIA. not at the same time show how the objects came to be aggregated? (ausa autem reminiscendi, says Aquinas, est ordo motuum qui relinquuntar in' anima ex primna imnpressione ejus, quod primo apprehendim?1s.* The process of recollection depends on the order of the motions left in the mind from the first impression; and Aquinas, after Aristotle, states the law of that order, though only, as Sir J. ~Mackintosh observes, for the sake of explaining recollection. The objects are strung together, like beads, upon the string of propinquity or relationship; in reminiscence we lay hold of the string, and follow it with the hand, till we arrive at the particular bead which we wish to bring close to the eye. Mr. Burton says that " the scope of Aquinas's remarks has more reference to mnemonics or artificial memory than to association." But since artificial memory depends wholly upon association, and association itself also depends on memory-(for we could not connect any one mental presentation with another if we could not preserve those we have once had and distinguish them from such as are immediately present)-Aquinas could not well refer to the principles of the one without indicating the law of the other. Memory comes into act only in conjunction with other powers of the mind; its relation to phantasy or imagination is implied by Hobbes in his Human Nature, chap. iii. and it is plainly stated by Aristotle De Mfiemoria, cap. i. Ti pEtv oVV ea-rt /tvf/zn cai rSa Tov/uyovevetv eip7Trat, or7t avraCu/arof, dg e6ClivoS or vc vraa/ua, Oft.s "What then memory and to remember is, hath been said, namely, that it is the habit of the phantasm, as the image of that which the phantasm represents:" that is, says Aquinas, a certain habitual conservation of the phantasrn, not indeed according to itself, for that belongs to the imaginative virtue, but inasmuch as the phantasm is the image alicujus prius sensati, of something previously perceived by sense. In this first chapter Aristotle shows that Memory has its seat in the same power of the soul as phantasy. Tivoc jv oVv i-6v rC'vxc fCarstv 4 avt#ju, CavrEpav, OtC oV7rep sal 4 pavyTara. It is true that Memory is concerned with intellectual representations as well as sensible ones, and therefore, as Maasz observes, does not belong to Imagination alone; but neither does association of ideas belong to Imagination alone; all our " ideas of reflection" are associable in the same way and by the same influences as those of sensation, though the former are not imaged. Mr. Coleridge did not think it necessary to state the connection between memory and other cognitive powers of the soul when he passed at once, at the end of chap. vii. from "Association of Ideas" to " Acts of Memory." Insisting upon the mnerits of Hume's classification, Mr. Burton observes, that it embodies cause and effect but not contrariety; that * Commentary, Lectio v. a. p. 26. APPENDIX.'17 of Aquinas contrariety* but not cause and effect; and that " in a division into three elements this discrepancy is material." IHume refined upon the older classification no doubt; he was not likely to overlook cause and effect, on which subject he wrote his most remarkable essay; but I doubt whether this division into three elements is so very material. Nearness in time and nearness in space, though they may form one clause of a sentence, are different kinds of nearness, and on the other hand cause and effect must in part be subordinated to them when viewed in reference to association;-likeness and contrast are not quite reducible to one principle, if the last may " be considered as a mixture of causation and resemblance." It is perhaps better to say, as Mr. Coleridge does, that there are five occasioning causes of recollections, or five sorts of connections of ideas more or less distinguished from each other, all containing the idea of nearness,t but each, I should suppose, exerting an influence on the association, in its own individual right. Mr. Burton's assumption that " Coleridge failed to keep in view, in his zeal to discover some curious thing, &c. that the classification is not that of Aquinas, but of Aristotle," is puzzling. Mr. Coleridge's aim all along is to show the classification to have been originally Aristotle's, and Aristotle's commentator is only called into court by him to depose on this point. Those who imagine that Mr. Coleridge had no other object, than to detect Hume or any one else in plagiar'sm, are judging him not by himself but by others very unlike him. NOTE B. p. 225. The elder Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, was a learned philologer of the eighteenth century, the author of several works, but best known by his writings on the instinct of animals, and since his death by the attribution to him of the famous Wolfenbiittel Fragments, published by Lessing in 1774 and 1777, his authorship of which was in the end put beyond doubt. * By contrariety Aquinas does not seem to have meant contrast in being and character, but opposition or antagonism in position, at least in his first mention of it. His example of Achilles and Hector shows this, for they were signal adversaries, but not directly opposed to each other in qualities of mind or body. Aristotle's expression ivavriov might signify any opposedness; and in a subsequent paragraph (e. p. 26) Aquinas explains contrariety as contrast, when he is concerned with Aristotle's own illustration of proceeding from the moisture of the atmosphere to Autumn, a dry season. t Speaking of Dr. Brown, Sir James Mackintosh says: " He falls into another and more unaccountable error, in representing his own reduction of Mr. Hume's principles of association (resemblance, contrariety, causation, contiguity in time or place) to the one principle of contiguity, as a discovery of his own, by which his theory is distinguished from "' the universal opinion of philosophers." Nothing but too exclusive a consideration of the doctrines of the Scottish school could have led him to speak thus of what was hinted by Aristotle, distinctly laid down by Ilobbes, and fully unfolded both by Hartley and Condillac."-Ethical Philosophy, p. 164. 718 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. His son, Job. Alb. Heinrich, was born at Hamburg in 1729, attained to eminence as a physician in his native city, became Professor of the Natural Sciences at the Gymnasium in 1796, died at Ranzau in 1814. Archdeacon Hare believes him to have been " a rationalizing moralist of the same class as Franklin, one of those who imagined that the world might be regenerated by philosophy;" and mentions that his writings were chiefly on electricity, conductors, &c., which led him into a kind of controversy with Kant. J. A. H. Reimarus, though of his Father's mind in regard to revelation, appears to have belonged to the higher order of those who profess to hold what is commonly called (by a misnomer as Mr. Coleridge has affirmed) natural religion. He maintained the existence of a Supreme Being, not as a mere abstraction-which he insisted that on Spinoza's system He is made to appear, however the author of that system may have protested against such a consequence-but as the living God, the source of all being, from our relations to whom, prayer, thanksgiving, and adoration naturally arise, but whose nature and ways are not properly apprehensible by us-in whom to know, to will, and to scork are one thing. His language on this subjectis very similar to that used afterwards by Fichte in his Bestinmmung des ilenschen. But Reimarus declared that the proof of all which men ought to know and believe for their soul's good in religion can never be derived from appearances, occurrences, tradition, history, or sayings of Fathers, nor through inward illumination or feeling or immediate inspiration, but-mistaken man!-certainly through development, comparison and examination of the complex and connection of truths, or by the labor of the understanding set forth in due order through the connection of thought. These views he unfolds in a treatise Uebeer die Gr-'nde cer menschlichen Erk-enntniss und der naturlichen Religion, and I suppose it is to a brief passing refutation of materialism, given in sections 3-7, at the beginning of this work, that Mr. Coleridge refers in the second sentence of chap. vi. of this volume.-S. C. NOTE D. p. 301. "About the close of the fourth century, and probably during the lifetime of Odin, Ulphilas, an Arian of Mcesia, undertook the conversion of the Goths. He translated from the Greek many portions of Scripture into the Bceso-gothic language (see.ichaelis's Introduction to the New Testament, ~ 82-87), went as a missionary among the inhabitants of Dacia, and succeeded in drawing their attention to the contents of the Sacred Books. So many Dacians had served in the army at Constantinople, or had visited that city from motives of commerce or curiosity, that the foundation of Christian places of worship among them had become a public wish. Ulphilas obtained from the APPENDIX. 719 Emperor Valeus, at Constantiiople, the requisite patronage, and was honored with a sort of episcopal jurisdiction over the Churches which he had founded,, and the tribes which he had undertaken to instruct; and he deserved by his virtues the confidence and allegiance of his extensive flock. " Of his translations from Scripture, but a small portion of the Gospel has been preserved, which was edited at Oxford in 1750, by Lye, and in divers cities of the Continent by Junius, by Ihre, and lately by Zahn, at Weissenfels, 1805. This version disputes with the poems of Odin the honor of being the oldest monument of German literature." From Taylor's Historic Survey of German Poetry. Vol. i. p. 93. NOTE E. p. 303. Otfride or Ottfiride was a pious and learned monk, who spent the greater part of his life in the Monastery of Weissemburg in Lower Alsace. Taylor, in the Historic Survey, says that he studied at Fulda, and wrote before the year 876; that his rhymed Pater Noster, rhymed Eucharistic Hymn, metrical version of various portions of Scripture, and rhymeless poemn on the Nativity are to be found in Hickes. IHe also wrote a grammar for the sake of purifying the German language, or rather completed that which Charlemagne had begun.-S. C. NOTE F. p. 303. Hans Sachs, whose proper name was Loutzdorffer, was born at Niirnberg in 1494, became a Protestant, edited his poems in 1558, and died in 1576. In early youth he wandered from city to city, joining the Meistersingei', who composed godly poems and hymns, and sang them in the Churches, wherever he went. He has been described as a pattern of virtue, who withdrew others from the ways of vice to good and holy living. Taylor says that his poems filled three folio volumes, that they were received with noisy approbation, because they had a very popular turn and favored the new doctrine; and compares the author to one Pierce the Plowman, who, in like manner, by his satirical verses, lent an efficacious assistance to Wickliffe. The collection of the poems of tHans Sachs, edited by Biisching at Niirnberg, 1816, contains Tragedies, Plays, Farces, Dialogues, Sonnets, Fables, Mherry Tales, and Drolleries, the style of which is simple in thought and expression, but easy and flowing; the metre short and ballad-like, generally the height or nine syllale iambic with rhyme. A tragic drama on the Creation and Fall of Adam and his Expulsion from Paradise, is placed first in the collection. This first volume 720 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. (ea'st. Buch.) contains the grotesque Play on the story of Cain and Abel, which Mir. C. describes in the Lectures on Shakspeare, IV. p. 238; translated by Sachs from the Latin of AMelancthon. It is at p. 143. The first and last parts of this piece are not very congruous with each other. In the last act we have the awful adult Cain of the Old Testament; in the earlier ones, a naughty good-for-nothing boy, who runs away from his tasks to fight with dirty rough lads in the street, and longs to give that mammy-child, Abel, a good knock on the head. The dialogues between this sweet youth and his brother and parents, when he refuses to come and be washed and made smart to appear before the heavenly Examiners the next day, are amusingly natural, and show that _Melancthon did not always abide in his study or the assemblies of the learned, but was acquainted with sin in its every day juvenile forms. This drama, which is entitled The unlike Children of Eve, and how God spake to them, is the prince of all naughty and good child stories: and if these are to be reckoned among the fruits of the Reformation, they are not among its best. But the tendency to bring the grotesque and the trivial into connection with serious and sacred subjects has been called " the disease of the age," and was by no means confined to the Reforming party. Archdeacon Hare thinks that the poem entitled-The Devil seeks him an abode upon earth (Zweit. Bauch. p. 52), may have suggested the general plan of the Devil's Walk. It describes the Devil roaming about upon earth and observing the various ways of wickedness therein; but the details of the two poems are perfectly different. The drift of the older piece was puritanical; to warn youth against the ungodliness of the dance. The most marked piece of Hans Sachs about the Reformation is that called The Wittemberg Nightingale (die Wittembergisch7' aclchtigctll), which describes the mummeries and corruptions of Popery, the Scriptural doctrine of Martin Luther, and the persecution undergone by his followers. This is a longish piece, consisting of 701 lines. In regard to what Mr. C. says in Section 2, I have learned by the kindness of the Chevalier Bunsen, that there is a hymn by Hans Sachs, but one that does not at all answer to Mr. C.'s description-that he could not indeed have known of its existence, and that he must have been thinking of Luther's own Hymn of the Reformation; that he was also mistaken in ascribing the Morning Star (der lforgenstern), to the Uiirnberg poet. Both these devotional poems are contained in his Excellency's Andacwhthuch (Hymnn and Prayer Book), the first at p. 263, the second at p. 203, with the name of the author, Phil Nicolai.