and who here" might lie on fern or withered heath," resigning his mind to his senses, and his senses to the "sweet influences" around and above, till they lull him into a waking dream of better worlds, which it is sad to think must be alloyed and dashed by the thought of what storms of strife are stirring in the earth, and perchance even now "in his native isle;" for the alarm of an invasion was then abroad in the country. The poet has thus brought us to the very heart of his subject. National dangers obviously suggest national offences, which he proceeds to arraign in a strain of solemn, indignant, and yet mournful vituperation, which rolls along most majestically, till the vividness of the delineations of guilt brings home so powerfully the prospect of retributory infliction, that he bursts forth in supplication to Providence, to "spare us yet awhile," and from supplication rises into an animated call upon all true hearts to stand forth and repel the foe.

‹ And oh! may we return
Not with a drunken triumph, but with fear :
Repenting of the wrongs with which we stung
So fierce a foe to frenzy!'

This again suggests the "bitter truths" which he has told, "but without bitterness," although aware that this may not secure him from being vilified by the idolaters of power as an enemy of his country:

'Such have I been deemed

But O, dear Britain! O, my mother isle!

Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy

To me, a son, a brother, and a friend,

A husband and a father! who revere

All bonds of natural love, and find them all

Within the limits of thy rocky shores.

O, native Britain! O, my mother isle!

How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy

To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills,

Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas,

Have drunk in all my intellectual life,

All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts,
All adoration of the God in nature,
All lovely and all honourable things,
Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel
The joy and greatness of its future being.
There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul
Unborrowed from my country. O divine
And beauteous island! thou hast been my
And most magnificent temple, in the which
I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs,
Loving the God that made me!'-i. p. 151.

sole

The violence of his emotions has now exhausted itself. Passion has subsided into calmness. The train of thoughts which external objects had originally suggested, and which grew so absorbing and powerful, that those external objects were altogether unheeded, gradually becomes less vivid, and as it wanes, they resume their ascendancy, make their presence and their influence again felt, and the poem concludes, as it began, with description. This transition is beautifully managed :—

My filial fears, be vain! and may the vaunts
And menace of the vengeful enemy

Pass like the gust, that roared and died away
In the distant tree which heard, and only heard
In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass.'

But the final description has more of variety, extent, and associated feeling, than that at the commencement. Evening has come on; the changed appearances of things rapidly recall him from his bodings; he pursues his path from the dell "up the heathy hill," and is startled at the burst of prospect," the shadowy main," and the "rich and elmy fields," which seem like society

Conversing with the mind, and giving it
A livelier impulse'

And the village church, and his friend's house, and the trees which hide his own lowly cottage, draw him on with "quickened footsteps," grateful, as he says,

That by Nature's quietness

And solitary musings, all my heart

Is softened, and made worthy to indulge

Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind.'

It is difficult to imagine stronger contrasts or more varied emotions than are presented or excited by different parts of this poem. The scene shifts from a most " soft and silent spot" shut in by hills, to "college and wharf, council and justice-court;" thence to the field of battle; and thence again to a wide and peaceful but not unanimated prospect, closing in the social seclusion of a cottage home. The feeling varies from passive, dreamy reverie, to painful sympathy, burning indignation, trembling apprehension, solemn supplication, animated appeal, tempered triumph, calm expostulation, devout confidence, till it ends in the contemplative enjoyment of benevolent affection. And yet we are never startled by any abrupt transition; all is unforced, natural, and continuous; and we are carried on without any consciousness of the extent of the circle through

which the mind is borne until the revolution is completed, and the same external objects present themselves as at the outset; but present themselves as does the scenery of his native land to the traveller who has voyaged round the globe, and who brings to its contemplation the change, the extension, the elevation of thought produced by an intermediate acquaintance with the most remote and dissimilar regions. This history of the feelings of a solitary hour is as diversified, and as interesting, as the narrative of an eventful life. It is a tale alike powerful in its progress and satisfactory in its conclusion. What is the value of a succession of events but the corresponding succession of emotions? To produce these in the mind of the reader or spectator, is the triumph of the novelist's, or the dramatist's, art. The poet has here accomplished the same result by the simpler means of throwing open to us the train of his own thoughts and feelings. Here is the essence of all narrative, adventure, plot, and catastrophe. It has been said, that all the beings and events in the world are but the thoughts of the Deity in this instance, the thoughts of the poet are beings and events; they affect us in the same way; we are complacent in their quiet; agitated in their crimes and conflicts; exultant in their triumph; and close the poem in glad and satisfied sympathy as they subside into calm and enlightened enjoyment.

:

The War Eclogue is a splendid composition; the scene a desolated tract in La Vendée (it was written in 1796); the speakers, Fire, Famine, and Slaughter; the dialogue consisting of an exulting recapitulation of the horrors they had perpetrated since they were let loose by one whose name they will not utter, because 'twould "make an holiday in Hell," but whom they describe enigmatically, and consult how to "yield him honour due." Famine proposes to excite the starving multitude against him; Slaughter promises that "they shall tear him limb from limb;" Fire rebukes them :

"O thankless beldames and untrue!

