4 these insinuations, I must observe that there is no such line in Coleridge's Ode; the word "footsteps" is neither in Samson Agonistes nor the Ode; the line in the first being,— "When insupportably his foot advanced;" and in the second, simply, "When, insupportably advancing." But this is unimportant. That these latter words were in Milton was a mere fact about which, with a book-shelf at hand, there could of course be no dispute; if, therefore, Mr. Coleridge denied that he was indebted to Milton for them, I believe-(as who in the world, but this "foremost of admirers," would not believe?)—that he meant to deny any distinct consciousness of their Miltonic origin, at the moment of his using them in his Ode. A metaphysician like Mr. Dequincey can explain what every common person, who has read half a dozen standard books in his life, knows,-that thoughts, words, and phrases, not our own, rise up day by day, from the depths of the passive memory, and suggest themselves as it were to the hand, without any effort of recollection on our part. Such thoughts are indeed not natural born, but they are denizens at least; and Coleridge could have meant no more. And so it seems that in Shelvocke's Voyage, there is a passage showing how "Hatley, being a melancholy man, was possessed by a fancy that some long season of foul weather was due to an albatross, which had steadily pursued the ship; upon which he shot the bird, but without mending their condition." This Mr. Dequincey considers the germ-a prolific one to be sure-of the Ancient Mariner; and he says, that upon a question being put to Mr. Coleridge by him on the subject, Mr. Coleridge disowned so slight an obligation." If he did, I firmly believe he had no recollection of it. What Mr. Dequincey says about the Hymn in the vale of Chamouni is just. This glorious composition, of upwards of ninety lines, is truly indebted for many images and some striking expressions to Frederica Brun's little poem. The obligation is so clear that a reference to the original ought certainly to have been given, as Coleridge gave in other instances. Yet, as to any ungenerous wish on the part of Mr. Coleridge to conceal the obligation, I for one totally disbelieve it; the words and images that are taken are taken bodily and without alteration, and not the slightest art is used and a little would have sufficed-to The disguise the fact of any community between the two poems. German is in twenty lines, and I print them here with a very bald English translation, that all my readers may compare them as a curiosity with their glorification in Coleridge : Aus tiefem Schatten des schweigenden Tannenhains Ahndend mein Geist ins Unendliche schwebet! Wer goss Euch hoch aus des ewigen Winters Reich, Wer Zeichnet dort dem Morgensterne die Bahn? Jehovah! Jehovah ! kracht's im berstenden Eis; Jehovah! rauscht's in den hellen Wipfeln, CHAMOUNI AT SUNRISE. TO KLOPSTOCK. Out of the deep shade of the silent fir-grove trembling I survey thee, moun tain head of eternity, dazzling (blinding) summit, from whose height my dimly-perceiving spirit floats into the everlasting (or hovers, is suspended in the everlasting). Who sank the pillar deep into the lap of earth, which for centuries past props (or sustains) thy mass? Who up-reared (thürmte, up-towered) nigh in the vault of ether mighty and bold thy beaming countenance (umstrahltes, beamed around)? Who poured you from on high out of eternal winter's realm, O jagged streams (Zackenströme) downward with thunder noise? And who commanded loud, with the voice of Omnipotence, "Here shall the stiffening billows rest?" Who marks out there the path for the morning star? Who wreathes with blossoms the edge (skirt, border) of eternal frost? To whom, wild Arveiron, does thy wave commotion (or wave-dizziness, hurly-burly, or tumult of waves, Wogentümmel) sound in terrible harmonies ? Jehovah! Jehovah! crashes in the bursting ice; avalanche thunders roll it down the chasm (cleft, ravine). Jehovah! rustles (or murmurs) in the bright tree-tops; it whispers in the purling silver brooks. Mr. Dequincey proceeds thus :-"All these cases amount to nothing at all as cases of plagiarism, and for that reason expose the more conspicuously that obliquity of feeling which could seek to decline the very slight acknowledgments required. But now I come to a case of real and palpable plagiarism; yet that too of a nature to be quite unaccountable in a man of Coleridge's attain ments." I will leave all the rest to the pen of Julius Hare. "I have been speaking on the supposition that the charges of plagiarism and insincerity brought by the Opium-eater against Coleridge are strictly, accurately true-that Coleridge is guilty to the full amount and tale of the offences imputed to him. Even in this case it indicates a singular obliquity of feeling, thus to drag them forth and thrust them forward. But are they true? Doubtless, -seeing that he who thrusts them forward can only do it out of a painful and rankling love of truth and justice; seeing that the voice which comes forth from his mask proclaims him to be the 'foremost of Coleridge's admirers.' Reader, be not deluded, and put to sleep by a name; look into the charges; sift them. Among them the accuser himself acknowledges that there is only one of any moment, the others having been lugged in to swell the counts of the indictment, through a somewhat over-anxious fear— a fear which would have been deemed malicious in any one but the foremost of his admirers-lest any tittle that could tell against Coleridge should be forgotten. One case, however, there is, he assures