No More Learning



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3843
-
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
(1772-1834)
BY GEORGE E. WOODBERRY
-
AMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, the English poet and philosopher,
was born at Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire, October 21st,
1772. He was the ninth and youngest son of the vicar of
the parish, a man characterized by learning and also by some of its
foibles, under whose care he passed his childhood; but on the death
of his father he was sent up to London to be educated at Christ's
Hospital, and there spent, in companionship with Lamb, his school
days from 1782 to 1791. He went in the latter year to Jesus College
Cambridge. His career as an undergraduate was marked by an esca-
pade, his enlistment in the King's Regiment of Light Dragoons in
the winter of 1793-94, from which he was released by the influence
of his relatives; and in more important ways by his friendship with
Southey, whom he found on a visit to Oxford, and his engagement
to Sarah Fricker in the summer of 1794. He had already been at-
tached to another young lady, Mary Evans, with whose family he
had been intimate. In December 1794 he left Cambridge without
taking a degree, and on October 21st, 1795, he was married. His
biography from this point is one of confused and intricate detail,
which only a long story could set forth plainly and exactly. Its
leading external events were a residence in Germany in 1798-99 and
a voyage to Malta, with travel in Sicily and Italy in 1804-6; in its
inward development, the turning-points of his life were his first inti-
macy with the Wordsworths in 1797, during which his best poems
were composed; his subjection to the opium habit, with increasing
domestic unhappiness, in 1801-2; and his retreat under medical con-
trol to Highgate in 1816. He was practically separated from his.
family from the time of his voyage to Malta. Troubles of many
kinds filled all these years, but he had always a power to attract
friends who were deeply interested in his welfare, and he was never
without admirers and helpers. Before he withdrew to Highgate he
had resided first at Stowey in the neighborhood of Tom Poole, and
later at Greta Hall near the Wordsworths; but he was often away
from home, and after he ceased to be an inmate there, from 1806 to
1816, he led a wandering life, either in lodgings frequently changed,
or in visits to his friends. His resources were always small, and


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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
from the start his friends were his patrons, making up subscriptions,
loans, and gifts for him; in 1798 the Wedgwoods gave him a pension
of £150 for life, which was soon secured for the support of his fam-
ily, and in 1812 one-half of this was withdrawn; in 1825 he was
granted a royal pension of one hundred guineas, and when this
lapsed in 1830 Frere made it up to him. De Quincey had distin-
guished himself by an act of singular and impulsive generosity to
him, upon first acquaintance. He was always cared for, though his
indulgence in opium made it difficult for those who knew the fact to
assist him directly in a wise way. His pecuniary embarrassment,
however, was constant and trying during a great part of his life; his
own wretchedness of spirit, under the painful conditions of his bodily
state and his moral as well as material position, was very great; but
through all these sufferings and trials he maintained sufficient energy
to leave behind him a considerable body of literary work. He died
July 25th, 1834.
The poetic genius of Coleridge, the highest of his many gifts.
found brilliant and fascinating expression. His poems-those in
which his fame lives-a are as unique as they are memorable; and
though their small number, their confined range, and the brief
period during which his faculty was exercised with full freedom
and power, seem to indicate a narrow vein, yet the remainder of
his work in prose and verse leaves an impression of extraordinary
and abundant intellectual force. In proportion as his imaginative
creations stand apart, the spirit out of which they came must have
possessed some singularity: and if the reader is not content with
simple æsthetic appreciation of what the gods provide, but has some
touch of curiosity leading him to look into the source of such re-
markable achievement and its human history, he is at once inter-
ested in the personality of the "subtle-souled psychologist," as
Shelley with his accurate critical insight first named him; in experi-
encing the fascination of the poetry one remembers the charm
which Coleridge had in life, that quality which arrested attention
in all companies and drew men's minds and hearts with a sense of
something marvelous in him "the most wonderful man," said
Wordsworth, "that I ever met. " The mind and heart of Coleridge,
his whole life, have been laid open by himself and his friends and
acquaintances without reserve in many volumes of letters and me-
moirs; it is easy to figure him as he lived and to recover his moods
and aspect: but in order to conceive his nature and define its traits,
it is necessary to take account especially of his incomplete and less
perfect work, of his miscellaneous interests, and those activities
which filled and confused his life without having any important
share in establishing his fame.
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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3845
The intellectual precocity which is the leading trait of Coleridge's
boyhood, in the familiar portrait of "the inspired charity-boy" drawn
by Lamb from schoolboy memories, is not unusual in a youth of
genius; but the omnivorousness of knowledge which he then dis-
played continued into his manhood. He consumed vast quantities of
book-learning. It is a more remarkable characteristic that from the
earliest period in which he comes into clear view, he was accustomed
to give out his ideas with freedom in an inexhaustible stream of
talk. The activity of his mind was as phenomenal as its receptivity.
In his college days, too, he was fanatical in all his energies. The
remark of Southey after Shelley's visit to him, that here was a
young man who was just what he himself had been in his college
days, is illustrative; for if Southey was then inflamed with radical-
ism, Coleridge was yet more deeply infected and mastered by that
wild fever of the revolutionary dawn. The tumult of Coleridge's
mind, its incessant action, the lack of discipline in his thought, of
restraint in his expression, of judgment in his affairs, are all impor-
tant elements in his character at a time which in most men would be
called the formative period of manhood, but which in him seems to
have been intensely chaotic; what is most noticeable, however, is the
volume of his mental energy. He expressed himself, too, in ways
natural to such self-abundance. He was always a discourser, if the
name may be used, from the London days at the "Salutation and
the Cat" of which Lamb tells, saying that the landlord was ready to
retain him because of the attraction of his conversation for cus-
tomers; and as he went on to the more set forms of such monologue,
he became a preacher without pay in Unitarian chapels, a journalist
with unusual capacity for ready and sonorous writing in the press, a
composer of whole periodicals such as his ventures The Watchman
and The Friend, and a lecturer using only slight notes as the mate-
rial of his remarks upon literature, education, philosophy, theology, or
whatever the subject might be. In all these methods of expression
which he took up one after the other, he merely talked in an ample
way upon multifarious topics; in the conversation, sermon, leading
article, written discourse, or flowing address, he was master of a
swelling and often brilliant volubility, but he had neither the cer-
tainty of the orator nor the unfailing distinction of the author;
there was an occasional and impromptu quality, a colloquial and
episodical manner, the style of the irresponsible speaker. In his
earlier days especially, the dominant note in Coleridge's whole
nature was excitement. He was always animated, he was often vio-
lent, he was always without the principle of control. Indeed, a
weakness of moral power seems to have been congenital, in the
sense that he was not permanently bound by a practical sense of