-S. C. NOTE G. p. 304. "Martin Opitz was born at Breslau in 1595, and wrote Latin and qerman poems; which last are remarkable for a terseness hitherto APPENDIX. 721 unknown. Suspected of Socinianism, he was protected by Bethlem Gabor, Prince of Transylvania, who made him rector of a free school at Weissenburg. His poems were printed at Frankfort, in 1623; and have since frequently been re-edited. He died of a contagious fever in 1639." The reputation of Opitz, perhaps, surpassed his merits, as it reposed rather on polish of diction than on strength of thought; his style however found many imitators." Historic Survey, i. 172, 173. J. G. Eichhorn's Geschichte der Literatur, after stating that Wekhrlin and Opitz arose, the one in 1618, in the South, the other in 1620, in the North of Germany, that both took very much the same course in attempting to introduce a better taste and style in poetry, both sought to ennoble and dignify the romantic material, by models selected from the ancients and the Italians, but that Wekhrlin with his inferior power and cultivation remained without imitators, proceeds to say: "Opitz on the contrary founded a poetical school in Silesia, which maintained and propagated the good taste he had awakened for more than half a century. Such a model as Opitz deserved success. From how many irregular excrescences has he not cleared the German tongue! with how many new words, expressions, and applications, has he enriched it! For this purpose he availed himself with a very pure taste of the old German poets and later writers of ballads, through whom he obtained, as by inheritance, the romantic materials which he improved; along with these German sources he studied the Greeks and Romans, as the fathers of a sound taste, and the works of the genius of our western and southern neighbors, especially the Italians. From the last he borrowed the sonnet, and the melo-drama; the ancients he imitated in didactic and lyric poetry; successful in the former but far from happy in the latter, when he sought to rise above the light song; for the loftier ode, either as regards its matter or spirit, he had not the remotest conception." Translation. (Viertert Band. ii. Abth. pp. 7740, 771.) —S. C. NOTE H. p. 304. Interesting accounts of the writers here mentioned are contained in the first volume of Taylor's Historic Survey. Christian Furchtegott Gellert was born July 4, 1715, at Haynichen in Saxony, where his father, who had twelve other children, was Pastor. He died, Dec. 5, 1769, longing for his release; for, like our own delightful Cowper, while he produced strains apt to inspire genial feelings in others, mirth and a love of nature, and even in hearts no longer young and gladsome for a while to renew Vernal delight and joy able to drive All sadness but despair, VOL. IT 2H 722 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. he was himself saddened by miserable hypochondria, which, after shadowing his early life with passing clouds, at length, instead of dispersing itself, gathered round him and darkened his whole sky. In 1758, he became Professor of Moral Philosophy at Leipzig, and was very popular as a Lecturer. In 1746 he collected his Fables in Verse, which had " astonishing success; and form, perhaps, the first native poetic work of the modern Germans, which became decidedly and nationally popular.?' The complete edition of his works, in five octavo volumes, appeared but a few months before his decease. Friedric Gottlieb Klopstock was born in the Abbey at Quedlinburg July 2, 1724; was the son of the land-steward of the dolnain, and eldest of ten children. He died in 1803, and was buried with great solemnity on the 22d of March. The Danish Minister Bernstorff, struck with his poetical talents, invited -him to Copenhagen, and obtained for him a pension of four hundred dollars for his support, while he completed his great work The Messiah, the first three cantos of which, already published, had made a great sensation in Germany. The Danish capital was his home till 1771. In 1798 he began to superintend a new and complete edition of his works, the first ten volumes of which contain his poetry, consisting of Odes, Epigrams, Dramas, and The Messiah (with which vol. iii. comlnences), an Epic Poem of twenty books in Hexameter verse. iMr. Coleridge compares it with Paradise Lost in Lectures on Shakspeare,IV. p. 302. According to Mr. Taylor, Klopstock was far from rivalling Milton in the "habitual demeanor' becoming a great sacred poet;-set no such example of Christian strictness, even after gaining fame by The Messiah, as that sublimest of Puritans, the author of Paradise Lost. Mr. Coleridge has protested against profaning " tie awful name of Milton, by associating it with the epithet Puritan."' Yet he would not have wholly dissented from the opinion of a well-known writer, now amongst us, who calls "this Puritanism of ours,"-that is, the thing itself, in its pure rather than puritanical form,-" among the noblest Heroisms that ever transacted itself on this earth." Charles William Ramler was born in 1725 at Colberg in Pomerania, of needy parents, and received his early education at the orphan school of Stettin. He became Professor of Logic and Fine Literature in the Berlin Academy for cadets, which office and his various literary exertions maintained him comfortably till 1787, when he obtained a pension, a seat in the academy, and a share in the direction of the National Theatre. He died in 1798 of pulmonary consumption, after having withdrawn from his employments for some time before from ill health. His poems, consisting chiefly of odes, in the manner of Horace, obtained great popularity. They were first collected apart in 1772. Taylor observes that, though the lyric works of Ramler might be objected to by a severe critic, as having too much the character of APPENDIX. 723 imitations, yet while Lessing passed for an Aristotle, Mendelsohn for a -Plato, and Gleimn for an Anacreon,-and all of those were friends of his, —to him the epithet of the German Horace was applied with less hyperbole. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born at Kamenz in Pomerania, in January, 1729; was the son of a clergyman (himself a voluminous writer), and the eldest of twelve children. He died at Hamburg, Feb. 15, 1781, after a life of many changes and various literary employments, having received the appointment of Librarian at Wolfenbiittel in 1769 from the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick. His poetry consists of Epigrams, -Minor poemns, Fables and Plays, of which Nathan the Wise, an argumentative drama, has been most celebrated, and, as curtailed by Schiller, became a favorite acting play throughout Germany. He appears however to have been far greater as a critic and polemic than as a poet, and wrote in an admirably clear style, and with considerable power of thought and erudition, on religion, philosophy, literature and art. A writer in the Gent's. Mang. of M ay, 1846, contrasting him with Voltaire, after speaking of his close rigid logic, and eminently philosophical mind, affirms that "the love of truth, not the love of fame, was the active spring, the vital principle, of his intellectual activity." Lessing is an author admired and extolled by men who have evidently no taste for German literature in its peculiar character, although it has lately been said, in an able article on Lessing in the Edinboro' Review (No. 166) that he " first gave to German literature its national tendencies and physiognomy;" that while Klopstock made it English, Wieland French, Lessing made it German. This remark rests, I think, upon no very solid grounds, at least as to Lessingg's priority; for was not Klopstock, in all his attempts at rivalling the great English Epic, -with his cumulated ornaments and multitudinous imagery-" festoons of angels singing at every soar of the interminable ascension" -thoroughly Teutonic-and Wieland's Muse, even according to his own account, Germanized Italian rather than French? That some French poets endeavored like him to turn their strains on Classic and on Italian models is but a limited ground of resemblance. The Wallenstein of Schiller and the finest parts of Goethe's Faust are perhaps more like English poetry of the first order, and have less unlikeness to it, than any other products of the German Muse; and for this reason that they are the best German poetry; and that, as the most beautiful forms and faces of all nations are alike in their predominant characteristics, so the finest and purest poetry of every nation has more in it which is common to all nations and less of mere national feature than the inferior kinds. But perhaps a national cast of thou7ght is more to be discerned in prose writers than in poets. The style of Lessing is too good and pure to be eminently national. 724 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. The " compeers" of the four writers above mentioned were Hagedorn, Schlegel, Ebert, Kramer, Gleim, Kleist and others. Wieland, Herder and Burger, more celebrated than those last named, came upon the field before they all had retired from it.-S. C. NOTE I. p. 304. The characteristics of German intellect Mr. Coleridge has given in The Friend (II. pp. 386-7). "If I take the three great countries of Europe," he says, "in respect of intellectual character,-I should characterize themn in the following way: —premising only that in the first line of the first two tables I mean to imply that genius, rare in all countries, is equal in both of these, the instances equally numerous; not, therefore, contra-distinguishing either firom the other, but both fromn the third country. GERMANY. ENGLAND. FRANCE. Genius Genius Cleverness Talent Sense Talent Fancy Humor Wit. So again with regard to the forms and effects, in which the qualities manifest themselves intellectually. GERMANY. ENGLAND. FRANCE. Idea or Law Anticipated Law discovered Theory invented Totality Selection Particularity Distinctness Clearness Palpability. Of "idea or law anticipated" he remarks that "this, as co-ordinate with genius, applies likewise to the few only, and, conjoined with the two following qualities, includes or supposes, as its consequences and accompaniments, speculations, system, method, &c." He represents the mind of the three countries as bearing the following relations to time. GERMANY. ENGLAND. FRANCE. Past and Future Past and Present The Present. "The parent vice of German Literature," says the article on Lessing referred to in the last note, " is want of distinct purpose; and, as consequences of this, want of masculine character and chastened style." Hence, according to the reviewer, its "manifest inferiority" to our own. Others, on the contrary, consider it a special merit in German literature that it does not attempt, or at least hold it necessary, to comprehend its whole purpose beforehand; that it has for its APPENDIX. 