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have an undesirable effect on any mind constituted for nobler aims; and this unquiet routine is, in my judgment, the very contrary to what I should deem a salutary alterative to the qualities in our friend's nature, of which the peccant excess is most to be apprehended. It is really grievous, that with a man of such a head and such a heart, of such varied information and in easy circumstances too, the miracle of Aaron should be reversed, a swarm of little snakes eat up the great one, the sacred serpent, symbol of intellect, dedicated to the God of Healing. I could not help thinking, when I last saw him, that he looked more aged than the interval between that and his former visit could account for."

MR. COLERIDGE'S "REMARKS ON THE PRESENT MODE OF CONDUCTING PUBLIC JOURNALS."

There is one other subject on which, after going through the present work in order to finish preparing it for the press, I have found it necessary to give some explanation. Throughout this edition I have abstained from interference with the text, as far as the sense was concerned, though the changes wrought in the course of thirty years would probably have led the author to make many alterations in it himself, had he republished the work at all in its present form. In one or two sentences only I have altered or removed a few words affecting the import of them, in order to do away with unquestionable mistakes respecting literary facts of slight importance. But from the end of the last chapter of the critique on Mr. Wordsworth's poetry I have withdrawn a paragraph concerning the detractors from his merits-the mode in which they carried on their critical warfare against him and some others for the same reason which led the late Editor to suppress a note on the subject in Vol. I.—namely this: that as those passages contain personal remarks, right or wrong, they were anomalies in my Father's writings, unworthy of them and of him, and such as I feel sure he would not himself have reprinted. This reason indeed is so obvious, that no explanation or comment on the subject would have been given, if I had not been told that Lord Jeffrey had of late years republished his reply to those remarks of Mr. Coleridge; this makes me feel it proper to say, that I suppress the passages in question, and should have done so if no contradiction had been offered to

them, simply because they are personal, and now also because I believe that some parts of them, conveying details of fact, are inaccurate as to the letter; but at the same time with an assurance that in spirit they are just and true. They may be inaccurate in the letter: the speeches referred to may never have been uttered just as they were told to my Father and repeated by him; Mr. Jeffrey's language to himself he may not have recalled correctly; and I am quite willing to allow that in the way of hospitality he received more than he gave, the fact of apparent cordiality, however, being equally attested whether Mr. Jeffrey asked Mr. Coleridge to dinner or received a similar invitation from him. By the mention of these particulars my Father injured, as I think, a good cause; a volume of such anecdotes, true or false, would never have convinced men of the party which he had opposed, or brought them to confess, that the criticisms of the E. Review were in great measure dictated by party spirit; to men not of the party, who should take the trouble of referring to them, I have little doubt, that this would be apparent on the face of those writings themselves,—from the manner and from the matter of them. I must repeat that I believe the suppressed passages to be neither mistaken nor untruthful as to their main drift, which I understand to be this: that the E. Reviewers expressed a degree of contempt for the poetical productions of their opponents in politics, which it is scarcely conceivable that they could have really felt, or would have felt had politics been out of the question-more especially with regard to the poems of Mr. Wordsworth, that they imputed a character to them, and as far as in them lay, stamped that character upon them to the eye of the public, which those productions never could have borne to the mind of any unprejudiced, careful, and competent critic-indeed such characters at once of utter imbecility and striking eccentricity as appear at first sight to be the coinage of an ingenious brain, rather than the genuine impression which any actual body of poetry could make upon any human mind, that was not itself either imbecile or highly eccentric. This charge was, indeed, not capable of a precise proof, and Mr. C. acted with his usual incaution in openly declaring what he felt quite certain of, but could not regularly demonstrate. Whether or no he had good reason to feel this certainty-waiving his personal recollections, even those that have not been denied—I willingly

leave to the judgment of all who are capable of comparing the critiques in question with the poems of Mr. Wordsworth, and with the general estimate of them in the minds of thoughtful readers and lovers of poetry in general, from the time when the Lyrical Ballads first appeared till the present day. There was doubtless a petitio principii on Mr. Coleridge's part in this dispute; he assumed the merits of his friend's poetry for though this was a point which he often sought to prove, by showing that, taken at large, it treated of the most important and affecting themes that can interest the heart of man, and, for the most part, in a manner that would stand the test of any poetical rule or principle that could be applied to it, and this without contradiction from any one meeting him on his own ground, not merely baffling him by rude reasonless irony, and boisterous banter-those heavy blunt weapons of disputants who abound more in scorn than in wisdom, still questions of poetical merit are so fine and complex, that they can hardly be decided altogether by rule, but must be determined, as spiritual matters are to be determined, by specific results and experiences, which are, in this case, the effects produced on the poetic mind of the community. Before this proof was complete he in some sort assumed the point at issue ;-he knew the critic to be possessed of superior sense and talent, and he felt sure that though it might be possible for a man of good understanding and cultivated taste not to love and admire the poetry of Mr. Wordsworth, it was almost morally impossible that the great body of it could appear to such a person as it was presented in the pages of The Ed. Review,—a thing to be yawned and hissed off the stage at once and forever.-Such strains of verse as Tintern Abbey, The Old Cumberland Beggar, Address to my infant Daughter, Boy of Wynander-mere, Lines left upon a Yew-tree seat, Character of the Happy Warrior;—such poems as the Ode to Duty, Evening Walk, Rob Roy's Grave, Highland Girl, Yarrow revisited, Ruth, Landamin, The Brothers, Female Vagrant, Forsaken Indian Woman,* The two April

This Complaint of the perishing mother may be compared with Schiller's admired Nadowessische Todtenklage; but I think that both in poetry and in pathos the English poem strikes a far deeper note. The anguish of a bereaved mother's heart no other poet, I think, has ever so powerfully portrayed as Mr. Wordsworth.

