THE COMPLETE ‘WORKS

0F

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY UPON HIS
PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL OPINIONS

EDITED BY

PROFESSOR \V. G. T. SHEDD

11V SEVElV VOLUMES
VOL. III.

 

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

 

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE

1884

llntcred, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand
eight hun’lred-vamLﬁiltﬁhree, by
i z 7 5+;
HARP /.' ERS,

in the Clerk 5 Uﬂicc of the District Court of the Southern District
of New York.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF

MY LITERARY LIFE AND OPINIONS

BY

‘ SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

PREPARED FOR PUBLICATION IN PART

BY THE LATE HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE

COMPLETED AND PUBLISHED BY

HIS WIDOW

%

T0

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Esq., P. L.

MY DEAR MR. WORDSWORTH,

I have received with great pleasure your permission to inscribe
to you this new edition of my Father’s B‘iographia Literaria.
You will ﬁnd in it some of the latest writings of my dear departed
Husband ;—- some too of my own, to which I know you will be
indulgent ; but my chief reason for dedicating it to you is, that it
contains, though only in a brief and fragmentary form, an ac-
count of the Life and Opinions of your friend, S. T. Coleridge, in
which I feel assured that, however you may dissent from por-
tions of the latter, you take a high and peculiar interest. His
name was early associated with yours from the time when you
lived as neighbors, and both together sought the Muse, in the
lovely Vale of Stowey. That this association may endure as long
as you are both remembered,

 

that not only as a Poet, but as a
Lover and a Teacher of Wisdom, my Father may continue to be
spoken of in connection with you, while your writings become
more and more fully and widely appreciated, is the dearest and
proudest wish that I can form for his memory.

I remain, dear Mr. Wordsworth,

With deep affection, admiration, and respect,

Your Child in heart and faithful Friend,

SARA COLERIDGE

REGENT’S PARK,
January 30, 1847.

ADVERTISEMERT.

THIS new edition of my Father’s Biographia Literm'ia, was
partly prepared for publication by his late Editor. The correc-
tions of the text in the ﬁrst nine or ten chapters, and chapters
xiii. xiv. xv. and perhaps xvi. are by his hand ; the notes signed
“ Editor” were written by him ; and he drew up the Biographi-
cal Supplement (the ﬁrst three chapters of it containing the
Letters), which is placed at the end of the volume. His work
it has fallen to me to complete, and the task has been in-
teresting, though full of affecting remembrances, and brought
upon me by the deepest sorrow of my life. The biographical
. sketch I have published as I found it, with triﬂing'alterations and
omissions, ﬁlling up a few gaps and supplying the mottoes.
Had the writer himself taken it up again, he would probably
have improved and continued it.

I have only to add that my thanks are due to many kind
friends, who have assisted mein my part of the undertaking
with advice, information, or loan of books ; especially my Father’s
dear Friend and Fellow Student, Mr. G i, Archdeacon Hare,
and my brother-in-law, Mr. Justice Col ridge. I am also much
indebted for help toward my work to Mr. Pickering, by whom a
great number of the books riferred to in the notes were placed in
my hands

CONTENTS.

PAUH
INTRODUCMON................. .. )0

CHAPTER I.

Motives to the present work—Reception of the Author’s ﬁrst publica
tion—Discipline of his taste at school—Effect of contemporary
writers on youthful minds—Bowles’s Sonnets—Comparison between
the poets before and since Pope . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

CHAPTER II.

Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of facts—
Causes and occasions of the charge—Its injustice . . . . . . . 164

CHAPTER III.

The Author’s obligations to Critics, and the probable occasion—Prin-
ciples of modern Criticism—Mr. Southey’s works and character . . 178

CHAPTER IV.

The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface—Mr. Wordsworth’s earlier poems
-—On>Fancy and Imagination—The investigation of the distinction
important to the Fine Arts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

CHAPTER V. -
On the law of Association—Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley 207

CHAPTER VI.

That Hartley’s system, as far as it diffels from that of Aristotle, is
neither tenable in theory. nor founded 1n facts . . . . . 226

viii CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VII.

PAG-
Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory—Of the original

mistake or equivocation which procured its admission—Illemoria
tecllnica . D I O O . O I D O O C O I O I I C O I 231

CHAPTER VIII.

The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes——Rcﬁned ﬁrst by
Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia
prmstabilita—Hylozoism—MaterialisnlmNone of these systems, or
any possible theory of Association, supplies or supersedes a theory
of Perception, or explains the formation of the Associable . . . . 235

CHAPTER IX.

[3 Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its conditions ?—Gior-
dau‘o Bruno—Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of a tacit com-
pact among the learned as a privileged order—The Author’s obliga-
tions to the Mystics—to Immanuel Kant—The difference between
the letter and the spirit of Kant’s writings, and a vindicationof
prudence in the teachings of Philosophy—Fichte’s attempt to com-
plete the Critical system—Its partial success and ultimate failure—

, Obligations to Schelling; and among English writers to Saumarez . 247

CHAPTER X.

A Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that
on the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power—On
Pedantry and pedantic expressions—Advice to young authors re-
specting publication—Various anecdotes of the Author’s literary
life, and the progress of his opinions in Religion and Politics . . . 272

CHAPTER XI.

4m affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves
disposed to become authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314

CHAPTER XII.

\h; A Chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or
’ omission of the chapter that follows. . . . . . . . . . . . 329

CONTENTS ix
CHAPTER XIII.
PAGE
' On the Imagination, or Esemplastie power . . . . . . . . . 356

CHAPTER XIV.

Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed—
Preface to the second edition—The ensuing controversy, its causes

and acrimony—Philosophic deﬁnitions of a Poem and Poetry with +—

scholia .

CHAPTER XV.

The speciﬁc symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis
of Shakspeare’s Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece.

CHAPTER XVI.

Striking points of difference between the Poets of the present age and
those of the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries—Wish expressed for
the union of the characteristic merits of both .

CHAPTER XVII.

Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth—Rustic life
(above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavorable to the forma-
tion of a human diction—The best parts of language the product of
philosophers, not of clowns or shepherds—Poetry essentially ideal
and generic—The language of Milton as much the language of real
life, yea, incomparably more so, than that of the cotttager .

CHAPTER XVIII.

. 364

. 375

382

. 394

Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially differ- ‘7

 

ent from that of prose—rOrigin and elements of metre Its neces-
sary. consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the
metrical writer in the choice of his diction.

CHAPTER XIX.

Continuation—Concerning the real. obj eet which, it is probable, Mr.
Wordsworth had before him in his critical preface—Elucidation and
application of this .

Aak

. 410

. 434

CONTENTS.

‘ >1

CHAPTER XX.
, PAGE
The former subject continued—The neutral style, or that common to
Prose and Poetry, exempliﬁed by specimens from Chaucer, Herbert,
andothers.....................443

CHAPTER XXI.

Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals . . . . 451

' CHAPTER XXII.

The characteristic lefects of'Wor worth’s poetry, with the principles
from which tho: judgment, that t _ ey are defects, is deduced—Their
proporti? t 13?? geauties—For the greatest part characteristic of
histheOr ony“. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .460

f" 1

SATYRANE’SLE'I'I‘ERS 505
6

4

CHAPTER X1811.

CritiqueonBertram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .555

CHAPTER XXIV.
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 583
BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . 599

APPENDIX. . , ......691

INTRODUCTION.

_——§+§—————

MR. COLERIDGE’S OBLIGATIONS TO SCHELLING, AND THE UNFAIB
VIEW OF THE SUBJECT PRESENTED IN BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE.

SOME years ago, when the late Editor of my Father’s works
was distantly contemplating a new edition of the Biographia
Literaria, but had not yet begun to examine the text carefully
with a view to this object, his attention was drawn to an article
in Blackwood’s Magazine of March, 1840, in which “the very
large and unacknowledged appropriations it contains from the
great German Philosopher Schelling,” are pointed out; and by
this paper I have been directed to those passages in the works of
Schelling and of Maasz, to which references are given in the fol-
lowing pages,—to most of them immediately, and to a few more
through the strict investigation which it occasioned. Whether
or no my Father’s obligations to the great German Philosopher
are virtually unacknowledged to the extent and with the unfair~
ness which the writer of that article endeavors to prove, the
reader of the present edition will be able to judge for himself;
the facts of the case will be all before him, and from these, when
the whole of them are fully and fairly considered, I feel assured
that by readers in.general,—and I have had some experience on
this point already,—no such injurious inferences as are contained
in that paper will ever be drawn. The author, it must be ob-
served, before commencing his argument, thinks ﬁt to disclaim
the belief, that conscious intentional plagiarism is imputable to
the object of his censure ; nevertheless, throughout great part of
it Mr. Coleridge is treated as an artful purloiner and selﬁsh
plunderer,‘ who knowingly robs others to enrich himself, both the
tone and the language of the article expressng this and no other
meaning. Such aspersions will not rest, Ithink they never have

xii INTRODUCTION.

rested, upon Coleridge’s name ; the protest here entered is a
duty to his memory from myself rather than a work necessary
to his vindication, and the remarks that follow are made less
with a view to inﬂuence the opinions of others than to record
my own.

The charge brought against my Father by the author of the
article appears to be this, that, having borrowed largely from
Schelling,* he has made no adequate acknowledgments of obli-
gation to that philosopher, only such general admissions as are
quite insufﬁcient to cover the extent of his debt ; that his antici-
patory defence against a charge of “ ungenerous concealment or
intentional plagiarism” is no defence at all ; and that his partic-
ular references are too few and inaccurate to vindicate him from
having dealt unfairly toward the author from whom he has taken
so much. The plaintiff opens his case with giving as the whole
of this defence of my Father’s—(that it is not the whole will ap-
pear in the sequel,)——-certain parts of a passage upon Schelling
that occurs in the ninth chapter of the Biographia Lit‘emi'ia,
and although, in that passage, the author desires, that, “ what-
;ever in this or any future work of his resembles or coincides with
the doctrines of his German predecessor, though contemporary, be
(wholly attributed to him,” yet he insists that Coleridge has dir-
, fra-ttded Schelling of his due, and seeks to support the impeach-
,ment on these two grounds, ﬁrst, that very “ absence of distinct
references to his books,” which he himself plainly admits and
particularly accounts for; or, in the accuser’s own words, his
omission of specific acknowledgments in the instances in which
he was indebted to him ; secondly, his having affirmed that he
had in some sort anticipated the system which he proposed to
teach.

N ow it must be remarked, by way of preliminary, that no man
can properly be said to (hfraild another, nor ought to .be so spoken
of, who has not a fraudulent intention: but it never yet has
been proved, after all the pains that have been taken to this of
feet, that Mr. Coleridge intended to deprive Schelling of any part
of the honor that rightfully belongs to him, or that he has, by

* The passages borrowed by my Father from Sehelling and Maasz are
pointed out in this edition in notes at the foot of the pages Where they 00
cur. For the particulars and amount of the debt, therefore, readers are
referred to the body of the work, chapters v. vii. viii. ix. xii.

INTRODUCTION. xiii

Mr. Coleridge’s means, been actually deprived of it, even for an
hour. With regard to the ﬁrst ground of accusation, it is doubt-
less to be regretted by every friend of the accused, that he should
have adopted so important a portion of the words and thoughts
of Schelling without himself making those distinct and accum'te
references, which he might have known would eventually be re
quired as surely as he succeeded in his attempt to recommend the
metaphysical doctrines contained in them to the attention of stu-
dents in this country. Why did Mr. Coleridge act thus, subjecting
himself, as he might well have anticipated, aware as he was of
the hostile spirit against his person and principles, that existed
in many quarters, to suspicion from the illiberal, and contumc-
lious treatment at the hands of the hard and unscrupulous?
Why he so acted those who best knew him can well understand,
without seeing in his conduct evidence of unconscientiousness:
they see the tiuth of the matter to be this, that to give those
distinct and accurate references, for the neglect of which he is F1
now so severely arraigned, would have caused him much trouble
of a kind to him peculiarly irksome, and that he dispensed him-
self from it in the belief, that the general declaration which he
had made upon the subject was sufﬁcient both for Schelling and
for himself. This will be the more intelligible when it is borne
in mind, that, as all who knew his literary habits will believe,
the passages from Schelling, which he wove into his work, were
not transcribedij the occasion, but merely transferred from his
note-book into the text, some of them, in all likelihood, not even
from his note-book immediately, but from recollection of its con-
tents. It is most probable that he mistook some of these trans-
lated passages for compositions of his own, and quite improbable,
as all who know his careless ways will agree, that he should
have noted down accurately the particular works and portions
of works from which they came.

“ But even with the fullest conviction,” says Archdeacon
Hare, “that Coleridge can not have been guilty of intentional
plagiarism, the reader will, probably, deem it strange, that he
should have transferred half a dozen pages of Schelling into his
volume without any reference to their source. And strange it
undoubtedly is. The only way I can see of accounting for it is
from his practice of keeping note-books or journals of his thoughts,
ﬁlled with observations and brief dissertations on such matters as

xiv I NTRODUCTI ON.

happened to strike him, with a sprinkling now and then of ex
tracts and abstracts from the books he was reading. If the name
of the author from whom he took an extract was left out, he
might easily, years after, forget whose property it was, especially
when he had made it in some measure his own, by transfusing
it into his own English. That this may happen 1 know from
experience, having myself been lately puzzled by a passage which
I had translated from Kant some years ago, and which cost me
a good deal of search, before I ascertained that it was not my
own.”*

My Father says himself, in the ninth chapter of this work, “ I
have not indeed (ehezt! res angztsta dom-i .’) been hitherto able
to procure more than two of his books, viz. the first volume of
his collected Tracts, and his System of Transcendental Ideal-
ism; to which, however, I must add a small pamphlet against
Fichte, the spirit of which was to my feelings painfully incon-
gruous with the principles, and which (with the usual allowance
afforded to an antithesis) displayed the love of' wisdom rather
than the wisdom of love.” From this pamphlet (entitled Dar-
Zegnng, &c. Exposition of the 17‘266 relation of the Philosophy
of .Natme to the improved doctrine of F ichte) he had just cited
a striking passage, and it is represented as strangely disingenuous,
that he should have given that extract merely as “ observations
from a contemporary writer of the continent,”’r without specifying
the particular work from which it was taken, or even the writer’s
name. So indeed it may appear on an examination undertaken
ostensibly for the love of wisdom, but a still closer one, conducted
in the wisdom of love, will convince any reader that there was
as little of self-regard in this transaction as of accuracy. At
that stage of his work, at which the citation is made, my Father
had not yet introduced Schelling to his ‘readers, readers unac-
quainted, as he doubtless imagined, with the German philoso-
pher and his writings. He immediately proceeds, however, to
give an account of the authors whom he successively studied,
when he had “found no abiding place for his reason” in the
“schools of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley ;” and then,

* From Mr. Hare’s defence of Coleridge in the British Magazine of Jan-
uary, 1835, pp. 20, 21.

‘r See p. 250. Of the use made by the writer in B1. of this passage]
shall have to speak again further on.

INTRODUCTION. 1: V

after doing honor to Kant and justi‘ée to Fichte, he speaks of
Schelling by name, and mentions every work of histo which he
ever owed (my thing. The “ Vorlesmigen rather die JVIethode ties
Academisehen Stadium,” which, as well as the Dalrlegmtg, is
mentioned as containing the word Ih-eins-bildzmg, the original,
as is supposed, of his “ esemplastic,” he never possessed and prob-
ably never saw. In mentioning the pamphlet against Fichte,
he, naturally enough, described its general character, and proba-
bly either forgot, while he was so doing, that from this same
work his previous citation had been made, or felt that for read-
ers to whom the very name of Schelling was new, such particu-
larity as that of reciting its long title, and referring to it the
passage he had brought forward, was superﬂuous.

Ideen zu einep Philosophie der Nata?" was one of the works
of Schelling, which my Father had not in his possession, when he
composed the Biogv'ctphia, Literaria, and it is 7'ema7'hed that he
entitled it Schelling’s Natur-Philosophie.’—that he had pre-
sumed to contract the proper name of a book he had once read,
from its fuller form in the title-page, to that abridged one, which
it probably wore upon its back. N 0 comment is made, indeed,
upon this" important fact, but that is supplied by the strain of
the article.

His accuser urges against him that he did not elaborate over
again what he had borrowed and thus make it, in some sense,
his own. It is not easy to see how that rwhich is borrowed can
ever, strictly speaking, become the property of the borrower, so
as to cease to be that of the original possessor ; the new form in
which he invests it, or the fresh matter which he engrafts upon
it, will be his, but the debt to him who has furnished the sub-
stance, in the one case, or the nucleus, in the other, is not can-
celled because of these additions, and honesty as well as grati-
tude would equally require its acknowledgment, though the obli-
gation will be less apparent to the general reader. And surely
if there had been any design of appropriating in my Father’s
mind, he would have sought to make the borrowed passages cip-
pear his own, by change of expression at least. It has been well
said of the genuine Plagiary that his

“Easy vamping talents lies
First Wit to pilfer, then disyuise.”

xvi INTRODUCTION.

This is the plan which all‘crafty plagiarists adopt; this is the
way in which numberless writers have dealt with my Father
himself, the major part of them, however, not craftily or selfish-
ly, but doubtless unawares to themselves; there being far less
of conscious, far more of unconscious, plagiarism among authors
than the world is apt to suppose. But Coleridge repeated the
very words of Schelling, and in so doing made it an easy task
for the German to reclaim his own, or for the dullest Wight that
could read his books to give it him back again. Must he not
have been careless of the memn at least as much as of the tuum,
when he took whole pages and paragraphs, unaltered in form,
from a noted author—whose writings, though unknown in this
country, when he ﬁrst brought them forward, were too consider-
able in his own to be ﬁnally merged in those of any other man,—
at the same time that he was doing all that in him lay to lead
Englishmen to the study of that author, and was referring read-
ers to his works both generally, and in some instances, and those
the most important, particularly? From his accuser’s bluster-
ing conclusion——“ Plagiarism, like murder, will out 3” it might
be supposed that Mr. Coleridge had taken pains to prevent
his “plagiarism” from coming out,—that with the “stealthy
pace” of the murderer he had “moved towards his design like a
ghost.” Verily, if no man ever tried to murder an author’s
good name with more of malice prepense than he to steal one,
the literary world would be freer from felonious practices than it
is at present.* I

One of the largest extracts my Father accompanies with these
words in a parenthesis (See Schell. Abhmzdl. zur E'rlaute'r, des
Id. der Wissenschaﬂslehre).Jr “But from this reference,” asks

9* “Of a truth,” says Mr. Hare, “if he had been disposed to purloin, he
never would have stolen half a dozen pages from the head and front of that
very work of Schelling’s which was the likeliest to fall into his reader’s
hands ; and the ﬁrst sentence of which one could not read without detect-
ing the plagiarism. \Vould any man think of pilfering a column from the
porch of St. Paul’s ? The high praise which Coleridge bestows on Schelling
would naturally excite a wish in such of his readers as felt an interest in
his philosophy, to know more of the great German. The ﬁrst books of his
they would take up would be his Natur—Ph.ilosophie, and his Transcenden-
tal Idealism ; these are the works which Coleridge himself mentions ; and
the latter, from its subject, would attract them the most.”—Brit. Mag. of
1835, p. 20.

+ See p. 332.

INTRODUCTION. ' xvii

the censor, “would not a reader naturally deduce the inference
that C. was here referring to Schelling in support of his own
views, and not literally translating and appropriating the Ger-
man’s ?”

There are some who have eyes to see, and microscopically too,
but only in certain directions. To those whose vision is more
catholic I address the plain question, Did not my Father say fully
enough to put every reader of a studious turn, every reader able
to take up his philosophical views in earnest,—(and to whom else
were these borrowed passages more than strange words, or Schel-
ling’s claims of the slightest consequence '?)—into the way of con.
sulting their original source ? The longer extracts are all either
expressly acknowledged, as that from the Darlegnng in chap. ix.
and that beginning at p. 332; or taken from the Transcen-
dental Idealism, which he Speaks of more than once, orfrom
the above-mentioned treatise, of which he gives the long. title.

Most of these extracts the Writer in Blackwood refers, not to
the treatise, which my Father did name, but to the collection at
large—the Philosophische Schriften—whieh it so happened that
he did not; and moreover he asserts, that it would be next to im-
possible for a reader to ﬁnd the tract referred to by this same long
title, for that it is “ buried among a good many others in Schel-
ling’s Phil. Schrift.” of which it occupies 137 pages out of 511
——as if it could not possibly enter his head or the head of any
bookseller that he might employ, to look for it in the “ volume of
Sehelling’s collected Tracts” which my Father speaks of in chap-
ter ix. 'If' the works of Schelling were as good as dead and
buried for all here, that was not through any fault of his ; had
he named every one of their titles at full length, and given an
abstract of all they contained, the bill of fare, at that time, would
have attracted no guests. Grill would be Grill, and have his
unmetaphysic mind.

Fairly considered his conduct in this matter does but help to
prove the truth of his assertion, that he “regarded Truth as a
divine ventriloquist, not caring from Whose mouth the sounds
are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and
intelligible.’ ’

The Writer in Blackwood, however, takes a very different View
of it; he rather supposes the true interpretation of my Father’s
conduct to be that he would have nothing ascribed to Schelling,

xviii INTRODUCTION

which appeared in the works of both, though he desires that
every thing may be, and that this expression was used to provide
a refuge for himself, should he ever be discovered to have “ cab-
baged from his works ad Zibitum.” The style of these strictures
resembles the reasoning; things look rough and coarse on the
wrong side, and the reasoning they contain is of that kind, which
turns things wrong side out. It represents my Father’s apology
as being penned under a notion that he should gain credit for the
transcendentalism contained in his book, while at the same time
no comparison betwixt his writings and those of the original
transcendentalist would for years, if ever, be made. It was the
fact that for years his obligations to Schelling were not discov-
ered ; but it is ridiculous to suppose that he calculated on this,
with the amount of those obligations distinctly present to his
mind, for this could only have happened through the failure of
the attempt he was making to interest his countryan in the
transcendental system. When a doctrine comes into credit, in
days like these, the ﬁrst teacher of it is as soon discovered as the
lake that feeds the glittering brook and sounding waterfall is
traced out, when they have gained the traveller’s eye. It is not
true, that to the end of his life my father enjoyed the credit of
originality ;—originality was not denied him, simply because he
had no enjoyment and no credit.

The fact is, that these “borrowed plumes” drest him out but
poorly in the public eye, and Sir Walter Scott made a just obser-
vation on the fate of the Biographia Literaria, when he said
that it had made no impression upon the public. Instead of
gaining reputation as a metaphysical discoverer, at the expense
of Germany, the author was generally spoken of as an introducer
of German metaphysics into this country, in which light he had
represented himsetﬂ—a man of original power, who had spoiled
his own genius by devoting himself to the lucubrations of foreign-
ers. It is the pleasure of the Writer in Blackwood to give him
a vast metaphysical reputation, founded on the Biographia Lit-
erar-ia, and, at the end of one of his paragraphs, he implies, that
the passages taken from Schelling had been “paraded for up-
wards of twenty years as specimens of the wonderful powers of
the English philosopher.” Some, perhaps, have been weary
enough of hearing him called it‘07icle7fzd,—but the friends of
Coleridge well know, that the work was generally neglected till

INTRODUCTION. xix

the author’s name began to rise by various other means; and
that although passages of his writings have been often quoted of
late years, and some in the B. L. have been in the mouths of
many, While the book itself was in the hands of a very few, yet
that the transcendental portions of it were unknown to his ad-
mirers in general, till some of them, after his decease, were de-
clared to be the property of Schelling in Tait’s Magazine. If the
transcendentalism adopted in the Biographia be a jewel of great
price, no gem lodged in a dark unfathomed cave of ocean was
ever more unseen and unknown than this was for many a year.
In making an estimate of a man’s intellectual wealth we can not
abstract the inﬂuence upon his thoughts of other thinkers, prece-
dent or contemporary ; but all Mr. Coleridge’s direct debts to the
great Transcendentalist may be refunded, and whatever obliga-
tions reﬂective men of this age have felt and acknowledged
that they owe to him, the sum of them will not be sensibly di
minished.

In other quarters Mr. Coleridge has been accused of denying
his obligations to Schlegel ; yet he never denied having borrowed
those illustrations and detached thoughts, which are brought for-
ward in support of the charge. His words on the subject neither
say nor imply, in assertion of his originality, more than this, that,
in his ﬁrst course of lectures, which were delivered “before Mr.
Schlegel gave his on the same subjects at Vienna,”—(I believe it
was in 1804, previously to his departure for Malta,)——he put
forth the same general principles of criticism as in the following
courses; so that whatever substantial agreement there might be
between them, on this head, must be coincidence.

It was said of my Father by his late Editor, that, “ in think-
ing passionately of the principle, he forgot the authorship—and
sowed beside many waters, if peradventure some chance seedling
might take root and bear fruit to the glory of God and the spir-
itualization of man.”* He was ever more intent upon the pur-
suit and enunciation of truth than alive to the collateral beneﬁts
that wait upon it, as it is the exclusive property of this or that
individual. The incautious way in which he acted upon this
_\ impulse was calculated to bring him under suspicion with those to
whose minds any such feeling was alien and inconceivable. Yet
no unprcjudiced person, who reviews my Father’s life, on an inti-

* Preface to the Table Talk of S. 'l‘. Coleridge, Vl.

XX INTRODUCTION

mate acquaintance with it, will deny that he showed an unusual
disregard of this property in thought, where his own interests
were concerned, and that he spent in letters and marginal notes,
and in discourse at all times and to all auditors a great deal both
of thought and brilliant illustration, which a more prudential and
self-interested man would have kept back and presented in a form
better ﬁtted to procure for himself a permanent reward ; that he
would spend time and labor on a critical examination of the
works of others, and earnest consideration of their affairs, for
their sakes only, in a manner almost peculiar to himself. If he
was not always sufﬁciently considerate of other men’s property,
he was profuse of his own ; and, in truth, such was his temper
in regard to all property, of what kind soever ; he did not enough
regard or value it whether for himself or his neighbor. Nor is it
proof to the contrary that he (lid at times speak of his share in
the promulgation of truth and awakening of reflection, and of the
world’s unthankfulness. This he did, rather in self-defence,
when he was accused of neglecting to employ or of misemploying
nis natural gifts, than from an inordinate desire to parade and
exalt them. He was goaded into some degree of egotism by the
charges continually brought against him, that he suffered his
powers to lie dormant, or to spend themselves in a fruitless ac-
tivity. But they who spoke thus on the one hand under-rated
his actual achievements, the importance of which time and trial
were to discover, since Speculations like his show what they are
worth in the using, and come into use but slowly; and on the
other hand, over-rated his powers of literary execution. They
were struck by his marked intellectual gifts, but took no note of
his intellectual impediments,—were not aware that there was a
want of proportion in the faculties of his mind, which would
always have prevented him from making many or good books ;
for, even had he possessed the ordinary amount of skill in the
arranging and methodizing of thought with a view to publication
and in reference to the capacities of a volume, this would have
been inadequate to the needs of one whose genius was ever im-
pelling him to trace things down to their deepest source, and to
follow them out in their remotest ramiﬁcations. His powers,
compounded and balanced as they were, enabled him to do that
which he did, and possibly that alone.

Great as was the activity of his intellect in its own congenial

INTRODUCTION. XXI

Sphere, he wanted that agility of mind, which can turn the un-
derstanding from its wonted mode of movement to set it upon
new tasks necessary to the completeness and efﬁciency of what
has been produced of another kind, but uninteresting in them-
selves to the mind of the producer. He loved to go forward, ex-
panding and ennobliug the soul of his teaching, and hated the
trouble of turning back to look after its body. To the healthful
and vigorous such trouble appears nothing, simply because they
are healthful and vigorous; but to feel all exertion a labor, all
labor pain and weariness, this is the very symptom of disease and
its most grievous consequence.

The nerveless languor, which, after early youth, became almost
the habit of his body and bodily mind, which to a great degree
paralyzed his powers both of rest and action, precluding by a tor-
pid irritability their happy vicissitude,—rendered all exercises
difficult to him except of thought and imagination ﬂowing on-
ward freely and in self-made channels; for these brought with
them their own warm atmosphere to thaw the chains of frost
that bound his spirit. Soon as that spontaneous impulse was
suspended, the apathy and sadness induced by his physical con-
dition reabsorbed his mind, as sluggish mists creep over the valley
when the breeze ceases to blow ; and to counteract it he lacked
any other sufﬁcient stimulus :

With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll ;
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul!
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,

.And hope, without an object, can not live.

He had no hope of gainful popularity, even from the most la-
borious efforts that he was capable of making ; nor would this in
itself have been an adequate object of hope to him, without a
further one, more deeply satisfying, a dream of which was ever
unbracing his mind, but which life, such as he had made it, and
such as it was given him from above, had not afforded. Then
the complaints and warnings from “ all quarters,” of the obscurity
of his prose writings, were, as he expressed it, like “ cold water
poured” upon him. It may be questioned whether they who
thus complained were making any attempt to meet him half-
way,—whether they had done their part toward understanding
what they called unintelligible. It is the chief use and aim of

xxii INTRODUCTION.

writings of such a character as his to excite the reader to think,»
to draw out of his mind a native ﬂame rather than to make it
bright for a moment by the reﬂection of alien ﬁres. All literary
productions indeed demand some answering movement on the part
of readers, but, in common cases, the motion required is so easy,
so much in known ways and smooth well-beaten tracks, that it
seems spontaneous and is more like rest than labor. This is the
difﬁculty with which introducers of new thought have to con
tend; the minds that are to receive these accessions must them
selves, in order to their reception of them, be renewed propor~
tionately, renewed not from without alone, but by co-operation
from writhi1’1,+a process full of conﬂict and struggle, like the fer-
menting of raw juices into generous wines. Though my Father
understood this well in the end, he was by no means prepared for
it, and for all its consequences, in the beginning; coming upon
him as it did, it acted as a narcotic, and by deepening his de-
spondency increased his literary inertness. Speaking of “The
Friend” he observes, “ Throughout these Essays the want of illus-
trative examples and varied exposition is the main defect, and
was occasioned by the haunting dread of being tedious.” _

The Biographia, Literm‘ia, he composed at that period of his
life when his health was most deranged, and his mind most sub-
jected to the inﬂuence of bodily disorder. It bears marks of this
throughout, for it is even less methodical in its arrangement than
any of his other works. Up to a certain point the author pur-
sues his plan of writing his literary life, but, in no long time his
“ slack hand” abandons its grasp of the subject, and the book is
ﬁlled out to a certain size, with such miscellaneous contents of
his desk as seem least remote from it. To say, with the writer
in Blackwood, that he stopped short in the process of unfolding a
theory of the imagination, merely because he had come to the end
of all that Schelling had taught concerning it, and thus to ac-
count for the abrupt termination of the ﬁrst volume, is to place
the matter in a perfectly false light ; he broke down in the pros-
ecution of his whole scheme, the regular history of his literary
life and opinions, and this not for want of help in one particular
line, but because his energies for regular composition in any line
were dcserting him, at least for a time. It is suggested, that
" interspersed throughout the works of Schelling, glimpses and in-
dications are to be found of some stupendous theory on the subject

INTRODUCTION. X‘Xiii

of the imagination ;” that Coleridge expected to “catch and un-
riddle these shadowy intimations,” but that, ﬁnding himself un-
ablé to do this, he “had nothing else for it but to abandon his
work altogether, and leave his readers in the lurch.” What
these glimpses of a “stupendous theory” are, and where they are,
except “throughout the works of Schelling,” the announcer does
not inform us : his own imagination may have discovered to him
what was never discerned by Coleridge, in all whose notes upon
Schelling not a hint is given of this stupendous theory in embryo.
In the last part of the Transcendental Idealism, which relates
to the Philosophy of Art, at p. 473, a passage occurs in which the
poetic faculty and the productive intuition are identiﬁed, and that
which is active in both, that one and the same, declared to be
the imagination : but this appears to be the crown and comple-
tion of a system already laid down, not a germ of a system to be
evolved in future. The Imagination is also characterized in
aphorisms 34, 35, of Schelling’s Wissenschafdiche Abhaudlun-
gen .' but we must strain our eyes very much to ﬁnd any indica-
tions of a grand philosophical design there.* I suspect that this
“stupendous theory” has its habitation in the clouds of the ac-
cuser’s fancy,—clouds without uuter, though black as if they
were big with showers of rain.

