It

thought. It suggests more than it conveys. throws one strong ray of light full on its subject : formally, it is an epigram rather than a definition; still less is it what Coleridge calls it, a homely definition. But when he goes beyond a saying like this, he becomes, like all others who have made similar attempts to define poetry, confused and unreal. In the extract from the Biographia Literaria which has been chosen to head the following selection, we have Coleridge possibly at his most characteristic, but certainly not at his best or his most illuminating.

"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 we have exclusively appropriated the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul, reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation 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; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature, the manner to the matter, and our admiration of the poet to the sympathy with the poetry.'

There is not much help here; it is rhetoric, not criticism. And when we go on to read that 'Good Sense is the Body of poetic Genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each', we seem to be back in the barren word-play of a century earlier, in the desert from which poetry had already been delivered, and from which Coleridge himself had been one of her deliverers.

But as soon as we pass from these large incoherent abstractions to the body of criticism which they introduce, our feet are on firm ground, and Coleridge is a guide who seldom fails to show us a way. This is especially so when he handles Wordsworth. The conjunction and mutual interaction of the two minds in the Annus Mirabilis of 1796-7 had created much more than the volume of Lyrical Ballads. It had created a new world; and in that world Coleridge lived and had his effective being. All that he did afterwards may be traced back in germ to that year and its results. When he returns upon it he always recovers something of its original radiance and strength.

Apart from this, Coleridge the critic is generally at his best when he is, directly or by implication, criticizing criticism: for then he had something to bite on, and he was kept to the point. His critical faculty, like his creative faculty, was subject to fits of torpor; his delight in dialectic was constantly enticing him into bypaths of speculation. His powers were only called into full activity by some