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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
duty nor apparently observant of what place duty has in real life.
There was misdirection of his affairs from the time when they came
into his own hands; there was impulsiveness, thoughtlessness, a lack
of judgment which augured ill for him; and in its total effect this
amounted to folly. His intoxication with the scheme known as Pan-
tisocracy, by which he with Southey and a few like-minded project-
ors were to found a socialistic community on the banks of the
Susquehanna, is the most obvious comment on his practical sense.
But his marriage, with the anecdotes of its preliminaries (one of
which was that in those colloquies with Lamb at the London tavern,
so charmingly described by his boon companion, he had forgotten
his engagement or was indifferent to it), more strikingly exemplifies
the irresponsible course of his life, more particularly as it proved to
be ill-sorted, full of petty difficulties and makeshift expedients, and
in the end a disastrous failure. A radical social scheme and an im-
prudent marriage might have fallen to his share of human folly,
however, without exciting remark, if in other ways or at a later
time he had exhibited the qualities which would allow one to dismiss
these matters as mere instances of immaturity; but wherever Cole-
ridge's reasonable control over himself or his affairs is looked to, it
appears to have been feeble. On the other hand, the constancy of
his excitement is plain. It was not only mental, but physical. He
was, as a young man, full of energy and capable of a good deal of
hard exercise; he had animal spirits, and Wordsworth describes him
as "noisy" and "gamesome," as one who
"His limbs would toss about him with delight,
Like branches when strong winds the trees annoy;"
and from several passages of his own writing, which are usually dis-
regarded, the evidence of a spirit of rough humor and fun is easily
obtained. The truth is that Coleridge changed a great deal in his
life; he felt himself to be very different in later years from what
he was in the time when to his memory even he was a sort of glori-
fied spirit: and this earlier Coleridge had many traits which are
ignored sometimes, as Carlyle ignored them, and are sometimes
remembered rather as idealizations of his friends in their affectionate
thoughts of him, but any event are irreconcilable with the figure
of the last period of his life.
It has been suggested that there was something of disease or at
least of ill health in Coleridge always, and that it should be regarded
as influencing his temperament. Whether it were so or not, the plea
itself shows the fact. If excitement was the dominant note, as has
been said, in his whole nature, it could not exist without a physical
basis and accompaniment; and his bodily state appears to have been


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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3847
often less one of animation than of agitation, and his correspondence
frequently discloses moods that seem almost frantic. In the issue,
under stress of pain and trouble, he became an opium-eater; but his
physical nature may fairly be described as predisposed to such states
as lead to the use of opium and also result from its use, with the
attendant mental moods. His susceptibility to sensuous impressions,
to a voluptuousness of the entire being, together with a certain lassi-
tude and languor, lead to the same conclusion, which thus seems to be
supported on all sides,- that Coleridge was, in his youth and early
manhood, fevered through all his intellectual and sensuous nature,
and deficient on the moral and practical sides in those matters that
related to his personal affairs. It is desirable to bring this out in
plain terms, because in Coleridge it is best to acknowledge at once
that his character was, so far as our part-the world's part-in
him is concerned, of less consequence than his temperament; a
subtler and more profound thing than character, though without
moral meaning. It is not unfair to say, since literature is to be
regarded most profitably as the expression of human personality,
that with Coleridge the modern literature of temperament, as it has
been lately recognized in extreme phases, begins; not that tempera-
ment is a new thing in the century now closing, nor that it has
been without influence hitherto, but that now it is more often con-
sidered, and has in fact more often been, an exclusive ground of
artistic expression. The temperament of Coleridge was one of dif-
fused sensuousness physically, and of abnormal mental moods,—
moods of weakness, languor, collapse, of visionary imaginative life
with a night atmosphere of the spectral, moonlit, swimming, scarcely
substantial world; and the poems he wrote, which are the contribu-
tions he made to the world's literature, are based on this tempera-
ment, like some Fata Morgana upon the sea. The apparent exclusion
of reality from the poems in which his genius was most manifest
finds its analogue in the detachment of his own mind from the
moral, the practical, the usual in life as he led it in his spirit; and
his work of the highest creative sort, which is all there is to his
enduring fame, stands amid his prose and verse composition of a
lower sort like an island in the waste of waters. This may be best
shown, perhaps, by a gradual approach through his cruder to his
more perfect compositions.
The cardinal fact in Coleridge's genius is that notwithstanding his
immense sensuous susceptibilities and mental receptivity, and the
continual excitement of his spirit, he never rose into the highest
sphere of creative activity except for the brief period called his
annus mirabilis, when his great poems were written; and with this is
the further related fact that in him we witness the spectacle of the