The extent of Schelling’ s teaching on the subject of the Imag-
ination my fathe1 well knew bef01e he commenced the Biog7 cap/1m
Literal-rid, and he must also have known how far he was able to
“ catch and unriddle his shadowy intimations ;” what he did not
' know or sufﬁciently consider was the space, which such a disqui-
sition ought to occupy in his work, and the relation which it had
to his undertaking. But for the failure of his powers, he might
have recast what he had already written, and give it such shape
and proportions, as would have made it seem suitable to the work
-' in which he was engaged. Of this effort he felt incapable, and
the letter was devised in order to enable him to print what he
had already written without farther trouble. But he still cher-
ished the intention of continuing the subject, thus commenced, in
a future work, which was to explain his system of thought at
large, and to this object he devoted much time and thought,
during the latter years of his life,—with what fruit will, it is to

* lhave asked two students of Schelling if they ever met with tlns theory
In traversing his Works, but could learn nothing of it from either of them.

xxiv INTRODUCTION.

be hoped, hereafter appear in a philosophical work by his friend
and fellow-student Mr. Green.

The second great ground of accusation against my father is his
having laid claim to “the main and fundamental ideas” of Schel-
ling’s system. “ We ourselves,” says the critic, “in our day have
had some small dealings with ‘ main and fundamental ideas,’ and
we know thus much about them, that it is very easy for any man
or for every man to have them; the difﬁculty is in bringing them
intelligibly, effectively, and articulately out,—in elaborating them
into clear and intelligible shapes.” He proceeds to illustrate his
argument, on the hint of an expression used by Mr. Gillman, in
his Life of Coleridge, with a choice simile. “Wasps,” says he,
“and even” other insects, which I decline naming after him,
“ are, we suppose, capable of collecting the juice of ﬂowers, and
this juice may be called their ‘ fundamental ideas ;’ but the bee
alone is a genuis among ﬂies, because he alone can put forth his
ideas in the shape of honey, and make the breakfast-table glad.”
True or false, all this has little to do with any thing that my father
has said in the Biographia. Lilemria. As for the bare “raw
material” (to use the critic’s own expression), out of which intel~
leetual systems are formed, it is possessed by every human being,
from Adam to his children of the present day, by one just as
much as another. Clodpates, who draw no lines save with the '-
plough across the field, have all the geometry folded up in their
minds that Euclid unfolded in his book : Kant’s doctrine of pure
reason is a web woven out of stuff that is in every man’s brain ,
and the simplest Christian is implicitly as great a divine as
Thomas Aquinas. But when a man declares that the funda-
mental ideas of a system are born and nurtured in his mind, he
evidently, means, not merely that he possesses the mere material
or elements of the system, but that the system itself, as to its
leading points and most general positions, has been evolved from
the depths of his spirit by his own independent elforts ; this has
certainly more relation to the wrought honey than to the raw.
My father’s allegation, that the principal points of .Schelling’s
system were not new to him when he found them uttered in
Schelling’s words shall be considered presently ; his own full be-
lief of what he asserted, I, of course, do not make matter of ques—
tion or debate.

First. however, reverting for a moment to the simile of the

INTRODUCTION. XXV

" wasps,” I beg to observe, that even if such insects might suck
the juice of ﬂowers if they would, mechanically might (though
their organs are net adapted for the purpose like those of bees),
yet it is certain that instinctively they never do. In vain for them
not only the “ violetsblow,” but all the breathing spring beside.
On the other hand, a habit of searching the nectaries of delicate
blossoms, far sought on heights or in hidden glades, has been
found by naturalists to be generally connected with honey-making
faculties: and thus, without admitting any proper analogy be-
twixt ﬂower-juice, and ﬁmdamental ideas, I will so far avail
myself of the illustration as to suggest that, in like manner, he
who sought truth far and near, amid the pages of abstruse and
neglected metaphysicians of former times, and discovered the
merits of new ones, just sprung up in a foreign country, before
they were recognized in his own, was probably led to such re-
searches by some special aptitude for studies of this nature and
powers of thought in the same line. The wasps and baser ﬂies
of literature neither collect juice nor make honey ; they only buzz
and sting, ﬂitting around the well-spread board, to which they
have never furnished one Wholesome morsel, to the disturbance
of those who sit thereat; a meddlesome but not, like certain
wasps of old, the manlz'est race?“ for they most attack those who
have’the powers of the world least on their side, or, being gone
out of this world altogether, can neither resist nor return their
violence. Time was that when a lion died bees deposited their
sweets in his carcass; but now, too often, wasps and vulgar ﬂies
gather about the dead lion, to shed upon his motionless remains
only. what is bitter and offensive 11'

* a’vdpuccﬁra‘rov 26-1209: Rance, v. 1077.

f “N o sooner is the lion dead than these hungry ﬂesh-ﬂies swarm about
him, verifying a part only of Samson’s riddle, they ﬁnd meat, but they pro-
duce no sweetness.” Omniana, I. p. 234. I certainly did not recollect this
sentence when I wrote the sentence above. My father did not recollect
Samson Agonistes, 1. 136,

“When insupportably his foot advanced—”
at the time of his writing in the France,

“ When insupportably advancing
Her arm made mockery of the warrior’s tramp.”

Mr. Dequincey represented him as denying the debt to Milton. Now Iverily
think that I had never read the passage in the Omniana, when the lion illus-
VOL. III. B‘ '

xxvi INTRODUCTION.

To insects of this class too much countenance is given by the
tone and spirit in which Mr. Coleridge’s censor conducts his argu-
ment. In. order to ﬁnd full matter of accusation against him, he
puts into his words a great deal which they do not of themselves
contain. According to him my Father’s language intimates, that
what he was about to teach of the transcendental system in the
Biographia Literaria was not only his own by some degree of
anticipation, but his own and no one’s else—that “he was pro
pared to pour from the lamp of an original, though congenial,
thinker a ﬂood of new light upon the dark doctrines in which he
so genially coincidec .” Now, so far from pretending to pour a
ﬂood of new light upon the doctrines of Schelling, he not only
speaks of him as “the founder of the Philosophy of Nature and
most successful improver of the Dynamic system/”le but declares
that to him “we owe the completion, and the most important
victories of this revolution in philosophy”? He calls Schelling
his predecessor though contemporary. Predecessor in what ?
Surely in those same doctrines which he was about to unfold.
That he had not originally learned the general conceptions of this
philosophy from Schelling he does indeed afﬁrm, but he expressly
ascribes them to Schelling as their discoverer and ﬁrst teacher,
nor does he claim to be considered the author of the system in
any sense or in any degree. All he lays claim to, and that only
by anticipation, as what he hoped to achieve, is “the honor of
rendering it intelligible to his countrymen,” and of applying it to
“the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes 1”
and certainly in the application of philosophical principles to the
explanation, and, as he believed, support of the Catholic faith, by
which means the soundness of the principles themselves is tested,
he had a walk of his own in which “ no German that ever
breathed" has preceded or outstripped himﬁt

Plainly enough it was the sum of his future labors in the fur-

tration occurred to me; I never yet have read the book through, though 1
have had it within reach all my life. It is not worth acknowledging like the
other; but this and a thousand similar facts make me feel how much of
coincidence in such matters is possible. If my father had read Samson
Agonz’stes, still he may have thought that he should have written the line
even if he had not.

* Biog. Lit. chap. ix. + lb

1 Mr. Dequincey said of him, with reference to another application of his
thoughts, that, “he spun daily, from the loom of his own magical brain.

INTRODUCTION . xxvi i

therance of truth, not his metaphysical doctrines alone, but his
entire system of thought that he had in contemplation, when he
intimated a conﬁdent belief, that the work he should produce
would “appear to be the offspring of his own spirit by better
tests than the mere reference to dates :” and although his actual
performance fell very far short of what he was ever expecting to
perform, yet surely his writings at large contain an amount of
original thought suﬂicient to render this anticipatory pretension
at least not ridiculous. That his meaning was thus general more
clearly appears from the circumstance that, Just before this appeal
concerning his originality of authorship, he refers to his design of
applying philosophy to religion ; and without doubt his religious
philosophy differed materially from that of the great German.
In connection, too, with the same subject he mentions “this or
anyfuture work of his ;” so that to suppose him, when he thus
expressed himself, to have had in his mind’s eye just that portion
of his teaching in the B. L. which he had borrowed or was to
borrow from Schelling, is gratuitous indeed.* Is it conceiva
ble that Mr. Coleridge would have appealed to tests of origi-
nality, which his future writings were to furnish, had he not be-
lieved in his heart that they would furnish those tests ?—that he
would have deﬁed a comparison of dates, had he been claiming
originality merely on the score of what he had consciously bor.
rowed ?

But that pretension of his to having anticipated much of what
Schelling taught has been treated with vehement scorn, as a mere
pretence.

His accordance with the German philosopher, it is peremptorily
asserted, could not have been coincidence, because he gave forth
Schelling’s own doctrine in Schelling’s own words, without any
important addition or variation. “ Genial coincidences, forsooth!
where every one word of the one author tallies with every one

theories more gorgeous by far, and supported by a pomp and luxury of
images, such as no German that ever breathed could have emulated in his
dreams.”

9* His goodfrz'end in the Ed. Review of Aug. 1817, sees this matter in a
truer light, for he says Mr. C. “proceeds to defend himself against the
charge of plagiarism, of which he suspects that he may be suspected by the
readers of Schlegel and Schelling, When he comes to unfold, in fulness of
time, the mysterious laws of the drama and the human mind.” Fas est ab
haste juvari.

Xxviii IN TROD U CTION.

word of the other l” That it is ill-judged in any man to tell the
world, in his own favor, one tittle more than he is prepared to
prove, I have no intention to dispute, nor is it for the sake of
maintaining my father’s claims as a metaphysical seer, that]
trouble myself with the above position; for another reason, more
deeply concerning, I must contend, that his having neither added
to, nor varied from, the doctrines of Schelling does not make it
clear as noonday, that he had not some original insight into them,
nor is even his adoption of Schelling’s words any absolute proof,
that he had in no degree anticipated their sense. There can be
no reasonable doubt, that he was at least in the same line of
thought with him,—was in search of what Schelling discovered
——bef0re he met with his writings : and on this point it is to be
remarked, that the writer in Blackwood, though he professes to
give the whole of Mr. Coleridge’s defence, omits a very important
part of it, that in which he accounts for his averred coincidence
with the German writer, and thus establishes its probabilityﬂ“
True enough it is that the transcendental doctrine contained in
the Biograp/Lia Literaria is conveyed for the most part in the
language of Schelling, and this seems to show, that he had not
formed into a regular composition any identical views of his own
before he read that author’s works 3]” but that the main concep-

‘* See, in the ninth chapter of this work, the passage beginning, “We
had studied in the same school—” p. 264.

+ This admission refers to such parts of the book as expressly convey
the transcendental doctrine. Certain observations on religious philosophy
cited by Mr. Coleridge he declares himself to have anticipated in writing.
A few sentences with whieh he prefaces the extract in the ninth chapter,
which have been strongly animadverted upon, I give here, together with the
defence of them, in order to avoid any recurrence to the present subject
hereafter: “ While I in part translate the following observations from a
contemporary writer of the Continent, let me be permitted to premise, that
I might have transcribed tnc substance from memoranda of my own, which
were written many years before his pamphlet was given to the world; and
that I prefer another’s words to my own, partly as a tribute due to priority
of publication ; but still more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where
coincidence only was possible.” “This passage,” says my Father’s late
Editor, “is noted with particular acrimony by the writer in Blackwood, as

outraging common sense and the capacities of human belief,’ with more
about ‘cool assurance,’ and ‘taking upon him to say,’ and the like. And
why all this? Is there any thing in the substance or leading thought in the
following paragraph so peculiar and extraordinary, as to make it incredible

INTRODUCTION. xxix

tions of Schelling’ 8 system were wholly new to his mind, when
he met with them there, can not be dete1mined by any such test.

Coincidences 111 the discoveries of science am more common,
especially among contemporaries, than in the products of fancy
and imagination, because these are not, like the last, mere arbi-
trary combinations of materials drawn from the storehouse of the
universe, capable of being inﬁnitely varied; but revelations of
truths which manifest themselves, one and the same, to every
inquirer who goes far enough in a certain direction of thought to
meet with them—which lie in the path of the human intellect,
and must be arrived at, when it has made a certain progress in
its pre-appointed course. In all scientiﬁc product two factors are
required ; energy of thought in the discoverer, and a special state
of preparation for the particular advance in the state of science
itself. Real Idealism could never have dawned on the mind of
Schelling had he not been born into the meridian light of the
Idealism of Kant, which was surely founded on the Idealism of

that the same may have passed through the mind of such a man as even
this writer eeems to admit Mr. Coleridge to have been? He studied in
Germany in 1798, and Schelling’s pamphlet was published in 1806. The
writer can not comprehend how Mr. C. could take upon him to say, ‘that co-
incidence only was possible’ in the case, ‘exeept on the ground, that it was
impossible for any human being to write any thing but what he (Mr. C.) had
written before.’ And yet no human being but one could ever suppose that
Mr. Coleridge meant any such folly. What can be simpler? He says he
had before 1806 noted down-—and his friends and his enemies—(that he
should have such still l)—know his habit in this particular—the substance,
that is, as most people understand it, the general thought of the paragraph.
If that were so, there having been no personal intercourse between Schel-
ling and Coleridge, coincidence, in Italics or Roman, was only possible in
the case.”

, A'complaint is also made that a passage of 49 lines comprising six only
of original writing, should be said to be only in part translated; which Cole-
ridge never said. “The following observations” very obviously extend to
the words “William Law,” two pages beyond the 49 lines; of the whole it
is truly said, that it is partly translated, about one half of it, in different
parts, not being so. H. N. C.

Upon this false supposition that my father referred only to the 49 lines
in his acknowledgment, he is not only attacked for having spoken of them
as in part translated, but declared to have taken without acknowledgment
“ two other long sentences from the Darlegung,” which occur in the follow-
ing paragraph, and which, because he altered them a little for the occasion,
he is reproached with having “curiously transmogriﬁed.”

xxx INTRODUCTION.

Berkeley Is it any thing then so very incredible, that a man,
from his childhood an ardent metaphysical inquirer, who had
gone through the same preparatory discipline with Schelling,
by reﬂection upon the doctrines of Kant, their perfect reasonablec
ness, so far as they advanced beyond all previous thought, their
unsatisfactoriness where they stopped short, and clung, in words
at least, to the old dogmatism, might have been led into modes
of rectifying and completing his system similar to those whicl
Schelling adopted? That Coleridge does not appear to have
gone beyond the subtle German in the path of discovery is insuf-
ﬁcient to prove, that he might not independently have gone as
far ; for we do not commonly see that more than one important
advance is made in metaphysical science at any one period.
Berkeleyanism presented itself to the mind of Arthur Collier be-
fore he had read a syllable of Berkeley’s metaphysical writings,
and he maintained the non-existence of matter by arguments
substantially the same as those employed in the Principles of
Human Knowledge and Dialogues between Hylas and Philw
nous, without communication, as we may reasonably suppose,
with their admirable authorf"< Let us suppose Collier to have
been a man careless and immethodical in his habits, continually
diverted from regular scientiﬁc inquiry by a “ shaping spirit of
imagination,”—one whose disposition led him to be ever seeking
matter for new thought, rather than laboring to reduce into pre-
sentable order that which he had already acquired ; let us further
suppose that, before he had given expression to his views in a
regular treatise, the works of Berkeley had fallen in his way;
would it not almost inevitably have happened, that the concep-
tions, ﬂoating in his mind, but not yet fixed in language, would
have mixed themselves up indistinguishably with those of the
older author, and assumed the same form? But if the form into
which his thoughts were thrown had been the same with that
adopted by his “predecessor though contemporary,” the philos-
ophy of the two would have been identical, for Collier’s view
neither materially added to Berkeley’s nor varied from it. On
such considerations as these it may surely be deemed possible,
that my Father did not wholly deceive himself, much less wil‘
fully seek to deceive others, when he afﬁrmed that “the main
and fundamental ideas” of Schelling’s system were born and ma-

* See Mr. Benson’s Memoirs of Collier, pp. 18, 19.

INTRODUCTION. xxxi

tured in his mind before he read the works of Schelling; and if
such a belief would do no great discredit to the head of any in--
quirer into this question, how much more honorable to his heart
wouli be the readiness to think thus, especially of one whose ser-
vices in the cause of truth are at this time wholly denied by none
but his personal or party enemies, than the impulse to ﬂing it
aside with a scornful “ credat Judwus Apella, non ego .”’ Those
were the words of a Heathen Satirist. We Christians know,
that itwas not credulz’ty, but want of faith and of a spirit quicker
to discern-truth and goodness than to suspect im’posture and evil,
by which they of the circumcision were most painfully charac-
terized.*

9* When I had written thus far I received a. letter from Mr. Green, con-
taining the following remarks: “ It would not be difﬁcult, I apprehend, to
show that he (Coleridge) might have worked out a system, not dissimilar
to Schelling’s in its essential features. What however did Coleridge him-
self mean by thefzmdamental truths of Schelling’s scheme? It is very true
that the reader of the Biographia is under the necessity of supposing, that
he meant the doctrines, which he has adopted in the passage taken from
Schelling’s works: but I confess that I strongly doubt that such was the
meaning of Coleridge. My acquaintance with S. T. C. commenced with the
intention of studying the writings of Schelling ; but after a few interviews
the design was given up, in consequence of Coleridge’s declaring his dissent
from Schelling’s doctrines ; and he began immediately the exposition of his
own views.

“ This perhaps renders. the Biograplaz'a more inexplicable. For herein
S. T. C. assumes the originality .of Schelling—e-which can only be received
with great qualiﬁcations—and is content to have it admitted, that the agree-
ments between himself and Schelling were the coincidences of two minds
working on the same subject and in the same direction. Now this is the
more remarkable, that it may be shown, that many or most of the views
entertained by Coleridge, at least at the period of our ﬁrst acquaintance,
might have been derived from other sources, and that his system differs
essentially from that of Schelling. Some light might perhaps be thrown
upon this interesting question by a knowledge, which unfortunately I do
not possess, of the circumstances under which the fragment called the Bio-
graphia was drawn up. It is possible, no doubt, that Coleridge’s opinions
might have undergone a change between the period, at which the B. L. was
published, and that at which I had the happiness of becoming acquainted
with him. But at the latter period his doctrines were based upon the self»
same principles, which he retained to his dying hour, and differing as they
do fundamentally from those of Schelling, I can not but avow my convic-
tion, that they were formed at a much earlier period, may that they were
growths of his own mind, growing with his growth, strengthening with his
strength, the result of a Platonic spirit, the stirrings of which had already

xxxii INTRODUCTION.

But the writer in Blackwood, out of his great zeal in behabf
(3f the plundered and aggrieved, would not only deprive Cole-
ridge of his whole credit as a philosopher—he would fain take
from him “ some of the brightest gems in his poetic wreath
itself.” It is thus that two couplets, exemplifying the Homeric
and Ovidian metresﬁ" are described by his candid judge ; and in
the same spirit he describes my Father as having sought to con-
ceal the fact, that they were translated from Schiller, a poet Whose

evinced themselves in his early boyhood, and which had been only modiﬁed,
and indirectly shaped and developed by the German school.”

“ That in the B. L. when developing his own scheme of thought, he
adopted the outward form, in which Sehelling had clothed his thoughts,
knowing, that is to say, that the formula was Sehelling’s, though forgetting
that it was also the language of Sehelling, may be attributed to idleness,
carelessness, or to any fault of the kind which deserves a harsher name;
but certainly not to dishonesty, nor to any desire of obtaining reputation
at the expense, and by the spoliation, of the intellectual labors of another
—and can form no ground for denying to him the name of a powerful and
original thinker. And the unacknowledged use of the quotations from
Schelling in the B. L. which have been the pretext for branding him with
the opprobrious name of plagiarist, are only evidences, in my humble judg-
ment at least, of his disregard to reputation, and of a segﬂessness (if I may
be allowed such a term, in order to mark an absence of the sense of self,
which constituted an inherent defect in his character), which caused him to
neglect the means of vindicating his claim to the originality of the system,
which was the labor of his life and the fruit of his genius.”

"’9 He pronounces them in part worse, in no respect a whit better than
the originals.

Im pentameter drauf fallt sie melodiseh herab.
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

To my ear, as I fancy, the light dactylic ﬂow of the latter half of the
pentameter, is still more exquisite in the English than in the German,
though the spondee which commences the latter is an advantage. The
English line is rather the more liquid of the two, and the word “back,”
with which it closes, almost imitates the plash of the reﬂuent water ‘ O'ainst
the ground.

Even from the sentence on the inferiority of Coleridge’s Homeric verses
there might perhaps be an appeal: but neither in German nor in English
could a pair of hexameters be made to present such variety in unity, such a
perfect little whole, as the elegiac distich.

Readers may compare the translated verse with the original in the last
edition of Coleridge’s Poems in one volume; where they .will also ﬁnd the
poem of Stolberg, which suggested, and partly produced, my Father's Lines
on a Cataract.

INTRODUCTION . _ xxxiii

works are perhaps as generally read here as those of Shakspeare
in Germany.

The expression “ brightest gems,” however, is meant to include
Lines on a Cataract, which are somewhat more conspicuous i1:
Coleridge’s poetic wreath than the pair of distiches ; in these he,
is said to have closely adopted the metre, language, and thought:
of another man. Now the metre, language, and thoughts of
Stolberg’s poem are all in Coleridge’s expansion of it, but those
of the latter are not all contained in the former, any more than
the budding rose contains all the riches of the rose full blown.
“ It is but a shadow,” says the critic, “ a gloriﬁed shadow per-
haps,” but still only a shadow cast from another man’s “ sub-
stance.” Is not such glory the substance, or part of the substance,
of poetic merit '3 How much of admired poetry must we not 7m-
suhstaritialize, if the reproduction of what was before, with addi
tions and improvements, is to be made a shadow of ? That which
is most exquisite in the Lines on a Cataract is Coleridge’s own :
though some may even prefer Stolberg’s striking original. These
and the verses from Schiller were added to the poetical works of
Mr. Coleridge by his late Editor. Had the author superintended
the edition, into which they were ﬁrst inserted,p_himself, he would,
perhaps, have made references to Schiller and 'Stolberg in these
instances, as he had done in others ; if he neglected to do so, it
could not have been in any expectation of keeping'to himself
what he had borrowed from them.

Lastly, Mr. Coleridge’s obligations to Schelling in Lecture VIII.
on Poesy and Art are spoken of by the writer in Blackwood, after
his own manner. '

It is true, that the most important principles delivered in that
Lecture are laid down by the German Sage in his Oration on
the relationship of the Plastic Arts to Nature,*—yet I can not
think it quite correct to say that it is “ closely copied and in
many parts translated” from Schelling’s discourse. It not only
cmits a great deal that the other contains, but adds, and, as it
seems to me, materially, to what is borrowed : neither, as far as
I can ﬁnd, after a second careful perusal of the latter, has it any
passage translated from Schelling, only a few words here and
there being the same as in that great philosopher’s treatise.

Let me add, that Mr. Coleridge did not publish this Lecture

* Phil. Schrift. p. 343.
13*

xxxiv INTRODUCTION.

himself. Whenever it is re-published, what it contains of A Schell-
ing’s will be stated precisely. Would that an equal restitution
could be made in all quarters of all that has been borrowed, with
change of shape but little or no alteration of substance 3 In this
case, not a few writers, whose originality is now unquestioned,
would lose more weight from their coinage than my Father will
do, by subtraction of that which he took without disguise from
Schelling and others :—for how commonly do men imagine them-
selves producing and creating, when they are but metamor-
phosing !

“That Coleridge was tempted into this course by vanity,” says
the writer in Blackwood toward the end of his article ; “ by the
paltry desire of applause, or by any direct intention to defraud
others of their due, we do not believe ; this never was believed and
never will be believed.” Truly I believe not ; but no thanks to
the accuser who labors to convict him of “ wanting rectitude and
truth ;” who reads his apologies the wrong way, as witches say
their prayers backward g—who hatches a grand project for
Sehelling in order to bring him in guilty of a design to steal it ;
who uses language respecting him which the merest vanity and
dishonesty alone could deserve. This never has been or will be
believed by the generous and intelligent, though men inclined to
fear and distrust his opinions are strengthened in their prejudices
by such irnputations upon their maintainer, and many are pre-
vented from acquiring a true knowledge of him and of them.
What Schelling himself thought on the subject will be seen from
the following extract of a letter of Mr. Stanley, author of the Life
of Dr. Arnold, kindly communicated to me by Archdeacon Hare.
“ Schelling’s remarks about Coleridge were too generally ex-
pressed, I fear, to be of any use in a vindication of him, except
so far as proving his own friendly feeling toward him. But as
far as I can reconstruct his sentence it was much as follows, being
in answer to a question whether he had known Coleridge per-
sonally. ‘ \Vhether I have seen Coleridge or not, I can not tell;
if he called upon me at Jena, it was before his name had become
otherwise known to me, and amongst the number of young
Englishmen, whom I then saw, I can not recall the persons of
individuals. But I have read what he has written with great
pleasure, and I took occasion in my lectures to vindicate him
from the charge, which has been brought against him, of pla-

INTRODUCTION. xxxv

giarizing from me, and I said that it was I rather who owed
much to him, and that, in the Essay on Prometheus, Coleridge
in his remark, that “Mythology was not allegorical but taute-
gorical,”* had concentrated in one striking expression (in einem
schlagenden Ausrlruc/c) what I had been laboring to represent
with much toil and trouble. This is all that I can be sure of.’ ”

Such was this truly great Man’s feeling about the wrongs
that he had sustained from my Father. Had the writer in Black-
wood pointed out his part in the Biograpltz'a Literarz'a without
one word of insult to the author’s memory, he would have proved
his zeal for the German Philosopher, and for the interests of
literature more clearly than now, because more purely, and de-
served only feelings of respect and obligation from all who love
and honor the name 0 Coleridge.

It will already have been seen, that no attempt is here made
to justify my Father’s literary omissions and inaccuracies, or to
deny that they proceeded from any thing defective in his frame of
mind ; I would only maintain that this fault has not been fairly
reported or becomingly commented upon. That a man who has
been “ more highly gifted than his fellows,” is therefore to have
less required of him in the way of “ rectitude and truth,” that he
is to be “ held less amenable to the laws which ought to bind all
human beings,” is a proposition which no one sets up except for
the sake of taking it down again, and some man of genius along
with it; but there is another proposition, confounded by some
perhaps with the aforesaid, which is true, and ought, in justice
and charity, to be borne in mind ; I mean that men of “ peculiar
intellectual conformation,” who have peculiar powers of intellect,
are very often peculiar in the rest of their constitution, to such a
degree that points in their conduct, which, in persons of ordinary
faculties and habits of mind, could only result from conscious
wilful departure from the rule of right, may in their case have a
different origin, and though capable, more or less, of being con-
trolled by the will may not arise out of it. Marked gifts are
often attended by marked deﬁciencies even in the intellect : those
best acquainted with my Father are well aware that there was
in him a special intellectual ﬂaw; Archdeacon Hare has said,
that his memory was “notoriously irretentive ;” and it is true
that, on a certain class of subjects, it was extraordinarily con-

* Lectures on Shakspeare, IV. p. 351.

fused and inaccurate: matter of fact, as such, laid no hold upon
his mind ; of all he heard and saw, he readily caught and well
‘ retained the Spirit, but the letter escaped him : he seemed inca-
pable of paying the due regard to it. That it is the duty of any
man, who has such a peculiarity, to watch over it and endeavor
to remedy it, is unquestionable; I would only suggest that this
defect, which belonged not to the moral being of Coleridge but to
the frame of his intellect, and was in close connection with that
which constituted his peculiar intellectual strength, his power of
abstractng and referring to universal principles, often rendered
him unconscious of incorrectness of statement, of which men in
general scarcely could have been unconscious, and that to it, and
not to any deeper cause, such neglects and transgressions of es-
tablished rules as have been alleged against him, ought to be
referred.*

* At all times his incorrectness of quotation and of reference and in the
relation of particular circumstances was extreme; it seemed as if the door
betwixt his memory and im. 0'ination was always open, and though the for-
mer was a large strong room, its contents were perpetually mingling with
those of the adjoining chamber. I am sure that if I had not had the facts
of my Father’s life at large before me, from his letters and the relations of
friends, I should not have believed such confusions as his possible in a man
of sound mind. To give two out of numberless instances,-——in a manuscript
intended to be perused by his friend Mr. Green, he speaks of a composition
by Mr. Green himself, as if he, S. T. Coleridge, were the author of it. A
man, who thus forgets, will oftener ascribe the thoughts of another, when
they have a great cognateness with, and a deep interest for, his own mind,
to himself, than such cognate and interesting thoughts to another; but my
Father’s forgetfulness was not always in the way of appropriation, as this
story, written to me by Mrs. Julius Hare, will show. She says, it was
“told him (Archdeacon Hare) many years ago by the Rev. Robert Tennant,
who was then his Curate, but afterwards went to Florence and died there.
He had a great reverence and admiration for Mr. Coleridge, and used occa-
sionally to call upon him. During one of thesevisits, Mr. C. spoke of
book (Mr. Hare thinks it was on Political Economy), in which there wer
some valuable remarks bearing upon the subject of their conversation. Mr
Tennant immediately purchased the book on this recommendation, but 0
reading it was surprised to ﬁnd no such passages as Mr. C. had referred to
Some time after he saw the same book at the house of a friend, and men
tioned the circumstance to him ; upon which his friend directed him to th
margin of the volume before him, and there he found the very remarks i
Mr. C.’s own writing, which he had writen in as marginalia, and forgotte
that they were his own and not the author’s. Mr. Hare had always intend
ed asking Mr. T. to give him this story in detail in writing, but unfor

INTROD UCTION. xxxvii

A certain inﬁdelity there was doubtless in the mirror of his
mind, so strong was his tendency to overlook the barrier between
imagination and actual fact. N 0 man had a keener insight into
character than he, or saw moral and mental distinctions more
clearly ; yet his judgments of particular persons were often rela-

lunately delayed it too long till Mr. T.’s very sudden death prevented it
ltogether ; but he can vouch for its general correctness.”