And is this all that you can do
For him who did so much for you?
Ninety months he, by my troth!
Hath richly cater'd for you both;
And in an hour would you repay
An eight years' work?-Away! away!
1 alone am faithful! I

Cling to him everlastingly.

Mr. Coleridge has deemed an "Apologetic Preface to this poem needful; in which he assures us that he meant no harm towards Mr. Pitt. It is a pitiful compound of cant and

sophistry. That he would not, had he been standing by the door of the infernal regions when Pitt arrived there, have pushed him in and turned upon him the key of that lock, whose bolt would not be shot back to all eternity, we very readily believe; and we suppose nobody ever doubted. But that he wrote in right earnest; that he regarded that atrocious minister as the scourge of his country and the human race; that he felt towards him as became a man, whose brethren had been insulted, plundered, oppressed, demoralized, starved, slaughtered by wholesale; that in his conscience he pronounced him guilty of immolating the prospects of France, the liberties of Britain, and the peace of Europe, at the shrine of aristocratical prejudice or interest; that he held him worthy of whatever penalty might be the appropriate result of such foul misdeeds; that, though he might have deprecated the multitudes acting as Famine and Slaughter prompted them, yet he would have deemed their doing so only another instance, in addition to many which history records and palliates, of the vengeance which outraged humanity takes; and that, though he would not have been accessary to the eternal burning of William Pitt, or of any one else, yet that he saw no better prospect for the Premier's soul, according to the common version of the religion whose prelates chose him as their altar's champion: this we do believe, and of this we hold the poem itself, even without the corroboration afforded by other indications of the author's opinions and feelings at that period, to be conclusive evidence. We will apply to it the very tests, by the use of which Mr. Coleridge would conduct us to an opposite conclusion. We will prove him an honest man, or at least an honest poet, in spite of himself. He says, and very justly, that "prospects of pain and evil to others, and in general, all deep feelings of revenge, are commonly expressed in a few words, ironically tame and mild." Exactly so; can there be an apter instance than the conclusion of our last quotation? Is not Fire quite affectionate? Not loquaciously, nor boisterously so; not with the agitated and agitating fervours of a passionate lady-love, but with the calm confidence of a betrothed, who feels herself already a wedded wife, and talks composedly of a long and lasting intercourse of every-day endearment? If the Eclogue were got up as a theatrical interlude, and Mr. Kean played the "hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta," what an effect he would produce by that last line. The low, equable voice, almost a whisper, with an affectation of tenderness in the tone; the arms slowly and softly folding on the breast, so as to suggest the pressure of a gentle but long embrace; the smile, the beautiful smile, with

the curl of the lip, scarcely perceptible at first, becoming more distinct, with every slowly-enunciated word, till the character of the expression was transformed into the grin and the sneer of ferocity; the eye alone, all the time, with its fixed and intense glare, indicating the real feeling within; these would be the actor's commentary on the poet's language; its true and genuine exposition. Mr. Coleridge has, with singular infelicity, introduced for the purpose of contrast, what serves for an excellent parallel, namely "Shylock's tranquil I stand here for law."" Nobody but himself, we may venture to predict, will ever recognize in this the moral antipodes of the conclusion of the War Eclogue, or find any resemblance to it in the "infinite deal of nothing," poured forth by that "skipping spirit," the "goodnatured Gratiano."

Again, it is truly observed, in the Apologetic preface, that "the images that a vindictive man places before his imagination will most often be taken from the realities of life; they will be images of pain and suffering which he has himself seen inflicted on other men, and which he can fancy himself as inflicting on the object of his hatred." But the poet does not come forward personally in the War Eclogue, as the agent of retribution. He assigns that work to the creatures of his imagination. And Famine, Slaughter, and Fire, in their amiable propositions, follow the very course here marked out. They simply contemplate the exaction of payment in kind from the great debtor of the human race. Like the worthy Stephen Steinenherz von Blutsacker, they would ennoble themselves by doing their office upon their employer. And although Fire may possess the singular advantage of prolonging her operations into another world, yet that world, so far as its torments are particularized, is of necessity only an accumulation of the evils which we behold inflicted here. The case comes therefore within the author's own rule, and is established by both the tests which he has set up to explain it away.

It is with strong emotions of disgust that we arrive at the climax of this apology in which the author gravely makes the following affirmations:

'Were I now to have read by myself for the first time the Poem in question, my conclusion, I fully believe, would be, that the writer must have been some man of warm feelings and active fancy; that he had painted to himself the circumstances that accompany war in so many vivid and yet fantastic forms, as proved that neither the images nor the feelings were the result of observation, or in any way derived from realities. I should judge, that they were the product of his own seething imagination, and therefore impregnated with that pleasurable