725 object to enlarge the domain of revealed truth and knowledge, the entire fruits of the discovery in these particulars being left for time to disclose. It is a besetting evil of English literature that scarcely any thing is produced here, the want of which is not felt and declared, before it makes its appearance. The vice of the English mind, in the present age, as many feel, is its pseudo-practicality; every thing treated of must issue in something to be done forthwith and outwardly; to be enjoyed sensuously or sentimentally. The Germans write on a different principle or from a different impulse; they are not such slaves to the comforts of life as we are, and consequently care more for pure intellectual activity; can better afford to say with Bacon: opera ipsa pluris Jficienda sunt, quatenus sunt veritatis pignora, quam propter vita commoda. They write far more than we do, in a free spirit of enterprise, that takes no bond beforehand, but carries on the adventurer with hopes the larger because undefined, and very slight fears of censure or contempt. They go exploring in all directions; and though doubtless in many directions nothing is to be found but barrenness, —though many of the travellers are not furnished with the powers and means necessary for drawing any advantage from such expeditions, though most of them are too little restrained by spiritual habits of awe and reverence; yet, can it be doubted that, acting in this spirit, they have made discoveries in fruitful regions, while the English have been making none; have been marching with a pompous measured gait along beaten tracks, and, what is more to be contemned, maintaining that by the old roads men may reach new places, the need of arriving at which they can not but feel, even while they declaim against the presumption of travelling otherwise than as our fathers travelled before us; for instance, that by the old doctrine of Inspiration (the verbal doctrine) we can harmonize the new views of Holy Writ which present themselves to advancing thought and a development of mind as necessary and natural as that roses should blow in the summer season. The divinity of Scripture is a truth which no intellectual error can throw into total darkness, because it shines with light reflected from the very heart and moral being; but men obscure and dishonor it by persisting in presenting it under the form which it seemed to wear in the twilight of reflection, even while a stronger day is revealing its true lineaments more clearly. Let us judge the " worthy Teutones" as thinkers and writers not by the quantity of their chaff but by the quantity of their grain; the good grain which already enters into our own loaf. Much that is German may be found in the thoughts of our most marked writers, even those that are fighting against what they call Germanism. But no sooner do we abstract the solid matter from the- mass of the unsound that floats around it, than we forget whence it came. When '726 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. it is found to be Catholic it is no longer admitted to be Teutonic, and unless it is hollow and visionary it is not recognized as German. Who can wonder that one who sees a "manifest inferiority" in German literature to English literature of the same period-(if our literature of past ages is meant to be included the comparison is hardly fair)-should ascribe this inferiority to a "want of culture" in the producers? I however conjecture, that a systematic education of the intellect is more general in Germany than here. Germans are taught to think-Englishmen to read and write; there are very fine specimens of style in German literature; and if German authors, as a body, write worse than the English I believe it is because they think more, and have a greater number of new thoughts to provide with new apparel. The streams of language run less smoothly when they are flowing through freshly opened channels. I will conclude this note with referring the reader to an interesting little essay in the form of comments upon a saying of Mr. Coleridge, on the advantages which the Germans owe to their philosophical education, to their "being better trained and disciplined" than ourselves " in the principles and method of knowledge." It is in the Guesses at Truth, pp. 244-9, 2d edit. —S. C. NOTE J. p. 308. Tait's Magazine, Jan. 1835, p. 9. " These are things too unnatural to be easily believed; or, in a land where the force of partisanship is less, to be easily understood. Being true, however, they ought not to be forgotten: and at present it is almost necessary that they should be stated, for the justification of Coleridge. Too much has been written upon this part of his life, and too many reproaches thrown out upon his levity or his want of principle in his supposed sacrifice of his early political connections, to make it possible for any reverencer of Coleridge's memory to pass over the case without a full explanation. That explanation is involved in the strange and scandalous conduct of the Parliamentary Whigs. Coleridge passed over to the Tories only in that sense in which all patriots did so at that time, and in relation to our great foreign interest-viz. by refusing to accompany the Whigs in their almost perfidious demeanor towards Napoleon Bonaparte. Anti-ministerial they affect to style their policy, but in the most eminent sense, it was anti-national. It was thus far-viz. exclusively, or almost exclusively, in relation to our great feud with Napoleon-that Coleridge adhered to the Tories. But because this feud was so capital and so earth-shaking a quarrel, that it occupied all hearts, and all the councils of Christendom, suffering no other question almost, to live in its neighborhood, hence.it happened that he, who acceded to the Tories APPENDIX. 727 in this one chapter of their policy, was regarded as an ally in the most general sense. Domestic politics were then, in fact, forgotten: no question, in any proper sense, a Tory one, ever arose in that sara; or, if it had, the public attention would not have settled upon it, and it would speedily have been dismissed." lb. October, 1834, pp. 593-4. "From Malta, on his return homewards, he went to Rome and Naples. One of the Cardinals, he tells us, warned him, by the Pope's wish, of some plot, set on foot by Bonaparte, for seizing him as an. anti-Gallican writer. This statement was ridiculed by the anonymous assailant in Blackwood, as the very consummation of moon-struck vanity; and it is there compared to John Dennis's frenzy in retreating from the sea-coast, under the belief that Louis XIV. had coimmlissioned emissaries to land on the English shore and make a dash at his person. But, after all, the thing is not so entirely improbable. For it is certain that some orator of the Opposition (Charles Fox, as Coleridge asserts) had pointed out all the principal writers in the iforning Post, to Napoleon's vengeance, by describing the war as a war'of that journal's creation.' And as to the insinuation that Napoleon was above throwing his regards upon a simple writer of political essays, that is not only abundantly confuted by many scores of analogous cases, but also is specially put down by a case circumstantially recorded in the second tour to Paris, by the celebrated John Scott. It there appears, that on no other ground whatever, than that of his connection with the London newspaper press, some friend of Mr. Scott's had been courted most assiduously by Napoleon during the hundred days. Assuredly, Coleridge deserved beyond all other men that ever were connected with the daily press, to be regarded with distinction. Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be disentombed, or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving bell will bring up again. But nowhere throughout its shoreless magazines of wealth does there lie such a bed of pearls confounded with the rubbish and' purgamenta' of ages, as in the political papers of Coleridge. No more appreciable monument could be raised to the memory of Coleridge than a republication of his essays in the Moorning Post, but still more, of those afterwards published in the Courier. And here, by the way, it may be mentioned, that the sagacity of Coleridge, as applied to the signs of the times, is illustrated by the fact that distinctly and solemnly he foretold the restoration of the Bourbons, at a period when most people viewed such an event as the most romantic of visions, and not less chimerical tiani that'march upon Paris,' of Lord Hawkesbury's, which for so many years supplied a theme of laughter to the Whigs." —S. C. 728 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. NOTE K. p. 314. William Whitehead was born at Cambridge in 1714-15. He was the author of several successful plays-The Rornan Father, Creiisa, and The School for Lovers; and of miscellaneous poems, that have scarce any individualizing characteristics, but are in the manner of writers of the time of Queen Anne. On his return from travelling with noble pupils, he published an Ode to the Tiber and six Elegiac Epistles, which were applauded at first, and in course of time neglected; the usual fate of poems produced by Talent apart from Genius: the Junonian offspring of a female parent alone. This Ode to the Tiber is an excellent specimen of such poetry as may be written by a clever man, on command, having every thing that is to be desired, except a soul of its own: it reads like a first-rate school exercise, or such an exercise as might be produced in an adult School of Poetry. Whitehead succeeded to the laureateship on the death of Cibber, and died suddenly, April, 1785, after a life unusually calm and comfortable for a votary of the Muses, and for one who had originally to live by his wits, though very substantial patronage together with singlehood, exempted him from actually depending upon them; and in the opinion of those who agree with the "m nisogyne," Boccaccio, on the subject of marriage, will partly account for his ease and tranquillity. He published two volumes of his works in 1774; to these Mason added a third, with a Memoir of his Life and Writings prefixed to it. His highest ambition as a poet, it is said, was to resemble Pope, whose notice he gained, when at Winchester School, by his talent in verse writing. It is remarkable that another imitator of Pope, named Whitehead, lived at the same time with the former: was born 1710, died 1774. In his satire entitled Manners, this Paul Whitehead complains, that he was not allowed, like Pope, to " lash the sins of men" without being himself lashed by scornful censure in return: and speaks of it as a hardship, that little satirists are punished while great ones are applauded. How little he was he probably never knew, nor do they appear to have felt it, who have given him a place in the tenth volume of the British Poets. -S. C. NOTE L. p. 314. A Charge to the Poets. This poem, first printed in 1741, may be considered as a sequel to Tlie danger of writing verse, an Epistle by the same Author, in which he observes shrewdly enough: One fatal rock on which good authors split Is thinking all mankind must like their wit; APPENDIX. 729 And the great business of the world stand still To listen to the dictates of their quill. Hurt if they fail, and yet how few succeed! What's born in leisure men of leisure read; And half of those have some peculiar whim Their test of sense, and read but to condemn. In the latter he says, If nature prompts you, or if friends persuade, Why write, but ne'er pursue it as a trade. After giving his reasons, and displaying the evils of a life of weriting, he thus proceeds: What refuge then remains?-with gracious grin Some practised bookseller invites you in: - Where luckless bards, condemn'd to court the town, (Not for their parents' vices, but their own!) Write gay conundrums with an aching head, Or earn by defamation, daily bread, Or, friendless, shirtless, penniless complain, Not of the world's, but " Coelia's cold disdain." A pendant to this picture might be obtained from Mrs. Charlotte minith's poetical description of strolling actors. While shivering Edgar in his blanket roll'd Exclaims with too much reason, " Tom's a-cold!" And vainly tries his sorrows to divert While Goneril or Regan-wash his shirt! The author of this work observes that though "'; praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving," yet in "promiscuous company no prudent man will oppugn the merits of a contemporary." On the same subject Whitehead, after advising the guardians of the sacred font to " keep the peace," writes thus: What is't to you, that half the town admire False sense, false strength, false softness, or false fire? Through heaven's wide concave let the meteors blaze; He hurts his own, who wounds another's bays. What is't to you, that numbers place your name First, fifth, or twentieth in the lists of fame? Old Time will settle all your claims at once, Record the genius and forget the duncebut sometimes not till " the genius" has settled his accounts with time altogether, and forgotten a world which once forgot him!