My Father trusted to his memory, knowing it to be powerful and not
aware that it was inaccurate, in order to save his legs and his eyes. I sus
pect that he quoted even longish passages in Greek without copying them,
by the slight differences that occur. Another plzaenomenon of his memory
was its curious way of interchanging properties; as when he takes from
Hobbes and gives to Des Cartes, what is not to be found in the latter and is
to be found in the former. (See chapter v.) This he did in the face of Sir
James Mackintosh, one of the most clear-headed and accurately learned men
of the day, after inciting him to examine his own positions by contradiction;
so incautious and dreamy was he. It seems as if he was ever dreaming of
blows and caring for them no more than for the blows of a dream. How
much strength of memory may co-exist with weakness, the intellect remain
ing quite sound in the main, may often be observed in old men. Just so
many a nervous man can walk twenty miles when he can not walk straight-
into a room, or lift a cup to his lips without shaking it.

It was from this same mixture of carelessness and confusedness that my
Father neglected all his life long to make regular literary acknowledgments.
He did it when he happened to think of it, sometimes disproportionately,
at other times not, but without the slightest intention, and in some cases
without the possibility of even temporary concealment. He published The
Fall of Robespierre as An Historic Drama by S. T Coleridge, without join-
ing Mr. Southey’s name with his in the title-page, though my Uncle and all
his many friends knew that he wrote the second and third act of it; and in
a note to the Conciones he spoke of the ﬁrst act only as his own. He did
not call the Oatullian IIendecasg/llables a translation, though at any hour I
might have seen the original in the copy of Matthisson’s poems which he
had given me, and in which he had written, after the presentation, “Die
Kinderjahre, p. 15—29; der-Schmetterling, p. 50; and the Alpenreise, p. 7 5,
will be especial favorites with you, I dare anticipate. 9th May, 1820, High-
gate.” His Hendecasyllables contain twelve syllables, and as metre are, to
my car, a great improvement, on Matthisson’s eleven—syllable lines. He
acted in the same way with regard to two epigrams of Lessing’s, one in the
Poetic Works, ii. p. ’7 8, called Names, and another on Rufa and her Lapdog,
which has been printed somewhere,—(Die Namen and An Die Dorilis.
Works of Lessing, vol. i. p. 19 and p. 46.) He had spoken of them as trans-
lations to Mr. Cottle. Mr. Green tells me that in the Confessions are a few
phrases borrowed from Lessing, which will be pointed out particularly
hereafter. My Father once talked of translating all that author’s works.
An epigram printed in the Remains, Hearse Mcevius is also from the Cler-

xx xviii INTRODUCTION.

tively wrong ; not that he ascribed to them qualities which they
did not possess, or denied them those which they had, but that
his feelings and imagination heightened and magniﬁed that side
or aspect of a mind, which was most present to him at the time
when his estimate was drawn: the good and the beautiful, which

man; he seems to have spoken of it as such to Mr. Cottle. The fourth and
sixth stanzas of Separation, VII. p. 198. are adopted from Cotton’s
C/tlorinda. The late Mr. Sidney Walker thought that my Father was in-
debted to Casimir’s xiiiLh Ode for the general conception of his Lines in an-
swer to a melancholy Letter, one of the Juvenile Poems. The second stanza
looks like an expansion of the commencement :

Non si sol scmel occidit,
Non rubris iterum surgct ab Indiis.

I see no likeness elsewhere, except of subject. Mr. S. \V. also pointed out
to me an image taken from the opening of Ossian’s lVar of Inisthoma, in
Lines on an Autumnal Evening, “ As when the Savage,” &c. (VII. p. 42.)
The Rose (VII. 43.) is, I believe from the French.

“ And I the while, the sole unbusy thing
Nor honey make, nor build, nor pair, nor sing,”
VII. p. 271.

would probably have been written, even if Herbert had not written, as Mr
Walker reminded me,

All things are busy; only I
Neither bring honey with the bees,
Nor ﬂowers to make that, nor the husbandry
To water these. (Employment, Poems.)

I think it will hardly be supposed that Mr. Coleridge meant to cheat Cas-
imir, Cotton, Lessing and Matthisson of the articles be borrowed from them.
The two former he celebrated in his writings, when they were not much in
the world’s eye : the two latter are popular and well-known authors, whose
works are in every hand in Germany, and here in the hands of many. Mr.
Dequincey says he relied “too much upon the slight knowledge of German
literature in this country ;”—a blind remark ! Who relies for concealment
on a screen which he is doing his best to throw down? Had my Father
calculated at all he would have done it better: but to calculate was not in
his nature. If he ever deceived others it was when he was himself deceived
ﬁrst. Hazlitt said he “ always carried in his pocket a list of the Illustrious
Obscure.” I think he made some writers, who were obscure when he ﬁrst
noticed them, cease to be so; and it will be found, that he did not generally
borrow from the little known without declaring his obligations; that most
of his adoptions were from writers too illustrious to be wronged by plagia-
"ism. It is true that Maasz, from whom he borrowed some things, never

INTRODUCTION. XXXix

he beheld at the moment, appeared in his eyes the very type of
goodness and beauty : the subjects of it were transﬁgured before
him and shone with unearthly hues and lineaments. Of princi-
ples he had the clearest intuition, for that which is without de-
gree is in no danger of being exaggerated; nor was he liable,
from his peculiar temperament, to miss poetic truth ; because na-
ture, as she lends to imagination all her colors, can never be mis-
represented by the fullest expenditure of her own gifts upon her-
self. And even in his view of the particular and individual,—
though, as has been said of him in his literary character, “ often
like the sun, when looking at the planets, he only beheld his own
image in the objects of his gaze, and often, when his eye darted
on a cloud, would turn it into a rainbow,”*—yet possibly even-
here far more of truth revealed itself to his earnest gaze than the
world, which ever observes too carelessly and superﬁcially, was
aware of. Many of his poems, in which persons are described
in ecstatic language, were suggested by individuals, and doubtless
did but portray them as they were constantly presented to him
by his heart and imagination.

Such a temper is ever liable to be mistaken for one of ﬁckle-
ness, insincerity, and lightness of feeling ; and even so has Cole-
ridge at times been represented by persons, who, judging partially
and superﬁcially, conceived him to be wanting in depth of heart
and substantial kindness, whose depths they had never explored,
and with whose temperament and emotions there was no conge-
niality in their own. But it is not true, as others will eagerly
testify, that the affections of Coleridge were slight and evanes-
cent, his intellectual faculties alone vigorous and steadfast :
though it is true that in persons constituted like him, the former
will be more dependent on the latter, more readily excited and ‘
determined through the powers of thought and imagination than
in ordinary cases. His heart was as warm as his intellectual
being Was lifesome and active,—nay, it was from warmth of
heart and keenness of feeling that his imagination derived its
glow and vivacity, the condition of the latter, at least, was in-
timately connected with that of the former. He loved to share
all he had with others ; and it is the opinion of one who knew

was famous: but had he “relied” on the world’s ignorance of him he would
not have mentioned him as a writer on mental philosophy at all.
* See Guesses at Truth, 2d edit. p. 241.

Xl' IN TROD UCTION .'

him well and early, that, had he possessed wealth in his earlier
years, he would have given great part of it away. If there are
any who conceive that his affections were apt to evaporate in
words, I think it right to protest against such a notion of his char-
acter. Kind words are not to be contrasted with good deeds,
except where they are substituted for them, and those kindly
feelings which, in the present instance, so often overflowed in
words, were just as ready to shape themselves into deeds, as far
as the heart was concerned ;—how far the hand can answer to
the heart depends on circumstances with which the last has no
concern. Had there been this tenuity and shallowncss in his
spirit, he could never have made that sort of impression as an
author, which many thoughtful persons have received from his
works, much less as a man have inspired such deep love and
esteem as still waits upon his memory from some who are them-
selves loved and honored by all that know them wellﬁ“ That
the objects of his affections oftener changed than consisted with,
or could have arisen in, a happy even tenor of life, was, in his
case, no symptom of that variableness which results from the
union of a lively fancy with a shallow heart : if he soon formed
attachments, this arose from the quickness of his sympathies,—
the ease with which he could enter into each man’s individual
being, loving and admiring whatever it contained of amiable or
admirable; from a “constitutional communicativencss and ut-
terancy of heart and soul,” which, speedily attracting others to
him, rendered them again on this account doubly interesting in
his eyes; if he “stood aloof,” during portions of his life, from
any once dear to him, this was rather occasioned by a morbid in-
tensity and tenacity of feeling than any opposite quality of mind,
—the same disposition which led him to heighten the lights of
every object, while its bright side was turned toward himself, in-
clining him to deepen its shadows, when the chances and changes
of life presented to him the darker aspect,—the same temper
which led him to over-estimate marks of regard, rendering him
too keenly sensible of, or quick to imagine, short-comings of love
and esteem, his claims to which he not unnaturally reckoned by

* Some pe1sons appear to have confounded the general courtesy and
bland overﬂowing of his manners with the state of his aﬁections, and be
cause the feelings which prompted the for mer ﬂitted over the suifaee of his
heart, to suppose that the latter weie ﬂitting and superﬁcial too.

INTRODUCTION. ' xli

nis readiness to bestow, ‘which was boundless, rather than his
ﬁtness to receive, which he ever acknowledged to be limited.
He was apt to consider affection as due simply to affection, irre-
spectively of merit in any other shape, and felt that such a “fund
of love” as his, and that too from one so highly endowed as few
denied him to be, ought “almost” to “supply desert.” He too
much desired to idolize and be idolized, to ﬁx his eye, even in '
this mortal life, only on perfection, to have the imperfections
which he recognized in himself severely noted by himself alone.

“ For to be loved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.”

This turn of mind was at least partly the cause of such change
and ﬂuctuation in his attachments through life as may have sub
jected his conduct to unfavorable construction: another cause
he himself indicated, at an early period of his career, when, after
speaking of the gifts assigned him by heaven, he sadly exclaims,

 

“ and from my graspless hand
Drop friendship’s precious pearls like hour-glass sand l”

Some of these precious pearls he let fall, not from wanting a
deep sense of their value, or any lightness of feeling, but because
he lacked resolution to hold them fast, or “stoop” to recover what
he yet “wept” to lose. Still it was but a cruel half truth, when
one strangely converted from a friend into an enemy, ever shoot-
ing out his arrows even bitter words, spoke of him thus : “ There
is a man all intellect but without a will 3” Sometimes indeed to
will was present with him when he found not how to perform ;
all the good that he would he did not; but his performance,
taken upon the whole, his involuntary defects considered, in-
‘ spired his many friends with the belief that he was not only a
wise, but humanly speaking, a good man. “Good and great,”
some say: whether or no he was the latter, and how far, let
others declare, time being the umpire ; it signiﬁes, conipamtivelz,
nothing to the persons most interested in and for him what the
decision on this point may be; but the good qualities of his
heart must be borne witness to by those in the present day who
knew him best in private. Thus much may be said for the cor—
rectness of his intuitions and the clearness of his moral sense.

xlii INTRODUCTION.

that, through life, his associates, with few exceptions, were dis-
tinguished by high qualities of head and heart : from ﬁrst to last
of his course here below he was a discoverer and a proclaimer
of excellence both in books and men.

MR. COLERIDGE,S RELIGIOUS OPINIONS; THEIR FORMATION; MISCON-
CEPTIONS AND MISREPRESENTATIONS ON THE SUBJECT.

Such imputations as those I have had the painful task of dis-
cussing, are apt to circulate rapidly and meet a ready credence
from part of the public, when they concern a writer whose writ-
ings are obnoxious to various parties in politics and religion, and
who has never secured the favor and admiration of the light-
reading and little thinking world. For one man who will fully
and deeply examine any portion of the opinions, religious or
philosophical, of a full and deep thinker, there are hundreds ca-
pable of comparing the run of sentences and paragraphs and being
entertained by a charge of plagiarism : if some are grateful -to
him for light thrown, as their eyes tell them, upon truth, far
more are offended because this same light reveals to them the
untruth which they would fain not see in its proper hues and
proportions ; who, not being prepared to overthrow his reasonings
by a direct attack, are glad to come at them obliquely, by lower-
ing his personal character and thereby weakening his authority.
The whole Romish world was bent on convicting Luther of An~
tinomianism, and as they could not discover it in his writings,
they were resolved, if possible, to ﬁnd it in his life, and as it was
not forthcoming in either, they put it into both; they took all
his rhetoric the wrong way up, and hunted for unsoundness in
his mind and libertinism in his conduct, as vultures hunt for
things corrupt in nature.* The spirit evidenced in this proced-

* I believe that Bayle’s article caused a dead silence on the subject of the
great Reformer’s personal “ carnality” for . «res. Of late years it has been
revived, and there is a faint attempt to bring up some of the old stories
circulated against him to the effect that he made liberty a cloak fo-r licen-
tiousness ! (See on Luther’s Life and Opinions Hare’s Illissz'on of the 00m-
forter, vol. ii. pp. 656-87 8.) It was an “easy feat” to put Pantheism into
the “bottom of Luther’s doctrine and personal character” (Essay on Devel-
opment, p. 84), because the bottom of doctrine is one knows not where, and
Pa’ntheism, as modern polemics employ the term, one knows not what ; but-
to fasten dissoluteness on his conduct is by no means easy.

INTRODUCTION. xhil

ure,—that “ancient spirit is not dead ;” religious writers, even
at the present day, are far too prone to discredit a man’s opin-
ions at second-hand by tracing them to some averred evil source
in his character, or perverting inﬂuence in the circumstances of
his life. This seems exceptionable however gently done, ﬁrst
because it is a very circuitous and uncertain mode of arriving
at truth ; a man’s opinions we know on his own statements of
them: but in attempting to discover the means through which
they have been formed, we are searching in the dark, or the
duskiest and most deceptive twilight, and, having no clear light
to guide us, are apt to be led astray by some ignisfatmis of our
own prejudices and delusions. Let the opinions be tried 011 their
own merits, and if this is beside the inquirer’s purpose, and he
chooses to assume the truth of those he himself holds, consider-
ing them too certain and too sacred to be made a question of, in
the same spirit let him disdain to snatch an argument in their
favor, out of themselves, from doubtful considerations. Alas!
how many of those who hold this lofty tone, calling their oyvn
belief the truth, and other men’s belief mere opinion, only be-
cause they have an opinion of the validity of a certain test of
truth which others can not assent to, will yet resort to questiona-
ble methods of recommending this their unquestionable creed,
and bring elaborate sophisms and partial representations, ﬁt only
to impose upon prepossessed and ductile readers, to the aid of
“practical infallibility. "’

But the second and even stronger objection to this mode of
proceeding is, that the desi1e to ﬁnd the o1igi11 of a man’s way
of thinking in the facts of his history, brings the inquirer under
great temptation to depart from strict truth in regard to the facts
themselves,—to mould them, often perhaps unconsciously, into
such a shape as best suits his purpose.

Now in order to show that these inconveniences do attach to
the. principle itself, I will take my example of its operation from
a respectable quarter, where no unkindly spirit is manifested in
tone orlanguage. The seventh number of the Christian IIIis-
cellany of July, 1842, contains ﬁfteen or sixteen pages of short ex-
tracts from Mr. Coleridge’s writings, which are entitled “ Con-
tributions of S. T. Coleridge to the Revival of Catholic Truths.”
I would suggest, by the way, that if my Father had taught only
as such eclectics from his works would have him appear to have

Xliv INTRODUCTION.

taught, his contributions to catholic truth would have been mea-
gre enough, and might even have told in favor of much that he
considered most uncatholic falsehood; had his views been com-
pressed within the bounds into which an implicit faith in the for-
mal theology of early times must have compressed them, his sys-
tem would have been lifeless and unreal as that which he was
ever seeking to enliven and organize ; he would have done little
toward enlightening his generation, though he might have aided
others to strengthen particular parties by bringing up again for
current use obsolete religious metaphysics and neglected argu-
ments—a very diﬁerent process from that of a true revival,
which, instead of raising up the dead body of ancient doctrine,
calls forth the life and substance that belong to it, clothed in a
newer and more spiritual body, and gives to the belief of ‘past
ages an expansion and extension commensurate with the devel-
oped mind of our progressive race. Such was the revival of
catholic truth at which he aimed, with whatever success, and to
bring him in as an assistant in one of an opposite character, is,
in my opinion, to do him injustice.

My immediate purpose, however, was not to notice the ex-
tracts themselves, but certain observations, respecting my Father,
preﬁxed to them. They are contained in the little introduction,
which speaks as follows :

“These excerpts are not brought forward as giving an accu-
rate representation of Mr. Coleridge’s opinions in all their modi-
ﬁcations, or as specimens of his writings generally; they are
rather the chance metal of a mine, rich indeed, but containing
ores of every degree of value. They may, however, serve to
show, how much he contributed by his elimination of powerful
truths, in the then unhealthy state of literature, to the revival of
sounder principles. In doing this it is not surprising that one,
who relied so much on himself, and was so little guided, at least
directly, by external authority, should have fallen into some incon-
sistencies. These inconsistencies are rather the result of an un-
due development of certain parts of Christian philosophy, than
the holding of opinions immediately heretical.”

“The circumstances in his Christian course, which we may
regard as having impaired his power of duly appreciating the rel-
ative value of certain Catholic truths, were his profession of liter-
ature, his having edited a newspaper, and having been engaged,

INTRODUCTION. xlv

m a course of heretical and schismatical teaching. That he was
rescued from these dangers and crimes, and to a great extent
saved from their effects, is, it is not improbable, owing to the
circumstances of his early education. He was the son of a cler-
gyman, admitted into the Church, and taught its doctrines by his
pious and simple-hearted father, was impressed by his instructor,
the Rev. James Bowyer, with the unrealities and hollowness of
modern literature, and during his Whole life was the subject of
severe afflictions, which he received in patience, expressing for
his past and often confessed sins, penitence in word, and doubt-
less penance in deeds. Through those means he may have at-
tained his happy privilege, of uttering the most important truths,
and clothing them in such language as rendered their reception
more easy to minds not entirely petriﬁed by the materialism of
the day.”

For Mr. Coleridge’s sake alone it might be thought scarcely
worth while to discuss the accuracy of remarks, which are per-
haps at this time remembered by few, and, like a thousand others
of similar tendency, can not fail to be counteracted in their drift,
so far as it is erroneous, by the ever-renewed influence of his
writings, as the returning waters sweep from the sea-shore what
children have scattered there during the ebb.* For the sake of
right principle, I must observe, that in seeking to strengthen our
own faith by casting any measure of discredit on minds which
have not received it, we rather show our zeal in its behalf, than
any true sense of its intrinsic excellence or conﬁdence in its
power. When a critic or biographer has a man’s whole life,—
whole body of opinions—under review, he may fairly enough,—
though it is'always a most difﬁcult process—attempt to show
how, and to what extent, his character and modes of thought
were affected by external circumstances; but I can not help
thinking it very unfair to pre-occupy a reader’s mind with two or
three points of a man’s life selected out of his personal history

9* The reader will perceive that I use this simile of the Sea to denote, not
the size or importance, but the comparative permanence of my Father’s
writings. That he has achieved a permanent place in literature (I do not
say What or where), I certainly believe; and I also believe that nopersons
well acquainted with his writings will be disposed to deny the position,
except those Who represent the Edinburgh Review of twenty and thirty
years ago. , a . - - -

xl-vi INTRODUCTION.

previously to introducing a few of his opinions to their notice.
Every man who is in error, who can not see the truth when it is
before him, labors under some defect, intellectual or moral, and
this may have been brought out,—-I think such defects are never
caused or implanted—by circumstances; but it is hardly fair
play to impute such defects to a writer or describe them as hav-
ing corrupted his opinions, when the nature of the opinions them—
selves is adhuc sub lite among Christians and good menﬂ'r

My principal objection, however, to the statements I have
quoted is, that they are incorrect either in the letter or the spirit
or both. It is plain enough that the real aim of the Miscellanist
was not to exhibit the amount of Catholicity in an individual
mind, but to spread what he considered to be Catholic truth, and
to this my Father’s character as a man was made subservient
On ﬁrst reading his preﬁx I regarded one of its assertions as a
pure mistake, and on this subject received the following testimo-
nial from Mr. Wordsworth, with whose great and honored name
it must ever be the pride and pleasure of the friends of Coleridge
to associate his.

—“ I feel absolutely certain that your Father never was Edito'l
of any periodical publication whatsoever except The Watchman
and The Friend, neither of which, as you know, was long con-
tinued, and The Friend expressly excluded even allusion to tem-
porary topics; nor, to the best of my remembrance, had The
Watchman any thing of the character of a newspaper. “Then
he was very young he published several sonnets in a London
newspaper. Afterwards he was in strict connection with the
editors or at least proprietors of one or more newspapers, The
Courier and The Zl/Iornz'ng Post; and in one of these, I think it
was the latter, your Father wrote a good deal.”—

“ So convinced was I of the great service that your Father ren-
dered Mr. Stuart’s paper, that I urged him to put in his claim to

3* I wish the reader to observe that I attach little or no importance to
the remarks of the Chr. Miscellany in themselves; as an index of a state of
feeling in certain quarters and an instance of what is daily practised, to the
production of injury and irritation more than any real good, they are not
insigniﬁcant. Personality is a poisoned weapon in religious warfare; and
all religious statements in these days are necessarily a warfare, open or un-
decla1 ed Per sonal character should never be dealt with at second -;hand
should be left to those who under take the trouble and responsibility, wliile
they possess the zeal, of the biographer.

INTRODUCTION. xlvii

be admitted a proprietor; but this he declined, having a great
disinclination to any tie of the kind. In fact he could not bear
being shackled in any way. I have heard him say that he should
be sorry, if any one offered him an estate, for he should feel the
possession would involve cares and duties that would be a clog to
him.”—’l(<

The “Newspaper” which is supposed to have retarded my
Father’s growth in Catholicism, it now occurs to me, may have
been The Watchman, as in that miscellany the domestic and
foreign policy of the preceding days was reported and discussed ;
but I still think, that the impression which this statement, to-
gether with the inference drawn from it, is calculated to convey,
is far from just. To be for any length of time the editor of a
periodical work, which 1s the successful organ of a party, what- 1,
ever principles that party may profess, nay even if they call them-l";
selves Catholic, is indeed to be 1n a situation of some danger to.” /
the moral and spiritual sense: but such was never my Father’s
situation. When he is described as having been impaired in his
religious mind by editing a newspaper, would any one guess the
fact to be this, that, in his youth, he put forth ten numbers of a
miscellaneous work, one portion of which was devoted to the
politics of the times, and was unable to make it answer because
he Would not adapt it to the ways of the world and of newspapers
in general? Let those who have been led to think that Mr.
Coleridge’s services to public journals may have deadened his
religious susceptibilities consider, not only the principles which he
professes and the frame of mind which he displays on this very
subject in the tenth chapter of the present work, but the charac-
ter of his newspaper essays themselves ; had the writer, to whose
remarks I refer, done this, before he pronounced judgment, I think
he could not have failed to see that my Father conformed the
publications he aided to himself and his own high views, in pro-
portion to the extent of his connection with them, not himself to
vulgar periodical writing. The Edinburgh Reviewers indeed, in
the year 1817, ﬂung in his teeth, “ Ministei'ial Editor.” With
them the reproach lay in the word Ministeiial. Tempora mu-
tantitr—but the change of times has not yet brought truth to the
service of my Father, or made him generally understood.

4" The leader' lS referred to chap. v. of the Biographical Supplement for
an account Of Mr. C.’ a connection with Mr. Stuart.

leiii INTRODUCTION.

Not however the connection with newspapers merely, but the
profession of literature is speciﬁed as one among other causes,
which alienated my Father’s mind from Catholicity. The pecu-
liar disadvantages of the “tmde of authorship” Mr. Coleridge
has himself described in this biographical fragment ; he has shown
that literature can scarcely be made the means of living without
being debased ; but he himself failed in it, as the means of living,
because he would not thus debase it,—.would not sacrifice higher
aims for the sake of immediate popularity. Literature, pursued
not as a mere trade, is naturally the ally, rather than the adver-
sary, of religion. It is indeed against our blessed Lord, if not for
him ; but though it has its peculiar danger, inasmuch as it satis-
ﬁes the soul more than any other, and is thus more liable to be-
come a permanent substitute for religion with the higher sort of -
characters, yet surely, by exercising the habits of abstraction and
reﬂection, it better disciplines the mind for that life which con-
sists in seeking the things that are above while we are yet in the
ﬂesh, than worldly business or pleasure. Inferior pursuits may
sooner weary and disgust, but during their continuance they more
unfit the mind for higher ones ; and the departure of one set of
guests does not leave the soul an empty apartment, swept and
garnished for the reception of others more worthy.

And how should literature indispose men toward Catholzc
views in religion? The common argument in behalf of those
which are commonly so called rests upon historical testimony and
outward evidence ; why should the profession of literature render
men less able to estimate proof of this nature ? A, pursuit it is
which leads to reﬂection and inquiry, and what can be said for
the soundness of that system to which these are adverse? Some
indeed maintain that our persuasions in such matters depend lit-
tle upon argument ; that none can truly enter into the merits of
the Church system, save those who have been in the habit of
obeying it, and that from their youth'up. Now it is not, of
course, contended that my Father was, during his whole life, in
the best position for appreciating Cathoricity and becoming attach-
ed to it ; but this may be fairly maintained, that he never was
so circumstanced, as to be precluded from drawing nigh to any
truthful system, existing in the world, and in due time coming
under its_habitual sway.

Again in what sense can it be truly said of Coleridge that he

INTRODUCTION. Xlix

disregarded authority? I It would be difﬁcult to instance a thinker
more disposed to weigh the thoughts 'of other thinkers, more ready
to modify his views by consideration 'of their’s or the grounds on
which they rest. Can those who bring the Charge against him
substantiate of it more than this, that he had not their convictions
respecting the authority attributable to a certain set of writers of
a certain age? And does it not appear that this theory of the
consentient teaching of the Fathers and its “practical infalli—
bility ” involves the depreciation of authority, at least in one very
important sense? He who binds. himself by it, strictly, must
needs held human intelligence to be of little avail in the determi-
nation of religious questions, since it is the leading principle of
this theory of faith, that our belief has been ﬁxed by an Outward
revelation,—-the commentary of tradition upon Scripture,—and
that we are not to look upon the reason and conscience of man,

interpreted by the understanding, as the everlasting organ of the '

Spirit of Truth? The weakest intellect can receive doctrine im-
plicitly as well as the strongest, and to' hand over that which
has been already settled and deﬁned requires no great depth or
subtlety of intellect. If the weightiest matters on which the
thoughts of man can be employed are already so determined by
an outward oracle, that all judgment upon them is precluded, and
the highest faculties of the human mind have no concern in estab-
lishing or conﬁrming their truth, authority, as the weight which
the opinion of the good and wise carries along with it, in regard
to the most important questions, is superseded and set aside. And
_ the fact is, I believe, that professors of this sort of Catholicity,
Whether for good or for bad, whether from narrowness or from
exaltedness, are by no means remarkable for a spirit of respect
toward highly endowed men, or for entering into the merits of a
large proportion of those who have conciliated the esteem and
gratitude of earnest and thoughtful persons; None are burning
and shining lights for them except such as exclusively ir1adiate
their own sphere (which 1s none of the widest) , and their_1adi-
' ance appears the stronger to their eyes because they see nothing
but darkness elsewhere. Let it be clearly understood that I here
refer to that antiquarian theory, according to which every doc-
trine'bearing upon religion, held by the Fathers, even though the
matter of the doct7ine be mthe; scientiﬁc and metaphyszcal than
' directly/I lsipiritutstl and practical, —as for instance the doctrine of
V6.1 C

l

'1."
t.