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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
imaginative instinct overborne and supplanted by the intellectual fac-
ulty exercising its speculative and critical functions; and in addition,
one observes in his entire work an extraordinary inequality not only
of treatment, but also of subject-matter. In general, he was an ego-
istic writer. His sensitiveness to nature was twofold: in the first
place he noticed in the objects and movements of nature evanescent
and minute details, and as his sense of beauty was keen, he saw and
recorded truly the less obvious and less common loveliness in the
phenomena of the elements and the seasons, and this gave distinc-
tion to his mere description and record of fact; in the second place
he often felt in himself moods induced by nature, but yet subjective,
-states of his own spirit, which sometimes deepened the charm of
night, for example, by his enjoyment of its placid aspects, and some-
times imparted to the external world a despair reflected from his
personal melancholy. In his direct treatment of nature, however,
as Mr. Stopford Brooke points out, he seldom achieves more than a
catalogue of his sensations, which though touched with imaginative
detail are never lifted and harmonized into lyrical unity; though he
can moralize nature in Wordsworth's fashion, when he does so the
result remains Wordsworth's and is stamped with that poet's origi-
nality; and in his own original work Coleridge never equaled either
the genius of Shelley, who can identify nature with himself, or the
charm of Tennyson, who can at least parallel nature's phenomena
with his own human moods. Coleridge would not be thought of as
a poet of nature, except in so far as he describes what he observes
in the way of record, or gives a metaphysical interpretation to phe-
nomena. This is the more remarkable because he had to an eminent
degree that intellectual power, that overmastering desire of the mind,
to rationalize the facts of life. It was this quality that made him a
philosopher, an analyst, a critic on the great lines of Aristotle, seek-
ing to impose an order of ethics and metaphysics on all artistic pro-
ductions. But in those poems in which he describes nature directly
and without metaphysical thought, there is no trace of anything
more than a sensuous order of his own perceptions. Beautiful and
often unique as his nature poems are, they are not creative. They
are rather in the main autobiographic; and it is surprising to notice
how large a proportion of his verse is thus autobiographic, not in
those phases of his own life which may be, or at least are thought
of as representative of human life in the mass, but which are per-
sonal, such as the lines written after hearing Wordsworth read the
'Prelude,' or those entitled 'Dejection. ' When his verse is not con-
fined to autobiographic expression, it is often a product of his interest
in his friends or in his family. What is not personal in it, of this
sort, is apt to be domestic or social.


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If we turn from the poems of nature to those concerned with
man, a similar shallowness, either of interest or of power, appears.
He was in early years a radical; he was stirred by the Revolution in
France, and he was emotionally charged with the ideas of the time,
-ideas of equality, fraternity, and liberty. But this interest died
out, as is shown by his political verse. He had none but a social
and a philosophical interest in any case. Man, the individual, did not
at any time attract him. There was nothing dramatic in his genius,
in the narrow and exact sense; he did not engage his curiosity or
his philosophy in individual fortunes. It results from this limitation
that his verse lacks human interest of the dramatic kind. The truth
was that he
was interested in thought rather than in deeds, in
human nature rather than in its concrete pity and terror. Thus he
did not seize on life itself as the material of his imagination and
reflection. In the case of man as in the case of nature he gives us
only an egoistic account, telling us of his own private fortune, his
fears, pains, and despairs, but only as a diary gives them; as he did
not transfer his nature impressions into the world of creative art,
so he did not transfer his personal experiences into that world.
What has been said would perhaps be accepted, were it not for
the existence of those poems, The Ancient Mariner,' 'Christabel,'
'Kubla Khan,' which are the marvelous creations of his genius. In
these it will be said there is both a world of nature new created, and
a dramatic method and interest. It is enough for the purpose of the
analysis if it be granted that nowhere else in Coleridge's work,
except in these and less noticeably in a few other instances, do these
high characteristics occur. The very point which is here to be
brought out is that Coleridge applied that intellectual power, that
overmastering desire of the mind to rationalize the phenomena of
life, which has been mentioned as his great mental trait,- that he
applied this faculty with different degrees of power at different
times, so that his poetry falls naturally into higher and inferior
categories; in the autobiographic verse, in the political and dramatic
verse which forms so large a part of his work, it appears that he
did not have sufficient feeling or exercise sufficient power to raise it
out of the lower levels of composition; in his great works of con-
structive and impersonal art, of moral intensity or romantic beauty
and fascination, he did so exercise the creative imagination as to
make these of the highest rank, or at least one of them.
'The Ancient Mariner,' apart from its many minor merits, has
this distinction in Coleridge's work, it is a poem of perfect unity.
'Christabel' is a fragment, 'Kubla Khan' is a glimpse; and though
the Ode to France, Love, Youth, and Age, and possibly a few
other short pieces, have this highest artistic virtue of unity, yet in