-S. C. NOTE M. P. 320. Boccaccio does not appear a " Misogyne" when he is describing Dantes' adored Beatrice at eight years old, —" assi leggiadretta a 2 H* '780 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. bella secondo la sucsfanciullezza," with features:"piene, oltre allac bel lezza, di tanta onesta vaghezza che quasi un' angioletta era reputata da molti"-unless he thought that, as certain fruits are not good till they are past maturity, ladies, on the contrary, are only in perfection before they have attained it. His account of woman as wife, if it be meant for that of the genus and not merely of some rare species, may be pronounced not almost, but altogether slanderous. Well might he exclaim of such a creature as he describes-who compels her husband to render an account, not only of weightier matters, but even of every little sigh; what caused it, whence it came, and whither it is going; who, when he is glad, ascribes it to love of some one else, and when he is sorry sets it down to hatred of herself-" oh faticca inestimabile avere con cost sospettoso animbale a vivere, a conversare, ed ultimramento ad invecchiare e morire i" The last is all he could be supposed likely to do with satisfaction in such company. " Who does not know," says he, " that all other things are tried, before they are taken for better for worse, whether they please or not; but every one who takes a wife must have her, not such as he could wish, but such as Fortune grants her?" One might suppose that wives invariably turned out as ill as those of Socrates, of Dante, and of Hooker, as the first espoused of Milton, and the jealous partner of John Wesley. That he spoke generally is too plain by his concluding words: ~Lascino ifilosofanti lo sposarsi a' riechi stolti, a' signori e a' lav oratori; ed essi colla filosophia si dilettino, molto migliore sposa che alcuna altra. All the wives above-mentioned would have sown thorns in any bosom closely connected with them, unless they have been grievously belied. If men of letters and philosophers fare worse in marriage than other men, the last words of the sentence above quoted will suggest to the-mind why this may be. It may be because too often at least, they not only wed philosophy and literature as no man weds an ordinary profession, but are apt to both think her the best of wives.and to treat her as such; to make a Sarah of her, and to sink the poor mortal spouse into tlie place of Hagar; in consequence of which the children of the latter have to fight their way through life, like Ishmael, in a sort of wilderness. Kindly as well as wisely does Mr. C. advise that no man should permit the interests of an intellectual pursuit thus to over-ride those of the affections, but that the two should be made to bear equally upon the moral being and to sustain it. Philosophy has often sufficed so to fill a man's mind that it has stood him in stead of marriage: he who unites it with marriage must not suffer it to be thus engrossing, nor expect heart service from one to whom he has not given his heart,-in reality, though she may have no rival breathing. Any reader who wishes to pursue Boccaccio's wicked but amusing APPENDIX. 731 remarks on this subject, which are written-in very racy Italian, may find them in the Opere Volgari di G. Boccaccio, Firenza, 1833, vol. xv. (which contains La vita di Dante Alighieri) pp. 17-27. On behalf of Dante's wife I must add that marks of a harsh temper in the author of the Inferno seem to me plainly discernible in the Poem itself. His behavior to Alberigo in the third sphere of the last circle was worthy of the place and unworthy of a gentleman.* Milton would not have suffered one of his Fallen Angels to behave so unhandsomely in the " heart of hell," or so to forget the " imperial palace whence they came." If it were true that brutality to one in bale was good manners-costesiac fi lui esser villano-(which I deny, in such a case as this, where no ideal child of perdition, or abstractioin of wickedness was exhibited, but a certain sinful suffering fellow-creature) —by what alchemy was false-swearing and deceit rectified into righteous dealing? "M{ay I go to the bottom of the ice myself," said he, "if I don't free thine eyes!" Yet after hearing his story went and left them eased in crystal! Here was the spirit that christens falsehood and ferocity by the name of religious zeal and strictness. A little farther on he finds Brutus in the lowest depths of the descending circles-the patriot Brutus!-and he so great a patriot himself! It seems as if the Infernal journey had turned his brain, or touched his heart with madness. We may well believe that such a man would act as the "]Misogyne" boasts of his having acted, cast off the mother of his children utterly and forever; unlike our humane as wsell as " divine Milton," who took back his wife after her most disloyal and disobedient conduct,-after a desertion which left him " nothing belonging to matrimony but its chain," and even extended his protection to her mean and insolent relations.-S. C. P.S. Since writing these bold remarks on the "great philosophic poet" (as some consider him) of Italy, I have read Mr. Landor's delightful Pentameron, which contains a remarkable critique on Dante, and will just add that the passage concerning Alberigo, slight as it seems, spoke to my mind of Dante's temper mnore unequivocally than the striking instances of fierce and malignant sentiment which Mr. Landor adduces from the Poem; because it is possible to look upon them as the mere results of theory and opinion. Many a speculative atrocity may be found in the works of writers who would have been incapable of conceiving and coolly describing such conduct on their own part toward an individual, as Dante's imaginary treatment of the ice-bound Alberigo.-S. C. * Canto xxxiii. 1. 115-150. 732 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. NOTE N. p. 321. I have not yet been able to light upon the passage here quoted, in the labyrinth of Herder's prose writings. An account of this author is given in Vol. iii. of Taylor's Historic Survey. He was born in 1744, and was the son of a village schoolmnaster, who taught at Mohrungen, in Prussia. He seems to have been one of those whomn Nature and Fortune conspire to favor; till he fell under the dominion of that foe to genius, nervous derangement. He had a fine face, a fine figure, a fine voice, a fine flow of words; he was thought by many to have a fine talent both for prose and poetry, and first brought himself into notice in boyhood by writing a remarkably fine hand. He took holy orders at the usual age, and " obtained the situation of Lutheran minister at Riga, as well as that of rector over the high school attached to the Catledral there." After obtaining many honors, he died on the 18th of December, 1803; Taylor adds. "occupied in composing a hymn to Deity-which breaks off where he laid down at once his pen and his life."* The biographer seems to have caught at this story, for the sake of one of his silent sneers at earnestness in religion: IHerder's wife, however, declares that " he slept the whole day; nor in this world ever woke again; but at half-past eleven at night, gently and without a groan, slumbered away into the arms of God," —a very common mode of departure for those who are worn out by slow disease. It appears from the account of this " angelic wife," as Mir. Dequincey calls her, that Herder, with all his piety, was very loth to die and leave his literary designs unexecuted-he seems to have clung to this world with little less tenacity than the poor unprincipled son of Genius, Hoffmann. How often it is found that they who do their work well upon earth, even if it be work for the kingdom of heaven, are too unwilling to depart when summoned hence; while those who mismanage all affairs intrusted to them here below, sometimes gain great credit by the passive graces which they exhibit in the near prospect of death? Herder's works were edited after his decease by Heyne, who undertook the antiquarian, and Miiller, who undertook the theologic part; they "issued from the Cotta press, at Tiibingen, in 1805, and extend to thirty volumes." His poetry consists of popular songs, flowers from the Greek Anthology, which are translations of the more remarkable epigrams and minute poems in that collection, and miscellaneous productions of the minor kind. His prose too was poetical in its character. Taylor calls him the Plato of the Christian world. I see some general resemblance in Herder to Bishop Berkeley,-that beautiful soul in an amiable tabernacle,-and he too has been compared to Plato; indeed I should be surprised to find that * From an article on Herder in the London Magazine of April, 1823. APPENDIX. 733 any thing of Herder's so well bore out such a comparison as the dialogue of the admirable Bishop of Cloyne. Herder has been accused of obscurity and vagueness; but the orb of Berkeley's intellect was clear in its brilliance as that of the full moon on a frosty winter's night; while his heart and moral being glowed like the noon-day sun, filled and expanded by a steady religious enthusiasm, which secluded him from an unspiritual world in feeling and practice, even as his metaphysical theory confined him to a world of spirits. Mr. Dequincey declares it "difficult to form any judgment of an author so'mnany-sided' —so polymorphous as Herder:" but adds, " the best notion that I can give of him to the English reader, is to say that he is the German Coleridge; having the same all-grasping erudition, the same spirit of universal research, the same occasional superficiality and inaccuracy, the same indeterminateness of object, the same obscure and fanciful mysticism (schsoarmerey), the same plethoric fulness of thought, the same fine sense of the beautiful-and (I think) the same incapacity for dealing with simple and austere grandeur." (This judgment I quote not as assenting entirely to every part of it. Mr. Coleridge had one object in general-namely, truth, especially truth of religion, morals, metaphysics, and poetry; this he pursued in a desultory manner; but every disquisition which he entered into, whether it formed an essay or a brief marginal note, had a determinate object, and referred to a regular system of thought. I think he was seldom superficial, except sometimes in a survey of facts. His incapacity for dealing with austere grandeur is a truism; why should a writer be characterized by a negative; what boots it to say that Milton is not Shakspeare, or that a refreshing pomegranate has not the fine acid and sharp-edged crown of the pine-apple?) " I must add however that in fineness and compass of understanding, our English philosopher appears to me to have greatly the advantage. In another point they agree, —both are men of infinite title-pages. I have heard Mr. Coleridge acknowledge that his title-pages alone (titles, that is, of works meditated but unexecuted) would fill a large volume; and it is clear that, if Herder's power had been commensurate with his will, all other authors must have been put down:"and yet Mr. Dequincey can regret, as will be seen in the next note, that he was not permitted to produce more than " many generations would have been able to read;" instead of wishing that he had composed less and allowed his spirit more time to refresh itself and take in fresh stock!-S. C. BIOGRAPHI:AL LITERARIA. NOTE O. p. 821. Miseri quibus Intentata nitet!As I have availed myself of Mr. Dequincey's able pen when it has been used in doing honor to Mr. Coleridge, I feel prompted to notice his remarks when they express dissent or disapprobation of his opinions; and shall therefore point out to the reader his strictures upon the xith chapter of this work, contained in the London Magazine of January 18, 1823, in the first of a series of "Letters to a young man whose education has been neglected." These observations are worth reading, and so far as they bear on the abstract question, apart from personality, I do not attempt to set myself in direct opposition to their drift; though I confess, they leave my judgment and feelings, on one branch of that question at least, quite unaltered; what they are I can best express by saying, that even to a young man who should display all the powers of mind which MIr. Coleridge possessed, with all the bodily strength and mental resolution which he wanted, I should still, if my counsel were asked, address Mr. Coleridge's advice, Never pursue literature as the sole business of life or the means on which you rely for obtaining its comforts. I am looking at the subject as it concerns the welfare of the literary man-(for so it is principally considered in the B. L.)