1 INTRODUCTION.

free wil],——constitutes Catholic consent, is the voice of the Holy
Catholic Church, and therefore the voice of its heavenly Head ;
that the early Christian writers, where they agree, are to be con-
sidered practically infallible, on account of their external position
in reference to the Apostles; that succeeding writers are of no
authority, except so far as they deliver what is agreeable to
“Catholic doctrine,” so understood, and in so far as they differ
from it are at once to be considered unsound and unworthy of
attention. If such a theory is not, as I imagine, maintained by
a certain class of High Churchmen, I shall be very glad to ﬁnd
that it is only a shadow: though in this case I should be more
than ever perplexed to understand what it is that the Catholic
and orthodox so much disapprove in the opinion of my Father on
the subject in question ; or why he should be accused of disre-
garding authority, because, though he thought the consentient
‘ teaching of the early Christian writers worthy of deep considera-
tion, he did not hold it to be absolutely conclusive upon theologi-
cal questions, or certainly the voice of God. Something very
different was, to his mind, implied in the promise of Christ to his
Church; for without His presence in any special sense, as the
life-giving Light, a fully developed system of doctrine, capable of
being received implicitly, might have been transmitted from age
to age. He saw the fulﬁlment of it, partly at least, in the powei
given to individual minds to be what the prophets were of old,
by whom the Holy Ghost spake, religious instructors of their gen-
erationﬁ“
Literature, liberally pursued, has no other bearing on a man’s
3 :religious opinions than as it leaves him more at liberty to form
{lthem for himself than any other. Looking at the matter in
another point of viewI readily admit, that, so far as it is the
want of any regular profession at all, it may be in some degree
injurious to the man, and consequently to the thinkerf But if

* I ﬁnd the same argument in Dr. Arnold‘s Fragment on the Church. He
words it thus : “The promise of the Spirit of Truth to abide forever with
his Church, implies surely that clearer views of truth should be continually
vouchsafed to us; and if the work were indeed fully complete when the
Apostles entered into their rest, what need was there for the Spirit of Wis.
dom, as well as of Love, to be ever present even unto the end of the
World 3”

1- After speaking in warm eulogy, according to his wont, of S. T. C. Dr.
Arnold says, “ But yet there are marks enough that his mind was a little

IN PRODUCTION. li

a regular calling tends to steady the mind, restraining it from
too tentative a direction of thought, and what may prove to be a
vain activity, it tends perhaps in an equal degree to ﬁx and pet-
rify the spirit, of which I beleive abundant evidence may be found
in the writings of professional men. Perhaps there is no ﬁxed
occupation which does not in some measure tend to disturb the
balance of the soul ; the want of one permits a man to commune
with human nature more variously and freely than is possible for
those to whom a stated routine presents persons and things with
a certain uniformity of aspect; it is not more experience that
gives knowledge, but a diversiﬁed experience, and the power of
beholding the diversity it contains through the absence of a par-
ticular bias and leisure for contemplation. So far, therefore, as
it presents facilities for the acquirement of the philosophic mind,
even the want of a regular calling may in some degree facilitate
the acquirement of truthful views in religion. “It is scarcely
possible,” said my Father himself, addressing Mr. Frere, “to con-
ceive an individual less under the inﬂuence of the ordinary dis-
turbing forces of the judgment than your poor friend; or from
situation, pursuits, and habits of thinking, from age, state of
health, and temperament, less likely to be drawn out of his course
by the under-currents of hope or fear, of expectation or wish. But
least of all by predilection for any particular sect or party ; for
wherever I look, in religion or in politics, I seem to see a world
of power and talent wasted on the support of half truths, too often
the most mischievous because least suspected of errors.”*

It was the natural consequence of his having no predilection
for any sect or party that parties and party organs have either
neglected or striven against him ; they were indeed his natural
opponents, as they must ever be of any man, whose vocation it is
to examine the truth of modes of thought in general, while an
assumption of the truth of certain modes of thought is the
ground of their existence as parties, and the band that keeps
them together. It has been observed by Mr. Newman, in con-
demnation of “the avowed disdain of party religion. ;” that

diseased by the want of a profession, and the consequent unsteadiness of his
mind and purposes: it always seems to me, that the very power of contem
plation becomes impaired or diverted, when" it is made the main employ
m'ent of life.” See Arnold’s Life and Correspondence. vol. ii. p. 57.

*9 Church and State. Advertisement, VI. pp. 24, 25.

Iii INTRODUCTION.

“ Christ undeniably made a party the vehicle of his doctrine, and
did not cast it at random on the world, as men would now have
it ;”"‘"‘ and undeniable it surely is, that there is nothing radically
wrong in the union of members for the support or propagation of
truth. But then, from the weakness of human hearts and falli-
bility of human understandings it comes to pass, that while party
union is right in the abstract, parties are generally more or less
wrong, both in principle and conduct, and do more or less depart
from truth in their resolution to maintain some particular portion
or representation of it. The party that has our Lord at its head
and ﬁghts for Him and Him only is one with the Church of
Christ, considered as still militant; but this host, like the ﬁery
one that surrounded Elisha, is invisible. The party which
Christ instituted was not invisible, but it diﬂers essentially from
all parties within the precincts of Christendom for this very
reason, that it was undeniably instituted by Him, and that they
who composed it had to defend the moral law in its depth and
purity, theism itself in its depth and purity—(the acknowledg-
ment of God as a Spirit, one and personal, with the relations to
each other of the Creator and the creature—a faint distorted
shadow of which was alone preserved by Polytheists)—against a
popular religion, which, though pious and spiritual in comparison
with utter want of faith in the things that are above, was the
very world and the fleshj as opposed to Christianity. Thus
they were striving for the life and soul which animates the re-
ligion of Christ, whereas Iwould fain believe, that the contentions

*5 Sermons preached beforethe University of Oxford. Serm. viii. p. 165.

+ Heathenism in Scripture is represented as one with sensuality, pro-
faneness and disregard of the life to come ; to work the will of the Gentiles
was to run to every kind of evil excess; and almost the same, I suppose,
may be said of the monstrous heresies, against which the Apostles and their
successors spoke in terms of unqualiﬁed reprobation. In his Fragment on
the Church, Dr. Arnold remarks, that “the heresies condemned by the
Apostles were not mere erroneous opinions on some theoretical truth, but
absolute perversions of Christian holiness ; that they were not so much false
as wicked. And further, where there was a false opinion in the heresy, it
was of so monstrous a character, and so directly connected with proﬂigacy
of life. that it admits of no comparison with the so-called heresies of later
ages,” pp. 89, 90. Does it appear that our Lord ever rebuked either unbe-
lief or misbelief. except as one and the same with worldliness and wicked-
ness, or at least, as in the case of Thomas, subjection of the mind to the
ﬂesh?

‘ INTRODUCTION. _ liii

among parties of Christians are less for this life and soul than for
the forms in which they severally hold that it is most ﬁtly clothed,
and with which they identify it.’* And this is no unworthy sub-
ject of contention, because the life and spirit are best preserved
and most fully expressed in the truest forms,—a correct and dis-
tinct intellectual system is the best preservative of the essential
portion of faith ; but yet, because they are forms, the strife con-
cerning them will bo more apt to degenerate into an unholy war-
fare than a struggle pro art's et focis,—for the very ideas of a
spiritual religion and for a pure and pregnant morality, the tes-
timony to which every soul may ﬁnd at home, if it looks deep
into its own retirements.

In reference to the present subject, however, I need only ob-
serve that party compact operates chieﬂy for the preserving and
extending of truth, considered as already established, while the
discovery or development of it is only to be achieved by indi-
vidual efforts ;'it even tends to retard such progress in the begin-
ning, because, as essentially conservative, it ventures upon no ex-
periments, but is bound to consider every departure from that
form of teaching, which has hitherto served to convey and pre-
serve spiritual truth, as endangering its purity and stability ; and

*6 To take the extreme case, Soeinianism, I have long thought that a man
may, that many a man does, athwart the negative lines of this creed, which
in some cases appear to be quite negative in operation, behold in heart and
spirit every deep truth on which Christians around them are dwelling,
every truth meet to bring forth the fruit of good living, and to ﬁt the soul
for a higher life than the present. I hope and believe that such persons do
practically embrace the divinity of Christ, because they worship, serve and
obey Him,—they address their religious thoughts to Him habitually—they
attribute to Him that which is properly divine, the work of Creation and
Redemption, although they have wrong conceptions of the method of this
work. On the other hand I should suppose that many Romanists must
practically impute divinity to the blessed Mother of Jesus, from the ad-
dresses which they make to her, and the extent to which they seem to de-
vote their religious minds to her. At best they appear to make her one
with'our Saviour, and not merely with the man Christ Jesus but with the
Eternal Son of the Father, extending His attributes to her, and making of
the twain two persons and one God. How awfully dangerous would it be to
address Christ as the Mediator betwixt God and man if he were not himself
, both God and Man l It will not, I trust, be supposed that I am here instituting
any general comparison between Socinianism and Romanism with a prefer-
ence of the former. I am merely considering what either may possiotg/ be
to the heart and mind of the professor.

liv , INTRODUCTION.

thus it may easily happen that, although religious doctrine may
and must be diffused and maintained by men acting in concert,
yet they who are laboring to advance the truth, to reform and
expand the stock of divine knowledge, may be in continual antag-
onism and collision with those who are intent only on keeping it
Q from going back. My F ather’s vocation, if he had any in this
._l, province, was to defend the Holy Faith by developing it, and
itshowing its accordance and identity with ideas of reason ; he has
described himself as one who “ feels the want, the necessity of re-
ligious support ; who can not afford to lose any the smallest but-
tress; who not only loves Truth even for itself, and when it re.-
veals itself aloof from all interest, but who loves it with an in-
describable awe” which causes him to—“ creep toward the
light, even though it draw him away from the more nourishing
warmth.” “Yea, I should do so,” he adds, “even if the light
had made its way through a rent in the wall of the Temple.”*
But the gravest allegation contained in the passage I have
quoted, is, that Mr. Coleridge was once engaged in “ a course of
heretical and schismatical teaching :”—a statement which seems
to imply, that he had been at one time pledged to teach a par
ticular set of doctrines, as a man is pledged upon undertaking
the charge of a spiritual congregation, who expect that he shall
conﬁne himself within certain lines in his teaching, and will listen
to him no longer than he keeps faith with them on that point.
In such a case as this, supposing the doctrines false, to be en-
gaged in a course of teaching them, must tend to confirm the
man’s mind in alienation from truth ; because it weds him to the
false doctrines, not by inward love and preference only, but by an
outward and formal union. That Mr. Coleridge was never bound
to Heresy and Schism by any such bonds as these might be
gathered from the present work alone, and would be fully mani-
fest to any one who considered the matter with care. Soon after
leaving Cambridge he delivered lectures on revealed religion, in
which he set forth such views as he entertained at the time:
after this he preached occasionally at Bath, at Taunton, and as
an “ hireless volunteer” in most of the great towns which he
passed through on a tour from Bristol to Shefﬁeld. Once indeed
he entertained thoughts of taking upon him the charge of an

 

 

* It is best to peruse a fuller exposition of this sentiment in the passage
itself, which occurs in the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. Letter I. V

INTRODUCTION. lV

Umtarian congregation ; but after preaching one sermon, in which,
from the account of an ear-witness, there seems to have been
more of poetry and the general principles of religion than of vul-
gar heresy and schism, he abandoned the prospect that had been
held out to him. Not that the offer, by which he was suddenly
called away from it, tended to bias his opinions in an opposite
direction ; it left them free as air, operating solely to detach him
from all outward connection with religious bodies, and exempt
him from the least temptation to place himself in binding rela-
tions with them, or any sort of dependence upon them. To this
indeed it is unlikely he would ever have submitted; for, as he
mentioned to an acquaintance at the time, had he preached a
second sermon at Shrewsbury, it would have been such an one
as must “ effectually have disqualiﬁed him for the object in view ;”
so little was he disposed to keep the bounds of doctrine marked
out by any sect, or to let the body of his opinions live and grow
under external form and pressure. It is extravagant to suppose
that my Father was impaired for life in the power of religious dis-
ce1nment by a cou1se of teaching, which taught himself to per-
ceive the deﬁciencies and err01s of the creed in which he had‘i’
sought refuge , that he was perverted by the very process whichl
his mind went th1ough in orde1 to arrive at a more explicit
knowledge of the truth. That which to the passive and inert
may be a tainting experience, to minds like his, full of activity
and resistency, is but a strengthening experiment: he doubted
and denied in order to believe earnestly and intelligently. His V
Unitarianism was purely negative ; not a satisfaction in the pos-
itive formal divinity of the Unitarians, but what remained with
him to the last, a revulsion from certain explanations of the
Atonement commonly received as orthodox, together with that
insight which he believed himself afterwards to have attained
into the whole scheme of Redemption, so far as it can be seen
into by man, and its deep and perfect harmony with the structure
of the human mind as it it is revealed to the eye of Philosophy.*"
Against those, on the one hand, who describe him as “ intel-
lectually bold but educationally timid,”1L those on the other who

*5 See his own remarks on this subject in the middle of the tenth chapter
of the Biographia.

f Quoted from a volume of poetical selections and criticisms by Leigh
Hunt. entitled “ Imagination and Fancy.” Having referred to this agree

l‘7i INTRODUCTION.

suppose him to have been indebted to his early education for all
that is consonant with the true faith and fear of the Lord in his
religious creed, and lay to the account of after circumstances all
that they disapprove in it, I must ﬁrmly maintain, that what
they are so anxious, from the way in which their own spirit has
been moulded, to cast upon outward things in the formation of
his opinions, was, in the main, the result and product of his own
intellect and will. When the years of childhood were past, he
left behind him the Eden, as some consider it, of implicit faith :
the world of belief was all before him where to choose, and for a
time he sojourned with the Unitarians, beholding in them only
the firm and honest rejectors of a creed, which, as yet, he could
not receive explicitly. When he had Once entered their ranks no
circumstances existed to prevent him from remaining a Psilan-
thropist and becoming more and more conﬁrmed in opposition to
the sum of tenets and opinions commonly called Catholic ; many
men so situated, even if they had been nurtured as he was in the
bosom of the Church, would either have abode ﬁnally within
1 those precincts or left them only to proceed in an opposite direc-
\Ition to that which he took, and combined German metaphysics
Vtwith an atheistic Pantheism, instead of bringing them to the ser-
Ejvice of revealed religion. On the other hand, when he had quit-
‘ted the Unitarians, what outward inﬂuence was there to prevent
him from adopting High Church doctrine, as it is taught either
by Anglican or by Romish divines? Some men have passed
from a deeper and earlier training in “ heresy and schism” than
his to that Church theory which exhibits an earthly and visible
s rstem and proclaims it the shrine of a mystic and heavenly one,
not simply as God’s instrument, whereby the spirit is awakened
in man’s heart and mind by communion with Him, but as being
in itself, independently of all such effects and prior to them, a
receptacle of the divine Spirit ; and calls upon men to receive it

able book I can not refrain from expressing my belief that, had the author
gone as deep into Coleridge’s theosophy as into his poetry, or made himself
as well acquainted with his religious writings as with his poems, he could
never have said that “nine tenths of his theology would apply equally to
their own creeds in the mouths of a Brahmin or a Mussulman.” On the
contrary, nothing more characterizes the religious conceptions of Coleridge
than the ever-present aim and endeavor to show that Christianity is reli-
gion itself, religion in its deepest, highest and fullest expression, the very
ground as well as the summit of divine truth.

INTRODUCTION. lvii

as thus divine not principally on internal evidence, the harmony
of the whole scheme within itself, attested by its proper moral
and spiritual effects, but on an outward historic proof, reaching
no higher than probability, yet assumed to be that which only
the unspiritual mind can reject.

That he did neither the one nor the other, that he came to
consider the notions of the Church entertained by ordinary Prot-
estants inadequate and unspiritual, without adopting the Remish
doctrines respecting the clergy and the nature of their interven-
tion betwixt God and man in the mode of salvation ; that he ex-
alted the spirituality of sacraments without admitting the primi-
tive materialism, by many styled Catholic, that he saw the very
mind of St. Paul, in the teaching of Luther on the Law and J us
tiﬁcation by Faith, yet was open-eyed to the misuse of that
teaching and the practical falsities deduced out of it by modern
Methodists—all this and much more in his system of religious
opinion, distinguishing it equally from over-sensualized, and from
“ minimiﬁdian” Christianity, ought not to be traced to peculiar
circumstances and to accident as its principal cause. Doubtless
it was a blessing to “ the Christian philosopher” that he had a
good Christian for his father—that he had in him the pattern of
“an Israelite without guile.” But of his Churchmanship I be-
lieve that he was himself almost wholly the Father; and I verily
think, that even if he had been born in the Church of Rome, or
in the bosom of some Protestant sect, he would have burst all
bonds asunder, have mastered the philosophy of his age, and ar-
rived at convictions substantially the same as those which now
appear on the face of his writings.

There are some, perhaps, among the intelligent readers of
Coleridge, who take a different View of the character of his opin-
ions from that which I have expressed : who believe that, during
his latter years, he became in the main what High Churchmen
consider Catholic and orthodox, whilst any notions he still held
of a different character were anomalies, remnants of his early
creed, which would have been worked out of his mind had his
years been prolonged. , There are others amongst the proselytes
to the Oxford theology, who see nothing more in his teaching
than a stunted Anglo-catholicism; some of these aver that, in
the beginning of their course they were conducted for a little way
by the writings of Mr. Coleridge; that he ﬁrst led them out of

0*

lviii INTRODUCTION.

the dry land of negative Protestantism; but that now, by help
of newer guides, they have advanced far beyond him, and can
look down on his lower station from a commanding eminence.
They view the Aids to Reﬂection as a half-way house to Anglo-
catholic orthodoxy, just as others, who have got beyond them, in
a certain direction, consider their Anglo-catholic doctrine a half-
way house to what they consider the true Catholicism,—namely
that of the Church of Rome. My own belief is, that such a view
of'my Father’s theological opinions is radically wrong; that al-'
though an unripe High Church theology is all that some readers
have found or valued in his writings, it is by no means what is
there; and that he who thinks he has gone little way with Cole-
ridge, and then proceeded with Romanizing teachers further still,
has never gone along with Coleridge at all, or entered deeply into
any of his expositions of Christian doctrine ; though there may be
111 many of them a tone and a spirit with which he has sympa-
thized, and an emphatic condemnation of certain views of religion,
which has gratiﬁed his feelings. But, though I conceive my Fa~
ther’s religious system, considered as to its intellectual form, to be
different throughout from that of Anglo or Roman Catholic, as
commonly expounded, that it coincided in substance with that
which these parties both agree to consider Catholic doctrine, I
entirely believe. If they are steering Northward, his course is
to the North as much as theirs, but while they seek it by the
West he reaches it by an Easterly voyage ; I mean that he is as
consistently and regularly opposed to them in his Tatianale of
doctrine as consentient with them respecting the great objects of
faith, viewed in their essence ; at least in his own opinion, though
not in theirs; for he was accustomed to make a distinction be-
tween religions ideas and the intellectual notions with which
they have been connected, or the dogmas framed in relation to
them, to which they appear strangers. His Christian divinity
agreed more with “ Catholicism” than with the doctrines of any
sect, since according to his judgment and feelings that contains,
whether in a right or wrong form, the‘spiritual ideas in which
the true substance of Christianity consists, more completely : on
some points it coincided with the “ Catholicism” of Rome rather
than with that of Anglicans ; he recognized for instance the idea
of the immanence of spiritual power and light in the Church, in.
dependently of the authority of a revelation completed in past

INTRODUCTION lix

ages, opposed as he was to the application of thait“idea.made by
Papists. His religious system, according to his own view of it,
might be described as exhibiting the universal ideas of Christi-
anity, not those which have been consciously recognized always,
everywhere, and by all, but those which the reason and spiritual
sense of all men, when sufficiently developed, ‘bear witness to, ex-
plained according to a modern philosophy, which purports to be
no mere new thinking, but inclusively, all the thought that has
been and now is in the world. Such was the aim and design of
his doctrine. How far he made it good is not to be determined
here.*

They who differ from me on this question may have gone
deeper into my Father’s mind than myself. Iwill only say in
support of my own impressions, that they are derived from a
general survey of his writings, late and early, such as few beside
myself can have taken, and that I came to the study of them
with no interest but the common interest in truth, which all man-
kind possess, to bias my interpretation. Indeed I can conceive of \‘I,

l

no influence calculated to affect my judgment, except the natura l ;
wish, in my mind sufficiently strong, to find my Father’s opinio .
as near as may be to established orthodoxy,—as little as possible/ 1,
out of harmony with the notions and feelings of the great body ,
of pious and reﬂective persons in his own native land. To me,
with this sole biason my mind, it is manifest, that his system of /
belief, intellectually considered, differs materially from “ Catholic” iv
doctrine as commonly understood, and that this difference during
the latter years of his meditative life, instead of being shaded ofl,

* Since the chief part of this preface was written I have become ac-
quainted with Archdeacon Hare’s JlIz'ssz'on of the Comforter, which I dare to
pronounce a most valuable work, meaning that I ﬁnd it so, without the pre- 7
sumption, which in me would be great indeed, of pretending to enter fully
into its merits. I have had the satisfaction of meeting with remarks upon
my Father in the preface and in the notes of which the second volume con-
sists, conﬁrmatory of some which I have ventured to make myself. Even
the dedication coincides with the views given above, for it is this : “ To the
honored memory of S. T. Coleridge, the Christian philosopher, who through
dark and winding paths of speculation was led to the light, in order that
others by his guidance might reach that light, without passing through the
darkness, these Sermons on the “rOI'k of the Spirit are dedicated, with
deep thankfulness and reverence, by one of the many pupils, whom his
writings have helped to discern the sacred concord and unity of human and
divine truth.”

I) , IN TROD UCTION.

became more deﬁnite and boldly developed. How should it have
been otherwise, unless he had abandoned that modern philosophy,
which he had adopted on the deepest and fullest deliberation;
and how, without such abandonment, could he have embraced a
doctrinal system based on a philosophy fundamentally different?
How could he who believed that “ a desire to bottom all our con-
victions on grounds of right reason is inseparable from the charac-.
ter of a Christian,” acquiesce in a system, which suppresses the
exercise of the individual reason and judgment in the determina-
tion of faith, as to its content ; would have the whole matter, for
the mass of mankind, decided by feeling and habit apart from
conscious thought; and bids the soul take refuge in a home of
Christian Walk, in which its higher faculties are not at home,
but reside like slaves and aliens in the land of a conqueror ? To
his latest hour, though ever dwelling with full faith on the doc-
trines of Redemption and original sin, in what he considered the
deepest and most real sense attainable by man, he yet, to his
latest hour, put from him some of the so-ealled orthodox notions
and modes of explaining those doctrines. My Father’s whole
view of what theologians term grace—~the internal spiritual rela-
tions of God with man, his conception of its nature in a theoreti-
cal point of view, differs from that which most “ Catholics” hold
themselves bound to receive unaltered from the primitive and
medizeval Christian writers ; for in my Father’s belief, the
teachers of those days knew not what spirit was, or what it was
not, metaphysically considered ; in no wise therefore could he re-
ceive their explanations of the spiritual as sound divinity, readily
as he might admit that many of them had such insight into the
Christian scheme as zeal ' the ardor of a new love secure to
the student of Holy Writ. , Religion must have some intellectual
form; must be viewed through the medium of intellect ; and if
the medium is clouded the object is necessarily obscured The
great aim and undertaking of modern mental philosophy is to
clarify this inward eye, rather than to enlarge its sphere of vision,
except so far as the one involves the other—to show what spir-
itual things are not, and thus to remove the obstructions which
prevent men from seeing, as mortals may see, what they are.
Those who maintain certain doctrines, or rather metaphysical
views of doctrine, and seek to prove them Scriptural, simply be-
cause they were doctrines of early Christian writers, ought to look

INTRODUCTION. lXi

in the face the plain fact that some of the most influential of
those early writers were materialists,—not as holding the soul to
be the mere result of bodily organization, but as holding the soul
itself to be material ;—ought gravely to cziisider, whether it is
reasonable to reject the philosophy of a certain class of divines,
and yet cling “ limpet-like” to their forms of thought on religious
questions, forms obviously founded upon, and conformed to, that
philosophy. They believed the soul to be 1naterial,-—corporeal.
Of this assertion, the truth of which is well known to men who
have examined into the history of metaphysical and psychological
opinion,* I can not give detailed proofs in this place; but in
passing I refer the reader to Tertullian De Resmv'. Cami. cap.
xvii. and De Anima, cap. ix. ; to Irenaeus, Contra ereses,
Lib. ii. cap. xix. 6, and to the preface of the learned Benedictine
to the latter, p. 161, Artie. XI. De Animaruni natara et slam
post mortem. What ! are we to be governed in religious meta-
physique and the rationale of belief by men who thought that
the soul was poured into the body and there thickened like jelly
in a mould ?-—that the inner man took the form of the outer,
having eyes and ears and all the other members, like unto the
body, only of ﬁner stuff ?-—its corpaleney being consolidated by
densation and its eﬁigy formed by expression? This was the
notion of Cyprian’s master, the acute Tertullian, and that of
Irenaeus was like unto it. He compares the soul to water frozen
in a vessel, which takes the form of the vessel in which it freezesj
evidently supposing, with Tertullian, that the ﬁrm substantial
body moulded the ﬂuent and aerial souli—that organization was
the organizer. It appears that in those days the i‘ulgm' held the
soul to be incorporeal,§ according to the views of Plato and other

9* Mr. Scott, in his impressive Lectures on the evolution of Philosophy
out of Religion, maintained the materialism of the early Christian writers.

1' Contra ereses. Lib. ii. cap. xix. 6.

1: A primordio enim in Adam conereta et conﬁgurata corpori anima, ut
totius substantiae, ita et conditionis istius semen eﬂieit. Tertull. De .Anima.
Cap. ix. ad ﬁnem.

§ Tertull. De Res. Car. Cap- xvii. in initia—aliter anima non capiat
passionem tormenti sen refrigerii, utpote incorporalis: hoe enim vulgm
existimat. N 0s autem animam corporalem et hic proﬁtemur et in suo volu-
mine probamus, &c. On this pass. are Dr. Pusey observes in a note, that it
attests “the immateriality of the soul” to have been “ the general belief.”
I think it attests it to have been the belief of the common people, but not
that it was the prevailing opinion with Christian divines of that age.

[xii INTRODUCTION.

stupid philosophers, combated in the treatise De Anima; but
that orthodox Christian divines looked upon that as an impious
unscriptural opinion. Justin Martyr argues against Platonic no-
tions of the soul in his Dialogue with Trypho.* As for the vul-
gar, they have ever been in the habit of calling the soul incor-
poreal, yet reasoning and thinking about it, as if it had the prop-
erties of body. The common conception of a ghost accords
exactly with Tertullian’s description of the soul—a lucid aerial
image of the outward man. Thus did these good Fathers change
soul into body, and condense spirit into matter ; thus did they re-
verse the order of nature, contradict the wisdom of ages, and even
run counter to the instinctive belief of mankind, in recoiling from
Gnosticism; thus deeply did they enter into the sense of St.
Paul’s high sayings about the heavenly body and the utter in-
compatibility of ﬂesh and blood with the Kingdom of Heaven!
As they conceived the soul to be material, so they may very
naturally have conceived it capable of receiving and retaining the
Spirit, as a material vessel may receive and retain a liquid or any
other substance ; and, in their conception, within the soul may
no more have implied any affection of the soul itself, than within
the box or basin implies any change in the stone or metal of
which the receptacle was made. Indeed this sensuous way of
conceiving spiritual subjects is apparent in some of the passages
from old writers that are appealed to in support of what Arch-
deacon Hare happily calls, “baptismal transubstantiation ;” as,
for instance, one cited in the Tract for the Times called, by a
misnomer, asI think, Scriptural views of Holy Baptismﬁ the

* Ven. 1747, pp. 106 and 111. J ust-in Martyr and Tatian denied the
)riginal immortality of the soul on religious grounds, and the former afﬁrms
that it is not simple, but consists of many parts, p. 271.

1' “If the sun being without, and ﬁre by being near or at alittle distance
from bodies, warmeth our bodies, what must we say of the Divine Spirit,
which is indeed the most vehement ﬁre, kindling the inner man, although
it dwell not within but be without ? It is possible then, in that all things
are possible to God, that one may be warmed, although that which warmeth
him be not in himself.” From Ammonius. Scriptural Views, p. 264, 4th
edit. This writer evidently supposes the proper Indwelling to be distinct
from inﬂuence. My Father, in his MS. remains, declares against the opinion
of those who make “the indwelling of the Spirit an occupation of a place,
by a vulgar equivoque of the word within, inward, &c.” “For example,”
says he, “a bottle of water let down into the sea—The water contained and
the surrounding water are both alike in fact outward or without the glass,

INTRODUCTION. lxiii

author whereof is so fervent, so scriptural in spirit and intention,
that he almost turns all he touches into Scripture, as Midas
turned all he touched into gold. How the gold looked when
Midas was away I know not ; but to me Dr. Pusey’s Scriptural-
views, apart from his persuasive personal presence, which ever
pervades his discourses and constitutes their great effect upon the
heart,—seem but brass beside the pure gold of Holy Writ; his
alien piety gilds and hides them. The more we polish brass the/y
more brassy it appears; and so, these views only seem to my
mind the more discrepant from Holy Writ, the more clearly and
learnedly they are set forth. In Scripture faith is required as the
condition of all spiritual inﬂuence for purely spiritual and moral
effects, and that primary regeneration, which precedes a moral
one in time, and is not necessarily the ground of a change of
heart and life, was never derived from the Word of God, but has
been put into it by a series of inferences, and is supported princi-
pally by an implicit reliance on the general enlightenment of the
early Christian writers. The doctrine may not be directly inju-
rious to morality, since it allows actual faith to be a necessary in-
strument in all moral renovation; but the indirect practical con-
sequences of insisting upon shadows as if they were realities, and
requiring men to accept as a religious verity of prime importance
a senseless dogma, the offspring of false metaphysics, must be ad-
verse to the interests of religion. Such dogmatism has a bad
effect on the habits of thought by weakening the love and percep
tion of truth, and it is also injurious by producing disunion and
mutual distrust among Christians.

