scenery. An everlasting sameness and repetition in either would be intolerable. In one sentence Coleridge has given the true method of investigation:

"Follow nature in variety of kinds." As nature is inexhaustible in its variety, so are the possible combinations of the human mind. If we could see all the poems that exist potentially, nature and man being given, we should drop our critical rules, though they were as wide as Homer and Shakspeare. The man of true taste enlarges his apprehension to receive the new poem, as readily as to receive the new landscape. The Alps breed in him no contempt of the prairies. He has something in him which answers to Lake Leman, as well as to the ocean. He has no quarrel with Chaucer, because he loves Wordsworth. He feels the unity of beauty, and love, and grandeur, amid all the differences of forms; feels it, indeed, all the more intensely, with every glimpse of it in a new object. The swan and dove are both beautiful, but it would be absurd, says Coleridge, pertinently, "to institute a comparison between their separate claims to beauty from any abstract rule common to both, without reference to the life and being of the animals themselves ; or, as if, having first seen the dove, we abstracted its outlines, gave them a false generalization, called them the principles or ideal of bird beauty, and proceeded to criticize the swan and the eagle." It was from a method similar to this that critics, mesmerized by Pope and Goldsmith, dictated laws to Wordsworth and Shelley, and measured the genius of Shakspeare and Spenser. It was this method which made two generations rest contented with that precious morsel of criticism on Shakspeare, that he was a man of great beauties, balanced by great faults a man of the supremest genius, and execrable taste! In

view of the stupidities into which acute but narrow understandings have fallen, when they have mistaken the range of their own perceptions for the extent of the universe, we may exclaim, with Coleridge, "O! few have there been, among critics, who have followed with the eye of imagination the imperishable and ever-wandering spirit of poetry through its various metempsychoses and consequent metamorphoses, or who have rejoiced in the light of a clear perception at beholding with each new birth, with each rare avatar, the human race form to itself a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity."

We are convinced that the true philosophical principles of criticism are those implied in the instinctive processes of every tolerant reader of taste. The mind, untrammelled by forms and rules which bigotry has put into it, has a sense for the beauty of all new objects, and sees them in relation to their own laws. Imperfect intellectual statements of the inward sense of beauty, and the hardening down of feelings into rules, cannot altogether blunt the natural processes even of the critic's own imagination. Besides, the mode we have indicated does not ignore rules and principles, except when rules and principles are without foundation in nature. It deduces its canons of criticism from premises lying deep in the nature of man. It pierces to that mysterious region of the soul in which poetry and religion, and all that transcends actual life, have their home. It disregards individual dictation and petulance, and empirical rules; but it does not disregard the nature of things. It applies tests, and severe ones, but its tests are the laws, in obedi

ence to which the creative and modifying powers of the soul act. And these laws it philosophically investigates and systematizes. It requires unity in every work of art, because unity is the mark of organization. It tolerates the widest variety of kinds, but it demands that each shall have organic life. It detects deviations in a composition from its own law. It discriminates between what properly belongs to a work of art, what in it has been developed from its central principle of vitality,and the accretions adhering to it, but not inhering in it. When it condemns poems, it condemns them from their "inappropriateness to their own end and being, their want of significance as symbols or physiognomy." By assuming the writer's own point of view, it has a sense of those imperfections of which he himself is painfully conscious; discerns the distance between the law and its embodiment; and preserves the dignity of the ideal by knowing the possibilities as well as the products of the imagination. Every form of beauty, in nature or art, suggests something higher than itself.

In Coleridge's criticisms on Shakspeare, in his " Biographia Literaria," and in portions of his other prose I works, we have a distinct enunciation, often in sentences of great splendor and energy, of the leading principles of this philosophical criticism. His prose, to be sure, is full of provoking faults, which few mere readers can tolerate. It is sometimes diffuse, obscure, and languid: branching off into episodes and digressions, and not always held together by any perceptible thread of thought. Most students bring little from it but headaches. He is at once one of the best and one of the worst of writers. He continually gives evidence of a power of composition, of which his prose works, on the whole, are but imper

fect exponents. Sentences, full of muscular life and energy, embodying principles of the deepest import, words which come bright and rapid as lightning, splitting the "unwedgable and gnarled" problem, are often seen in his writings, in connection with unintelligible profundities and disordered metaphysics. The "Biographia Literaria" no one can read without being enriched, and without being bored. Tried by his own critical principles, it wants unity, clearness, and proportion. He expends page upon page of what most readers would consider meaningless metaphysical disquisition, preparatory to a definition of imagination, and then stops short with saying that, at present, he can merely give the result of his inquiries. That result is darker than the processes. "The primary Imagination," he says, "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 AM." We do not say that this and other passages are without any meaning, but the meaning is not clear. It is not unfolded, but wrapped up. The words buzz and whirl in the brain, but give no distinct ideas. The writer does not really communicate his thought, and therefore the first object of writing is overlooked. There is no subordination of the parts to the whole, but a splendid confusion.

Still, in this book, but more especially in the fragments on Shakspeare, Coleridge has given us the results of his investigations into poetry and art, though his metaphysical analysis of the faculties to which they relate is imperfect. His statements are better than his disquisitions-his appeal to consciousness better than his reasonings. The truths that he grasped in contemplation, he could not always succeed in legitimatizing in

metaphysical forms. But his theory of the vital powers of genius; his definitions of imagination and fancy; his felicitous distinctions, such as that which he makes between illusion and delusion; his view of the nature, scope and object of poetry; his acute perception of the difference between the classical and romantic drama, the essence of the first consisting in "the sternest separation of the diverse in kind and the disparate in degree, whilst the other delights in interlacing, by a rainbow-like transfusion of hues, the one with the other; "his elaborate criticism on the genius of Wordsworth; his view of the mind of Shakspeare; his criticism of single dramas, and his "endeavor to make out the title of the English drama, as created by and existing in Shakspeare, to the supremacy of dramatic excellence in general;" his definition of poetry as the art of representing, in measured words, "external nature and human thoughts, both relatively to human affections, so as to cause the production of as great immediate pleasure in each part as is compatible with the largest possible sum of pleasure in the whole;" his explanation of the sensuous element of poetry as the "union, harmonious melting down and fusion, of the sensual in the spiritual,"- all are replete with knowledge and suggestive thought. When Coleridge speaks of the poetical powers, we are constantly reminded, by his very language, that he transcribes his own consciousness, and speaks from authority, not as the reviewers; as when he refers to the "violences of excitement "

"the laws of association of feeling with thought ". "the starts and strange far-flights of the assimilative power on the slightest and least obvious likeness presented by thoughts, words and objects"-"the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it,