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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
them it is of a simpler kind. The Ancient Mariner,' on the other
hand, is a marvel of construction in that its unity is less complex
than manifold; it exists, however the form be examined. In the
merely external sense, the telling of the tale to the Wedding
Guest, with the fact that the wedding is going on, gives it unity; in
the merely internal sense, the moral lesson of the salvation of the
slayer of the albatross by the medium of love felt toward living
things, subtly yet lucidly worked out as the notion is, gives it unity:
but in still other ways, as a story of connected and consequential
incidents with a plot, a change of fortune, a climax, and the other
essentials of this species of tale-telling, it has unity; and if its
conception either of the physical or the ethical world be analyzed,
these too - and these are the fundamental things-are found con-
sistent wholes. It nevertheless remains true that this system of
nature as a vitalized but not humanized mode of life, with its bird,
its spirit, its magical powers, is not the nature that we know or
believe to be, it is a modern presentation of an essentially primitive
and animistic belief; and similarly this system of human life,—if the
word human can be applied to it, with its dead men, its skeleton
ship, its spirit sailors, its whole miracle of spectral being,-is not the
life we know or believe to be; it is an incantation, a simulacrum.
It may still be true therefore that the imaginative faculty of Cole-
ridge was not applied either to nature or human life, in the ordinary
sense. And this it is that constitutes the uniqueness of the poem,
and its wonderful fascination. Coleridge fell heir, by the accidents
of time and the revolutions of taste, to the ballad style, its sim-
plicity, directness, and narrative power; he also was most attracted
to the machinery of the supernatural, the weird, the terrible, almost
to the grotesque and horrid, as these literary motives came into
fashion in the crude beginnings of romanticism in our time; his
subtle mind, his fine senses, his peculiar susceptibility to the mystic
and shadowy in nature,—as shown by his preference of the moon-
light, dreamy, or night aspects of real nature, to its brilliant beau-
ties in the waking world,—gave him ease and finesse in the handling
of such subject-matter; and he lived late enough to know that all
this eerie side of human experience and imaginative capacity,
inherited from primeval ages but by no means yet deprived of
plausibility, could be effectively used only as an allegoric or scenic
setting of what should be truth to the ethical sense; he combined
one of the highest lessons of advanced civilization, one of the last
results of spiritual perception,- the idea of love toward life in any
form, with the animistic beliefs and supernatural fancies of the
crude ages of the senses. This seems to be the substantial matter;
and in this he was, to repeat Shelley's phrase, the "subtle-souled
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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3851
psychologist. "
The material of his imagination, on the sensuous
side, was of the slightest: it was the supernaturalism of the romantic
movement, somewhat modified by being placed in connection with
the animal world; and he put this to use as a means of illustrating
spiritual truth. He thus became the first of those who have employed
the supernatural in our recent literature without losing credence for
it, as an allegory of psychological states, moral facts, or illusions real
to the eye that sees them and having some logical relation to the
past of the individual; of such writers Hawthorne and Poe are emi-
nent examples, and both of them, it may be remarked, are writers
in whom temperament rather than character is the ground of their
creative work. The intimate kinship between imagination so directed
and the speculative philosophical temper is plain to see. In 'Chris-
tabel' on the other hand, the moral substance is not apparent: the
place filled by the moral ideas which are the centres of the narra-
tive in The Ancient Mariner,' is taken here by emotional situations;
but the supernaturalism is practically the same in both poems, and
in both is associated with that mystery of the animal world to man,
most concentrated and vivid in the fascination ascribed traditionally
to the snake, which is the animal motive in Christabel' as the
goodness of the albatross in the 'The Ancient Mariner. In these
poems the good and the bad omens that ancient augurs minded are
made again dominant over men's imagination. Such are the signal
and unique elements in these poems, which have besides that wealth
of beauty in detail, of fine diction, of liquid melody, of sentiment,
thought, and image, which belong only to poetry of the highest
order, and which are too obvious to require any comment. 'Kubla
Khan' is a poem of the same kind, in which the mystical effect is
given almost wholly by landscape; it is to The Ancient Mariner'
and 'Christabel' what protoplasm is to highly organized cells.
If it be recognized then that the imagery of Coleridge in the
characteristic parts of these cardinal poems is as pure allegory, is as
remote from nature or man, as is the machinery of fairy-land and
chivalry in Spenser, for example, and he obtains credibility by the
psychological and ethical truth presented in this imagery, it is not
surprising that his work is small in amount; for the method is not
only a difficult one, but the poetic machinery itself is limited and
meagre. The poverty of the subject-matter is manifest, and the re-
strictions to its successful use are soon felt. It may well be doubted
whether 'Christabel' would have gained by being finished. In 'The
Ancient Mariner' the isolation of the man is a great advantage; if
there had been any companion for him, the illusion could not have
been entire: as it is, what he experiences has the wholeness and
truth within itself of a dream, or of a madman's world,- there is no