The subtlest matter has all the properties of matter as much
as the grossest. Let us see how this notion, that the soul con-
sists of subtle matter, affects the form of doctrine, by trying it on
that of baptism. The doctrine insisted on as primitive by a
large party in the Church, nay set forth as the very criterion
stantz's 'vel cadentz's Ecclesice Anglicance, by some of them, is
this, that, in the moment of baptism, the soul receives the Holy ‘
Spirit within it; that the Holy Spirit remains within the soul,

but the antithetie relation of the former to the latter is expressed by the
preposition in or within : and this improper, sensuous, merely relative sense
of within, indwelling, &c. it is alas! but too plain that many of our theo-
logical Routim‘ers apply, though Without perhaps any distinct consciousness
of their Thought, to spiritual Presence !"

lxrv INTRODUCTION.

even though the baptized, as soon as he becomes capable of moral
acts, proves faithless and wicked, until it is expelled forever by a
large but indeﬁnite amount of wickedness, entitled utter repro-
bacy. How intolerable this doctrine is in its moral and spiritua
aspect, how it evacuates the Scriptural phrase, Christ in 713, of
its emphatic meaning, it is useless to urge upon those, who be-
lieve it to have been taught by the Apostles. I now only allege
that no man originally could have framed such a conception as
this, who had our modern conceptions of spirit, or had considered
what is the idea involved in the words, presence of the Ifoly
Spirit to our spirit. When the doctrine is unfolded and pre-
sented to the masters and doctors of it, they ﬂy off to the notion
of an inward potential righteousness. But this mere capability
of being saved and sanctiﬁed, we have from our birth, nor can it
be increased, because it is essentially, extra gradzmz,—not a
thing of degrees. Our capability of being spiritualized by divine
. grace is unlimited. Who are they that explain away the bap-
tismal gift into a shadow ?”*

My Father, in his latter years, looked upon baptism as a formal
and public reception into a state of spiritual opportunities (at
least so I understand him), which is equivalent, I suppose, to the
doctrine of some of our divines, VVaterland among others, that it
is a consignment of grace to the soul. It is conceivable that in
consequence of such consignment, the soul, by the will of God,
may have more outward means of receiving Spiritual inﬂuence
than it would otherwise have had ; if prayer can affect the
course and complex of events in favor of those who are not pray-
ing, so may the rite of baptism inﬂuence it in favor of the bap
tized, though he be passive in baptism. The objection to the
Antiquitarian doctrine is not that it implies a mystery, not that
it implies the reception of a spiritual opportunity independently
of the will of the receiver, but that, as it is commonly stated, it
contradicts the laws of the human understanding, and either af-
ﬁrms what can not be true,—What brings confusion into our
moral and spiritual ideas,——or else converts the doctrine into an
effectual vapor—“ a potentiality in a potentiality or a chalking
of chalk to make white white.” My Father, as I understand

* See remarks on this subject in the Mission of the Comforter, pp. 476—7

INTRODUCTION. lxv

him, continued to deny that the gift of baptism is a spiritual re-
creation preceding actual faith or any moral eapability,—an in-
troduction of the spirit into the soul, which it passively undergoes
as the dead cage receives the living bird, or a lodgment of the
Spirit within it irrespectively of its own moral state; a total
change wrought all in a moment conferring upon it no positive
moral melioration but only a power unto righteousness,——a capa-
bility 'of beng renewed by grace in addition to that which inheres
in man from the ﬁrst ; or on the other hand a partial and, incip-
ient spiritual change ; since regeneration ea: 722' tcmzini is some-
thing total and general; to be born again, 7'e-natus, implies a
new nature ; is so described in Scripture and was so understood
in the early Church. He looked upon it as an external grant,
called regeneration in virtue of that which it is its object to pro-
mote and secure, a grant which comes into effect gradually, as
the will yields to the pressure of the Spirit from without, but
which may be made of none effect by the will’s resistance. Such
a view of the effect of baptism is well expressed by George Her-
bert in these lines—

Two fallacies are current on the subject of momentary baptismal tran
substantiation. First—men say, that as we are passive in our original ere-
ation, so we are passive in our spiritual re-creation. The answer may be
given from the Angelieal Doctor, who teaches that we are not passive in
our original creation; and indeed it needs not the wisdom of an angel to
see, that neither man nor any other animal can become alive without a cor-
responsive act on his part—a sub-co-operation. If we throw a stone into
the still unmoving pool, the waters leap up: the pool has not stirred itself,
but it co-operates in the production of motion. The second commonplace
fallacy is this :—as a seed is set in the ground and remains inert and latent
for a time, then germinates, shoots up and bears fruit, so grace may be
poured into the soul of a child incapable of moral acts, may remain latent
for a time, then, when reason and the moral sense have come into play, may
produce good thoughts and good works, the fruit of the Spirit. The objec-
tion to this is that a spiritual being is not in a spiritual being as a material
thing is in a material thing; it is in it or present to it only inasmuch as it
acts upon it. It is the heart itself which, by the power of the Spirit, must
bear the fruit of virtue, not a something lodged within it, as the'seed in the
ground. Spiritual effects in the soul may exist unpereeived by men,—may
not produce outward works of holiness till long after they have been pro-
duced; but when the deeds are evil, as they are in many who were baptized
in infancy, we may fairly say that the effects were not produced—in other
words, that the person whovshows such an unspiritual mind, was not spirit-
ually regenerated in baptism.

lxvi INTRODUCTION.

‘ O blessed streams ! either ye do prevent
And stop our sins from growing thick and Wide,
Or else give tears to drown them as they grow-”

and is explained by himself in this passage from some of his
manuscript remains:

“ I see the necessity of greatly expanding and clearing up the
chapter on Baptism in the Aids to Reflection, and of proving the
substantial accordance of my scheme with that of our Church
I still say, that an act of the Spirit in time, as that it might be
asserted, (at the moment of the uttering of the words, I baptize
thee in the name, &c.—7zow the Spirit begins to act—is false in
Philosophy and contrary to Scripture, and that our Church service
needs no such hypothesis. Further, I still say, that the commu-
nication ofthe Spirit as of a power or principle not yet possessed,
to an unconscious agent by human ministry, is without precedent
in Scripture, and that there is no Scripture warrant for the doc-
trine—and that the nature of the [Joly Spirit communicated by
the Apostles by laying on of hands is a very difficult question—-
and that the reasons for supposing it to be certain miraculous
gifts of the Spirit peculiar to the ﬁrst age of Christianity and
during the formation of the Church, are neither few nor insig-
niﬁcant.

“Observe, I do not deny (God forbid 3) the possibility or the
reality of the inﬂuence of the Spirit on the soul of the infant.
His ﬁrst smile bespeaks a Reason (the Light from the Life of the
Word), as already existent, and where the Word is, there will the
Spirit act. Still less do I think lightly of the Graces which the
child receives as a living Part of the Church, and whatever
ﬂows from the Communion of Saints, and the "sot 10391701; of the
Spirit.

“The true import is this. The operations of the Spirit are as
little referable to Time as to Space ; but in reference to our prin-
ciples of conduct toward, and judgment concerning, our neighbor,
the Church declares, that before the time of the baptism there is
no authority for asserting, and that since the time there is no
authority for denying, the gift and regenerative presence of the
Holy Spirit, promised, by an especial covenant, to the members
of Christ’s mystical Body—consequently, no just pretence for ex-
pecting or requiring another new Inition or Birth into the state
of Grace.”

INTRODUCTION. lxvii

My Father denied not that the Spirit may inﬂuence the soul
of an infant, but he still refused to separate the presence of the
Holy Spirit from spiritual effects, and these from reason and the
moral being. Those whom he differed from are wont to argue,
not that the infant is capable of moral effects in virtue of its
awakening reason, but that it may be spiritually renovated in its
whole soul before it is morally renewed at all ; to this opinion
he was ever wholly opposed. The new birth, as the change of
the soul itself, is out of time ; viewed phenomenally in its mani-
festations, it takes place, as my Father conceived, gradually, as a
man becomes gradually a new creature, different from what he
was by nature (or, in other words, a good Christian), the new
birth indicating the Spiritual ground, the new creature the effect
and change produced.

Mr. Coleridge’s view of the Eucharist with his view of Sacra-
ments generally has been adopted and explained by his younger
son.* Would that all my labors in explaining our Father’s
views and clearing them from misrepresentations could be so su-
perseded I But my brother’s present avocations are all-eng7'oss-
ing, and more indispensable than the defence of opinions, how-
ever serviceable those may be deemed to the cause of truth. In
connection however with the subject just touched upon, of prim-
itive religious metaphysique, I am desirous, in times like these,
to specify what my Father’s notion of the 7'eal presence was not:
that was not the notion of a real presence in bread and wine.
My Father has been called a Pantheist by the blunderers of the
day, because he believed in the real presence of God throughout
the Creation animate and inanimate ; that He is present to every
blade of grass and clod of the valley, as well as to all things that
breathe and live ; that were He to hide his face, that is, with-
draw his power, the World would vanish into nothing, But the
presence in the Eucharist is a spiritual presence or agency for the
production of spiritual effects. God sustains mere material
things by his power, but is he present to them as the Spirit of
Holiness, the life-giving Word? Can-bread and wine become
holy and spiritual and be nourished to everlasting life? What
do we gain by this strange self-contradictory dogma, except an

* See the Scriptural Character of the English Church, &c., by the Rev.
Derwent Coleridge; M.A., now Principal of St. Mark’s College, Chelsea.
Last six sermons, passim. See also Coleridge’s Remains

lxvﬁi INTRODUCTION.

articulation of air? The sacrament is not for the bread and
wine, but for the soul of the receiver, and if we hope to receive
the Spirit by means of the hallowed elements, have we not all
that the doctrine can give us in the way of spiritual advantage '3
When I have urged this consideration upon a maintainer of the
ancient View, the reply has been, “We must not rationalize——
must not reason (it priori on these matters, but receive faithfully
what the voice of God has declared.” Alas! that men should
thus separate the voice of God from reason and the moral sense,
which God has given us as an inward Holy of Holies, wherein
He may appear to us, if we repair thither meetly prepared,
our souls being washed with pure water .’ Alas! that they
should so absolutely identify it with the voice of early Christian
writers, men zealous and simple-hearted, but nursled for the most
part in Paganism, and all kinds of “sensuous and dark” imagi-
nations on the subject of religion! One of these early writers,
if not more, believed in transubstantiation, that doctrine so con-
demned in our Church as not only irrational, but impious.
Waterland interprets the passage in the ancient Father,* to
which I refer, in his own way, only allowing him to be “inaccu-
rate in superinducing the Logos upon the symbols themselves,
rather than upon the recipients ;”1‘ but I think if we attend, as
the Benedictine editor requires, to the series of the holy Doctor’s
whole argumentation, we can not fail to perceive that the concep-
tion present to his mind was at least nearer to trans than to any
kind of con substantiationl He teaches that the Eucharist con-

9* Irenceus Contra ereses, L. iv. e. 18, p. 251. Ed. Bened. W'aterland’s
Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist, chap. vii. p. 221—et seq.

1- The same Divine, after explaining the holiness of the consecrated sym-
bols to be “a relative holiness,” and declaring himself to be of the opinion
judiciously expressed by Mr. Hooker, that grace is not to be sought in the
sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament, presently adds,
“Not that I conceive there is any absurdity in supposing a peculiar pres
ence of the Holy Ghost to inanimate things, any more than in God’s ap-
pearing in a burning bush.” Surely this is no parallel case. Who imagines
that Jehovah was joined or united with the burning bush, or that the Om-
nipresent Creator was present there as a man is present in a place? The
luminous appearance in the bush and in the pillar of ﬁre and in the Holy of
Holies was a sensuous sign of a supersensuous reality, of the special agency,
favor, and protection of Almighty God to the chosen people. Has this
any thing to do with a spiritual presence in bread and wine?

1 Diss. Pram. in Iren. Lib. Art. xiv. 83-84-85. The Benedictine refers

INTRODUCTION. lxix

sists of two parts, an earthly and a heavenly; I think that by
the earthly he understood not mere bread, but the material body
of Christ ; while by the heavenly he meant Christ’s quickening
Spirit : for he was contending against heretics who denied that
our Lord was one with the Creator, and that the Word of God
had assumed a true corporeal frame of substantial ﬂesh and
blood, and he uses the doctrine of the sacramental mystery as an
illustrative argument against them.* But what becomes of this
argument if the earthly part of the Eucharist is just that which
it appears to be and nothing more ? Waterland’s interpretation
of Irenaeus on that point is, in my opinion, a perfect anachronism;
it imputes to him modern immaterializing views, quite alien from
the general frame of his mind ; and is not an equal forgetfulness
of the state of thought in those times evinced by his saying, that
“the Christians despised the Pagans for imagining that Christ’s
body and blood were supposed to be literally eaten in the Eu-
charist ?”1‘ What the Pagans accused them of, and what they
“rejected with abhorrence,” was probably this, that instead of
bread and wine they placed upon the table real human ﬂesh and
blood, and partook of it under the name of their Lord’s body.
Irenaeus, who understood literally the saying of our Saviour,
I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine till I drink
it new with you in my Father’s kingdom, need scarcely be
supposed to have been more reﬁned than modern Romanists on
the subject of the Eucharist; Just in the same way Waterland
modernizes Tertullian ; just so he reﬁnes upon a sentence in that
unreﬁned treatise De Resurrectione Carnis. Toward the end
of an epigrammatic passage enumerating the benefits that ac-

to Fisher’s argument against (Ecolampadius in Which the same view of the
passage in Irenaeus is taken.

* Tertullian expresses this plainly. He “proves the truth or reality of
the Lord’s body and blood against the phantasm of Marcion by the sacra-
ments of the bread and the cup.” Advers. .Marcion, L. v. cap. 8.

1' He supports this assertion by referring to a “fragment of Irenaaus,
p. 343, concerning Blandina,” which does not, I think, really support it.

1 Contra Hoereses, Lib. v. cap. xxxiii. 1. He proves by the literal sense
of Matt. xxvi. 29, the carnal resurrection of the disciples and millennial
reign of Christ upon earth; Of course he takes Isaiah xi. vi. literally too,
and presses into the service of his opinion of a future earthly Paradise
every prophetic text about eating and drinking andsensuous delights that
he can gather out of Holy Writ.

13): IN TROD UCTION.

crue to the soul through the body of ﬂesh, and declaring, that as
the flesh and the Spirit are felloquorkmen here, so they shall
be partners in bliss hereafter, the ancient writer speaks thus:
Caro corpore et sanguine Christi vescitur, m at anz’nza dc deo
saginetmz The Anglican Divine understands this “in a mysti-
cal and constructional sense,” and for no other reason, apparent-
ly, than that any other would be gross and puerile. Yet who
that reads Tertullian can imagine that he was not gross and
puerile in his philosophy, however reﬁned in the play of fancy
and exercise of logic, unless he is predetermined to ﬁnd him oth-
erwise? Doubtless Tertullian thought, that the bread which
our Lord held in his hand at the last Supper, was but “a figure
of his body ;” the bread in the Eucharist, I verily think, he took
to be the material body of our Lord. The sixth chapter of St.
John many of the ancients seem to have understood spiritually,
because the meaning is expressly declared to be spiritual in the
text itself (verse 63) : and I think that the primitive Fathers al-
ways kept close to the text, though, when ﬁgurative, it some-
times led them away from the sense.

Our divines have generally rejected transubstantiation as irra-
tional and unspiritual. Any one who rejects it on this ground,
yet holds the presence of the redeeming Spirit in bread and wine,
strains at a gnat after swallowing a camel. “ If on all sides it
be confessed,” says Hooker, “ that the grace of baptism is poured
into the soul of man, that by water we receive it, although it be
neither seated in the water nor the water changed into it, what
should induce men to think that the grace of the Eucharist must
needs be in the Eucharist before it be in us that receive it ?”*

* Can any one who reads what Hooker has written on this subject be.
fore and after the sentence I have quoted, in Bk. V. ch. lxvii. (pp. 445—51
of vol. ii. of Mr. Keble’s ed.) imagine that he himself held what he describes
as utterly vain and unnecessary, and which is out of analogy with his doc-
trine of baptism ? .

Of all the doctrines which suppose a presence in the elements my Father
thought transubstantiation the best, and would have agreed, I believe, with
Mr. \Vard in denying the charge of rationalism brought against it by di-
vines of the school of Dr. Pusey. How does it explain the mystery a whit
more than their own view? It does but afﬁrm what that denies, that the
bread and wine are gone without pretending to say how : it neither ration-
alizes nor reasons, internally at least ; but bluntly aﬂirms a senseless prop
osition without throwing a gauze veil over its face.

INTRODUCTION. lXXi

But it was the anCz'ent opinion that the spirit descended upon the
water before it entered the soul of the baptized. It is not easy for
a sensible man, like Hooker, to stick to ancient opinions on the

subject of spirzt.
Yet Ireneeus is an evar gelical writer when he is not theologi-

zing, and loses sight of his Anti- Gnostic, which are often Anti-
Platonic, metaphysics. Indeed he at all times leans with his
whole weight upon Scripture and Reason, according to his no-
tions of both, just as a Rationalist like S. T. C. may do now-a-
days. He seems to have no horror of rationalism at all, but
looks as far into the internal consistency of things as he is able.
Viewed in their place in the history of thought, these primitive
writers are interesting and venerable. The attempt to make them
practically our masters on earth in doctrine, under a notion that
they received their whole structure of religious intellectualism
ready built from the Apostles—this it is which anti-patricians of

The attempt made by Mr. \V. to reconcile it with our article, however,
appears to me one of the most sophistical parts of the whole Tract Ninety
Argument—which is saying a good deal. The article declares against “ the
change of the substance of bread and wine in the Supper of the Lord.”
Mr. W'ard afﬁrms that it speaks popularly, and hence does not conﬂict with
the Romish metaphysique of the Eucharist, according to which the accidents
of bread and wine remain while the substance is changed ; it being assumed
in his argument that to speak popularly, in the language of the plain
Christian, who knows nothing of philosophy, is to identify accidents with
substance so as to do away with the latter entirely. N ow not to mention
the gross improbability, that the framer of the article was ignorant of, or
had no respect to the metaphysique, of the doctrine current in the schools
of Rome, and controverted in the schools of the Reformed,—it is surely
quite wrong to say, that the unmctaphysical man means nothing more by
an object of sense than its sensible qualities. It is true that he identiﬁes
the qualities with the substance, but yet he has the idea of substance too.
The notion that a thing is only a congeries of accidents, is the notion of
the idealizing philosopher in his study; while the idea of a substrate or
support of accidents is common to all mankind, and indeed is an original
form of the human intellect. This is admitted in the reasonings of Ber
kcley, Schelling, and every other Idealist. By the substance of bread the
plain man means not the mere qualities of bread, but a thing which has
those qualities: he means the bread itself with all that belongs to it. Mr.
Ward pretends to considerable knowledge of the nature and history of
thought—and, I believe, not without reason ; but he did not show his knowl~
edge of it by this a1 gument Indeed he is rather apt to use his logical skill
and metaphysical acumen for the purpose of cleverly confounding a subject
instead of making it clear.

lxxii I—NTROD UCTION.

my Father’s mind contemn. Belief in the phcnnix was no sign
that the early Christians were incapable of receiving a spirituai
religion ; but surely it is one among a hundred signs, that their
intellectual development of it might be incorrect ; that they had
reﬂected but little on the nature and laws of evidence.

I believe that the whole of the opinions which my Father ex—
presses on the Eucharist* may be reduced to this, that both transub-
stantiation and Luther’s doctrine of consubstantiation may be so
stated as not to involve a contradiction in terms; but that neither
doctrine is necessary, that there is no real warrant for either in
Scripture, and that the spiritual doctrine of the Supper of the
Lord involves a different statement. The gift and effect of the
Eucharist he believed to be “an assimilation of the spirit of a
man to the divine humanity.” How he sympathized with one
who fought against the old sensualism appears in his poem on
the dying words of Berengarius. But Berengarius certainly taught
a presence in the elements, for he said that the true body is placed
on the table. To the imperfection of light vouchsafed in that day
my Father seems to refer in the last lines of his poem :

The ascending day-star with a bolder eye

Hath lit each dew-drop on our trimmer lawnl
Yet not for this, if wise, shall we decry

The spots and struggles of the timid dawn ;
Lest so we tempt th’ approaching noon to scorn
The mists and painted vapors of our morn.

That my Father, though an ardent maintainer of the Church
as a spiritual power, organized in an outward body, co-ordinate
with the Spirit and the Scriptures, did not admit the ordinary
mysticism on the subject of Apostolical succession, seems clear
from this passage from some of his manuscript writings, dated
1827. “When I reflect on the great stress which the Catholic
or more numerous Party of Christians laid on the uninterrupted
succession of the Bishops of every Church from the Apostles, the
momentous importance attached by the Bishops themselves at the

* Remains, V. pp. 65, S4, 188, 219, 220, 224, 225, 227, 245, 293, 382.
The Romish dogma involves the supposition that a sensible thing can be
abstracted from its accidents. This may not be false logic and yet may be
false philosophy. The substance of the material body could do nothing for
eur souls: the substance of the divine humanity can be present to our souls
alone So it seems to many of the faithful.

INTRODUCTION. lxxiii

ﬁrst general council to this unbroken chain of the spiritual light-
ning, ever present to illuminein the. decisions and to scathe m
the anathemas of the Church—when I read, that on this articu-
lated continuum which evacuated the time which it measured,
and reduced it to a powerless accident, a mere shadow from the
carnal nature intercepting the light, a shadow that existed only
for the eye of flesh, between which and the luminary the carnal
nature intervened, so that every Bishop of the true Church,
speaking in and from the Spirit, might say,‘ Before Peter was, or
Paul, I am .’ ’*——Well l—Let all this pass for the poetry of the
claims of the Bishops to the same Spirit, and, consequently, to the
same authority as the Apostles, unfortunately for the claim,
enough of the writings of Bishops, ay, and of canonized Bishops
too, are extant to enable us to appreciate it and to know and feel
the woful difference between the Spirit that guided the pen of
Tertullian, Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Soc. and the Spirit by which
John and Paul spake and wrote! Descending into the cooler
element of prose, I conﬁne myself to the fact of an uninterrupted
succession of Bishops in each Church, and the apparent human
advantages consequent on such a means of preserving and hand-
ing down the memory of important events and the steadfast form
of sound words,—and when I ﬁnd it recorded that on this fact
the Fathers of the Nicene Council grounded their main argument
against the Arians, 350., I can not help ﬁnding a great and per-
plexing difficulty in the entire absence of all deﬁnite Tradition
concerning the composition and delivery of the Gospels.” He
then goes on to suggest a solution of this perplemty.

ZVoscitur a sociis is a maxim very generally applied : we trust
and love those who honor whom we honor, condemn whom we

9“ After describing Episcopal succession as a “ﬁxed outward mean by
which the identity of the visible Church, as co-ordinate with the written
Word, is preserved, as the identity of an individual man is symbolized by
the continuous reproduction of the same bodily organs,” as, “ more than this,
not merely one leading symbol of permanent visibility, but a co-eﬂicient in
every other,” my brother says, “ Yet it must be examined according to tliis
idea. I dare not affect to think of it, in order to render it intelligible and
persuasive to faithless and mechanical minds, as of a mere physical conti-
nuity, by which the spiritual powers of the pastorate, are conveyed, like a
stream of electricity along a metal wire.” My brother had never seen the
passage from my Father’s MS. Remains which I have given in the text when
he wrote this, and I believe it to be a perfect co-incidence.

VOL. 111. . D

lxxiv INTRODUCTION.

disapprove. My Father’s affectionate respect for Luther is enough
to alienate from him the High Anglican party, and his admiration
of Kant enough to bring him into suspicion with the anti-philo-
sophic part of the religious world,—which is the whole of it except
a very small portion indeed. My Father was a hero-worshiper
in the harmless sense of Mr. Carlyle; and his worship of these
two heroes, though the honors he paid to the one were quite
different from those he offered to the other, was so deliberate and
deep seated, that it must ever be a prominent feature on the face
of his opinions. He thought the mind of Luther more akin to St.
Paul’s than that of any other Christian teacher, and I believe
that our early divines, including Hooker and Field, would not
have suspected his catholicity on this score. Indeed it is clear to
my mind that in Luther’s doctrines of grace (no one has ever
doubted his orthodoxy on the subject of the divine nature, but his
doctrine of the dealings of God with man in the work of salva-
tion), there is nothing which ever would mortally have offended
High Churchmen, Romish or Anglican; that they tried to find
heresy in these because of the practical consequences he drew
from them to the discrediting and discomﬁture of their spiritual
polity. On the doctrine of Justiﬁcation he has been represented
as a mighty corrupter; let us see how and how far he differs on
that subject from his uncompromising adversaries.* There are
but three forms in which that doctrine can possibly be presented
to the mind, I mean there are but three ways in which St. Paul’s

9* My authorities for the following statements are the Decrees and Canons
of Trent, Luther’s Commentary on Galatians, and Table Talk, Bishop Bull’s
Harmonia with his thick volume of replies to the censures of it, and Mr.
Newman’s Lectures on Justiﬁcation, all of which I have dwelt on 'a good
deal. I have not yet read St. Augustine on the subject, but suspect from
extracts, that his view was the same as Luther’s so far as he developed it.

Mr. Newman says in his Appendix—“ I have throughout these remarks
implied that the modern controversy on the subject of justification is not a
vital one, inasmuch as all parties are . 0'reed that Christ is the sole justiﬁer,
and that He makes holy those whom He justifies.” Yet one who professed
to hold Mr. Newman’s religious opinions in general, could talk of Luther’s
doctrine as a doctrine too bad for devils to hold consistently, contrary to
natural religion, corruptive of the heart and at war with reason. It should
be remembered that the state ofmind in the justiﬁed is precisely the same in
all the different schemes. The dispute is only about the name to be given to
certain constituents of it; whether they are to be ‘called justifying or only
inseparable from, or the necessary product of, the justifying principle.

IN TROD UCTION. lxxv

justified by faith without the deeds if the law can be sci-
entiﬁcally explained or translated into the language of met-
aphysical divinity ;—namely the Tridentine, or that set forth
by the Council of Trent,——the Anglican or High Church Prot»
estant, set forth by Bishop Bull ;——and that of Luther. Nay.
I think that, really and substantially, there are but two, name
ly the Tridentine and High Anglican or doctrine of justiﬁca _
tion by faith and works as the condition of obtaining it, and Lu
ther’s soliﬁdianism or doctrine of j ustiﬁcation by means of faith
alone,——a faith the necessary parent of works. All parties agree
that God is the eﬂicient, Christ, in His sacriﬁce, the meritori-
ous cause of salvation : all profess this in words, all the pious
of all the diferent parties believe it in their hearts. The dis-
pute is not about the proper cause of salvation, but only concern
ing the internal condition on our part, or what that is in us
whereon justiﬁcation ensues,—-which connects the individual
man with the redemption wrought by Christ for all mankind.
Bull teaches that this link within us to the redemption without
us is faith informed with love and works—faith quickcned by
love and put forth in the shape of obedience. The Tridentine
teaches, in like manner, that we are justiﬁed directly upon our
holiness and works wrought in us by the Spirit,—that faith and
all other graces of which it is the root, are the condition of ac
ceptance with God. Between this statement and Bull’s I see no
real difference at all; it is but the same thought expressed ir-
- different words. The Anglican chooses to add that our holinesr
and works, in order to be thus justifying, must be sprinkled with
the blood of the covenant; the Tridentine declines that well-
sounding phrase: perhaps he thinks it a tautology Offensive tc
Him who forbade vain repetitions ; and, for my own part, I can
not think that his Saviour requires it of him, whatever divines
’may do. His anathemas against those who say either more or
less than he says on these points are, in my opinion, the only
anti-Christian part of his doctrine of justiﬁcation. Drive the
thing as far back as we may, still there must be something in us
-—-in our very selves which connects us with salvation ; it seems
rather nonsensical to say that this is the blood of Christ. We
should never have obtained this something without Him; He
created it, in us and to Him it tends; what more can we say
without nullifying the human soul as a distinct being altogether

lxxvi IN TRODU CTION.

and thus slipping into the gulf of Pantheism in backing away
from imaginary Impiety and Presumption? Even if with Lu-
ther we call Christ the form of our faith, and hence the formal
cause of our salvation, still there must be that in our very selves
which at least negatively secures our union with him; to that
we must come at last as the personal sine qua non of justiﬁca-
,tion, whether we call it the proximate cause, or interpose an-
other (the Holy Ghost dwelling in our hearts by faith), betwixt
ourselves and heaven. The Anglican may call our holiness in-
choate and imperfect, and may insist that only as sanctiﬁed and
completed by Christ’s merits is it even the conditional cause of
salvation; still this holiness, if it connects us with the Saviour
or precludes the impediment to such connection is, in one sense,
complete and perfect, for it does this all-important work perfect-
ly ; it is no slight matter, for it is all the difference between sal-
vation and perdition, as being indispensable to our gaining the
ﬁrst and escaping the last. Now in what other sense can the
Romanist imagine that our holiness is perfect and complete?
Does he think that it is perfect as God is perfect, or that it is
more than a beginning even in reference to that purity which
human nature may ﬁnally attain when freed from a temptable
body and the clog of the ﬂesh ?*

I am even bold enough to say, after all South’s valiant feats
against the windmill giant, Human Merit, that the dispute on
this subject seems to me a mere dispute about words. That in
us which even negatively (by preventing the prevention of it),
unites us with Christ, may be said to deserve Christ, and hence
to be unspeakably meritorious. The Romanist has declared that
all the merit qurocm‘ing salvation is in Christ—surely then
he only leaves to man—what no man should seek to deprive him
of,—the being rendered by the Holy Spirit a meet receptacle and
worthy dwelling-place for Itself. As for'grace of congruity and
condignity—our Lord says that he who hath to him shall be
given—does not this imply that he who hath grace deserves
more, that it is due to his internal condition raised and puriﬁed
by the Holy Spirit? Or does this notion really interfere with

* To call our inherent righteousness inchoate in reference to the power
of justifyino would be inco1 r ect, would it not ?—f01 it is the beginning and
end of what we cont1ibute toward our salvation, and certzunly not the com-
mencement of what IS done for us.

INTRODUCTION. lxxvii

the Scriptural truth, that weare unproﬁtable servants, and in
our best performances can do no more than we are bound to do 1”“
Is it essential to the idea of deserving reward, that he who de-
serves should be the original author and source of the services by
which he deserves it ? If it be, then the language of the Coun-
cil of Trent is incorrect ; but its doctrine is not incorrect, because
the very same sentence which afﬁrms the good works of the jus-
tiﬁed to be merits declares them previously to be gifts of God.
Very indefensible is the neat sentence which anat/z-ematizes him
who calls them only signs of justiﬁcation obtained and fears to
add that they are merits.

The Tridentine and the Anglican statements of Justiﬁcation

9* My Father says, “ I am persuaded, that the practice of the Romish
Church tendeth to make vain the doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ
alone; but judging by her most eminent divines I can ﬁnd nothing disso«
nant from the truth in her express decisions on this article. Perhaps it
would be safer to say :—Christ alone saves us, working in us by the faith
which includes love and hope.” “ I neither do nor can think, that any
pious member of the Church of Rome did ever in his heart attribute any
merit to any work as being his work. A grievous error and a mischievous
error there was practically in mooting the question at all of the condignity
of works and their rewards.” Remains, V. pp. 49, 50.