us, of real and palpable plagiarism': so, lest 'some cursed reviewer' eight hundred or a thousand years hence, should make the discovery,' he determines to prevent him by forestalling him, and states it in full, as in admirership bound. The dissertation in the Biographia Literaria 'on the reciprocal relations of the esse and the cogitare' is asserted to be a translation from an essay in the volume of Schelling's Philosophische Schriften. True: the Opiumeater is indeed mistaken in the name of the book; but that is of little moment, except as an additional mark of audacious carelessness in impeaching a great man's honour. The dissertation, as it stands in the Biographia Literaria, vol. i. pp. 254-261, is a literal translation from the introduction to Schelling's system of Transcendental Idealism; and though the assertion that there is no attempt in a single instance to appropriate the paper, by developing the arguments, or by diversifying the illustrations, is not quite borne out by the fact, Coleridge's additions are few and slight. But the Opium-eater further says, that 'Coleridge's essay is prefaced by a ་ few words, in which, aware of his coincidence with Schelling, he decíares his willingness to acknowledge himself indebted to so great a man, in any case where the truth would allow him to do so; but in this particular case, insisting on the impossibility that he could have borrowed arguments which he had first seen some years after he had thought out the whole hypothesis proprio marte.' That Coleridge never can have been guilty of such a piece of scandalous dishonesty is clear even on the face of the charge: he never could apply the word hypothesis to that which has nothing hypothetical in it. The Opium-cater also is much too precise in his use of words to have done so, if he had known or considered what he was talking about. But he did not; and owing to this slovenly rashness of assertion, he has brought forward a heavy accusation, which is utterly false and groundless, the distorted offspring of a benighted memory under the incubus of—what shall we say?—an ardent admiration. Not a single word does Coleridge say about the originality of his essay one way or other. It is not prefaced by any remark. No mention is made of Schelling within a hundred pages of it, further than a quotation from him in page 247, and a reference to him in page 250. In an earlier part of the work, however, where Coleridge is giving an account of his philosophical education, there does occur a passage (pp. 149-153) about his obligations to Schelling, and his coincidences with him. This, no doubt, is the passage which the Opium-eater had in his head; but strangely indeed has he metamorphosed it. For Coleridge's vindication it is necessary to quote it somewhat at length : "It would be a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my 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 Schelling, or that the conceptions were originally learnt from him. Many of the most striking resemblances, indeed, all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I had ever seen a page of the German philosopher. God forbid that I should be suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with Schelling for the honours so unequivocally his right, not only as a great and original genius, but as the founder of the philosophy of Nature, and as the most successful improver of the Dynamic system. To Schelling we owe the completion, and the most important victories, of this revolution in philosophy. To me it will be happiness and honour enough, should I succeed in rendering the system itself intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application of it to the most awful of subjects for the most important of pur poses. Whether a work is the offspring of a man's own spirit, 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 Jound 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 him; provided that the absence of direct 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 acknowledgement, be superfluous, be not charged on me as an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism.' "Yet the charge, which he thus earnestly deprecates, has been brought against him; and that, too, by a person entitling himself the foremost of his admirers! Heaven preserve all honest men from such forward admirers! The boy who rendered nil admirari, not to be admired, must have had something of prophecy in him, when he pronounced this to be an indispensable recipe for happiness. Coleridge, we see, was so far from denying or shuffling about his debts to Schelling, that he makes over every passage to him on which the stamp of his mind could be discovered. Of a truth, 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 from 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 Naturphilosophie and his Transcendental Idealism; these are the works which Coleridge himself mentions; and the latter, from its subject, would attract them the most. For the maturer exposition of Schelling's philosophy, in the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, is hardly to be met with in England, having never been published except in that journal; and being still no more than a fragment. Indeed, Coleridge himself does not seem to have known it; and Germany has, for thirty years, looked in vain expectation for the doctrine of the greatest of her philosophers. "But, even with the fullest conviction that Coleridge cannot have been guilty of intentional plagiarism, the reader will, probably, deem it strange that he should have transferred half a dozen pages |