-rather than as it bears on the interests of literature; looking at the whole subject, however, Mr. Coleridge states two main objections to professional authorship: first, that literature, in this country at least, if a man depends upon it for bread, is apt either to starve him or be starved itself-starved in one way, and debased and corrupted in another: in the second place, that it is unfavorable to domestic ease and comfort. The first objection Mr. Dequincey does not consider at all; he never adverts to the mass of writing, exhaustive yet unsatisfactory, which men of high aims: and capabilities are obliged to produce, if they live by their pen; nor of the low and pernicious sort of writing which men of less firm principle and elevated feeling are tempted to produce under the like circumstances. No one can estimate the works bequeathed to posterity by Walter Scott and Robert Southey-(speaking of them thus, as mere voicesfrom: the dead to the living, I omit the social prefixes to their honored names)-more highly than I do: no one can value them more, though many may appreciate them better; yet a thousand times have I reflected with pain how still more valuable their writings might have been, if it had not been the duty of them both to consider the immediate sale of some part at least of what they gave to the public. Had it been otherwise their productions might have been less in quantity, weightier, as to the whole mass, in quality; we might have had the History of the Monastic Orders, in APPENDIX. 735 stead of some less important works: front the historian of Brazil;: and from tile mWizard of the North fewer volumes of romance but more perfect romances, compositions more careful in structure, if not of higher excellence in particular parts, than those which he has bequeathed to posterity; and I believe that I am but reporting the opinion of the former, at least, of these gifted men when I venture to speak thus. The first part of Mr. D.'s disquisition considers literature exclusively as the means of sufficiently exercising. the intellect, which Mr. Coleridge had considered in conjunction with literature as the means of gaining a livelihood. His opponent charges him with "perplexing these arguments together, though they are incapable of:blending into any real coalition." This perplexity I do not perceive; a complexity there certainly is in his mode of presenting the subject, and I think a justifiable one, because his aim was directly- practical, and in actual life these two parts of the question,-the interests of the mind per se, and the interests of the man as dependent on the external conditions of inward -well-being —do usually present themselves in a concrete form. If the young man whose education has been neglected is born to a good fortune and moreover has no desire to marry, he may turn a deaf ear to Mr. Coleridge's counsel and attend only to that of Mr. Dequincey; but this is by no means a common case with neglected young men; the majority of them are poor, and yet rather more arxious to be married than the richest; since poor men snatch at marriage as: the one comfort which lies within their reach-careful comfort as they too often find it. In regard to the difficulty itself, Mr. Dequincey adopts and confirms Mr. Coleridge's opinion; and if, on foreseeing that literature: would not suffice for his mind with his purposes, he chose not to provide: for the want of a steadying occupation in the way recommended by' Mr. C. but according-to a plan of his own, this does not prove the recommendation a bad one, or that it would not conduce to the student's happiness more than a plan quite barren of worldly profit, unless he have pecuniary' resources independent of his own: exertions. Herder says "'with the greatest solicitude avoid authorship." That authorship should be- employed " too early: and immoderately" is scarcely avoidable where it is a' man's only profession, and Mr. Dequincey limits this experienced ma:n's advice in a manner which the wording of the passage quoted by Mr. C. does not appear to warrant. In illustration of his views Mr. D. institutes a comparison betwixt a certain eminent English scholar and the great German Leibnitz. There is much in his: account of: the former which would lead me to suppose that the description was meant for Mr. Coleridge; he commences it with saying, " This, Englishman set out in life, as I conjecture, with a plan of study modelled upon that of Leibnitz: that is to 3786 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. say, he designed to make himself, as Leibnitz most truly was, a Polyhistor or Catholic student." But -when I come to the sentence wherein it is affirmed, that " in general, as both had minds not merely powerful, but distinguished for variety and compass of power, so in both were these fine endowments completed and accomplished for work of Herculean endurance and continuity, by the alliance of a bodily constitution resembling that of horses,"-that they were " C(entaurs; heroic intellects, with brutal capacities of body-"! I am completely at fault. I know of no literary man of the present age to whom the brutal part of this description would properly apply. Sir Walter Scott had a vigorous frame, and gigantic powers of literary execution; a man to have success in literature on a large scale must have considerable physical energy, and a strong and lively imagination.presupposes, as its condition, a lifesome and active body, that moves fast while it moves at all, —before it wears itself out or falls undermined by some malignant of its own household. But I know of no literary genius of the present age, who had great toughness of fibre, or resisting power of constitution, as well as this sort of vitality, unless we may ascribe it to Goethe; and there are few to whom it is more inapplicable than the author of Christabel and The Friend. Yet the flings which come afterwards, about "hydrophobia of reviewers and critics," with a reference to the spray of the waterfall of criticism " mentioned in the B. L." lead me to suppose that, after all, Mr. C. must be the Centaur of this truly monstrous* description. He was indeed too sensitive to censure, and noticed reflections on himself more than for his owon sake was worth while; yet it should be recollected that his " indignation at literary wrongs," was at one and the same time a desire to ward off personal injuries; and this very fact strengthens his argument against professional authorship, because literary wrongs would not have been injuries affecting his peace of mind, if he had not depended on his literary reputation for what, in his circumstances, was much more important than itself. I can not find, however, that he almost believed himself the " object of conspiracies and organized persecution," except as he believed himself obnoxious to party men, who conspire against those that think it right to "follow and speak the truth;" neither can I admit that, in these contests, though "naturally no less amiable than Leibnitz," he betrayed "uncharitable feelings;" would that all who enter into such contests confined themselves, as he did, to describing the literary * Mr. Dequincey is fond of the monstrous-in some of his sketches of character, desinit in piscem muller formeosa superne. To quote the words of a celebrated writer used in conversation with me-" He says there was a man of the largest and most spacious intellect-of a regal and magnificent mind-and then he te'ls us, that the man was not commonly veracious!-Such a man as this never existed-no such man ever appeared upon the face of the earth." APPENDIX. 7t7 offences themselves, instead of descanting on the affairs, motives, feelings and personal character of those that have committed them!then salving over their uncharitableness in the end, with some piece of pseudo-benignity and humility-as if this last and smoothest serpent could swallow up all the snakes that had gone before-or as if a chaplet of lilies, stuck upon the snaky head of Alecto, could make her look innocent'and arniable.* AMr. D'equincey next proceeds to discuss Mr. Coleridge's advice in its reference to the interests of literature, and declares his belief that the list of celebrated men adduced by himn in proof of its practicability might be cut down to one, namely, Bacon. He makes no attempt to show the " various grounds" on which it might be thus reduced, " as a list any way favorable for Mr. Coleridge's purpose;" and my own mind does not suggest them. On this point, as before professed, I do not hold myself competent directly to contend with Mr. Dequincey; but I can not help saying, that his judgment surprises me, and that, having looked lately into a good many biographies of literary men, I have been left with a very different impression. " Weighty performances in literature" mnay be differently understood: very extensive and systematical ones are out of the scope of Mr. C.'s remarks: because they. must be carried on with mechanical regularity and with a certain pecuniary provision; but surely the great mass of the more esxquisite and the more valuable works of the pen have been produced by men, who did not depend upon literary performances for their livelihoodl-a large proportion of them by writers who, during a considerable part of their time, had regular employment in another way. Are not the works of Jeremy Taylor and all our great divines of this kind? Have not most of our eminent philosophers, as Locke, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, and many more, either had professions or held posts and places, which would have prevented them from being idle if they had never written a line of original composition? Would not Milton have starved long before Paradise Lost was finished had he relied on his writings for bread? Leibnitz himself, whom Mr. D. considers the model of a scholar, not only was " busied during a great part of his time," as a recent account of him notices, "with the conduct of civil and ecclesiastical negotiations," but also held " a succession of legal and literary offices at Hanover."t In all * There is often a great deal of personality where no name is mentioned, and individuals are satirized and caricatured under the guise of abstract description; and so too religious bodies are often injured and defamed by their opponents' connecting a certain character of heart and intellect with the creed they maintain. Party spirit warmly approves these methods. Truth hates and disdains them, knowing that to her they are injuriols as W:ell as superfluous. I Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors, to judge from report, may be cited as a recent proof, that an important theme in literature may be well handled by one who i" stands in the first rank of an emulous and laborious profession." 318 PBIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. these instances and hundreds of others that might be adduced, there was either the "faithful discharge of an established profession," or regular employment, independent of literary adventure, during great part of life; in all of them an entire exemption from dependence on mere literature, as distinguished from a literary office, for the means of living. Genius and native power will find time and place to manifest itself, and break forth with the more concentred force from having met with some resistance: I doubt whether the power of composing every day and all day is not more apt to foster a literary growth of inferior value, than necessary to evolve and cherish the products of genuine power. One of the most successful literary adventurers, of those who are not mere blowers of "soap-bubbles for their fellow creatures,"* was David Hume. But H-ume did not make his thousand a-year by mere literary means. At different times of his life he had lucrative appoitntments, which helped him on; these he may have owed in part to his literary success; but no young man, on setting out in life, can reckon on such success; and though literature has its side-advantages as well as other professions, yet this can not remedy or compensate the evil of the main wheel itself, on which others depend, being uncertain in its working, at least for the production of pecuniary effects. It is still more important to observe that Humne, till he was forty years old, had a paternal or fraternal home open to receive him, where he would probably have been icept alive,t even if his literary productions had been unpopular; and again, that Hume did not consider a better half among " the indispensable requisites of life" —perhaps partly fromn a sense that such a complement to his being might not leave him wholly undisturbed in his tranquil atheism. Indispensable or not, however, a helpmate is included in Mr. Dequincey's plan for the votary of literature, as well as in MIr. Coleridge's: "and the more so, because if we do not allow him a wife, he will perhaps take one without our permission." Such as this, then, is not the case contemplated by Mr. Coleridge-that of dependence on the sale of literary works " for the necessaries and comforts of life," where there is, or may be, a family to provide for. On the domestic part of the subject Mr. Dequincey expresses opinions rather different from those which my experience has led me to form; I pity the man who can not enter into the pleasure of "social * Carlyle's Miscellanies. Vol. ii. p. 192. t " For a man of Johnson's stamp," says Mr. Carlyle, in his very interesting review of Boswell's Johnson, " the problem was two-fold: First, not only as the humble but indispensable condition of all else, to keep himself, if so might be, alhve; but secondly, to keep himself alive by speaking forth the Truth that was in him, and speaking it truly, let the Earth say to this what she liked. Of which two-fold problem if it be hard to solve either member separately, how incalculably more so to solve it, when both are conjoined, and work with endless complication into one another!"