Canons ‘24 and 32 of the 6th Session of the Council of Trent are given in
a note at the foot of the page to be compared with this opinion. I think
there is no harm in them; they afﬁrm that the good works of the justiﬁed
are both gifts of God and merits of the justiﬁed person himself, that they
deserve increase of grace and eternal life. Now in the only sense in which
a believer in the primary merits of Christ can mean to aﬁi rm this I do not
see how any rational Christian can deny it. There is a notion connected
with this subject, which is taught not only in the Romish schools, but I
grieve to say in some of our own schools too of late years, which does seem
to me both presumptuous and unscriptural; I mean the notion. that a man
can do more in the way of good works and saintliness than he is bound to
do as a Christian,—-or at least that there is a kind and degree of holiness
which some men may and ought to seek and obtain, which the generality
of the faithful can not attain and ought not to strive after. This seems to
me both false and fraught with corruptive consequences to religion. When
Peter said to Ananias respecting his land, was it not thine own—in thine
own power .?—he surely did not mean that in offering it Ananias did more
than he was bound to do, as a Christian before God, but only that, as he
was not compelled to surrender it by any outward force or authority, his
pretending to give and yet not giving the whole of it, was a gratuitous
piece of hypocrisy—something worse than a simple falsehood extorted by
‘ fear

l? xviii IN TROD UCTION.‘

are tantamount to each other,—may be resolved into each other;
but there is a third way of stating the matter—between this and
the other two there is perhaps a logical, though, Ibelieve, no
practical difference whatever. I allude to the notion of Luther
that faith alone is that in us which connects us with Christ, and
consequently is our sole personal righteousness (or that which en-
titles us to freedom from the penal consequences of sin) ; that
faith justiﬁes (in this conditional and instrumental way) in its
own, right, not as informed with or accompanied by or productive
of love and works, but as apprehending Christ. Luther main-
tained that faith, although it is righteous and the necessary pa-
rent of righteous works, justifies only in bringing Christ to dwell
in the heart,* and that the righteousness which ﬂows from this
inhabitation, is not our justiﬁcation but the fruit of it, or in other
words that faith not love is the justifying principle. Now Ithink
it is a notable fact in favor of my Father’s opinion that these
different views are all but different aspects of the same truth,
and are not substantially different one from another, that Mr.
N ewman’s splendid work on justiﬁcation, which is generally con-
sidered by the High Anglican party as an utter demolition of
Luther’s teaching in the Commentary, and perhaps was intended
to be so, is, in fact, a tacit establishment of it, or at least of its
most important position ; since on this cardinal point, this hinge
of the question, whether faith justiﬁes alone, as uniting us with
Christ, or as informed with love and works, and as itself a work.
and a part of Christian holiness,—he decides with Luther, not
with Tridentines or High Anglicanst For he expressly states
that Faith does in one sense (the sense of uniting us with Christ,
which is the same as Luther’s sense), justify alone ; that it is the
“only inward instrument” of justiﬁcation; that, as such inward
instrument, it is one certain property, act,‘or habit of the mind,
distinct from love and other graces: not a mere name for them
all ; that there is “ a certain extraordinary and singular sympathy
between Faith and the grant of Gospel privileges, such as to con-
stitute it, in a true sense, an instrument of it, that is of justiﬁcation,

* Galatians ii. 3.

f Lectu1e X. th1 ono'hout p. 256— 287.

1 lb. pp 258— 9—“ When it (faith) is called the sole instr ument of justiﬁ-
cation it must stand 1n cont1ast to them (trust, hope, etc), and be contem-
plated in itself, as being one certain property, habit, or act of the mind.”

INTRODUCTION. lxxix

which includes them all 2” that "‘it alone coalesces with the
sacraments, 860., and through them unites the soul to God.”*
Further he identiﬁes his doctrine with that of our Homilies which
declares that repentance, hope, love and the fear of God are shut
out from the ofﬁce of justifyingf It seems as if, while he con-
tended against Luther, the Lutheran doctrine laid hold of him,
and held him and would not let him go, till it brought him home
to its own habitation.

Surely after all this Mr. Newman’s apparent hostility to Luther,
in the matter of justiﬁcation, is a mere shadow-ﬁght. He may
dislike his tone and language, and disapprove some subordinate
parts of his View, either as false or half true, but on the main
point he has adopted the Reformer’s doctrine ; and his new Har-
monia, which was to be the ruin of soliﬁdianism, is seliﬁdian
itself, in the only sense in which any systematic divine ever was
so. It is- true that, While thus embracing Luther, unwillingly,
he tries to ﬂing the old giant away 'from'him, by declaring that
he holds an antecedent external instrument, even Baptism ; that
Baptism gives to faith all its justifying power. But this does not
in reality separate him one hair’s-breadth from his unhonored
master. Luther held the doctrine of regeneration in baptism as
well as himself; he bids men cling fast to their baptism, recur to
it as to a ground of conﬁdence, and in the comment on verse 27
of chapter iii. of Galatians, he speaks of the “ majesty of baptism”
as highly as the Highest Churchman could speak of it, at the
same time observing “ these things. I have handled more largely
in another place, therefore I pass them over brieﬂy here.”1‘ Luther

9* Ib. pp. 58-9, 270— 71, 286, 333.

1- Sermon of Salvation, Pait 1.

1t Luther received baptismal 1 egeneration as it had been handed down to
him; he taught that “ the lenewing of the 1nwa1 d man is done 1n baptism.”
Would that he had been a reformer in this article also—had renewed the
fa? m of the doctrine, while he maintained its life and substance !-—the11
p1 obably disbelievers in “baptismal t1ansubstant1ation would not have
been disquieted by the w01 ding of our Liturgy. D1. Pusey did once cite
Luthei in his Scriptural Views, p. 28, as a witness to the t1 ue doctrine of
regeneration in baptism; why is not this remembered by writers of Dr.
Pusey’s school when Luther’s doctrine of justiﬁcation is under review ?

Luther taught indeed that men are born again of the Word of God, that
the Holy Ghost changes the. heart and mind by faith in or through the
hearing of the external word ; but if the sayings of St. Peter and St. Paul
and St James, afﬁrming the same thing, can be reconciled with inward re-

lxxx INTRODUCTION.

believed in baptismal regeneration and must therefore have be
lieved that every spiritual principle in the soul was derived from
it : he taught that faith was the work of the Spirit and that the
Spirit was given in baptism : his soliﬁdianism is not incompatible
with a sound belief on that subject, unless Mr. Newman’s is so
too, for they are one and the same.

What Luther fought against was not an external instrument
of salvation preceding actual faith and producing it: he saw no
harm in that notion ; what he fought against with all his heart
and soul and strength, was justiﬁcation by charity and the deeds
of charity, or what is commonly called a good life. He saw that
practically salvation was given to outward works and money
gifts, which might proceed from evil men, while, in theory, it was
ascribed to love and the works of the Spirit. He thought to pre-
clude this abuse and establish Scripture at the same time by de-
claring faith alone the means of salvation, and good works the
necessary offspring of faith in the heart. And how could such a
doctrine encourage Antinomianism, for is it not plain, that if good
-works ﬂow necessarily from saving faith, where the works are
not good, the mind whence they spring can not have saving
faith ?* This Luther expressly states. “ W hoso obeyeth the
ﬂesh,” says he, “ and continueth without any fear of God or re-
morse of conscience in accomplishing the desires and lusts thereof,
let him know that he pertaineth not unto Christ.”t The whole
strain of his commentary on chapters v. and vi. of Galatians is
an utter shattering of Antinomianism, which indeed is precluded
by the doctrine of the commentary from beginning to end. In one
respect a Soliﬁdian like Luther is a more effectual opponent to
Antinomians than a teacher of justification by faith and works
because he more completely wrests out of their hands those say
ings of St. Paul which seem to deny that Works of any sort do in
any sense justify—But it is an insult to the apostolic man’s
memory to defend him from the charge of Antinomianism. He
knocked down with his little ﬁnger more Antinomianism than
his accusers with both hands. If his doctrine is the jaw-bone of

newal in baptism, so can Luther’s, for he went not beyond Scripture on this
point. There are certainly comings of the Holy Spirit spoken of in the N
T. unconnected with baptism. See among other places John xiv. 23.

* Burnet urges this plea for soliﬁdians, though not one himself.

f Commentary on Galatians, chap. v. verse 18.

INTRODUCTION. lxxxi

an ass, he must have been a very Samson, for he turned num-
bers with this instrument from the evil of their lives; and the
same instrument in the hands of mere pigmies in comparison
with him has wrought more amendment of life among the Poor
than the most eloquent and erudite preachers of works and rites
have to boast, by their preaching. For this doctrine presents
hope and fear more sharply to the mind than any other ; it sup-
plies the steam of encouragement and propels from behind while
it draws on from before.

The following charges are brought against Luther. It has
been said that he denied the power of Christians to fulﬁl the law
or produce really good works; that he denied the use of con-
science in keeping Christians from sin and wickedness ; and that
he separated justifying faith from love.

That he denied the good works of Christians is just as true
as that he denied the sun in heaven. He beautifully com-
pares them to stars in the night, the night and darkness of sur-
rounding unjustiﬁcation ; and beautifully too does he say, that
even as the stars do not make heaven, but only trim and adorn”
it, so the charity of works does not constitute blessedness but
makes it shine to the eyes of men, that they may glorify the
Father of Lights.* That Luther denied the work of the Spirit
to be really good is one of the many charges against him which
sound loud and go off in smoke. He considered them relatively
good, just as any man else does,—saw a wide world of difference
betwixt the deeds of the justiﬁed and of the unjustiﬁed. If he
thought that, as sin remains in the best men, so likewise some
thing of human inﬁrmity clings about the best deeds, who shall
convict him of error ? That he denied any portion or quality of
real goodness to be in the soul in which Christ lives, I can not
ﬁnd and do not believe. But when Luther said that because our
righteousness is imperfect, therefore it can not be the ground of
acceptance with God, he drew, inrmy opinion, a wrong inference -
from his premiss. Our faith is as imperfect as our works; but
if it unites us with Christ, it is (not of course the deepest ground,
Christ alone is that), but the intermediate ground or condition of
our acceptance. The question is, shall we call faith alone, or
faith, love, obedience, all Gospel graces, the “ connecting bond”
between us and Christ ? If faith alone, then faith alone is 0111

* Table Talk, chap. xiv. p. 232.

lxxxii INTRODUCTION.

intermediate ground of acceptance; and repentance, love and
obedience are not excluded because they are imperfect, but be-
cause of their posteriority to faith.

That Luther denied the power of Christians to fulﬁl the law is
the self-same charge in another shape and false in that shape as
in the other. He reiterates that the faithful do fulﬁl the law and
that they alone fulﬁl it; that by faith they receive the Holy
Ghost and then accomplish the law.’)'F “I come with the Lord
Himself,” says Luther; “ on Him I lay hold, Him I stick to, and
leave works unto tliee : which notwithstanding thou never
didsz.’ He shows that against the righteous there is no law,
because he is a law to himself. “For the righteous,” says he,
“ liveth in such wise that he hath no need of any law to admon-
ish or constrain him, but without constraint of the law, he wil-
lingly doeth those things which the law requireth.”'f What
more would we have a teacher of the Gospel say? Ought a
Christian to perform the law unwillingly by a force from with-
out? Luther teaches that in the justiﬁed there is an inward law
superseding the outward: that the outward law remains, but
only for the sinner : that it either drives him to Christ or bridles
him in his carnality. This is the idea expressed in that passage
at the end of the introduction to his commentary, which sets
forth the argument of the Epistle. “ When I have this right
eousness reigning in my heart, I descend from heaven, as the rain
maketh fruitful the earth: that is to say, I come forth into
another kingdom, andl do good works how and whensoever oc
casion is offered.” What is there in this that is worthy of con
(lemnation or of sarcasm? Is it not true Pauline philosophy to

* Comm. Gal. v. 23.

1- Mr. \Vard thinks the Commentary on the Galatians such a “silly”
work! Shakspeare has been called silly by Puritans, Milton worse than
silly by Prelatists and Papists, Wordsworth was long called silly by Bona—
parteans; what will not the odium theologicum or politicum ﬁnd worthless
and silly? To me, perhaps from my silliness, his Commentary appears the
very Iliad of Soliﬁdianism; all the ﬁne and striking things that have been
said upon the subject are taken from it; and if the author preached a novel
doctrine, or presented a novel development of Scripture in this work, as
Mr. Newman avers, I think he deserves great credit for his originality.
The Commentary contains, or rather is, a most spirited Siege of Babylon,
and the friends of Rome like it as well as the French like Wellington and
the battle of \Vaterloo.

INTRODUCTION. lxxxrii

say, that the realm of outward works is another kingdom from
the realm of grace ?—that the true believer is freed from the
zompulsion of the law ?—to call the sum of outward things and
all deeds, considered as outward, the Flesh? To me this ani-
mated passage seems the very teaching of the Apostle to the
Gentiles uttered with a voice of joy; It is the unconfusing
intoxication of Gospel triumph and gladness. Some say mock--
ing, The man is full of new wine; but Luther was not really
drunk when he spoke thus; he spoke it in the noonday of his
vigorous life, with all his wits, and they were sound ones, about
him.*

It is afﬁrmed that Luther denied the use of conscience in reli-
gion, and thisis the grand engine which Mr. Ward brings to bear
upon him in his Ideal; you would think from the account of the
Gospel hero’s doctrine therein contained that he was a very ad-
vocate for unconscientiousness, and would have men go on sin-
ning that grace may abound; would have them “wallow and
steep in all the carnalities of the world, under pretence of Chris-
tian liberty,” and continue without anyfear of God 07' remorse
of conscience in accomplishing the desires of the ﬂesh ,' or at least
that his teaching involved this : I wonder how men can have the
conscience to write thus of Luther on the strength of a few mis
construed passages, while the broad front of his massive fortress
of Gospel doctrine, a stronghold against Antinomianism, must
present itself to their eyes unless they are stone blindi‘ Luther

* Mr. Newman points out that ﬁne passage on faith in Gal. ii. 16, and 334
Paulus his verbis, &c. and he quotes that admirable exposition of his on
“ incarnate faith or believing deeds,” in Gal. vii. 10, in which he brings in
the analogy of the Incarnation.

f I have read Mr. Ward’s Ideal with so much interest, and, I humbly
hope, beneﬁt, that I am far more grieved by the chapter on Justiﬁcation
than if the writer were a narrow, stupid, uncharitable man. I have heard
persons say it was the clever part of the book; the whole of the book is
clever, but this part has no other merit than cleverness, and that is a sorry
commendation of a discourse upon morals and religion : as the author him-
self would readily admit in general. It is the force with which he has made
this and other cognate truths apparent, the way in which he has vitalized
and, to use Luther’s phrase, “engrossed” them, for which I have to thank
him. But he special-pleads against Luther, and in a way which no pleader
could venture upon in a court of Justice. He presents his doctrines upside
down—wrong side before. If we tear up the rose-tree and place it root
upward, with all its blossoms crushed upon the earth, where are its beauty

lxxxiv INTRODUCTION.

teaches that the constraints and terrors of the law remain to keep
the ﬂesh in subjection; what he says concerning conscience re-
lates to sins that are past, not sins to come. He cxhorts men to
lay hold of Christ : not to let the sense of their ungodliness which
aforetime they have committed make them doubt of his power
to save them and purify their souls by the Holy Spirit. His rea-
sons for insisting on this doctrine are obvious ; it was to prevent
men from trusting for the washing out of sin to penance, the fear-
ful abuse, or rather use, of which he had witnessed. His doctrine
is, that in those whoare in a state of grace through a living faith,
the flesh remains, and is to be bruised, exercised, and kept down
by the LaW,—(be it observed, that by the Law, he always means
the Law viewed carnally or as a force from without)—While the
spirit rejoices in God its Saviour, the conscience sleeping securely
on the bosom of Christ. And surely, so far as we can contem-
plate man in a state of grace at all, having ﬁrm faith in the Re-
deemer and His power to save, he must be contemplated as free

and its fragrance 2—if we take the mirror and turn its leaden side to the
spectator, where are its clear reﬂections and its splendor ?

By-the-bye, it struck me that Mr. W'ard, in his searches for Socinianism,
after he had done demonizing the doctrine of Luther, slipped himself into
something like heresy on the human nature of our Lord. His words
seemed (seem, for there they are still) to imply that our Saviour had not,
while upon earth, a human mind as well as a human body. He introduces
the Godhead into the Manhood, so as to destroy, as it seems to me, the
character of the latter. Certainly Pearson and South, who were ever held
orthodox on the Incarnation, and good Patricians, teach that our Lord,
while upon earth, had the “ ﬁnite understanding” of a man ; that he “ stooped
to the meanness of our faculties ;” and indeed it is evident from the lan-
guage of the Evangelists, that they supposed Him to arrive at the knowl-
edge of ordinary things in an ordinary way: to have grown in wisdom and
knowledge, an expression not applicable to Omnipotence. If He foreknew
all that was to happen to him in one matter, so Abraham and Isaiah fore—
knew the future. Doubtless He knew far more of the mind of God than
they, even as a man. Perhaps Mr. W'ard was led to this error, as I be-
lieve it to be, from following too heedlessly certain remarks of the Tract
for the Times against Jacob Abbott. But surely it is a great and funda-
mental error to deny by implication, the real humanity of our Lord—that
he assumed the very soul of man; which he must have done in order to re
deem it ;——a worse error than that- of the Phantasmists, who denied his
ﬂeshly body. How he could be very God and very Man at the same time,
is an inscrutable mystery, but no less than this is the Catholic Faith of
the Incarnation, and to deny it is the heresy of Apollinaris. Shall “ Catho
lies” rationalize away a mystery i

INTRODUCTION. lxxxv

and joyful, conﬁdent of salvation notwithstanding the inﬁrmity
of his mortal nature, not paralyzed by the Law in the conscience
or agonized by a fearful looking back upon sins that are past.
Surely the conscience may sleep on the bosom of Christ, if it be
really His bosom on which it is resting ; that is, if we know that
upon the whole our heart is set upon the things that are above
we may safely cast our eye forward, in peace and gladness, hoping
and striving through grace to live better from day to day ; not
backward upon the detail of our past transgressions, with a soul-
subduing solicitude to balance them by penance exactly propor-
tioned to their amount.

Luther afﬁrmed that we must make a god of the law out of
the conscience, but that in the conscience it is a very devil.
Doubtless he had seen fatal effects of the tyranny of the law in
the conscience, had seen how, like the basilisk’s eye, it benumbed
the gazer, and prevented him from ﬂying at once to Christ for
pardon and puriﬁcation and power to follow His steps; how it
threw him into the hands of the priest, who, in those days, too
often, instead of preaching faith in the Saviour and fulfilment of
the law by faith, prescribed a certain set of outward Observances,
which never could take away sins, but which the terriﬁed yet
unrepentant spirit rested in, and substituted for general renova-
tion. Looking at the law in this point of view he called it with
great force and truth the very diabolus, the malignant accuser,
who by its informations and treacherous representations kept the
soul separate and estranged from the Prince of Life. Bunyan
has worked upon this thought powerfully in the Pilgrim’s Pro-
gress, and he too makes the murderous Moses give way to Christ
when He appears, and “depart out of the conscience.” “ Lu-
ther,” says Mr. Newman, contrasting him with the ancient Fa-
ther, declares that “ the Law and Christ can not dwell together
in the heart; Augustine, that the Law is Christ.” Well! but
what Law? Surely not the outward Law, which St. Paul de
clares dead for the Christian,* which Luther declares incompati

4“ I know not whether there remains upon the face of the earth any 0!
that generation of Scripture interpreters, who were wont to afﬁrm, that
when St. Paul declared the law dead, he meant only the ceremonial law
of Moses 1 That such people existed in Bishop Bull’s time seems clear from
his taking the pains to refute the notion methodically. See Harmonia, cap
vii. Diss Post. Oxford edit. vol. iii. 120—21. -

lxxxvi INTRODUCTION.

ble with Christ, but the inward law, “ the law of grace, the law
of the law, the law of liberty, righteousness, and everlasting life,"
which Luther identifies with Christ from ﬁrst to last of his evan-
gelical commentary.

Luther’s language on the exceeding difficulty of believing unto
salvation, on the relics of sin that cling even to the justiﬁed, does
but show how searchingly, how earnestly he looked on these sub-
jtcts—how hard he was to be pleased in matters that pertain
to justiﬁcation. Perhaps he should have taught more distinctly
that all men are sinners, and require the coercions of the law
more or less. Still it was but the remnants of sin which Luther
spoke of, when he said, prospectively, that sin should not be im-
puted to the justiﬁed.”* His fault as a teacher was that he stuck
too close to Scripture in his mode of expression, and repeated
without explanation, or imitated too closely, its strong ﬁgurative
language. But this doctrine of his that the enormity of sin must
not make the sinner despair, is no ﬁgure; it is literal Gospel
truth. Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as ’white as
snow. Did Luther in all his strong language on the power of
faith, that is of Christ dwelling in the heart by faith, go beyond
this glad message of salvation? Blessed be his name for the
courage wherewith he re-proclaimed a saving truth, which a self-
serving, self-exalting clergy were putting out of sight—were
hiding by the complicated superstructure of outward ways and
means, which they erected upon it ! Luther’s a lax system 3—
No man will ﬁnd it such who tries to understand and practise
rather than to criticize it.

But the grand charge against Luther’s doctrine remains be-
hind. He is said to have separated saving faith from loverl'

* See Commentary, chap. xi. ver. 17. “But it'followeth not therefore
that thou shouldst make a light matter of sin, because God doth not im-
pute it ;” and many other places in the Commentary.

1‘ Mr. Newman in Lecture XI. argues that faith is not a virtue or grace
in its abstract nature, that it is “but an instrument, acceptable When its
possessor is acceptable.” Faith apart from love is not a virtue, but this
seems to be no proof that it is not a distinct grace; faith is not mere belief,
though it includes belief; no one in common parlance would say, that he
bad faith in that which he merely believed. Faith is of the heart, not of
the head only, or it is not faith. Nor can I think that it “ differs from other
graces” in that “it is not an excellence except it be grafted into a heart that
has grace.” Love, humility, meekness are all in the same case; abstract

INTRODUCTION. lxxxvii

The anti-Lutherans are never weary of harping upon this string.
Having failed to convict him of Antinomianism on one side—the
denial of good works to Christians, they try to thrust it upon. him
on the other,—to ﬁnd it in his deﬁnition of faith. But after all
where has he said, speaking analytically, that saving faith exists
apart from love as a mere habit of the mind ? “Luther con-
fesses, in so many words,” says Mr. Newman, “that the faith
that justiﬁes is abstract ﬁdes as opposed to concrete, in Gal. iii.
10.” But if we look at Gal. iii. 10, 1 think we shall ﬁnd, that
by abstract faith as opposed to concrete he meant faith considered
as a spiritual principle in opposition to faithful works, and that
by works he meant not mere acts of the mind but outward ac-
tions. This is quite evident from his language, from the whole
strain of his argument, and from all his illustrations. Let the
reader, if he cares about the matter, look and see. Referring to

from these their direction, their object, and you leave a caput mortmlm of
mere human feeling. Love of Godis excellent; love of man for God’s sake,
is excellent; but the mere adhesion of the soul to a certain object has no
excellence in it. So humility, as a low estimation of ourselves is not neces
sarily virtuous; it is only a virtue when it arises from a clear view of our
relations to divine perfection,—a clear view of the relative goodness of
others, which the mists of self-love and pride are apt to conceal from our
sight. Have we'any natural good acts or habits of mind; do not all our
affections require to be raised and puriﬁed by divine grace before they can
be acceptable? To say the contrary is Pelagianism. Love is as little a
virtue without faith as faith without love, for no man can love as Christ
commands except he believe in God. It is not easy, indeed, to deﬁne Faith
as a property of the will; but who can deﬁne primary feelings?

Consistently with the notion that Faith, in its abstract nature, is only
Belief, Mr. Newman denies that it is to be identiﬁed with Trust: Yet surely
Faith and Trust are only different attitudes of the same habit, the difference
being in the tense or time of the habit. Faith believes that there is an Infi-
nitely Good Being, and that he is good to us: Trust believes that he will be
good to us. The devils believe; but they have not religious faith: for this
binds us to its object. N 0 man owes fealty except for beneﬁt and protec-
tion. It is unwise to separate the idea of love of God or faith in Him from
that of advantage to ourselves; they are reciprocal and co-inberent; the
love of God is its own reward, its fruition union with Him. Mr. Newman
teaches that faith in its own abstract nature is no grace; that it is merely
such a sense of the spiritual as belongs to the devils; that union with love
and all the graces of a religious spirit alone makes it virtuous; my Father
looked upon Faith as that in the will which corresponds to belief in the urn
derstanding; he thought that faith includes belief, but is more than belief '
that it is a grace distinct from love though inseparable from it.

lxxxviii INTRODUCTION

the 11th chapter of Hebrews, he speaks of David who slew Goli~
ath. The sophister, says he looks upon nothing but the outward
appearance of the work; but we must consider what manner of
person David was before he did this work—that he was a right-
eous man, beloved of God, strong and constant in faith. Luther
could hardly have thought that David was without love when
he was beloved of God. Mr. N. represents it as a monstrous ex-
travagance”“ in the Reformer to teach that faith justiﬁes before
and without charity. Yet it is evident enough, and must have
been plain as noon-day to simple hearers, that when Luther
speaks of charity he speaks of this virtue as it is manifested in
the outward and visible course of life. Works he described as
the bright children of salvation not the parents of it. He insisted
that a man must believe in God before he could perform godly
actions, must lay hold on Christ before he could walk as a Chris
tian. His commentary is practical, popular, and highly rhetor~
ical in form, not scientiﬁc, though I think that every word of it
may be scientiﬁcally defended. Where does he say that justifying
faith, apart from love,——faith in the shape of bare belief, such as
devils may have,—comes ﬁrst, lays hold of Christ, and then be-
comes the parent of all graces? He merely explains the saying
of St. Paul, that by faith we have access to grace. His doctrine
amounts to no more than what Mr. Newman himself confesses
when he calls faith the “ sole inward instrument of justiﬁcation.”
That pale phantom of justifying faith, which ﬂits about, a mere
outline, a line without breadth or thickness, is not to be found in
Luther’s pages, but only in the pages of Luther’s adversaries.
Nor kan he aught of that other meagre shadow, justiﬁcation
by imputed righteousness alone n” he said that those three things,
Faith, Christ, and imputation should always go together, and

9* That Luther never “renounced” any of his “ extravagances” directly or
“indirectly,” early or late, is a point strongly insisted on by Archdeacon
Hare, in note W, pp. 712—13. His extravagances were strictly Within the
bounds of Scripture.

Jr Mr. N. does not give this, I believe, to Luther, but calls it the high
Protestant doctrine. High indeed in the heaven of absurdity. It should be
sent to Milton’s Limbo with a living Faith apart in time from Love—and
should not Mr. N ewman’s own Justification precedent to justifying Faith, go
along with them? Indeed I think this last is the Queen Chimaera of the
whole tribe.

INTRODUCTION. lxxxix

that faith and works should never be separated.* They who say
that Luther’s scheme presents but half of the Gospel, know but
half of his mind, and that not rightlyqL

Surely no one can think that the sentences quoted in the Lec~
times or. Justiﬁcation at p. 10, from Luther’s Commentary, con-
tain any proof that he thought or taught that “justifying faith is
without love when it justiﬁes,” which Mr. N. declares to be
plainly his doctrine, and “ no matter of words.” Luther, in
them, shows that faith not love is the root of good works, since .
Paul said Faith worketh by Love, not Love worketh ; he shows
that charity or following works do not inform faith, that is, do
not impart to it its justifying power, but that faith informs char-
ity, and is “ the sun or sunbeam of this shining.” What is this
more than Mr. N. himself asserts in Lecture X. when he teaches
that faith, as faith, in its distinct character, unites the soul with
God, or as he expresses it elsewhere, is “ the only connecting bond
between the soul and Christ.” I say again, that everywhere in
the Commentary Luther connects charity with works and the
outward life, and nowhere describes justifying faith as existing
apart from the habit of love. His doctrine on this point is
merely an expansion of St. Austin’s sound maxim: per ﬁdem
(hominem) posse jastiﬁcari etiamsi Legis opera non prcecesse-

*9 The confusion respecting the priority of justifying faith to love per-
haps arises in this way. Faith includes belief, or the mere assent of the
understanding to divine truth; though it is more than belief ; and intellec—
tual assent or perception is the means whereby we obtain the faith of the
heart, which is joined with love. The one may not indeed precede the other
in time; we may perceive the truth and embrace it spiritually at the same
moment; the willingness of the heart clearing the head and the head open-
ing the heart; still there is a priority of faith to love in idea. Fides est
humane salutis initinm,fundamentum et radix omnisjusliﬁcationis, says
' the Council of Trent. The Homily of Salvation shuts out love from the
ofﬁce of justifying; why is this, except that faith is conceived to have come
first and done the work? Of course we make the notion both absurd and
mischievous, if we suppose that justiﬁcation is obtained by some one act of
faith once acted. Faith is always coming ﬁrst in the soul of the Christian,
laying hold of Christ (or in Mr. Newman’s words, uniting the soul to God),
and producing good works.

-|- Luther preaches the whole Gospel with an emphasis on particular
parts to suit the exigencies of the day. So in our Tractsfor the Times
there is an emphasis on sacraments, outward works, all kinds of ecclesias
tical visibilities, and whatever can be brought forward relative to priestly
power and authority.

X0 INTRODUCTION.

rant; sequuntur em'm. justiﬁcatum 72072. prcecedzmt justified?»
dam. (Quoted by Mr. N. himself, p. 438.)

Mr. Newman has beaatifully described Luther’s conception of
justifying faith in his ﬁrst Lecture. It was then perhaps that he
fell in love with it, though he did not tell his love at the time,
but acted the lover in Lecture X. taking it for better for worse.
I hope he will never divorce it. Yes I Luther thought of faith
as the mere turning or adhering of the soul to Christ, which
“ may be said” not “by a ﬁgure of speech” but literally and
truly to “live in Him in whose image it rests.” He thought
that love lost itself in the object, Christ dwelling in the soul;
that love of our neighbor, charity, and all the family of outward
works, when set up as our justification or a part of it, were as
a solid screen betwixt us and the Saviour, while the former was
a medium like the ﬂuid air, colorless and transparent. St. Paul’s
language in the fourth of Romans prima facie favors Luther’s
view, because it so pointedly calls faith our righteousness, as if
we had no other justifying principle within us ; and declares sal-
vation to be of grace not of debt, and if it were obtained, even
in a conditional sense, by our virtues, it would seem to be in
some sort our due. But, on second thoughts, we perceive that
what is true of faith may be safely ascribed to the sanctification
that is one with it, and that salvation is of grace if secured by
the graces given us from above. St. Paul’s only object was to
show that men can not save themselves, and Luther’s only object
was to prevent the practical recurrence of this trust in self-salva-
tion by detached and outside performances.

The great opponent of Luther, on the article of Justiﬁcation,
agrees with him on the following points, which, I think, are all
the points of this high game. First, in holding Christ living in
the heart to be the true form of our righteousness. This is the
idea which is at the bottom of his whole theory, and it is very
distinctly set forth in the comments on chap. ii. verses 16 and
20?)? Secondly, in holding faith to be the sole inward instru

* Mr Newman gives him credit for this, in Lecture I. p. 22, and appen-
dix, pp. 405 and 409,—“the bold, nay correct language of Luther, that
Christ himself is the form of our jzostéﬂcation.”—l\/Iy Father’s deep satisfac-
tion in this thought may be seen from the following pass. 0'e in the Remains,
V. p. 289.