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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
standard of appeal outside of his own senses and mind, no real
world; but in Christabel' the serpentine fable goes on in a world of
fact and action, and as soon as the course of the story involved this
fable in the probabilities and actual occurences of life, it might well
be that the tale would have turned into one of simple enchantment
and magic, as seems likely from what has been told of its continua-
tion; certainly it could not have equaled the earlier poem, or have
been in the same kind with it, unless the unearthly magic, the spell,
were finally completely dissolved into the world of moral truth as is
the case with The Ancient Mariner. ' Coleridge found it still more
impossible to continue 'Kubla Khan. ' It seems a fair inference to
conclude that Coleridge's genius, however it suffered from the mis-
fortunes and ills of his life, was in these works involved in a field,
however congenial, yet of narrow range and infertile in itself.
In
poetic style it is to be observed that he kept what he had gained;
the turbid diction of the earlier period never came back to trouble
him, and the cadences he had formed still gave their music to his
verse. The change, the decline, was not in his power of style; it
was in his power of imagination, if at all, but the fault may have
laid in the capacities of the subject-matter. A similar thing certainly
happened in his briefer ballad poetry, in that of which Love,' The
Three Graces,' 'Alice Du Clos,' and 'The Dark Ladie,' are examples;
the matter there, the machinery of the romantic ballad, was no
longer capable of use; that sort of literature was dead from the
exhaustion of its motives. The great 'Ode to France,' in which he
reached his highest point of eloquent and passionate expression,
seems to mark the extinction in himself of the revolutionary impulse.
On the whole, while the excellence of much of the remainder of his
verse, even in later years, is acknowledged, and its originality in
several instances, may it not be that in his greatest work Coleridge
came to an end because of an impossibility in the kind itself? The
supernatural is an accessory rather than a main element in the in-
terpretation of life which literary genius undertakes; Coleridge so
subordinates it here by making it contributory to a moral truth; but
such a practice would seem to be necessarily incidental to a poet
who was also so intellectual as Coleridge, and not to be adopted as
a permanent method of self-expression.
From whatever cause, the fact was that Coleridge ceased to create
in poetry, and fell back on that fluent, manifold, voluminous faculty
he possessed of absorbing and giving out ideas in vast quantities, as
it were by bulk. He attended especially to the theory of art as he
found it illustrated in the greatest poets, and he popularized among
literary men a certain body of doctrine regarding criticism, its
growth and methods; and in later years he worked out metaphysical


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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3853
theological views which he inculcated in ways which won for him
recognition as a practical influence in contemporary church opinion.
In these last years of his lecturing and discoursing in private, the
figure he makes is pathetic, though Carlyle describes it with a grim
humor, as any one may read in the 'Life of Sterling': over against
that figure should be set the descriptions of the young Coleridge by
Dorothy Wordsworth and Lamb; and after these perhaps the contrast
which Coleridge himself draws between his spirit and his body may
enable a reader to fuse the two-youth and age-
into one. What-
ever were the weaknesses of his nature and the trials of his life, of
which one keeps silent, he was deeply loved by friends of many
different minds, who if they grew cold, had paid at least once this
tribute to the charm, the gentleness, and the delight of his human
companionship.
Условия
KUBLA KHAN
N XANADU did Kubla Khan
IN
A stately pleasure-dome decree,
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With wall and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover:
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething.
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,


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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail;
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw;
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air-
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! beware
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.


## p. 3855 (#221) ###########################################

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3855
THE ALBATROSS
From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'
ITH sloping masts and dripping prow,
WITH As who, pursued with yell and blow,
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold;
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen;
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken-
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around;
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
At length did cross an Albatross:
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!
And a good south-wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollo!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whilst all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white moonshine. —


## p. 3856 (#222) ###########################################

3856
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends that plague thee thus!
Why look'st thou so? -With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross!
THE Sun now rose upon the right;
Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the sea.
And the good south-wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariner's hollo!
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!
Nor dim nor red, like God's own head
The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
'Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;


## p. 3857 (#223) ###########################################

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3857
As idle as a painted ship.
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink:
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
VII-242
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue, and white.
And some in dreams assurèd were
Of the spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathoms deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the' root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
TIME, REAL AND IMAGINARY
N THE wide level of a mountain's head
ON (I knew not where, but 't was some faery place),
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread,
Two lovely children run an endless race,
A sister and a brother!
This far outstript the other;
Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
And looks and listens for the boy behind:
For he, alas! is blind!
O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed,
And knows not whether he be first or last.