-Miscellanies, vol iv. p. 69. APPENDIX. 783 silence," and finds nothing in Mr. Coleridge's description of a literary man's evening but a theme for sarcasm. Mr. Dequincey, "when he sits with a young woman makes a point of talking to her and hearing l-her talk, even though she should chance to be his own wife, &c." Mr. Coleridge was by no means deficient in the power of addressing young women, to judge by specimens of his discourse in that kind which he has left behind him, as well as from other documents: but a wife is a young woman only for a time; it was in his manner of addressing the imliddle-aged, so full of kindly and judicious courtesy, and in his tenderness for the old of our sex, that the peculiar aspect of his character towards women was most clearly shown. Somewhere else Mr. Dequincey eloquently declares, that " every man, who has once dwelt with passionate love on the fair face of some female companion throulgh life, must have commended and adjured all-conquering Time, there at least, and upon that one tablet of his adoration, To write no wrinkle with his antique hand."* There is tenderness of feeling in this, but a still better feeling is displayed in strains like those of Mr. Wordsworth, which, not content with drily exposing the emptiness of any such "rebellion against the laws that season all things for the inexorable grave," supply reflections whereby, even in this life, Time may be set at defiance-grace and loveliness may be discerned in every age, as long as the body continues to be a translucent tenement of the mind. But without contending any longer on behalf of those whose charms of youth are departed or transmuted, I do maintain that a wife, whether young or old, may pass her evenings most happily in the presence of her husband, occupied herself, and conscious that he is still better occupied, though he may but speak with her and cast his eyes upon her front time to time: that such evenings may be looked forward to with great desire, and deeply regretted when they are passed away forever. Wieland, whose conjugal felicity has been almost as celebrated as himself, says in a letter written after his wife's death, that if he but knew she was in the room, or if at times she stepped in and said a word or two, that was enough to gladden him. Some of the happiest and most loving couples are those who, like Wieland and his wife, are both too fully employed to spend the whole of every evening in conversation. But Mr. Dequincey objects to Mr. Coleridge's evening plan that it introduces a sister into the circle, and excludes the "noisy boy or noisier girl, or, what is noisier than either, both." "D id a very little babby make a very great noise?" is the first: line of a nursery song, in which Mr. Coleridge recorded some of his experience on * This pleasure is feelingly alluded to by Mrs. Joanna Baillie in her interesting Lines to dgnes. Baillie on her Birthday;.-Fugitive Verses, pp. 222-3. 740 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. this recondite subject; but he probably considered that children, however noisy by day, are usually in the silent domains of Morpheus in the evening. The suggestion of banishing them to the nursery seems brought in ad inqvidiamr, and very unfairly as against Mr. Coleridge, who was not only fond of his own babes and prattlers, but what is uncommon, especially in a grave musing man, fond even of other people's, if tolerably attractive. But he knew that there is a time and a place for all things, and that in the evening, after they are "tired of boisterous play" in doors, or of trotting about after the daisies and buttercups, this "lively part of the creation" ought to shut up their flower-bright eyes and fold themselves to sleep-several hours at least before grown persons need retire from their employments. When they are no longer thus disposable a new state of things has taken place: the boys are at school: the girls form a party by themselves with the " sister" or governess, and the wife can join them or the good man in his study-unless a studious daughter takes her place-as suits all parties best; and this is no mere fancypiece, but a picture from life. If the picture now-a-days can seldom be realized by the professional man, it is not for the reasons alleged by Mr. Dequincey, as far as my observation extends, but because the profession itself, or the demands of society, engross the whole of his time. Busy men can see their little children only by snatches, as the traveller views refreshing waters on his way-except inl the deeplyenjoyed holiday or vacation: there are not many, who even desire to spend hours in juvenile or infantine company, unless occupied in teaching. It is true, as Mr. Dequincey observes, that professors of literature are not absolutely obliged to quarrel with their wives; yet I fear there is some truth also in Mr. Coleridge's hint, that their wives often quarrel with them, unless the catastrophe be averted either by heavenly patience on their part, or what sometimes answers the same purpose, but brings its own evil along with it-a stupid placidity. Love is strong as death; stronger than all the trials of life; that is, Love in ideal perfection; but in ordinary cases, it at least makes toward the window, when Pecuniary Embarrassment comes in at the door; and, even if it does not fly away forever, yet sadly bruises its light wings, and dulls their plumage, by fluttering in and out of the embrasure. The morbid sensitiveness consequent on too continuous literary efforts, combined with anxiety about money matters, exposes it to imminent danger, even if the husband be less eccentric and irritable than Richter's Advocate of the Poor, and the wife not quite so common-place and irritating as his pretty, but too womanish, Lenette; though even she could have loved her Siebenkaise, if he had had any thing to " crumble and to bite." Jean Paul himself saw his " sunbeams weighed on hay-scales, and the hay-balance give no symptoms APPENDIX.'.41 of moving," and " his heart moved as little as the balance;"-for he was alone. Would his heart have lain as still, had the comfort of wife and children depended on the power of his sunbeams to weigh down a hay-scale? In drawing the parallel betwixt Leibnitz and Coleridge Mr. Dequincey leaves out of sight that the German scholar was born into good circumstances, obtained immediate success in his career in life-partly by means of that effective patronage, which is so much oftener afforded to the philosophic student in Germany than in England-and moreover was exempt from matrimony. These advantages probably did more to keep the philosopher in a serene state of mind than even his regular mathematical studies. There is a story, indeed, that the disturbance and vexation caused by his dispute with Newton concerning the invention of the differential calculus hastened his end; and we need not this story to prove, that if men do not form personal attachments of the nearest kind, the art or science, to which they wed themselves, may grow too close to their heart, and make them as uneasy as a wife and children could do. MSr. Dequincey concludes his discussion by declaring it clear to his judgment, " that literature must decay, unless we have a class wholly dedicated to that service, not pursuing it as an amusement only, with wearied and pre-occupied minds." Literature, pursued only as an amusement, can never flourish in any high and worthy sense; that it must decay unless carried on by a class wholly dedicated to that service, seems to me very questionable: since the best part of the literature we already possess was not produced in that way. Mr. Dequincey thinks that he sufficiently corrects the " misrepresentation" of Mr. C. in regard to Herder, by giving a list of the works which this author vainly desired to write, and also by repeating his lamentations about want of " tinme, time, time i" and his longing to be " shut up for some years in a fortress, with permission to pursue his labors and to procure the books he might want." All this appears to me a very doubtful proof, that Mr. C. sought to convey "delusive impressions" respecting unprofessional literature in the B. L. "His thesis was," says Mr. D. "that the performance of this ordinary business might be so managed, as not only to subtract nothing from the higher employments but even greatly to assist them; and Herder's case was alleged as a proof and an illustration." Now I think Mr. C.'s thesis may be more fairly stated thus: first, that to pursue literature as the sole business of life and the sole means of support, is unfavorable to the welfare of the literary man himself, consequently unfavorable to literature; in the second place, that weighty performances in litecrature may be, as they have been, produced in addition to regular employment of another kind. That Herder might not have written more, if his whole time had been at his disposal, who ever doubted? The question is, would he have written better, upon the whole, even if he )7JS BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. had been fortunate enough to be " thrown into a dungeon," or "shut up in a fortress with books at command:" did he not write much and well even as it was; would he npt probably have written worse, had he composed under pain of starvation if his writing did not succeed and that immediately? For blink it who will, such is the alternative in the case of the persons whom Mr. Coleridge meant to address: such -must have been the case with Herder himself,* if he had had no regular calling. Mr. Dequincey informs us that this gifted man lived uneasily and died before reaching a good old age, by reason of a 4 most exquisite and morbid delicacy of nervous temperament:" and this he would hav;e had him counteract by uninterrupted composition! Doubtless his hypochondria was brought on, as the malady has been brought on in numberless other cases, by excessive mental exertion; he was overwrought by his two kinds of work, that of his profession and literature, pursued as he pursued them: but to have withdrawn the one and doubled the other, with a large infusion of anxiety over and above, would not have made him easier as a man, or more effective as an author. Are not men apt to deceive themselves, when they fancy how much more they should have done but for some external hindrance? Surely original power and composing energy are no perennial fountain that will flow on as long as ever a vent is given to it; else why do so many authors cease to write well before they cease to write? This is of the highest importance, that men should be able to write genially while their intellect is in its prime; should then be free to choose the worthiest vehicle for their peculiar powers, — and finally array Their temple with the Muses' diadem. Literature draws its life from all that enlivens and invigorates the man; and whatever the wearied Herder may have said, in his playful mood, "to be shut up in a fortress," or confined to a study, is not the best preparation for writing well; they who enter on the arena of public labor become in some respects better qualified. Little intellectual benefit indeed is to be gained from work, which " any stout man might do for a guinea a day." Must we account Herder's work in the ministry, with its collateral business, as of that sort? The "wearied and pre-occupied mind" is indeed an objection to Mr. C.'s plan, without being a recommendation of that which has been set up against it. The state of our. social economy renders every man's trade or business so exigent and engrossing as to leave him very little * Of " a certain indifference to money matters," specified by my father as one of the tokens of a gentleman, Mr. Carlyle says " which certain indifference must be wise or mad, you would think, exactly as one possesses much money, or possesses little!" Mr. Dequincey's "' indifference to money matters" in his treatment of the present question lifts him far out of sight of Mr. Coleridge's practical view-quite into the clouds I fancy. APPENDIX. 