‘ And I, my loving Brentius, to the end I may better understand this

INTRODUCTION. xci

ment by which the conjunction of the soul with Christ is ef-
fected. That Christ dwells in the heart by faith is directly
afﬁrmed in Scripture??? Thirdly, in holding works necessary/J in
the order of salvation, as necessarily ﬂowing from saving faith or
rather from the Holy Ghost, united by faith with the soul, and
the proper signs and manifestations of grace “ impetrated by
faith.” Fourthly, in holding that the outward law for the right-
eous is superseded by the inward law of the mind, though it re-
mains to keep the ﬂesh in subjection. Fifthly, which might
have been ﬁrstly, that saving faith is itself produced by the Holy
Ghosti Sixthly, that the Holy Ghost is given, and the soul re
newed, in baptism. Seventhly, that conversion is wrought, and
I suppose I may add, since “ St. James says so,” and St. Peter
too, that we are divinely begotten or born again, in some spirits
ual sense, by the Word of God.

Wherein then do they differ ? why truly in this. Luther denies
that we are justiﬁed by the graces and works that ﬂow out of
our justiﬁcation ; Mr. Newman afﬁrms that we are justiﬁed by
them, that they help to justify together with the faith which
makes them what they are. This appeared to Luther a hyste'ron
pv'otei'on; and it certainly does look like a contradiction in Mr.
Newman’s scheme, that after confessing faith to be the sole in-
ward instrument of justiﬁcation he should call graces and works
instruments also ;——that after agreeing with the Homilist to shut
them out from the office of justifying, he should think it essential

case, do use to think in this manner, namely, as if in my heart were no
quality or virtue at all, which is called faith, and love (as the Sophists do
speak and dream thereof, but I set all on Christ, and say, my formalis jzi‘s-
tz'tz'a, that is, my sure, my constant and complete righteousness (in which is
no want nor failing, but is, as before God it ought to be) is Christ my Lord
and Saviour.” (Luther’s Table Talk, p. 213.)

“ Aye! this, this is indeed to the purpose. In this doctrine my soul can
ﬁnd rest. I hope to be saved by faith, not by my faith, but by the faith of
Christ in me." S. T. C.

9“ Gal. ii. 20. Eph. iii. 17.

1- Commentary, chap. iii. verse 11, and elsewhere, Luther teaches that the
righteousness which saves is a passive righteousness given us from above.
Had he taught that we were saved by faith, as an act of our own taking us
to Christ and laying hold of Him, this would have been as false and injuri-
ous as to ascribe salvation to outward works. The faith which accepts
grace is itself the effect of grace.

1 lb. chap. iii. verses 27, 28. Chap. iv. verse 6.

xcii INTRODUCTION.

to a sound belief—to shut them in again. Granted that the dis-
pute is a verbal one, still if we decide that one form of words is
the correct form, we surely ought not to adopt another form which
directly contradicts it. As for St. James, when he said that man
is not justiﬁed by faith alone, he evidently meant by faith not
what Luther deﬁnes it, a gift and a present of God in our
hearts, the substance whereof is our willf“< but what Antinomians
mean by it, mere belief; for this is a common art of rhetorical
argument to adopt the adversary’s expressions and turn them
against him. With him works stood for a working spirit, by that
common ﬁgure which puts the effect for the cause, as a man
might say, this “ spring was health to me,” meaning the cause
of health. The outward act of Abraham was nothing; in the
mind of Abraham were an act of faith and an act of obedience
intimately united. Now Luther taught that the faith in this joint
act alone justiﬁed ; and Mr. N. seems to say the same, when he
calls faith the sole inward instrument of justiﬁcation. Luther’s
opponents maintain, that the obedience, which is one with the
faith, helps to justify, and this Mr. Newman afﬁrms also: but
how can he make it consist with the sole instrumentality of faith '?
Surely that which alone joins us to Christ alone justiﬁes us.
N ow Mr. Newman declares that faith is “the only instrument or
connecting bond between the soul and Christ.” What signiﬁes
it, as against Luther, to say, that according to St. James, we
are “justiﬁed in good works '3” Luther only denied that we are
justiﬁed by them.

Mr. Newman has a great objection to Luther’s explanatory
phrase apprehensive ; he will not say that faith justiﬁes by lay-
ing hold of Christ and applying Him to the soul, though this is
said in our Homilies, with which he yet.seeks, in his work on
Justiﬁcation, to be in accordance. He calls this way of speaking
a human subtlety and alleges that such words are not in Scrip-
ture: yet surely there is quite as much of human subtlety and

* Table Talk, chap. 13. Of Faith and the cause thereof. Luther was
vacillating in his deﬁnitions of faith, for he sometimes placed it in the un-
derstanding and sometimes in the will, whereas it is in both; but he always
described it as a work of the Holy Ghost (Comm. chap. iii. ver. 11), he calls
it a believing with the heart, and he declares that it can not be separated
from Hope which resteth in the will, the two having respect to the other,
as the two cherubims of the mercy-seat, which could not be divided. My
Father says he diseoursed best on Faith in his Postills. Remains, V. p. 290

INTRODUCTION. ' xciii

extra-scriptural language in his own scheme : where can we ﬁnd
it said by the Saviour or his Apostles, that faith is “but the
secondary or representative instrument of justiﬁcation,” or its
“ sustaining cause,” “ not the initiation of the justiﬁed-state,” or
that “ it justiﬁes as including all other graces in and under it,”
as having “ an unexplained connection with the invisible world,”
or ﬁve hundred sayings of like sort? These are but inferences
from Scripture—not Scripture itself. Luther’s term laying hold
of Christ seems to me a mere translation into ﬁgurative language
of what Scripture repeatedly afﬁrms, namely that Christ dwells
in the heart by faith; and the very same thing appears to be
implied in Mr. N.’s own admission that it alone unites the soul
to God as the inward instrument of justiﬁcation. Even if faith
and works of faith are all one and what is true of the parent is
true of the offspring, still if Christ alone is the meritorious cause
of salvation, our personal righteousness justiﬁes as connecting us
with Him, that is as apprehensive, and not merely as purifying
our souls in his sight. Luther denied that it justzﬁed in the
latter sense at all, and whether he was right or wrong in this,—
this is the doctrine of our Articles and Homilies, which certainly
intimate that not the faithful work, but faith in the work justi-
ﬁes, by laying hold on Christ. They who condemn his teaching
in the present day, copy his only fault, unfairness to his oppo-
nents—casting into one condemnation practical perverters with
theoretic teachers—while they hide all his merits behind a bushel.

Many of Luther’s opponents remind one of Jack the Giant-
killer’s doughty host, they think they are belaboring Jack, while
they are but beating a stuffed bolster. Mr. Newman is too skil-
ful a combatant for this ; but his ﬁght against Luther is not more
effectual ; he keeps gazing at him with a look of deep hostility,
but rather makes feints than really strikes him, and when he does
aim a stroke at the old swordsman it descends upon his shield or
his breast armor. There is one point in Mr. Newman’s scheme,
and one alone, which seems to me utterly false, not in words
alone but in sense: I mean his assertion that justiﬁcation prc—
cedes justifying faith ; that faith does but take up and sustain a '
spiritual state already established in the soul; that the faith
which is our access to grace is unjustiﬁed and unjustifying ; con-
trary to the doctrine of Aquinas who teaches that the Spirit pro-

duces its own recipient, that it enters by the avenue of faith
13*

xciv . INTRODUCTION.

which it ﬁrst opens out. Luther’s own View of baptism implies
as much undoubtedly, and it seems to me that he is wrong in too
much agreement with Patrician theology not in too much depart-
ure from it.

As for the Apostolic teaching, I believe that it is quite on one
side of these contentions ; that the object of St. Paul was to re-
fute Judaism, the notion that men can save themselves by the
mere direction and compulsion of an outward law, without Christ
in the heart ; not to combat such an opinion as Bishop Bull’s or
that set forth in the Council of Trent; that the object of St.
James was to put down Antinomianism, not such a Soliﬁdian
view as Luther’s. I believe these inspired teachers would have
assented to the statement of either party, and when they heard
each confess Christ cruciﬁed and salvation by His merits, would
have inquired no further. It is grievous to hear Christians
accuse each other of irreligion and impiety on such grounds as
their different views on this question.>X< “Satanic inﬂuence I"
cry the parties one against another :—as if Satan was simple
enough to spend his time in weaving webs of justiﬁcation ! The
nets with which he catches souls are of very different make and
materials}L

It was not these bubbles which my Father was thinking of
when he called “Luther, in parts, the most evangelical writer he
knew after the apostles and apostolic men ;” it was the depth of
his insight into the heart of man and into the ideas of the Bible,
the fervor and reality of his religious feelings, the manliness and

*5 Bishop Bull observes that there is but the difference of a qua and a quae
between his view and the Soliﬁdian, when you come to the bottom of the
latter; but is it not strange that he should ridicule the Lutheran because he
ﬁghts ﬁercely for qua (the opinion that faith alone which worketh by love
justiﬁes), yet ﬁght himself for qua (the opinion that faith inasmuch as it
worketh by love justiﬁeth), as if the safety of the Church depended on the
decision. I think if he had fought with Luther himself instead of certain
narrow-minded disciples of Luther’s school, he would have been brought to
see that the Soliﬁdian statement was at least as good as his own. If qua
can be wrested into Antinomianism more easily than qua, on the other ham:
qua more readily slips into Judaism than qua}.

Jr Either the Romanist or the Lutheran doubtless may add to his belief of
Redemption by the merits of Christ what overthrows or overshadows it, in
practice. But these practical falsehoods and heresies do not appear in for-
mal schemes of J ustiﬁeation; let them be hunted out and exposed. but not
confounded with theories and confessions of faith.

INTRODUCTION. X0?

tenderness of his spirit, the vehement eloquence with which he
assails the Romish practical fallacies and abuses. He even con~
tends with Luther when he lays too much stress on his Soliﬁdian
dogma, the exclusion of charity from the ofﬁce of j ustifying ; and
on the certainty and perpetuity of faith in the elect preferred
the notions of Hooker to those of the earlier assertor of faith.*
Perhaps it may be objected to Luther’s teaching, that he does not
expressly enough distinguish between the ideal and the actual,
the abstract and the realized. Luther declares, after St. Paul,
that the outward law remains for the outward man, is dead for
the spiritual man ; but in actual men and women the carnal and
spiritual exist together in different proportions. If any Christian
on the face of the earth should apply to himself without reserve
what St. Paul and what Luther say of the spiritual man, he
will fall into spiritual error of the deepest kind. There have
been great disputes whether St. Paul in the viiith chapter of R0-
mans, and in Galatians v. 19, refers to the state of the justiﬁed
or the unjustiﬁed. The disputants never seemed to ask them-
selves whether it appeared on the face of St. Paul’s teaching,
that he divided the world into the justiﬁed and unjustiﬁed, the
regenerate and unregenerate, as the shepherd divideth the sheep
from the goats, after the manner of modern schools. But surely
to suppose, that in describing those contests between the ﬂesh
and the spirit, he spoke of the absolutely unjustiﬁed, of persons
in the main under the dominion of sin, and of them exclusively,
is further from the truth than Luther’s interpretation, namely,
that the desires of the ﬂesh will remain even in those who are
believers unto salvation, and for the most part are walking in the
light. There was a tendency in his time to understand ﬂeshly
desires of sensuality alone. He set himself to combat this notion
and to show, that though one set of vices might be wholly kept
down in this life, the ﬂesh was never wholly subdued. Again in
Luther’s language, copied from the Scripture, the ﬂesh sometimes
is to be understood in a neutral sense, and means the sum of out-
ward things—that “other kingdom” distinct from the kingdom

9“ Remains, V. p. 288. HIS views on this subject are given in his note on
Fenelon, Remains, V. p. 527—in the notes on a Sermon of Hocker’s, Ib. p
47—on Donne, p. 91—on Luther’s Table Tulle, Ib. p. 269—on A Barrister’s
Hints, p. 464—on The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 252—-and in his Essay on
Faith, V. p. 557.

xc v1 INTRODUCTION.

of grace. This way of speaking offended Romanists, who were
bent on exalting the outward. They sought to Christen the
whole visible creation, and I think they introduced ﬂesh and
blood too much into the kingdom of heaven.

These were practical points, though they seemed to be theory,
and Luther’s sins against Rome were of a practical description.
His rationale of grace never made Catholic divines his ﬁerce oppo-
nents. As for the “heroic man’s” rhetorical atrocities, his “tiger
lilies” of speech, as my Father called them, they are all capable
of an innocent meaning at least ; they are but “sheep in wolves’
clothing,” silly sheep enough perhaps, yet harmless to the per-
sons to whom they were addressed, who took them as they were
meant, knowing the speaker’s mind at large. Now, adversaries
of Lutheranism take up these spent rockets, and ﬂing them into
the arena of religious contention l—of course they look black and
smell sulphureously. What makes the host of Catholic divines a
host of enemies to Luther, is his enmity to the mediaeval Church
s stem with all the net-work and ramiﬁcation of doctrine devel-
oped for the temporal advantage of the clergy—all the branchery
of mystic beliefs and superstitious practices, works, vows, reli-
gious abstinences, self-tortures, which supported,—all the mum-
meries rehearsed by Hans Sachs in his Nachtigall, which adorned,
this clerical polity—his determination that men should read the
Word of God itself, though with every help to the understanding
of it—his determination, powerfully carried out, to simplify the
access of the soul to G0cZ,—not to make the narrow a broad
way, as, in common with St. Paul, he is falsely reported, but a
straight and short passage, though a passage through which no
man could squeeze the bloated body of licentiousness—to batter
down for as many as possible that labyrinth of priestly salvation,
in the mazy windings of which the timid and tender-conscienced
wander weary and distressed, while for the worldling and care-
less liver there lies a primrose path outside its gloomy walls,
through which, if he will pay for salvation, he may saunter
pleasantly to a better world; with many a short cut, such as
Milton describesﬁ“ and which my Father, when he visited Sicily,

“ “ And they, Who to be sure of Paradise,
Dying, put on the weeds of Dominick,
Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised.” _
Par. Lost, B. iii. 1. 478. y

INTRODUCTION. ‘ xcvii

knew, as other sojourners in Roman Catholic-countries have
known, to be actually provided by or in a church, which is rather
too much all things to all men.

It is for these things that staunch “Catholics” hate, for theSc
things that my Father loved and honored, Luther’s name. The
Lutheran Church has not prospered w ell. But how would Chris~
tendom have faied without a Luther ?—what would Rome have
done and dared but for the Ocean of the Refo1med that wands
her ? Luther lives yet,—not so beneficially in the Lutheran
Church as out of it,—an antagonist spirit to Rome, and a purify-
ing and preserving spirit in Christendom at large???

I do not deny but that the Romish system, with its low checks
and coarse incentives, may have some special effect in moralizing
the Poor, while Protestantism, except as Methodism, is apt to fly
above them, or to fleet before them, like a cold and formless
vapor. Paganism was more effectual upon the minds of the
many than Platonism ; Judaism or self-salvation by outward
works will restrain a few who care not for Pauline doctrine:
Montanisrn did more for some than the discipline of the Church.
Nevertheless whatever is the purest, highest and most spiritual
form of faith, to that must men he raised up if possible. Make them
but spiritual enough to embrace it, and there will be no lack of

9* After describing the Papacy, or “the Papal Hierarchy, which is, in
truth, the dilated Pope,” as “a power in the Christian Church, which, in
the name of Christ, and at once pretending and usurping his authority, is
systematically. subversive of the essential and distinguishing characters
and purposes of the Christian Church,” my Father, in his Church. and State,
proceeds to say: “It is my full conviction, that the rites and doctrines,
the agenda at credenda of the Roman Catholics, could we separate them
from the adulterating ingredients combined with, and the use'made of them,
by the sacerdotal Mamelukes of the Romish monarchy, for the support of
the Papacy and Papal hierarchy, would neither have brought about, nor
have sufﬁced to justify, the convulsive separation under Leo X. Nay, that
if they were fairly, and in the light of a sound philosophy, compared with
either of the two main divisions of Protestantism, as it now exists in this
country, that is, with the fashionable doctrines and interpretations of the
Arminian and Grotian school on the one hand, and with the tenets and Ian
guage of the modern Calvinists on the other, an enlightened disciple of
John and of Paul would be perplexed which of the three to prefer as the
least unlike the profound and sublime system he had learned from his great
masters. And in this comparison I leave out of view the extreme sects of
Protestantism, whether of the frigid or the torrid zone, Soeinian or fanatic"

VI.pp. 110. 111.
VOL. III. E

\

Q

a

xcviii INTRODUCTION.

power or of substance in a philosophical Christianity to fill the
deepest and the widest soul that ever yet appeared among thr
sons of men.

Mr. Coleridge’s love and respect for Luther I might well have
allowed to vindicate itself, had I not felt so strong a desire to
Show how deeply I sympathize with him on that subject; his
esteem and admiration of another great German, of a totally dif-
ferent spirit, a reformer of philosophy, I wish to set in the true
light, lest it be mistaken for what it is not. My Father himself
supposed that he had fallen into suspiciOn through his partial ad-
vocacy of Spinoza ;* Ibelieve he has done himself harm with
those who, as Archdeacon Hare says, talk of Germany as if its
history belonged to that of Kamschatka, by his language respect-
ing Immanuel Kantf Let the reader bear in mind that he spoke

9* My Father alludes to the defects in Spinoza’s system in several of his
writings. His ultimate opinion of that philosopher has been published in
Mr. Gillman’s Life of Coleridge, pp. 319—22.

+ “He calls Calvin a great man l”—I have seen speciﬁed as a charge in a
religious indictment. I can not sympathize with that “ catholicity” which
looks upon Luther as a “bold bad man,” and thinks it a crime to call Calvin
a great one; defames the character of our noble Reformers, and disparages
the glorious poetry of Milton ; holds the memory of King William infamous
and that of Cromwell execrable; contemplates coldly the ﬂames that con-
sumed Latimcr, and ﬁres at remembrance of the axe that beheaded Laud
ﬁnds out that Dr. Arnold was over-happy to be a saint, and attributes the
power of Mr. Carlyle’s writings to the Prince of the Air._ Mr. Carlyle’s
“i1‘1‘eligion”* as well as Mr. Irving’s “religion” the author of The Doctor
reckons among those non-entities which pass for substance with a misjudging
world. To the religion of Irving Mr. Carlyle himself has paid a most beau-
tiful and affecting tribute (see his Illiscellam'es, vol. v. pp. 1—6). He quotes
this saying of one who knew him well; “His was the freest, brotherliest,
bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with: I call him on the
whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough, found in this world,
or now hope to ﬁnd.” But my dear Uncle saw Irving under the most
unfavorable circumstances, when he had drunk that “ foulest Circean
draught, the poison of Popular Applause ;” when “Fashion crowded round
him with her meteor lights and Bacehic dances,” and he seemed him-
self, perhaps, in some respects, like one of the empty, gaudy, intoxicated
and intoxicating throng.--—But who holds all this cluster of opinions? I

 

*5 I ﬁnd, on referring to the passage in The Doctor, that I have mistaken
“ Mr. Carlisle’s irreligion,” seriously meant for “ Mr. Carlyle’s irreligion” in
the sense of irony. But the mistake is no misreport of my Uncle’s opinion
of Mr Carlyle.

INTRODUCTION. XCLX

and felt thus at the same period when he was ardently defending
Christianity among the Germans against those whom he deemed
undoubtedly its opponents.* The truth was that he never be-
held in Kant the foe of Christianity; he kept his eye on the
great characteristic parts of Kant’s teaching, and these, he main-
tained, might be brought to the service of Christianity, as far as
they went ; might strengthen the faith by purifying it and bring-
ing it into coincidence with reason. They who pronounce the
writings of this great genius directly and positively adverse to pure
religion, whether right or wrong, are but setting their judgment
of what Christianity, historical as well as ideal, is and involves,
of what Kant’s doctrine is and involves, against my Father ; they
can not accuse him of supporting a system of inﬁdelity without
ﬁrst begging the question against him on both points. Kant is

know not whether any man holds them all, but the spirit of exclusiveness in
the religious partisan has maintained every one of them, and earnestly too.
Mr. Maurice’s remark, in his Bog/1e Lectures, on one strong point in Mr.
Carlylc’s writings, the sense they exhibit of an Absolute Will and the ne-
cessity of absolute submission to it on the part of man, which they bring
out with special force in a practical way, is an instance of that power of rec-
ognizing the substance of religion wherever it be, and under whatever form,
which is so characteristic of his own genius.

*9 This is an extract from a letter of Dr. Parry, printed by Dr. Carlyon in
his recollections of my Father in Germany.

“Eichorn, one of the principal theologists in Germany, and a lecturer
here, seems, from all accounts, to be doing his utmost to destroy the evi
dences on which we ground our belief. He is a good man and extremely
charitable, but this attempt speaks neither for his'head nor for his heart.
Coleridge, an able Vindicator of these important truths, is well acquainted
with Eichorn, but this latter is a coward, who dreads his arguments and
his presence. Even atheism is not altogether unfashionable here, in the
higher, and sometimes among the lower classes of society. The priests are
generally weak and ignorant men, who pay little attention to their ﬂocks,
at least, out of the pulpit. They are, however, pairl badly. I have twice
mentioned Coleridge, and much wish you were acquainted with him. It is
very delightful to hear him sometimes discourse on religious topics for an
hour together. His fervor is particularly agreeable when contrasted with
the chilling speculations of the German philosophers. I have had occasion
to see these successively abandon all their strongholds when he brought to
the attack his arguments and his philosophy.” (Early Years and Late
Recollections, pp. 100—101.)

Dr. Carlyon himself, in my opinion, misunderstood my Father in many
things, as he misunderstood some of his favorite authors: but I am obliged
to him for his testimony on this point.

c INTRODU CTlOI'.

called an Atheist : yet: who but he overthrew the grand atheist-
ical argument of Hume ? he is called a Pantheist, yet he it was
who first discovered and clearly stated the fundamental error in
the Pantheistic system of Spinoza : others had abused it as im-
pious ; he alone proved it to be irrational.*

Every thing that the Germans teach requires to be substantiated
by the English mind, to be enlivened and spiritualized. They
are analyzers,—all, more or less, what Kant was pre-eminently,
Alle's-:emmlmemlemz-——shatterers to pieces. But this process is
a necessary preliminary to the construction of what is sound—a
necessary work toward pure religion. They can overthrow per-
manently only what is ready to fall, or incapable by its nature
of re-construction. They can not extinguish the spiritual in-
stincts of mankind, or blot out the records of history. The
draining of marshes will never render a country dry and barren,
while there are yet springs in the mountains whence clear streams
‘may ﬂow. If Germans disbelieve, it is not from their \activity
‘of intellect ; their clear searching glances ; it is more from what
they leave undone than from what they do ; from what they have
not than from what they possess. Some of their marked writers

* “ Zimmermann,” says Dr. Carlyon, “gave us his opinion freely of Kant’s
philosophy, and no one could have more cordially reprobated its general
tendency. After maintaining, as Kant has done, that the existence of a God
can never be proved; to what purpose, asked Z. is it to tell the world that
the best argument which can be adduced in its favor is this very impossi-
bility of proving it ‘3 The generality of mankind, he said, would recollect
the possibility, but forget the inference.” Dr. C. adds, “Coleridge attended
to what he said, without showing any desire to defend the Philosopher of
Konigsburg on this occasion.”

My Father perhaps thought it good economy to save his breath on that
occasion, and to judge from the comments upon his writings of some who
were present, very wisely. But I think I know what he would have said
to this smart shallow objection of Zimmermann’s, that if good for any thing
it is good against every philosophical and religious argument that ever was
published. \Vhat is there in the way of reasoning that may not be made
false and injurious by being cut in half 2 That treatise of Kant’s was ad-
dressed and adapted to students, and, if students had not misrepresented it
the world would not have misunderstood it. So it is with the teaching of
Luther : the simple hearers, who expect that the teacher will bring forth
what is true rather than what is false, what accords with their moral ideas
rather than what contradicts them, these found him scriptural enough I
dai e say. It was the systematic divines, the Romish and Romanizing
sophisters, that turned his commentary into Antinomianisni.

INTRODUCTION» , ._7 a

want that imaginative power,—so necessary in religious specu
lation,—which brings the many into one, and judges the parts
with reference to the whole.

Mr. Arthur Hallam, whose Remains inspire some who knew
him not with deep regret that they are remains, not ﬁrst fruits,
and commencements, has said on this subject 2* “ I do not hesi-
tate to express my conviction, that the spirit of the critical phi-
losophy, as seen by its fruits in all the ramifications of art, liter-
ature, and morality, is as much more dangerous than the spirit
of mechanical philosophy, as it is fairer in appearance, and more’
capable of alliance with our natural feelings of enthusiasm and
delight. Its dangerous tendency is this, that it perverts those
very minds, whose office it was to resist the perverse impulses
of society, and to proclaim truth under the dominion of falsehood.”
The difference between the critical and the mechanical philos-
ophy is this, that the latter is incongruous and inconsonant with
Christianity ; while the former (as far as it goes) is capable of
ﬂowing along with it in one channel and even blending with it
in one stream, as I contend that it does in the Christian philos-
ophy of my Father. The latter blunts the religious suscepti-
bilities—perverts the habits of thought—suppresses the inward
ﬁre which, at the impulse of the external revelation, springs up-
ward into a living ﬂame, as the ﬂint draws the hidden ﬁre from
the rock. But the critical philosophy cultivates the moral sense
while it clears the eye of reason; its positions are compatible
with every spiritual truth, and to the spiritual are spiritual
themselves. It is like the highest poetry—like the poetry of Mr.

* Remains in Verse and Prose, p.189. I think that Mr. A. Hallam
might perhaps have modiﬁed his opinion of the Critical Philosophy, had he
lived and thought longer. As a substitute for Christianity it is indeed but
a beautiful shadow; unite the two and it becomes substantial. A really
searching system can be injurious to none but those who are undone already
and adopt it as a goodly cloak for their own bare and hideous heart-unbe-
lief. There will ever be in the world born Mechanicians, Pelagians, Psilan—
thropists, Antinomians, Judaizers, who will have systems that suit their
feelings. But these systems are positively false, and tend to corrupt the
heart; while the Critical philosophy, considered apart from the religious
opinions of Kant and some of his followers, has never yet been proved so
by systematic and searching argument. See remarks in the JlIissz'on of the
Comforter, vol. ii. pp. 799—800, on injustice done to German writers by party
judges, slightly acquainted with their writings, whose irrelevant ﬁne say-
ings are taken for con futations of their untouched adversaries.

9

cii iNTRoDUCTION.

'Wordsworth, not religion itself, much less dogmatic divinity, but
cognate with it and harmoniously co-operativeiy-<
Let it be understood, however, that by the writical philosophy,
I mean the really critical part of Kant‘s teaching,—-all his
purely philosophical and metaphysical doctrines, which have a
most important bearing on religious belief a posteriori, but do
not treat of it directly—of which the bulk of his works consist.
I speak particularly of his Logic, Prolegomena t0 evcryfuture
system of .ZlIetaphysics, Critique of the Pure Reason (his great.
west production), Critiques of the Judgment and of the Practical
Reason, Only possible ground of proof for demonstrating the
Existence of God, and ﬂIetaph/ysical Elements of I’Vatural Phi-
loSOphy. I do not speak of his Religion within the bounds of
pure Reason so far as the doctrine of that work really conﬂicts
with all outward Revelation and Historical Christianity. The
treatise just mentioned,—-which forms scarcely more than a four
or ﬁve-and-twentieth part of the author’s whole writings, though
in the minds of some persons it seems to form the whole—con-
tains an application of the critical philosophy, which many, who
embrace the philosophy itself, may and do reject—which cer-
tainly my Father never adopted. His argument in the ﬁrst Lay
Sermon on miracles supposes the historical truth of the miracles
recorded in the Bible, and the admiration he expresses of the
treatise above-mentioned refers not to any portion of it, which is
irreconcilable with the substance of the Catholic Faith, but to
that part only which serves to place it in more complete accord-
ance with Practical Reason (the moral-intelligential mind), than
the primitive or medizeval conceptions. The general character
and aim of the critical philosophy has been described by my Fa-
ther, when he speaks of “that logical 7190mud£la domyaaunﬁ,
that critique of the human intellect, which previously to the
Weighing and measuring of this or that, begins by assaying the
weights, measures, and scales themselves ; that fulﬁlment of the
9* I do not speak here of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, or parts of The E2:-
cursion expressly Christian and Catholic, but of Mr. VVordsworth’s poetry
in general, including much of an earlier date than those productions, in
which formal religion is not apparent. but in which the spirit of Christianity
is “the spirit of the whole.” I do not say so much as this of the Critical
Philosophy, but still I think it has been evolved by Christianity (that is, by

the general spirit of the religion surrounding men’s minds as an atmos; here)
and agrees with it, though by itself it is not Christianity.

INTRODUCTION. oiii

heaven-descended nosce teipsum, in respect to the intellectivc
part of man, which was commenced in a sort of tentative broad-
cast way by Lord Bacon in his Novmn O-rganum, and brought
to a systematic completion by Immanuel Kant in his 1075157276 cler
reinen Vernunft, K'rz'ti/c (167' Urtheils/crqft, and Metap/Lysz'sche
Anfangs-grtmde (Zer Natm'wz'ssenschaft3"? It was of the Kan-
tean Philosophy considered in this point of view that Schiller
said, in his correspondence with Goethe, though its “ form shall
one day be destroyed, its foundations will not have this destiny
to fear ; for ever since mankind has existed, and any reason
among mankind, these same ﬁrst principles have been admitted
and on the whole acted upon.”

Mr. Dequincey has spoken with horror of Kant’s table-talk in
ﬁdelity. What authority he has for such a horrid charge I know
not: he does not write well on personal points, though admirao
bly always, when he keeps away from the Jl’Im‘emma, or Snake
Marsh of private anecdote. This is certain, that Kant’s disciples
and commentators in general are a most silent and discreet set
of men if their master “planted his glory in the grave and was
ambitious of rotting forever.” They seem profoundly ignorant
of this part of his creed. This also is certain that he has
amongst the admirers of his writings Churchmen and good
Christians, who have found a coincidence between the more im-
portant parts of his teaching and the ideas of the Catholic faith,
together with suggestions, that throw light on some of the dark
places of divinity by clearly exhibiting the structure and limits
. of the human mind,-——which enlightens the object by pouring
light into the subject. Is it of no use to religion to clear and cor-
rect its intellectual form ? A great deal of superstition may hold
a great deal of Spiritual truth, as the wax of the honeycomb holds
the pure nourishing honey. The honey may be drawn off into a
glass basin ; and how necessary would this be if the comb were
not merely insipid and innutritious but unwholesome or even poi-
sonous ! It should ever be remembered that intellectual error in
religion injures those least who are least intellectual ; and hence
it is a fallacy to argue that because men in past times, or simple
Christians at all times, have lived holy lives though their creed
may be challenged as in part irrational, therefore contradiction

- * Works. Leipzig, 1839, vol. ii.—vol. vii. pp. 1-364.—vol. viii. pp. 441-
659.