## p. 3858 (#224) ###########################################

3858
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
DEJECTION: AN ODE
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
BALLAD OF SIR PATRICK SPENCE.
WEL
LL! if the bard was weather-wise, who made
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Unroused by winds that ply a busier trade
Than those which mold yon cloud in lazy flakes,
Or the dull sobbing draft that moans and rakes
Upon the strings of this Æolian lute,
Which better far were mute.
For lo! the New Moon, winter-bright
And overspread with phantom light,
With swimming phantom light o'erspread,
But rimmed and circled by a silver thread;
I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling
The coming on of rain and squally blast.
And oh! that even now the gust were swelling,
And the slant night-shower driving hard and fast!
Those sounds, which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
And sent my soul abroad,
Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give-
Might startle this dull pain and make it move and live.
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear-
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear —
O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle wooed,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow-green;
And still I gaze-and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars,—
Those stars that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen;


## p. 3859 (#225) ###########################################

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3859
Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue:
I see them all so excellently fair —
I see, nor feel, how beautiful they are!
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail,
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavor,
Though I should gaze forever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within.
O lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold of higher worth
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd-
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth;
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be,
What and wherein it doth exist,
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making power:
Joy, virtuous lady! Joy that ne'er was given
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
Life, and life's effluence, cloud at once and shower-
Joy, lady, is the spirit and the power
Which wedding nature to us, gives in dower
A new Earth and Heaven,
Undreamt-of by the sensual and the proud;
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud-
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colors a suffusion from that light.
―


## p. 3860 (#226) ###########################################

3860
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress;
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence fancy made me dreams of happiness.
For hope grew round me like the twining vine;
And fruits and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth,
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
Hence, viper thoughts that coil around my mind-
Reality's dark dream!
I turn from you, and listen to the wind,
Which long has raved unnoticed.
Of agony, by torture lengthened out,
That lute sent forth! Thou wind, that ravest without!
What a scream
Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree,
Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb,
Or lonely house, long held the witches' home,
Methinks were fitter instruments for thee,
Mad lutanist! who in this month of showers,
Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flowers,
Makest devils' Yule, with worse than wintry song,
The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among!
Thou actor, perfect in all tragic sounds!
Thou mighty poet, e'en to frenzy bold!
What tell'st thou now about?
'Tis of the rushing of a host in rout,
With groans of trampled men, with smarting wounds-
At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold
But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence!
And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd,
-
With groans and tremulous shudderings—all is over
It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud!


## p. 3861 (#227) ###########################################

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3861
A tale of less affright,
And tempered with delight,
As Otway's self had framed the tender lay:
'Tis of a little child
Upon a lonesome wild-
Not far from home, but she hath lost her way;
And now moans low in bitter grief and fear
And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.
'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep;
Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep!
Visit her, gentle Sleep, with wings of healing!
And may this storm be but a mountain-birth;
May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,
Silent as though they watched the sleeping earth!
With light heart may she rise,-
Gay fancy, cheerful eyes-
―――――――
Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice;
To her may all things live, from pole to pole-
Their life the eddying of her living soul!
O simple spirit, guided from above!
Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice!
Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.
THE THREE TREASURES
COMPLAINT
ow seldom, Friend! a good great man inherits
Η
Honor or wealth, with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits,
If any man obtain that which he merits,
Or any merit that which he obtains.
REPROOF
For shame, dear Friend; renounce this canting strain!
What wouldst thou have a good grea man obtain ?
Place - titles-salary- a gilded chain
Or throne of corses which his sword has slain?
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? three treasures,-love and light,
And calm thoughts, regular as infant's breath;
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night—
Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death.


## p. 3862 (#228) ###########################################

3862
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
TO A GENTLEMAN
COMPOSED ON THE NIGHT AFTER HIS RECITATION OF A POEM ON
THE GROWTH OF AN INDIVIDUAL MIND
F
RIEND of the Wise! and Teacher of the Good!
Into my heart have I received that lay
More than historic, that prophetic lay,
Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright)
Of the foundations and the building up
Of a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tell
What may be told, to the understanding mind
Revealable; and what within the mind,
By vital breathings secret as the soul
Of vernal growth, oft quickens in the heart
Thoughts all too deep for words!
Theme hard as high!
Of smiles spontaneous, and mysterious fears,
The first-born they of Reason, and twin-birth;
Of tides obedient to external force,
And currents self-determined, as might seem,
Or by some inner Power; of moments awful,
Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,
When Power stream'd from thee, and thy soul received
The light reflected, as a light bestowed
Of fancies fair, and milder hours of youth,
Hyblean murmurs of poetic thought,
Industrious in its joy, in Vales and Glens
Native or outland, Lakes and famous Hills!
Or on the lonely High-road, when the Stars
Were rising; or by secret mountain Streams,
The Guides and the Companions of thy way!
Of more than Fancy, of the Social Sense
Distending wide, and Man beloved as Man,
Where France in all her town lay vibrating
Like some becalmèd bark beneath the burst
Of Heaven's immediate thunder, when no cloud
Is visible, or shadow on the Main.
For thou wert there, thine own brows garlanded,
Amid the tremor of a realm aglow,
Amid a mighty nation jubilant,
When from the general heart of humankind


## p. 3863 (#229) ###########################################

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3863
Hope sprang forth like a full-born Deity!
Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down
So summoned homeward, thenceforth calm and sure,
From the dread watch-tower of man's absolute Self
With light unwaning on her eyes, to look
Far on
- herself a glory to behold,
-
The Angel of the vision! Then (last strain)
Of Duty, chosen laws controlling choice,
Action and Joy! - An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts,
To their own music chanted!
O great Bard!
Ere yet that last strain, dying, awed the air,
With stedfast eye I viewed thee in the choir
Of ever-enduring men. The truly Great
Have all one age, and from one visible space
Shed influence! They, both in power and act,
Are permanent, and Time is not with them,
Save as it worketh for them, they in it.
Nor less a sacred roll than those of old,
And to be placed, as they, with gradual fame
Among the archives of mankind, thy work
Makes audible a linkèd lay of Truth,
Of Truth profound a sweet continuous lay,
Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!
Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn,
The pulses of my being beat anew:
And even as life returns upon the drowned,
Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains-
Keen Pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;
And Fears self-willed that shunned the eye of Hope,
And Hope that scarce would know itself from Fear,
Sense of past Youth; and Manhood come 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!
That way no more! and ill beseems it me
Who came a welcomer in herald's guise
Singing of Glory and Futurity,
To wander back on such unhealthful road,