748 time or energy for any other pursuit; and thus over-civilization operates against cultivation.* Literature-any extensive pursuit of itwhether carried on as a profession or in addition to another-must be a struggle in England at the present time, and except where there is a strong mind in an almost Herculean body,-a constitution like that of a Centaur, —4it is apt to wear out both before their time. One word more. To some spirits perhaps, in their superfluity of strength and gladness, the risk of starvation may act as a stimulant; but was Mr. Coleridge in error when he intimated, that to the greater number of sensitive men-and men of genius are generally such-it acts as a narcotic? Mr. Carlyle's account of Jean Paul Richter's struggles with poverty is highly affecting and interesting. He almost puts a new spirit into the feeble mind, while he describes how this strong man of letters had " looked desperation full in the face, and found that for him she was not desperate;" how "his strength both of thought and resolve did but increase," while he was " sorely pressed on from without," and " establish itself on a surer and surer foundation;" how lie " stood like a rock amid the beating of continual temnpests; nay, a rock crowned with foliage; and, in its clefts, nourishing flowers of sweetest perfume." Very effective is his contrast of such a character, whose " better soul, fiom the depths of sorrow and abasement, rose purified and invincible, like Hercules from his long labors," with those who have "passed through as hard a probation," and "borne permanent traces of its good and evil influences; some, with their modesty and quiet endurance, combining a sickly dispiritment, others a hardened dulness or deadness of heart; others again whom misery itself can not teach, but only exasperate; who far from parting with the mirror of their vanity, when it is trodden in pieces, rather collect the hundred fragments of it, and with more fondness and more bitterness than ever, behold not one but a hundred images of self therein." But after dwelling upon this representation, I conclude upon two things; first that if Jean Paul in Germany sixty years ago was " often in danger of starving," in England at this present time, a man of his genius, who had to live entirely by his wits, would starve outright, or live very miserably. He says himself concerning authors, "the sprig of laurel, like the lemon in the mouth of the wild boar, is not put into ours until we are shot and dished up." He would have been dished up in this country, " the finest in the world if a man could only live in it!"-long before he had written sixty volumes in a vein so peculiar as those by which he finally attained independence in his own land, —and perhaps have missed the laurel too. Compare his writings with those of any one of our popular novelists; if thought * Mr. Coleridge says in the Church and State, VI. p. 55, that'; a nation can never be a too cultivated, but may easily become an over-civilized race." '744 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. of the deeper sort, abundant fancy, and various learning go for weight in the scale, would not any of them kick the beam instantly if weighed against his?* Secondly, I imagine that the "massive portly cynic" had no small force of body to under-prop and sustain this "giant force within;" more at least than the majority of " myriad-minded men," whose corporeal energies are seldom to be computed by the same arithmetic as their mental ones. I imagine that he was at least a far better Centaur than S. T. C.t Such a man might sport for a while, in the heyday of life, with "poverty, pain and all evil, as with bright-spotted wild beasts which lie had tamed and harnessed;" but weaker-bodied men would perish by their fangs in the midst of the process; he might travel through " a parched Sahara," "without losing heart or even good-humor;" but to one of more delicate fiame "the stern sandy solitude" would soon have yielded only a grave.4 Men of letters and literary genius are too often what is styled, in trivial irony, "fine gentlemen spoilt in the making." They care not for show and grandeur in what surrounds them, having enough within, beside " the pomp of groves and garniture of fields," and super-regal array of likes at their feet, when they go forth into outward nature; but they are fine gentlemen in all that concerns ease and pleasurable, or at least comfortable, sensation. How can they live hard and sparingly who are relaxed and languid from muscular inaction; exhausted by incessant activity of brain; rendered sensitive, and therefore, in some sort, luxurious, by refinement of thought and vividness of imagination? "Indifference to money matters" in men of genius is for the most part more gentlemanly than wise; say rather downright incoherency and madness. It is a noble doctrine that teaches how slight a thing is Poverty; what riches, nay treasures untold, a man may possess in the midst of it, if he does but seek them aright; how much of the fiend's apparent bulk is but a fog-vapor of the sickly and sophisticated mind. It is a noble endeavor that would bring men to tread the fear of this phantom under their firm feet, and "dare to be poor!"~ Herein I see an analogy between the teaching of a mighty Poet,-him who wrote of " the Leech Gatherer on the lonely moor,"-and the writings * This is not meant as a comparison of mzerits, but only of the more recondite merits with those which it requires less intellectual refinement to appreciate. I conjecture, that the German public are more cultivated, intellectually at least, than the English; I do not say upon the whole, better educated, or as highly polished and civilized. t Both however died at about the same age, a few months before completing their 63d year. Richter was born March 21, 1763, died November 14, 1825. My Father was between nine and ten years younger, and lived about six weeks longer.''"And mighty Poets in their misery dead." Resolution and Independence. St. 17.1. 1.4. ~ At Ieast in the sense of being unable to "' keep a gig." I am glad that the last Quarterly nottces with approbation " a manly, cheerful tone in some remarks on the improved condition of literary laborers" in Mr. Burton's Memoirs of David Hu-me, and is able to add:' the fact of the general improvement on which he dwells can not be doubted." APPENDIX. 745 of Thomas Carlyle. I see a similarity of spirit between them, inasmuch as both show how great a thing is- man in his own original greatness, sluch as God made him and enabled him to become by his own energies, independently of all aid except from above; how noble he is in his plain native dignity, the net-work veil' of social fictions and formalities, which " the dreary intercourse of daily life" spins out, being taken from before his face. And this theme the one has illumined with the glories of poetic imagination, the other with the lambent many-colored flame of wit and humor, and a playful yet powerful eloquence, teeming with bright fancies, like a river which foams and flashes, and sparkles in the. sunshine, while it flows onward with a strong and steady current. Nevertheless, when we have blown into thin air and transparency whatever is unsubstantial in this object of Dread, still Poverty, or an insufficiency of the external means of ease and enjoyment according to our actual condition, must ever remain one of life's great evils; if it be not the greatest of all those which we do not create by acts * our own will, yet surely none is greater, seeing that it too often brings in its train all the rest,-" cold, pain, and labor," with unrelievedi or unprevented sickness, and want or loss of lively, joyous, warm affection, that scatters flowers and sunshine on the path of life. It presses hard upon the body, and both directly and indirectly it presses hard upon tle mind. Richter, with all his super-abundant energy, got rid of it as soon as possible, and no man who had not keenly felt how it can embitter and impoverish even a brave man's life could have written as he has done in his history of Siebenkase, the Advocate of the Poor. Indeed the thorns of this piece may be felt: thelfruit and flowers we can see and admire, but scarcely seem to taste them or inhale their living odors.-S. C. NOTE P. p. 332. Trois Lettres.X I-fr. Reimond de Mont-Mort. 1741. (opp. ed Erdmann Berol. 1840. P. ii. pp. 701-2.) "Outre que j'ai eu soin de tout diriger a 1'Sdification, j'ai tabche de dterrer et de r6unir la verite ensevelie et'dissipEe sous les opinions des cifirlentes Sectes des Philosophes; et je crois y avoir ajout6 quelque chose du mieni pour faire quelques pas en avant." I suppose that most- philosophers attempt to traverse the ground of all foregoing philosophies, and flatter themnselves that they make quelqvtes pas en avant, while the unplilosophic insist upon it, that they do but move in a circle-that there is among them vertigo qucedam et agitatio perpetua et circulus,-and the anti-philosophic poet is of opinion, that' --- never yet did philosophic tube That bin gs the planets home into the eye VOT.. 11. 21 A46 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Of observation, and discovers, else Not visible, his family of worlds, Discover -Him that rules them. After the sentence quoted verbatim by Mr. C. the letter proceeds thus:"Les Formalistes cornme les Platoniciens et les Aristoteliciens out raison de chercher la source des choses dans les causes finales et formelles. Mais ils ont tort de n6gliger les efficientes et les mat6rielles, et d'en inf6rer, comme faisoit Mr. Henri Morus en Angleterre, et quelques autres Platoniciens, qu'il y a des -Phenomenes qui ne peuvent etre expliques mecaniquement. Mais de l'autre c6te les Materialistes, on ceux qui s'attachent uniquement a la Philosophie mecanique, ont tort de rejeter les considerations metaphysiques, et de vouloir tout expliquer par cc qui d6pend de l'imagination." "Je me flatte d'avoir pe6ntr6 l'llarmonie des diff6rens rbgnes, et d'avoir vu que les deux partis ont raison, pourvu qu'ils ne se choquent point; que tout ce fait mecaniquerfnt et metaphysiquement en mnme tems dans les phenom~nes de la nature, mais que la source de la m6canique est dans la m6taphysique. I1 n'-toit pas aise de dkcouvrir ce mystore, par ce qu'il y a peu de gens qui se donnent la peine de joindre ces deux sortes d'etudes." I have often thought that probably there is-much one-sided reasoning and halving of truth amongst us at this day, because the men who are mathematical are not deeply and systematically metaphysical, and vice versa; those who are given to philosophical studies are not minutely acquainted with the history and present state of the Christian religion; while the great patricians and theologians have not been regularly trained and disciplined in metaphysical science,-do not appear to have patiently examined what a large portion of the studious world hold undoubtedly to be discoveries in that direction. They hear persons who have travelled in Germany, but never set foot in the region of German metaphysics, or inhaled one breath of its thin atmosphere, maintain that this science makes no real permanent advances,-that what one man builds up another pulls down, to erect his own equally unstable edifice in its place. Judging of the matter from without, and hearing only censure and contention instead of consent and approbation, they are not aware how large a part of his immediate predecessor's opinions the successor quietly assumes. It is strange, however, that they should be ignorant of the general fact, that a philosopher argues more against that teacher of philosophy from whom he has derived the main body of his opinions, whose system contains great part of that which his own consists of, than he does with the whole world-beside. Could all that belongs to Leibnitz be abstracted from Kant, and all that belongs to Kant be abstracted from Fichte and Schellilg, I should imagine that the metiaphysical system of each would straightway fall APPENDIX. 