Spinoza whose name the detective had taken to mean himself. From what I have said of Coleridge's habits of work, you will not be surprised to find that when the Lyrical Ballads were to go to press, and Wordsworth had twenty-two poems ready, Coleridge had only the Ancient Mariner and a part of the weird poem of Christabel, which was never finished. Hazlitt says that the Ancient Mariner is the only one of Coleridge's poems which he should like to put into any person's hands whom he wished to impress favorably with his great powers. No doubt he is right; and this one poem is great enough for one reputation. It is a unique poem in our literature; and to those who feel its weird fascination it exercises a sway over the imagination which very few poems in our language can exercise. Christabel remains a fragment, although Coleridge intended to finish it. He added a second part to it after it was first published, of which he said: "As in my first part I had the whole present to my mind, with the wholeness no less than the loveliness of a vision, I trust that I shall be yet able to embody in verse the three parts yet to come.” It is characteristic of Coleridge that the mood for which he waited never came, and that to the last we have only the fragment. The poem of Genevieve, or Love, was written as an introduction to a longer poem, which was planned, but never written. It is, however, complete in itself, an exquisite little love-story in verse, and I quote it entire : LOVE. All thoughts, all passions, all delights, And feed his sacred flame. Oft in my waking dreams do I The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene, She leaned against the armed man, Few sorrows hath she of her own, The songs that make her grieve. I played a soft and doleful air, She listened with a flitting blush, I told her of the knight that wore I told her how he pined; and ah! She listened with a flitting blush, But when I told the cruel scorn That crazed that bold and lovely knight, And that he crossed the mountain-woods, Nor rested day nor night; That sometimes from the savage den, And sometimes from the darksome shade, And sometimes starting up at once In green and sunny glade, T was partly love, and partly fear, I calmed her fears, and she was calm, My bright and beauteous bride. Coleridge wrote the dramatic poems Remorse, Zapolya, and the Fall of Robespierre. His finest dramatic work was in the translation of Schiller's Wallenstein, which is so well done that it has the value of an original drama in English. Of all the Lake School, Coleridge seems to me to have been most of a poet by nature. "Logician! Metaphysician! Bard!" as his friend Charles Lamb addresses him, I can hardly limit my conception of what he might have been if, freed from the bondage of opium, he had only had the power of patient, persistent work in one direction. But it is work and patience against the world; and without these, allied to genius, even genius itself can give nothing to the future. LII. ON WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AND ROBERT SOUTHEY. [EVER was the judgment of the critics more wholly NEVE overturned than in the case of William Wordsworth. He began by being laughed at; he lived to see his name set among the great poets, and died at eighty with the full knowledge that his fame was waxing greater and greater. No doubt he was helped, even in his darkest hour, by his belief in himself. He set out early in life to be a great poet; he adopted it as a sacred profession, one for which Nature had chosen him. He had fixed ideas about subjects for poetry, and the way these subjects should be handled. It did not disturb him that his ideas were different from the poets who had come before him. It did not discourage him that his first poems were laughed at. There never was a poet who started with a clearer sense of what he meant to do as a poet, with a higher appreciation of his calling, or with a fuller belief in his own powers. This made it easy for him to wait till the world could see what he saw, and he waited without anxiety or trouble about the result. Fortunately he was in the right path. He had chosen to be the poet of humanity; all that he wrote and felt was in harmony with the thought and feeling of the new age. Thus he could not speak far wide of his mark, and sooner or later he was sure to reach that heart to which he spoke. His faults - and I think his best lover will admit faults in him come from some of the very causes that make him great. Believing firmly in himself as a poet, working upon a theory which was exact and proportioned in his own mind, there is often something a little business-like in his manner as a poet. He finds poetical capital in all things: a tour on the Continent, a mountain ascent, a walk in the garden, - all furnish him song or sonnet. Having made up his mind that the natural, simple scenes of human life are the grandest themes for poetry, he finds nothing too trivial, and he sometimes tries to exalt things that cannot be lifted from the region of commonplace. It is well for genius when it is not moody, and can work patiently; but we do not want to make it a common draught-horse. In I am sure that, with the best disposition to admire Wordsworth, the reader with a strong imagination will find him an unequal poet. After he has carried you away up with a flight like an eagle, he drops you like a stone. reading his long poems you are constantly dropped thus. The divine fire in the poet never quite goes out; that spirit which in youth whirled him about in such ardor of enthusiasm for liberty, equality, and fraternity, controls him in nobler fashion as he grows older and calmer; but with all |