## p. 3864 (#230) ###########################################

3864
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Plucking the poisons of self-harm! And ill
uch intertwine beseems triumphal wreaths
Strewed before thy advancing!
Nor do thou,
Sage Bard! impair the memory of that hour
Of my communion with thy nobler mind
By Pity or Grief, already felt too long!
Nor let my words import more blame than needs.
The tumult rose and ceased: for Peace is nigh
Where Wisdom's voice has found a listening heart.
Amid the howl of more than wintry storms,
The Halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours
Already on the wing.
Eve following eve,
Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home
Is sweetest! moments for their own sake hailed
And more desired, more precious for thy song,
In silence listening, like a devout child,
My soul lay passive, by the various strain
Driven as in surges now beneath the stars,
With momentary Stars of my own birth,
Fair constellated Foam, still darting off
Into the darkness; now a tranquil sea,
Outspread and bright, yet swelling to the Moon. .
And when-O Friend! my comforter and guide!
Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength! -
Thy long-sustained song finally closed,
And thy deep voice had ceased-yet thou thyself
Wert still before my eyes, and round us both
That happy vision of beloved faces-
Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close,
I sate, my being blended in one thought
(Thought was it? or Aspiration? or Resolve ? )
Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound -
And when I rose, I found myself in prayer.
-
-


## p. 3865 (#231) ###########################################

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3865
ODE TO GEORGIANA, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE
ON THE TWENTY-FOURTH STANZA IN HER PASSAGE OVER MOUNT
GOTHARD'
A
ND hail the Chapel! hail the Platform wild!
Where Tell directed the avenging Dart,
With well-strung arm, that first preserved his Child,
Then aim'd the arrow at the Tyrant's heart.
Splendor's fondly fostered child!
And did you hail the platform wild
Where once the Austrian fell
Beneath the shaft of Tell?
O Lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure!
Whence learnt you that heroic measure?
Light as a dream your days their circlets ran;
From all that teaches Brotherhood to Man,
Far, far removed! from want, from hope, from fear.
Enchanting music lulled your infant ear,
Obeisance, praises, soothed your infant heart:
Emblazonments and old ancestral crests,
With many a bright obtrusive form of art,
Detained your eye from nature's stately vests
That veiling strove to deck your charms divine;
Rich viands and the pleasurable wine,
Were yours unearned by toil; nor could you see
The unenjoying toiler's misery.
And yet, free Nature's uncorrupted child,
You hailed the Chapel and the Platform wild,
Where once the Austrian fell
Beneath the shaft of Tell!
O Lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure!
Where learnt you that heroic measure?
There crowd your finely fibred frame,
All living faculties of bliss;
And Genius to your cradle came,
His forehead wreathed with lambent flame,
And bending low, with godlike kiss
Breathed in a more celestial life;
But boasts not many a fair compeer
A heart as sensitive to joy and fear?
T


## p. 3866 (#232) ###########################################

3866
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
And some, perchance, might wage an equal strife,
Some few, to nobler being wrought,
Co-rivals in the nobler gift of thought.
Yet these delight to celebrate
Laureled War and plumy State;
Or in verse and music dress
Tales of rustic happiness-
Pernicious Tales! insidious Strains!
That steel the rich man's breast,
And mock the lot unblest,
The sordid vices and the abject pains,
Which evermore must be
The doom of Ignorance and Penury!
But you, free Nature's uncorrupted child,
You hailed the Chapel and the Platform wild,
Where once the Austrian fell
Beneath the shaft of Tell!
O Lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure!
Where learnt you that heroic measure?
You were a Mother! That most holy name,
Which Heaven and Nature bless,
I may not vilely prostitute to those
Whose Infants owe them less
Than the poor Caterpillar owes
Its gaudy Parent Fly.
You were a Mother! at your bosom fed
The Babes that loved you. You, with laughing eye,
Each twilight-thought, each nascent feeling read,
Which you yourself created. Oh, delight!
A second time to be a Mother,
Without the Mother's bitter groans:
Another thought, and yet another,
By touch, or taste, by looks or tones,
O'er the growing Sense to roll,
The Mother of your infant's Soul!
The Angel of the Earth, who while he guides
His chariot-planet round the goal of day,
All trembling gazes on the Eye of God,
A moment turned his face away;
And as he viewed you, from his aspect sweet
New influences in your being rose,
Blest Intuitions and Communions fleet
With living Nature, in her joys and woes!