7~47 into a shapeless, baseless wreck. There is perhaps no fallacy so common and so deluding as the imagination that we can understand another man's system of thought and feeling by looking at it from the outside, without having entered into it and abode in it, and learned experimentally, its true nature and character. When a man is decrying German philosophy without having studied it, or perhaps read a word of what any German philosopher has written in his own books, his speech is sure to betray him: " so dangerous is it for the ablest man to attempt speaking of what he does not understand."* —S. C. NOTE Qp. P. 353. See his treatise concerning the Search after Truth. —De la Recherche de la Verite, book iii., especially chap. 6. Father Malebranche was born at Paris, 1638, died in the same city, Oct. 13, 1715. Cousin speaks as follows of this pious philosopher:"iNicolas Malebranche, l'un des Peres de l'Oratoire, genie profond, cache sous un exterieur pen avantageux, et incontestablement le plus grand m6taphysicien que la France ait produit, developpa les id6es de Descartes avec originalite, en les reproduisant sous des formes plus claires et plus anim6ees; mais son tour d'esprit 6minemment religieux lui fit donner a sa philosophic un caractere mystique qui lui est particulier. La. theorie de la connoissance, celle de l'origine des erreurs, surtout des erreurs qui tiennent aux illusions de l'imagination, enfin Ia m6thode pour bien conduire notre pens6e, telles sont les parties dont ii a traits avec le plus de succes. Malebranche admit la th6orie de la passivite de Pentendement et de l'activite libre de la volonte; il considera l'etendue comme l'essence des corps, l'ame comme une substance essentiellement simple, et Dieu comme le fond commun de toute existence et de toute pensbe:. ces doctrines l'amenerent a combattre les idees innees par des objections pleines de force, et a soutenir que nous voyons tout en Dieu: Dieu, suivant lui, comprend en soi toutes choses de la maniSre dont elles s'offrent a notre intelligence; il est l'infini de l'espace et de la pensee, le monde intelligible et le lieu des esprits." —Vfanuel, vol. ii. pp. 113-14. It has been thought that there is a resemblance between the peculiar tenets of this philosopher and the doctrines of George Fox concerning divine illumination. They certainly prepared the way for the Idealism of Berkerey. Among the posthumous works of Locke is An Examination of P. Malebranche's opinion of Seeing all things in God. (Works, fol. 1751, vol. iii. p. 410) which examination is examined again by Leibnitz in his Remarques sur le sentiment du P. Malebranche, &c., 1708 (Opp. ed. Spoken by Mr. Dequincey in reference to a celebrated German writer. 748 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. Erdmann ii. p. 456). To compare these two discourses is highly instructive and interesting. There are other critiques by eminent men of the Father's doctrine. The following account of the last days of Malebranche is given in the Life of Berkeley prefixed to his Works, the materials.of which were chiefly furnished by his brother. "At Paris, Mr. Berkeley took care to pay his respects to the illustrious PNre Malebranche. lIe found this ingenious father in his cell, cooking in a small pipkin a medicine for a disorder with which he was then troubled, an inflammation on the lungs. The conversation naturally turned on our author's system, of which the other had received some knowledge from a translation just published. But the issue of this debate proved tragical to poor Malebranche. In the heat of disputation he raised his voice so high, and gave way so freely to the natural impetuosity of a man of parts and a Frenchman, that he brought on himself a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off a few days after." Thus did the illustrious Father Malebranche melt away, as it were, like a man of snow, before the vigorous sun of Berkeley, who was then about one-and-thirty, splendid in mind, and person, and potent with his tongue, while the Father had entered his seventy-eighth year; his great metaphysical mind,-the greatest perhaps that France ever produced,-joined with an eager spirit, proving at last too much for the decaying tenement of his body, which appeared from the first so weakly put together that the wonder was how it kept the metaphysician within the bounds of Time and Space so long. Yet his term of earthly existence exceeded by eight years that of his robust rival, who expired Jan. 14, 1753, "as he was sitting in the midst of his family listening to a sermon,"- an end very suitable to the tenor of his gentle and pious yet strenuous life.-S. C. NOTE Q 2, P. 353. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac was born in 1715 at Grenoble, died in 1780. Cousin says that he labored to perfect the empirical system of Locke, and attempted to trace up all the active faculties of the soul to sensibility by means of the transformation of sensations. Others, as La Mettrie, carried forward this system, till they pushed it by its consequences, or what they deemed such, into Atheism, Materialism, and a rigorous Determinism. Condillac has remained to the present time the representative of French philosophy and its avowed chief. (Manuel, pp. 208-210.) Des Cartes and Malebranche, though Frenchmen, were philosophers of so different a character, that they had no more to do toward the founding of this French school than metaphysicians of other nations.-S. O. APPENDIX. 749 NOTE R. P. 353. Dr. Reid, who is considered by many to have been, as the Biographie Universelle describes him, the founder of a new caa in the history of Mlodern Philosophy, was born in 1710, at Strachan in Kincardineshire. In 1763 he succeeded Adam Smith in the chair of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University; died in October, 1796. He produced many works, the principal of which is Essays on the powers of the human mind: Loend. 1803, three vols. in 8vo.; and perhaps the most popular, Inquiry into the human mind on the principle of common sense, 8vo. which appeared in 1763: it came into a sixth edit. in 1804. He also wrote Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man: Edinb. 1786, in 4to. Sir James Mackintosh, with his usual anxiety to give all men as well as all arguments their due, and to put down hasty and unjust depreciation, defends Dr. Reid from the charge of shallowness and popularity, and maintains his righit to " a commendation more descriptive of a philosopher than that bestowed by Professor Cousin of having made a vigorous protest against skxepticisn on behalf of common sense." IIe alleges that this philosopher's'"observations on suggestion, on natural signs, on the connection between what he calls sensation and perception, though perhaps occasioned by Berkeley, whose idealism Reid- fhad once adopted, are marked by the genuine spirit of original obse'vation." Sir Jamnes, however, admits that "'Dr. Brown very justly considered thle claims of Reid to the merit of detecting the universal delusion whichl had betrayed philosophers into the belief that ideas, which were the sole objects of knowledge, hadl a separate existence, as a proof of his having mistaken their illustrative language for a metaphysical opinion."* Wllether a man who utterly misurnderstands the language of preceding philosophers on a cardinal point can himself be a " deep thinker," is a question which I do not pretend to solve; I only think it is a question, and without offering a philosophical opinion I must say that Dr. Reid's literal way of understanding his predecessors in the matter of ideas, and his representing them accordingly as a set of cloud-weavers and phantasts, has always reminded me of certain amusing remarks in Lamb's Essay entitled "Imperfect Sympathies." His bantering style too is more popular than philosophic, and scarcely evinces that patience and modesty for which Sir james, I doubt not on sufficient grounds, upon a review of his whole works, gives him credit. I should say, if it were worth while to record my impression-(I do not call it a judgment)-that Cousin's summary of his merits is as clear-sighted and clever as his summaries usually are, and that a certain vigor in commanding and * In this misapprehension Professor Stewart has followed him, as is evident from Elements, chap. iv. section ii. 75o0 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. presenting a limited view of the subject of external perception, is the best characteristic of Dr. Reid's Inquiry. And was it not this mistaken part of his teaching more than his intelligent remarks in extension of that of Berkeley, which installed him in his high reputation of "the founder of a new vera?" Dr. Reid's great merit, even according to Stewart, consisted in his having "had courage to lay aside all the hypothetical language of his predecessors concerning perception, and to exhibit the difficulty in all its magnitude by a plain statement of the fact."* But if he misunderstood that language, and' combated, as Sir James affirms (p. 164) "imaginary antagonists," where was his victory? Was not this combat and seeming triumph the very pith and marrow of his book, and that which gave it great part of its savor to the public? Did he really advance the science of metaphysics materially beyond the point at which it had arrived in the days of Berkeley? The answer to Berkeley from the first had been: "Nevertheless we do perceive an external world, and what presents itself within us, which we instinctively refer to things without us, does really tell us that there are things without us, and what they are in reference to us; and that we feel as sure of this as of our existence, and are incapable, by the constitution of our minds, from thinking otherwise, is a sufficient proof that it is true. Does Reid's explanation amount to more than what has just been expressed! But so much as this Berkeley himself anticipated. He stated the objection to his theory contained in the fact of universal original belief of' the contrary, and tried to push it aside-it was the only obstacle that did not yield to his victorious hand.t That Dr. Reid's philosophy was received with applause in Paris, when taught there by M. Royer Collard, favors the supposition that it was clear rather than deep; smart, rather than characterized by the grave energy, which slowly and laboriously grasps a something more of truth,-a real and substantial something. Hume's compliment to Dr. Reid's profundity may have been mere gentlemanly courtesy to a gentlemanly antagonist. He would perhaps have been as polite to Dr. Beattie, if he had not "indulged himself in the personalities and invectives of a popular pamphleteer," and so departed from fairness and, what he undertook to defend, "common sense." Dugald Stewart, the accomplished disciple of Reid, and improver of his philosophy, was born in the College of Edinborough in 1753, became Professor of Moral Philosophy there in 1785, died in June, 1828. He published Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind in 1792, Philosophical Essays in 1810, Outlines of Moral Philosophy, Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, and * Elements, p. 69. t Principles of Human Knowledge, ss. 54-5-6-7. APPENDIX. 751 other works. Sir James Mackintosh has given his character, as a man and an author, in his interesting Dissertation, p. 145, edit. 1830. -S. C. NOTE S. p. 357 I take this opportunity of mentioning that the solution of the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise brought forward in The Friend (II. p. 399), and in Tait's Mag. of 1834, is distinctly given by Leibnitz in his Letters to Mr. Foucher, Sur quelques axiomes philosophiques, in which he says, "Ne craignez point, M~onsieur, la tortzu que les Pirrhoniensj -'isoient aller aussi vite qu'Achille. * * * Un espace divisible sans fin se passe dans un terns aussi divisible sansfin.. Je ne conqois point d'indivisibles physiques sans miracle, et je crois que la nature peut reduire les corps a, la petitesse que la Geomrtrie peut considerer." In his rejoinder to Foucher's reply he says that P. Gregoire de St. Vincent has shown, by means of geometry, the exact place where Achilles must have caught the tortoise. Opp. ed. Erdnmann, i. pp. 115-118. Aristotle, in his brief way, had given the solution long before, when he said that Time does not consist of indivisible nows or now-existents -ic rvs v'v ovr70v (16tatperav-any more than any other magnitude. See the editor's note upon the passage of The Friend referred to above. S. C. END OF VOL. 11.