and at an age when most men think of retiring from all active exercise of their powers, he resolutely bent his energies to free himself from enormous pecuniary liabilities. For what sentimental idealists would call the mere vulgar virtue of paying his debts, he consciously sacrificed his life. He literally paid his creditors in instalments of his vitality; and worked incessantly until brain and heart were crushed beneath the load of labor. Had the "pound of flesh nearest his heart" been cut off at once, it would have been mercy compared to that lingering toil, that slow exhaustion of faculty, that gradual letting forth of the blood, drop by drop, which was the mode ordained for his destruction. Now, if instead of killing himself to pay his debts, he had written a very affecting "Farewell to my Books," or some elegant rhymes accusing fortune of cruelty, or a truculent rhapsody about his own miseries, had he done as poets usually do when great practical evils pitilessly invade the sanctuaries of their ideal existence, we have no doubt that his personal admirers would be multiplied among "men of deep feeling," and "genial critics,” and mild-mannered sympathizers with "the infirmities of genius." The same disposition which makes society so fearful that the private mourner will not experience sufficient grief, and so nicely critical of his conduct and features after calamity, leads it to expect that men of genius will be communicative in misery, and allow no "secret wounds to bleed beneath their cloaks."

The position of SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE among his contemporaries has never been settled by common consent. Mr. Griswold boldly places him at the head, calling "him the most wonderful genius of the nineteenth century." When we consider the beauty and

delicacy of his genius, and the all but universal acquirements of his mind, it is difficult to resist joining in the acclamation of his disciples. A great part of his fame is doubtless owing to the passionate eulogies of friends who enjoyed his companionship, and listened to the eloquence of his conversation. Wordsworth speaks of him as the "rapt one, with the godlike forehead," the heaven-eyed creature." Hazlitt says that no idea ever entered the mind of man, but at some period or other "it had passed over his head with rustling pinions." Talfourd writes of seeing "the palm-trees wave, and the pyramids tower, in the long perspective of his style." All who knew him seemed to have confidence in his capacity of doing an indefinite something, which no other man could do. The records of his conversation, in a book called "Coleridge's Table Talk," are mere rubbish compared with what we might have expected from the eulogists of his discourse. In fact, Coleridge's reputation was greater for the works he was to write, than for those he had written. With regard to his intended productions, society "never was, but always to be, blest." His mighty work on philosophy, which his disciples were continually preparing the world to receive, never came. In the “Friend" and the "Aids to Reflection," there is displayed a lack of constructive power, which casts "ominous conjecture" on his capacity to frame a system of metaphysics at once comprehensive and comprehensible. They can hardly be called philosophical, replete though they be with splendid fragments of truth and examples of intellectual acuteness and force. They excite wonder, because the processes of the understanding and the imagination are continually crossing each other, and producing magnificent disorder. Visions

intermingle with deductions, and inference follows image. He thinks emotions, and feels thoughts. We hear the "rustling pinions" of the great principle that is to comprehend all, but it passes over the head, not into it. The mind of the man does not seem to comprehend and bind together the ideas it singly perceives or appropriates. His prose works contain great things, without being great works. They give an impression, which we believe was felt among many of his contemporaries, that he was half seer, and half charlatan.

From his poetry, his philosophical criticism, and the' traditions of his conversation, Coleridge will probably be most esteemed by posterity. As a poet we think that his genius is displayed with the most wonderful effect in "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner." In these the mystical element of human nature has its finest poetical embodiment. They act upon the mind with a weird-like influence, searching out the most obscure recesses of the soul, and waking mysterious emotions in the very centre of our being; and then sending them to glide and tingle along every nerve and vein with the effect of enchantment. It is as if we were possessed with a subtile insanity, or had stolen a glance into the occult secrets of the universe. All our customary impressions of things are shaken, by the intrusion of an indefinite sense of fear and amazement into the soul. To address so refined an element of thought as this, is one of the most daring efforts of genius; for the chances are always in favor of failure, and failure inevitably draws down ridicule. Everybody detests the idea of mysticism, and denies its legitimacy; and keen must be the imagination which succeeds in piercing through the common experience of consciousness, to its remote seat

in our nature. When it is awakened, no effort of the will can stifle its subtle workings. Touched by a master mind, it becomes a source of mysterious delight; and Coleridge knew well the mental avenues and labyrinths through which language must pass to reach its dwellingplace. He could likewise stir that supernatural fear in the heart, which he has so powerfully expressed in one stanza of the "Ancient Mariner ".- a fear from which no person, poet or prosaist, has ever been entirely free; —and which makes the blood of the pleasantest atheist at times turn cold, and his philosophy slide away under his feet:

:

"Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round, walks on,

And turns no more his head,

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread."

The harmony and variety of Coleridge's versification, his exquisite delineations of the heart, his command of imagery, his "wide-wandering magnificence of imagination," have so often been the theme of admiring comment, that they need not be dwelt upon here. There is no person, with the least pretension to poetical taste, who cannot find something in Coleridge, either in the gorgeous suggestiveness of his poetry, or in its delicate and graceful feeling, to admire or love. There are, at the same time, a number of obvious faults, scattered over his poems, which evince that he sometimes reposed on his laurels, and wrote when he ought to have slept. Some of his love pieces are merely pretty, and others tame and mawkish. No poet, with so much feeling and faculty for the sublime, and with such a sway over the most majestic harmonies of sound, ever allowed himself

to fall into such bombast as occasionally disfigures his style. Affluent as he was, he seems to have sometimes selected those hours for composition when his mind chanced to be barren and nerveless; and the results of those sterile intervals every lover of his genius would desire to see blotted from his works. It appears impossible that the mind that created "Genevieve” should likewise have produced amatory verses which would do no honor to Mrs. Cowley or Robert Merry. Coleridge, indeed, surprises us almost as much by his failures as his triumphs.

ROBERT SOUTHEY fills a large space in the literary annals of our time. His name and his powers were connected with those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in the poetical revolution which marked the commencement of the century. Though the largest portion of his time was spent in retirement, he was engaged in continual contests. Byron detested and reviled him, with the utmost warmth of his nature; and the Edinburgh Review, for a series of thirty years, made him the object of its sarcasm and ridicule. Many of these attacks were almost justified by Southey's own intolerance of nature. He was a dogmatist of the most provoking kind, cool, calm, bitter, and uncompromising; and he delighted to dogmatize on subjects which his mind was unfitted to treat. Nothing could shake his egotism. Though, in many respects, one of the best of Christians and noblest of men, he was never free from bigotry when there was any occasion for its development. He often confounded his prejudices with his duties, and decked out his hatreds in the colors of his piety. In all his controversies he never seems to have appreciated the rights of an adversary. To oppose him was to champion infidelity