## p. 3867 (#233) ###########################################

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3867
Thenceforth your soul rejoiced to see
The shrine of social Liberty!
O beautiful! O Nature's child!
'Twas thence you hailed the Platform wild,
Where once the Austrian fell
Beneath the shaft of Tell!
O Lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure!
Thence learnt you that heroic measure.
E
THE PAINS OF SLEEP
RE on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble Trust mine eyelids close,
With reverential resignation;
No wish conceived, no thought expressed!
Only a sense of supplication,
A sense o'er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest;
Since in me, round me, everywhere,
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.
But yesternight I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Upstarting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which, all confused, I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did:
For all seemed guilt, remorse, or woe,-
My own or others', still the same
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.


## p. 3868 (#234) ###########################################

3868
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
So two nights passed: the night's dismay
Saddened and stunned the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
Distemper's worst calamity.
The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child;
And having thus by tears subdued
My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due
To natures deepliest stained with sin;
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish to do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved all need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.
SONG, BY GLYCINE
A
SUNNY shaft did I behold,
From sky to earth it slanted;
And poised therein a bird so bold-
Sweet bird, thou wert enchanted!
He sunk, he rose, he twinkled, he trolled
Within that shaft of sunny mist;
His eyes of fire, his beak of gold,
All else of amethyst!
And thus he sang: "Adieu! adieu!
Love's dreams prove seldom true.
The blossoms, they make no delay:
The sparkling dewdrops will not stay.
Sweet month of May,
We must away;
Far, far away!
To-day! to-day! »


## p. 3869 (#235) ###########################################

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
3869
YOUTH AND AGE
VERS
ERSE, a breeze 'mid blossoms straying,
Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee-
Both were mine! Life went a-Maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,
When I was young!
When I was young? —Ah, woful when!
Ah, for the change 'twixt now and then!
This breathing house not built with hands,
This body that does me grievous wrong,
O'er airy cliffs and glittering sands,
How lightly then it flashed along:-
Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,
On winding lakes and rivers wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar,
That fear no spite of wind or tide!
Naught cared this body for wind or weather
When Youth and I lived in't together.
Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like,
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
O the joys that came down shower-like,
Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty!
Ere I was old!
Ere I was old? Ah, woful Ere,
Which tells me Youth's no longer here!
O Youth! for years so many and sweet,
'Tis known that thou and I were one;
I'll think it but a fond conceit -
It cannot be that thou art gone!
Thy vesper bell hath not yet tolled:-
And thou wert aye a masker bold!
What strange disguise hast now put on
To make believe that thou art gone?
I see these locks in silvery slips,
This drooping gait, this alter'd size:
But spring-tide blossoms on thy lips,
And tears take sunshine from thine eyes!
Life is but thought: so think I will
That Youth and I are housemates still.
-


## p. 3870 (#236) ###########################################

3870
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
PHANTOM OR FACT?
AUTHOR
A
LOVELY form there sate beside my bed,
And such a feeding calm its presence shed,
A tender love, so pure from earthly leaven
That I unnethe the fancy might control,
'Twas my own spirit newly come from heaven,
Wooing its gentle way into my soul!
But ah! the change. it had not stirred, and yet -
Alas! that change how fain would I forget!
That shrinking back like one that had mistook!
That weary, wandering, disavowing Look!
'Twas all another, - feature, look, and frame,—
And still, methought, I knew it was the same!
―――――
FRIEND
This riddling tale, to what does it belong?
Is't history? vision? or an idle song?
Or rather say at once, within what space
Of time this wild disastrous change took place?
AUTHOR
Call it a moment's work (and such it seems);
This tale's a fragment from the life of dreams:
But say that years matured the silent strife,
And 'tis a record from the dream of Life.


## p. 3871 (#237) ###########################################

3871
WILLIAM COLLINS
(1721-1759)
HERE is much to inspire regretful sympathy in the short life
of William Collins. He was born at Chichester, and received
his education at Winchester College and at Magdalen Col-
lege, Oxford. A delicate, bookish boy, he had every stimulus toward
a literary career. With a fine appreciation of beauty in all forms of
art, and a natural talent for versification, he wrote poems of much
promise when very young. His Persian Eclogues' appeared when
he was only seventeen. Then Collins showed his impatient spirit and
fickleness of purpose by deserting his work
at Oxford and going to London with the
intention of authorship. His head was full
of brilliant schemes,-too full; for with
him as with most people, conception was
always easier than execution. But finding
it far more difficult to win fame than he
anticipated, he had not courage to per-
severe, and fell into dissipated, extrava-
gant ways which soon exhausted his small

means.
WILLIAM COLLINS
In 1746 he published the 'Odes, Descrip-
tive and Allegorical,' his most character-
istic work. They were never widely read,
and it took the public some time to appre-
ciate their lyric fervor, their exquisite imagery, and their musical
verse. In spite of occasional obscurities induced by careless treat-
ment, they are among the finest of English odes. His love for
nature and sympathy with its calmer aspects is very marked. Speak-
ing of the Ode to Evening,' Hazlitt says that "the sounds steal
slowly over the ear like the gradual coming on of evening itself. "
According to Swinburne, the 'Odes' do not contain "a single false
note. " "Its grace and vigor, its vivid and pliant dexterity of touch,"
he says of the 'Ode to the Passions,' « are worthy of their long
inheritance of praise. "
But the inheritance did not come at once, although Collins has
always received generous praise from fellow poets. His mortified
self-love resented lack of success. With a legacy bequeathed him by
an uncle he bought his book back from the publisher Millar, and the
unsold impressions he burned in "angry despair.