Warmly as I admire the poetry of Keats I can imagine, that an intelli

VOL. III.

F

Mornings, The Fountain, Yew-trees, Nutting, Peel Castle, 'Tis thought that some have died for love, Lines to H. M.;such sonnets as that Composed on Westminster Bridge, On the Eve of a Friend's Marriage, the World is too much with us, Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour, those four called Personal Talk, so frequently quoted-could any cultivated and intelligent man read these productions attentively without feeling that in them the author had shown powers as a poet which entitled him at least to a certain respect and even deference? Is there any thing very strange or startling in these compositions? Or are they flat and empty, with nothing in them-no freshness of thought or feeling? Seen through a fog the golden beaming sun looks like a dull orange or a red billiard ball;-the fog that could rob these poems of all splendor must have been thick indeed! I have not mentioned all the most admirable of Mr. Wordsworth's poems; but those which a general acquaintance with poetry, and general sense of the poetical might enable any one to understand; for we may understand and respect what we do not deeply enjoy. The multitude of laughers knew nothing of Wordsworthian poetry but what they saw in the pages of the Review, through the Reviewer's tinted spectacles; the Reviewer himself must have known it all, in its length and breadth. If he seriously avows that the pages of that Journal give a correct view of his notion of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, nothing more can be said than that it is a curious fact in the history of the human mind; Mr. Coleridge could but judge by appearances, and I think he has not misrepresented them.

In regard to the review of the Lay Sermon, I am not surprised that the Editor saw nothing in it to disapprove; though few, I

gent man might read the Endymion with care, yet think that it was not genuine poetry; that it showed a sheer misuse of abundant fancy and rhythmical power. For its range is narrow; like the artificial comedy it has a world of its own, and this world is most harmonious within itself, made up of light rich materials; but it is not deep enough or wide enough to furnish satisfaction for the general heart and mind. The passion of love excited by beauty is the deepest thing it contains, and therefore, though its imagery is so richly varied, we have a sense of the monotonous in reading it long together. It is toujours perdrix or something still more dainty delicate, and we long for more solid diet, when we have had this fare for a little while. But if ever a poet addressed the common heart and universal reason it is Mr. Wordsworth.

think, who, at this hour, standing without the charmed circle of party, perused that article, would fail to see, that it is not so much a critique of the Sermon as a personal pasquinade-(what are "caprice, indolence, vanity," but personal charges) ?—penned by one, who had scanned the author narrowly, in order to abuse him scientifically, and with a certain air of verisimilitude.* He had enjoyed special opportunities of taking those observations, which he afterwards recurred to for such an ill purpose. My Father had received him (at Stowey and, I believe, once again at Keswick), with frank hospitality under his own roof; had extolled his talents when others saw no lustre in the rough diamond; had furnished his mind with pregnant hints-intellectual seed, which, as the soil was very capable, bore, in due time, a harvest of fruit for his own enrichment. I think he did not deny these obligations, even while he was privately expressing that personal pique and hostile feeling, which he vented to the public under cover of patriotism and concern for the people. Under cover, I say, without impugning his sincerity and earnestness in either; the former, the angry feeling against Mr. Coleridge, he made no secret of among his associates in general. Under the

* This air of verisimilitude is less in that article than in the parent lampoon (in Mr. Hazlitt's Political Essays), any distorted resemblance which the latter may be thought to contain, being frittered away, in the Edinboro' copy, by an evident desire that the portrait should be pure deformity. In the former Mr. Coleridge is described as "belonging to all parties," and "of service to none." This might be favorably interpreted; he who belongs to all parties at one and the same time, belongs to none in particular and can serve none in particular; but he may serve his country all the more. This feature was not copied; but the portion that follows, "he gives up his independence of mind," in which there was no truth at all, was carefully transfused, the spirit of it at least,—into the second portrait. Both contain the same insinuation respecting my Father's fundamental religious principles--the same attempt to cast them into suspicion with the unphilosophic world-upon which I need make no remark. At that time it may perhaps have brought some additional discredit upon his name, that he imputed catholicity to his mother church. "The Church of England, which he sometimes, by an hyperbole of affectation, affects to call the Catholic Church"-!!!

These things are said in the supposition that my Father was not wrong in believing the author of the critique in the E. R. and the writer of the two critiques in the Pol. Essays, to be the same person. Either they are identical, or the one is a close copyist of the other, his spleen the same, only colder and more unrelenting.

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