in middle age. Coleridge is only one among many instances of thinkers who have passed through a stage of poetic productiveness, and then lost their singing voices and "stooped to truth." Nor is it wise to lament, with Swinburne, that in Coleridge the poet was spoiled in the theologian and the metaphysician. The time which his inquiring spirit devoted to speculative problems was not altogether wasted time. The poet cannot, without peril, consciously isolate the realm of art, or cut away the domain of beauty from the whole territory of human thought and knowledge. Be this as it may, the "long and blessed interval" during which the bard prevailed over the logician and metaphysician, was not so very long in the comparison. Coleridge's blossoming time was brief and was practically confined to the two years, 1797-98, which he spent in intimate association with Wordsworth at Nether Stowey and Alfoxden. To those years belong The Ancient Mariner, the first part of Christabel, Love, Kubla Khan, the ode to France, and the fine blank verse poems, Frost at Midnight, The Nightingale, and Fears in Solitude. With a few exceptions, this list includes everything of high value which he wrote in verse. In September, 1798, he sailed for Germany in company with Wordsworth and the latter's sister Dorothy. He parted from them immediately on his arrival in Hamburg and spent the next nine months, mainly at Ratzeburg and Göttingen, in assiduous study of German literature and philosophy. This was the turning point in Coleridge's literary life. When he returned to England in the summer of 1799, had given place to the philosopher.

the poet in him Shortly after his

arrival in London, in November, 1799, he made in six weeks his noble version of Wallenstein; and in the autumn of 1800, at Keswick in the Lake Country, whither he had followed Wordsworth, he added a second part to Christabel. But translation-even such translation as Wallenstein-is not original creation; and a comparison between the first and second parts of Christabel shows a distinct falling off in poetic power. The fairyland which was the scene of the romance, as originally conceived, has become Cumberland, and there is mention of Windermere and Borrowdale and other Lake Country localities. The magic glamour has faded into the light of common day, and even that splendid passage which Byron admired:

Alas! they had been friends in youth, etc.—

is of deeper stress than accords with the romantic tone in which the story was first pitched. The fact that Christabel was left unfinished is not needed, as evidence, to prove that Coleridge could never have finished it in the spirit in which it was begun.

In turning from verse to prose, Coleridge did not leave the poet quite behind him. There are eloquent passages, and passages marked by imaginative beauty; in all his writings. But the "shaping spirit," the artistic skill which distinguishes his verse, seems to have deserted him. None of his books are wholes. With loftier endowments than his friends De Quincey and Lamb, he added no masterpiece to our prose literature ; nothing at all comparable in general and enduring interest with the Confessions of an English Opium Eater or the Essays of Elia. It must be confessed,

indeed, that his writings, as a whole, are not interesting, and that in parts they are almost unreadable. A select circle of readers delights in them for the stimulating quality of their thought and their frequent flashes of insight. But they have no popular attractiveness, and in turning their pages it is easy to see why Coleridge is an influence and not a classic. His abstract subjects, his subtle dialectic, his longueurs, and above all his eternal discursiveness, repel and fatigue. He carried digression to a science alike in his conversations and his books. And although De Quincey asserts that this wandering was only apparent, and due to "the compass and huge circuit by which his illustrations moved . . . before they began to revolve"; yet he acknowledges that "long before this coming round commenced, most people had lost him, and, naturally enough, supposed that he had lost himself."

The unsystematic and fragmentary nature of Coleridge's writings is largely accounted for by defects of character. With a sensitive conscience, a devout and tender heart, and a sympathy with everything that is lovely and of good report; he had a weakness of will and a lack of high spirit, and even of ordinary self-respect, which made him an object of contempt to men who were morally and intellectually his inferiors. His unpracticality and shiftlessness; his constitutional indolence and habits of procrastination; his willingness to accept gifts of money from men on whom he had no special claim, to allow his sons to be sent to the university at the expense of his friends, to take a pension from the King and to leave his family dependent upon his brother-in-law, Southey, are things which

one finds it impossible to reconcile with an honorable pride. Hazlitt said that the moment any action presented itself to Coleridge in the light of a duty, that moment he was unable to perform it. He was sadly conscious of his own failing. The character of Hamlet had a peculiar fascination for him because he saw in it a likeness to himself, the same morbid energy of the speculative reason, the same paralysis of the will. "Hamlet's character," he said, "is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. . I have a smack of Hamlet myself."* Wordsworth's steadfastness of purpose aroused in his friend

"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 corse and borne upon my bier

In the same coffin, for the self-same grave." +

In the famous picture or caricature of Coleridge at Highgate, which Carlyle drew in his Life of Sterling, he describes him as flabby and irresolute in appearance, hanging loosely on his knees, with stooping shoulders and shuffling gait. "A lady once remarked he never could fix which side of the garden-walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both "-a little physical trait significant of a corresponding hesitancy in character. His head is described as well shaped and the eyes

* Table Talk.

To William Wordsworth, 1805.

hazel, or dark gray-as fine, but the lower lip had a tendency to droop, and the nose, said Hazlitt, was insignificant.

For a number of years Coleridge was a slave to the opium habit, and opium eaters, according to De Quincey, though good fellows in general, never finish anything. There was a very German turn to Coleridge's mind, and one remembers Heine's taunt about Faust, and Schelling's God, and the Prussian Constitution, and other things unfinished. Coleridge had, for instance, Gründlichkeit, i. e., not thoroughness in the English sense, but an instinct for going back to first principles, for being "basic" and "central" in the discussion even of subjects like literary criticism or contemporary politics. "Bentham and Coleridge," wrote J. S. Mill, "agreed in perceiving that the groundwork of all other philosophy must be laid in the philosophy of the mind. To lay this foundation deeply and strongly, and to raise a superstructure in accordance with it, were the objects to which their lives were devoted."

Coleridge was always laying foundations, but the superstructure seldom got raised. Among other things which he projected were a History of British Literature in eight volumes, a monumental Logosophia, or philosophical system, and an epic poem on the Fall of Jerusalem. "I schemed it at twenty-five," he said of the last, "but alas! venturum expectat." At the end of his uncompleted ballad, The Three Graves, the poet wrote, "Carmen reliquum in futurum tempus relegatum. To-morrow! and to-morrow! and to-morrow!-" a pathetic outcry, which might not inappropriately stand