Civ INTRODUCTION.

to the laws of the understanding in theological articles is of mi
consequence. It is of the more consequence the clearer-sighted
we become: it is one thing to shut our eyes to falsehood, and
quite another not to see it.

Most desirable is it that philosophy should be independent of
religious shackles in its operations in order that it may conﬁrm
religion. It is even a benefit to the world, however great a loss
to himself. that Kant, with his mighty powers of thought and
analysis, was not religiously educated. Had he been brought up
a Churchman he could never have divested himself of dogmatic
divinity; he could never have given the (2 prio/‘i map of the hu-
man mind as independently as he has given it; and, if it had
been less independently and abstractly given, the correlation of
Christianity with the mental constitution of man could never
have been so evident as it now is to those who have studied his
writings, and who know and love and revere the Bible. Idc
not, of course, mean that mere spirituality interferes with specu-
lative philosophy, but only that religious persons are generally
such as have come early under the sway of some dogmatic sys-
tem, which has guided their thoughts from the first; nor (101
mean, that a mill! dogmatically educated may not become a
great philosopher: but that it is an advantage to religious phi-
losophy to obtain the undirected thoughts of a powerful investi-
gator, who has considered the human mind by its own light
alone ; because thus the harmony of the outward revelation with
our internal conformation is most incontrovertibly ascertained
No fervent devotee of the outward revelation could have done
religion this particular service, or shown how perfectly the re-
ports ot' the mere intellectual explorer in the region of mental
metaphysics coincide with the spiritual believer’s scheme of
faith ; and, as 011 a clear view of this coincidence all correctness
of religious theory depends, they who value such correctness ought
not to chpise the labors of a subtle analyst like Immanuel Kant,
or deny, before examination, that they may be important “ con.
tributions to Catholic Truth.” There is a maxim current among
religious Ea'clusz't’cs, that he who is wrong positively or nega-
tively in his creed can have no true insight into any province of
human thought connected with Morals and Religion. This opin-
ion if acted on would be most injurious to the cause of both, be-
cause great powers of thought belong to some who, unhappily for

INTRODUCTION. 'cv

themselves, are not devout or spiritual-minded. Truth is ad-
vanced by the efforts of various minds, and what an irreligious
man throws out may be converted to a use he little dreamed of
by the religious. Mr. Dequincey has said ﬁnely of Kant con-
trasting him with my Father: “He was the Gog and he was
the Magog of Hunnish desolation to the existing schemes of phi-
losophy. He probed them ; he showed the vanity of vanities
which besieged their foundations,——the rottenness below, the hol-
lowness above. But he had no instincts of creation or restoration
within his Apollyon mind ; for he had no love, no faith, no self-
distrust, no humility, no child-like docility; all which qualities
belonged essentially to Coleridge’s mind, and waited only for
manhood and for sorrow to bring them forward.” It was be-
cause my Father had these qualities that to him the philosophy
of Kant was religion ; and, indeed, I think it may be maintained,
that although Kant’s process was analytic rather than synthetic,
and was occupied in clearing away rather than in erecting, it
was by no means purely destructive, but, after the clearance, had
materials enough left wherewith to construct the base of a phi‘
losophy coincident with a spi1itual Christianity.

It was afﬁrmed by Hume that religion must rest 011 faith—that
reason could not prove its truth. This p1 oposltlon was 1e- -afﬁrmed
by Kant, but with an utterly opposite inference from that which
Hume drew from it, for he saw what Hume saw not, that there
is a power in the human mind sufﬁcient to support and substan-
tiate religion, apart from the mere speculative faculty ; that spir-
itual truths must have their own speciﬁc evidence ; that if there
is no absolute demonstration in these matters for the mere under-
standing, none is needed, none would serve any purpose of reli.
gion; that theoretic reason has performed her whole ofﬁce in
religious proof when she has shown the impossibility of disprov-
ing the objects of faith. Reason can not oblige us to receive,
said Kant, more than reason can prove. But what mere Specu-
lative Reason can not oblige us to receive, the Moral and Spirit-
ual within us may. This is the doctrine of the Aids to Reﬂec-
tion ; I believe that my Father, in his latter years, added some-
thing to it, on the subject of Ideas, which will appear, I trust.
hereafter.

The question for us is not, did Kant himself accept the out-

ward Revelation, but does his teaching overthrow or does it es-
Rae

cvi INTRODUCTION.

tablish the religion of the heart and conscience '3 If it establishes
the law written in the heart it will assuredly strengthen the out.
ward Revelation, when rightly used. There are some who say,
that God and Christ and Law and Nature and Scripture have all
placed religion on the rock of external evidence. The larger and
stronger this rock can be made to appear so much the better. To
rest the whole structure of the faith upon it my Father ever held
to be a most venturous and blind proceeding. He held that
beneath this rock there is a broad and deep foundation, out of
which the rock grows and with which it coheres as one,——that
this foundation was laid by the Creator himself—that His voice,
both as it speaks in the heart and reasonable mind, and as it is
uttered in the Written Word, refers us to internal evidence as
the only satisfying and adequate evidence of religion ;-——that on
this foundation, the accordance of the Bible with our spiritual
wants and aspirations, the internal coherency of the whole
scheme of Revelation within itself to the eye of Reason and the
Spirit, Christianity ever has been and ever must be supported and
maintained. They who term external evidence the 9'00]: of the
Faith, its only secure foundation, never scruple to adopt from
those whom they condemn as Rationalists, because they hold the
internal evidence indisPensable, thoughts and sentiments which
they, with their professions, have but little right to. They make
themselves ﬁne with borrowed plumes, and talk of spiritual ideas,
instincts, needs, aptitudes, preconfigurations of the soul to reli-
gion and correspondences of the heart and spirit to doetrineﬁ
They say that religion is to be known by its fruits, the nobleness,
the blessedness, the inward peace and beauty that it produces.

’* Mr. Allies in his Church of England cleared from the charge of Schism,
and Mr. Archer Butler in his Letters on Mr. Newman’s Essay on Develop
ment, have treated in a searching and masterly way certain portions of the
external evidence against Romanism in defence of our church. Aman who
clearly and learnedly sets forth historical records must throw light. on the
truth; but no good is done to the cause of religion by those declaimers,
who exalt outward evidence without bringing it forward, and condemn the
demand for internal evidence while they are presupposing the need and ex-
1stencc of it in their whole argument; who look one way and row another '
who rave at Rationalism while they are picking her pocket,,and jumble to
gether whatever is most specious in different systems, without regard to
consistency. This kind of writing pleases the mob of the would—be orthodox
wthe lifajoritarians; but it is of no service to religion.

INTRODUCTION. cvn

Now if these deep ideas, these harmonies of the human spirit
with objects of faith, presented by the Written Word and Tradi~
tion, exist, must not they be the rock that underlies the structure
of external evidence and substantiates it '3 Can we think that it
is in the power of any appearance to the outward sense, any
vision or voice, to implant the ideas of God or of any spiritual re-
ality '3 Can these outward signs do more than excite it? Main-
tainers of external evidence, as the roe/.7 of the faith, insist that
religion must ﬁrst be proved historically, and then brought home
to the heart by its internal merits. It never can be proved his-
torically unless, as a whole, it be ideally true, and if the power of
ideas within us show it to be such, this must be the deepest and
only sufﬁcient proof of its reality. To say that Reason and the
Moral Sense may speak, but only after outward evidence has been
given to the Understanding, is to annul the very being of Reason.
For that is a spiritual eye analogous to the bodily one. What
should we say of an eye that could not be sure whether a partic-
ular object was black or blue, round or square, till it was declared
to be so by authority ? Should we not say that it had no power
of sight at all? Let the maintainers of external evidence and
historical proof guard this rock and make as much of it as they
may ; but let them not cry out angrily against those who seek to
probe and examine it ; for assuredly if it will not bear the ham-
mers of all the Inquisitors in Christendom it is no true granite
but crumbly sandstone. Doubtless religion, as far as it is out-
ward history, and involves facts and events, must be outwardly
proved and attested: but how insigniﬁcant would be the mere
historical and outward part of religion, how unmeaning and
empty, if it were not ﬁlled and quickened by spiritual ideas, which
no outward evidence can prove ; which must be seen by the eyes
of the spirit within us; must be embraced by the will, not blind-
ly and passively received 3 Mr. Archer Butler, in his Letters on
Development, observes: “A man who should affect to discard
all revealed testimonies, and to prove the divinity of Christ
or the Doctrine of the Trinity exclusively by internal reason,
would be a rationalist, though his conclusion be not a negative,
but a most positive dogmatic truth.” Here the misemployment
of reason, in which the formal nature of rationalism had just been
declared to consist,* is assumed, and we are told that rationalism

* “ The formal nature of rationalism is the undue employment of reason

CViii INTRODUCTION.

is the discarding revealed testimonies and trusting solely to the
internal ; and indeed the term is constantly applied in a manner
that begs the question,—-applied to those who insist upon the par.
amount necessity of internal evidence in the things of religion.
Certainly he who should discard all external testimonies of the
Gospel Revelation, would be irrational and ungrateful to God
who has given them; but the endeavor to show, that by the
light within us alone we may perceive their truth, is no misem-
ployinent of reason or evasion of the obedience of faith. Faith-
less far rather are they, who mistrust internal evidence and seek
preferably the external ; how must they want the spiritual mind,
which sees what it believes and 7.720203 in what it is trusting!
The question is this, Can external testimony by itself or princi-
pally and primarily prove the truth of revelation? The “ ra-
tionalism” of my father assigns to outward testimony and inter-
nal evidence independent functions in the instruction of man;
be conceived that the former must prove religions truth, so far as
it is historical and logical ; the latter must evidence it, so far as
it is spiritual and ideal. Outward evidence can apply only to
the outward event or appearance, and this, apart from the ideas
of which it is the symbol, could never constitute an article of re-
ligion. The only ofﬁce of external testimony with respect to the
spiritual substance of the faith, in my Father’s view, was that of
exciting and evolving the ideas, which are the sole sufficient evi

in the things of religion, with a view to evade in some way the simplicity
of the obedience of faith.” Rationalism in one of the Tracts for the Times
was called “asking for reasons out of place.” According to these deﬁni-
tions rationalism is as general a term as impiety or presumption, with
which indeed it is commonly identiﬁed. Now I think, that a man can be
guilty of this error only in this way; he may ask for a kind of reasons in
spiritual matters, which are inappropriate to such matters; he may ask for
positive logical proof of spiritual verities, or outward evidence of that to
which the Spirit within Can alone bear witness; but I believe. ﬁrst that
there is no religious article for the reception of which we are not bound to
give a suﬂicient reason; secondly, that suﬁicient reason for the reception of
any religious article can never be found extrinsically; that its interna.
character, tried by the religious faculties given us by our Maker, ought to
determine its acceptance or rejection. Leibnitz’ Discours de la Con__formité
de la. Foi avec la It’aison, contains a very clear view of this subject, as far
as it goes. He maintains that the Fathers never simply rejected reason as
modern teachers have done, both in the High Church and Puritan schools.
a. 51.

INTRODUCTION. cix

dence of it,—at once the ground that supports it and the matter
of which it is formed. The Incarnation and Atonement he be-
lieved to be both spiritual facts, eternal and incomprehensible,
and also events that came to pass in the outward world of Time ;
he believed therefore, that in the proof of both, external and in-
ternal evidence must work together, but that the work of the
last is the deeper and more essential. Before the publication of
' the Gospel no man could have discovered that the Son of God
was to come in the ﬂesh ; nevertheless it is reason and the spirit
that has, in one sense, shown to men those deep truths of reli-
gion, the Redemption of mankind, the Divinity of the Redeemer,
and the Tri-unity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Outward ap-
pearances have led men to the knowledge of them, but the rec-
ognition itself, which constitutes saving faith, is from within.
To this rationalism Professor Butler himself draws verynigh
when he says, that “the fundamental error” (of Mr. N .’s whole
Development system) “consists in this very thing, that it con-
ceives Christianity is to be investigated as a mere succession of
historical events in order to determine faith.” “ This,” he says,
“ is to confound the knowledge of Church history as a succession
of events, with the knowledge of Christianity as a Rule of Duty;
to confound Christianity as a mixed earthly Reality with Chris-
tianity as a pure heavenly Ideal.” Can we attain the knowl-
edge of a pure heavenly Ideal or a Rule of Duty, by outward
attestation? Is it not the law written in the heart that inter-
prets and substantiates the teaching of the Scriptures ?-——and if
the divinity of the Bible did not shine forth by its own light,
could the belief of a certain number of persons, that it was the
Word of God, have imposed it upon the world and sustained it in
credit from age to age ? This error of substituting historical for
internal evidence runs through the whole Antiquarian theory of
faith ; that theory proposes to establish all religious doctrines by
the former alone or chieﬂy, whereas but for the latter, the struc-
ture of external evidence would fall into a shapeless heap, as a
brick wall would do if all the mortar were withdrawn. I will
conclude this subject by referring the reader to a passage on the
relations of evidence (2 'posteriori and d prion; in the notes to the
First Lay Sermon, Appendix E, I. p. 495, and requesting that
it may be read in connection with the statement of belief on
the evidences of Christianity contained in Chapter xxiv

ox INTRODUCTION.

p. 583, of this work. The Whole is too long to quote, but thisis
a part of it:

“In each article of faith embraced on conviction, the mind
determines, ﬁrst intuitively, on its logical possibility; secondly
discursively, on its analogy to doctrines already believed, as well
as on its correspondence to the wants and faculties of our nature ;
and thirdly, historically, on the direct and indirect evidences. But
the probability of an event is a part of its historic evidence,
and constitutes its presumptive proof, (\r the evidence a priori.
N ow as the degree of evidence (2 posteriori, requisite in order to
a satisfactory proof of the actual occurrence of any fact, stands in
an inverse ratio to the strength or weakness of the evidence a
priori (that is, a fact probable in itself may be believed on slight
testimony), it is manifest that of the three factors, by which the
mind is determined to the admission or rejection of the point in
question, the last, the historical, must be greatly inﬂuenced by
the second, analogy, and that both depend on the ﬁrst, logical
congruity, not indeed, as their cause or preconstituent, but as
their indispensable condition ; so that the very inquiry concerning
them is preposterous (damage: 106 ﬁarégov ngorégou) as long as
the ﬁrst remains undetermined.”*

Lest what has been said on my Father’s view of the Atone-
ment should be misconstrued, I would say a few words more upon
that point. It is too common, I fear, to confound a denial, that
the language in which “the nature and extent of the conse-
quences and effects of the Redemptive act” is described in Scrip
ture, ought to be literally understood, with a denial that these
terms stand for a real act on God’s part. Thus they who mean
only to deny, that “ the essential chamcter of the causative act
of Redemption can be exactly defined by the metaphors used in
Scripture to describe its effects and consequences, are spoken of
as if they had denied the causative act itself—the remonstrance
of those who humbly but ﬁrmly maintain that, this act being
truly transcendent and mysterious, it can be known to us only in
and through these effects and consequences; that the human
conceptions in which the Sacred Writers present it to us do but
Ihadow it forth, not properly express it ; that we are not bound

9" Mr. Newman’s Presumptive character of the Proof, in his Essay on De
oelopment, p. 131, coincides, as far as it goes, with my Father’s positions in
the above passage. .

IN TRODUCTION.- oxi

to receive as Gospel all that divines have laid down respecting
the vindictive justice of God, of this justice being satisﬁed by a
substitution of the sufferings of the innocent for those of the
guilty, and of the divine wrath being transferred from the sinful
to the sinless,—that “change of purpose” can not be properly
predicated of the eternal, omniscient, omnipotent God, any more
than arms or wings or bowels of mercy, is strangely supposed to
imply a notion, that Atonement is true only in a subjective sense,
that instead of Redemption having been wrought for us by the
act of God and our Saviour Christ, only the phantom of such a
thing is made to play before our eyes,-——a scenic representation of
it set forth upon the theatre of Holy Writ in order to produce cer-
tain effects on the souls of Spectators ! For proof that the two
views are wholly distinct, and that the latter was foreign to the
mind of Coleridge, I refer readers to the Aids to Reﬂection”)?

I believe too that it is foreign to other minds to which it has been
imputed, “ Thus Christ is emphatically said to be our Atonement ;
not that we may attribute to God any change of purpose towards
man by what Christ has done ; but that we may know that we
have passed from the death of sin to the life of righteousness by
him ; and that our hearts may not condemn 11s.” This passage
has often been cited to ﬁx a charge of deepest heterodoxy upon
the writer, a living divine. It is conceived to contain a denial
of the Atonement in any but a subjective sense, although it af-
ﬁrms that by what Christ has done we have passed from the
death of sin to the life of righteousness; but further, that this
mystery has been presented to us under a certain ﬁgure, in order
that we may judge rightly of its effects and consequences for them
that believe. Thus to speak and think is, in the apprehension
of some, to deny Redemption objectively considered l To believe
that by what Christ has done we have passed from death unto
life is nothing,——a mere shadow of faith, unless we are ready to
say also, that the eternal Redemption, fore-ordained before the
foundation of the worldj‘ actually produced a change in the
mind of Him who willed it, the Eternal, with whom is no va-
riableness nor shadow of turning l—that after a manifestation
made in these last times the designs of the Inﬁnite were altered,

9* 0n Spiritual Religion. Comment on Aphorism, xix. I. p. 307.
+ See 1 Peter i. 20. Who verily wasfore-ordained before the foundation
of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you.

l

\

cxii INTRODUCTION.

and He began to consider that pardonable which before he had
considered unpardonable. What has this latter doctrine beyond
the former, save a contradiction ? Can we ascribe change of
purpose, in the literal sense, to the Omniscient God without con-
tradicting the very idea of a God? We might indeed believe
that a something, veiled not revealed by those words, is true, had
we assurance to that effect ; but this would not be what seems
to be contended for, namely, an admission that they are true in
the literal sense. I suppose there is no Christian who doubts that
the mystery of Redemption has more in it than man can fathom.
When I see how some men impregnate the writings of others with
the products of their own swarming brains, supposititious heresies,
felonies, fantasies, foolcries, false philosophies, demoniacal doc-
trines and so forth, I often recall a couplet of Dryden’s respecting
perversions of the Bible :—

The fly-blown text conceives an alien brood,
And turns to maggots what was meant for food.*

I would fain learn of those, who look upon my Father’s scheme
of faith as something less satisfactory to a religious mind than that
which they have embraced, if they can point out any important
moral truth, any great spiritual idea, any soul-sustaining belief,
any doctrine unquestionably necessary or highly helpful to the
support and safety of the Christian faith, which was rejected or
unrecognized by him. Can they show that his “ rationalizing,”
as some designate the efforts he made to free the minds of Chris.
tians from schemes of doctrine, which seemed to him “ absolutely
irrational,” and therefore derogatory to God and injurious to man,
excluded him from participating in any practical results, that can
be deemed favorable to a pure, deep, earnest Christianity. If-
they are unable to do this, and neither en the doctrine of the
Church, of Original Sin, of the Inspiration of Scripture, of Sacra-
ments, of J ustification, as far as I am aware, has any opponent
of his Christian philosophy hitherto even attempted to show that
his conceptions were not as pregnant and spiritual, as deeply per-
vaded with the sense of the relations betwixt the creature and the
Creator as those to which they adhere ; instead of asserting that
his creed is less pious and religious than their own, they should

* Religio Laici. This pungent couplet was pointed out tome, some years
ago, by my friend, Mr. H. C. Robinson.

INTRODUCTION. cxiii

try to prove that it is less reasonable and stands upon a less se-
cure foundation. W'hen they have shown this they will have in-
clusively proved, that, whatever spiritual ideas he may have
possessed, his system, did not properly contain them. But such a
proof can only be furnished by strict logical processes ; there can
be no short cut to it by assumption, or representations concerning
his state of mind, and the inﬂuences upon it, calculated to lessen
the value of his testimony.

I can not quit the subject of my Father’s competency for the
investigation of religious questions, without noticing another sug-
gestion which has been thrown out on this same point, and
which, from its partial truth, seems likely to conﬁrm or convey
what is very far from true. It has been observed that Coleridge
was given to contemplation rather than to action, and that he
even resembled Hamlet in carrying to excess the habit of abstract-
ing. But religious doctrine is to be tried by its capability of
practical application, its relation to appointed ends, and hence the
speculative mind is ill qualified to judge truly on a subject of this
nature; instead of acquiescing in a sound and pious creed, per-
sons of such a character are apt to prefer a shallow, unsubstantial
and fantastic one, framed by their limited understanding and hu-
man imagination. The following is part of a passage once ap-
plied to my Father in a striking article in the QuarterlyReview.
“ When a religious creed is presented, say to a disputatious and
subtle mind, in which the action of the critical faculty overbears
and absorbs all other energies, that faculty regards the creed pro-
posed polemically, considers it with reference to logical and tech-
nical precision, and not in respect to its moral characteristics and
tendencies, and wastes upon this theoretic handling of sacred
themes all the sedulity which ought to be employed in seeking to
give effect to the proffered means of spiritual amelioration.”*

All this may be true enough of the mere intellectualist; but
who that was well acquainted with Coleridge, as an author or as
a man, could suppose that such was his character, or speak of
views like his as the product of understanding unirradiated by
reason, and fancy uninspired by the spiritual sense? Of all men
in the present age he was among the ﬁrst and ever among the

t“ See the Quarterly Review for December, 1841, pp. 11—12. The pas-
sage is from Mr. Gladstone’s “ Church Principles considered in their results."
p. 68.

cxiv INTRODUCTION .

most earnest to maintain, that “religion must have a moral
origin, so far at least that the evidence of its doctrines can not,
like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the
will :”* that “religion is designed to improve the nature and facul-
ties of man, and that every part of religion is to be judged by its
relation to this main end.”t These maxims he insisted on during
his whole course as a religious writer; they plainly had a deep
hold on his mind, and were uttered by him, not with the lip only,
as if learned from others, but as if they had indeed been drawn
from “the fountain-head of genuine self-research.” If he then
tried a religious creed “ with reference to logical and technical pre-
cision, and not in respect to its moral characteristics and Zen-
(Zencies,” how strangely must he have deserted a principle which
his own experience had established l—how unaccountably shut
his eyes to the light of a “safety lamp,”.’£ which his own hands
had hung up for the guidance of others I Let any candid reader
consult on this subject the Aids to Reﬂection, especially that por-

’ tion in which the author maintains, that “ revealed truths are to
be judged of by us, as far as they are grounds of practice, 01 in

gasome way connected with our moral and spilitual interests,” ——

j/ that “the life, the substance, the hope, the love, in one word, the
faith—these are derivatives from the practical, moral and spir-
itual nature and being of man ;” and then ask himself whether
he who wrote thus could be capable of falling into the error de-
scribed above. And again let him see whether he can cite a
single passage from his writings in which he appears to be trying
a creed according to logical precision alone, without regard to its
deeper bearings. So far from being apt to consider articles of
belief exclusively in their intellectual aspect, in his departures
from received orthodoxy he was chieﬂy inﬂuenced by moral con-
siderations, by his sense of the discrepancy, betwixt the tenet, in
its ordinary form, and the teachings of conscience,—his conviction
that the doctrine, as commonly understood, either meant nothing
or something which opposed the spiritual sense and practical
reason.§

*5 Biog. Literaria, p. 297.

f Aids to Reﬂection, I. p. 223.

it; See the Aids to Reﬂection on Spiritual Religion. Comment on Apb.
(L, I. p. 215.

§ The interesting Article on Development in the Christ. Remmnbmncei

INTRODUCTION. cxv

. The mere intellectualists, who try divine things by human
measures, had in my Father a life-long opponent. Why then is
a charge of mere intellectualism brought against himself? Is it
because he resisted the insidious sophism which splits the complex
being of man; separates the moral in his nature from the rational,

for January, which has just come into my hands, and in which I ﬁnd a con-
ﬁrmation of some remarks of mine, in this Introduction, on the Romish doc-
trine of the Eucharist, contains the following sentences, which I take the
liberty to quote for the sake of explaining more clearly my Father’s mode
of thought on tha relation of divine truth to the mind of man: “Our ideas
on mysterious subjects are necessarily superﬁcial; they are intellectually
paper-ideas; they will not stand examination; they vanish into darkness if
we try to analyze them. A child, on reading in fairy tales about magical
conversions and metamorphoses, has most simple deﬁnite ideas instantly of
things, of which the reality is purely unintelligible. His ideas are paper
ones; a philosopher may tell him that he can not have them really, because
they issue, when pursued, in something self—contradictory and absurd; that
he is mistaken and only thinks he has them; but the child has them, such
as they are, and they are powerful ones, and mean something real at the
bottom. Our ideas, in the region of religious mystery, have this childish
character; the early Church had such. It held a simple, superﬁcial, child-
like idea of an absolute conversion of the bread and wine into the Body and
Blood; and with this idea, as with an hieroglyphic emblem of some mysteri
ous and awful reality, it stopped short,” pp. 135—6. Our ideas on the
supersensual and spiritual are without the sphere of the understanding, the
forms of which are adapted to a world of sense, though it is by the media-
tion of the understanding alone, by its “hieroglyphic emblems,” that we can
take any cognizance of them or bring them into the light of consciousness :
still to describe these ideas as “superﬁcial,” and as merely indicating “ some
mysterious and awful reality,” appears to be scarcely doing them justice.
There is indeed a background of mere mystery and undeﬁned reality in all
our religious beliefs; exeunt omnes in mysterium; but they have a fore-
ground too, a substance apprehensible by faith, visible to the eye of reason
and the spirit, as truly and actually as the things of sense are perceptible
by our senses. A vague belief that something, referred to by the words
“conversion of bread and wine into the Body and Blood,” is a religious
reality,—-can this be digniﬁed with the name of an Idea .9 What can verify
or attest the truth of avague spiritual Something .9 What spiritual beneﬁt
can such vague belief confer upon our spirits ? If religious ideas are vague
and superﬁcial, what ideas are positive and profound? Again, is it true
that the ideas of children and of the early Church were of this description?
I more than doubt that. A child who reads of magical metamorphoses has
very deﬁnite conceptions before his mind, and so had the early Church in re-
gard to the Eucharist. The early Fathers seem to have held, that the con-
secrated elements became the material body and blood of Christ; that, his
body being immortal, to feed upon it immortalized our bodies. even as his

cxvi IN TROD UCTION.

the spiritual from conscience and reason; thrusts aside the un-
derstanding from its necessary ofﬁce of organizing and evolving
the whole mind, and thus brings half truth and confusion into
every department of thought? Did he show himself unspiritual
in declaring that superstition is not, as some will have it, a be-
based form ofﬁcilh, but a disguised inﬁdelity, since men become
superstitious inasmuch as they are “sensuous and dark, slaves
by their own compulsion;” or heartless because he refused to
establish faith on feeling and fancy, apart from reﬂection, and to
adopt the slavish maxim, that forms of doctrine, which have
been associated with religious ideas are to be received implicitly,
——are not to be examined whether they stifle the truth or con-
vey it rightly? No 3 it is not from a strict and careful exami-
nation of his ’zcrilings that these notions have arisen, but from a
partial View of his [Life and its bearing upon his character. It
has been thought that he led too exclusively a life of contempla-
tion to be thoroughly well qualiﬁed for a moral preceptor, that
he dwelt too much on the speculative side of philosophy to have,
in fullest measure, a true philosopher’s wisdom. It has been af-
ﬁrmed that he dealt with “ thoughts untried in action, unverified
by application, mere exercises of the thinking faculty revolving
into itself:” that he “lived a life of thinking for thinki ig’s sake.”
I can not admit that this is true. Whether or no it would. have
been better for Mr. Coleridge’s own mind and character had he
exercised a regular profession, and been less withdrawn from
family cares, it is not for me to determine : but this I can afﬁrm,

Word and Spirit gave eternal life to our souls; that by miracle the divine
Body and Blood were multiplied as the loaves and ﬁshes had been, and re-
tained the phenomena of bread and wine. This ancient sensuous notion of
the Real Presence is deﬁnite enough; and equally deﬁnite is the. modern
spiritual notion, that by the Body and Blood we are to understand the life-
giving power and inﬂuence of the Redeemer upon our whole being, body
and soul, and that this power of eternal life is conveyed to us in an especial
manner when we receive the appointed symbols in faith. The sensuous
tenet has been exchanged for the spiritual doctrine because that sensuous
tenet was no mere mystery but a plain absurdity, a poor, weak, grovelling
shallow conception. Yet this low conception preserved the substantial
truth: it was a cocoon in which the spiritual idea was contained, as in a
tomb-cradle, buried, yet kept alive. The spiritual ideas contained in the
doctrine of the Eucharist, and the intellectual statement of the doctrine, are
of course different things; the former orght to be positive and certain,—
the latter intelligible and distinct.

 

INTRODUCTION. cxvii

that to represent him as having spent a life of inaction, or 01
thinking without reference to practical ends, is an injustice both
to him and to the products of his mind. To write and to think
were his chief business in life; contemplation was the calling to
which his Maker called him; but to think merelyfor thin/eing’s
salsa—merely for the excitement and pastime of the game, is no
man’s calling; it is an occupation utterly unworthy of a rational
and immortal being. Whether or no he deserves such a judg-
ment let men determine by a careful survey of his writings ; in
connection with all those studies which are necessary in order to
make them understood ; let them pronounce upon his character
afterwards; perhaps they will see it with different eyes, and
with clearer ones when they have ﬁnished the course. I can not
of course attempt here to vindicate his claim to some “gift of
genuine insight,” as an ethical writer; but in reference to the
remarks lately cited I ask, of what sort are the thoughts dealt
with in The Friend, the Aids to Reﬂection, the Lay Sermons,
the Church and State, the Literary Remains? May it not
be said that, of the thoughts they contain, one large class, that
relating to politics, can not, by their nature, “ issue out of acts,”
—out of the particular acts of an individual life,—or be tried and
applied in action by the individual who treats of them, though
they tend to acts and are to have practical consequences; seeing
that they relate to national movements, interests of bodies, deal-
ings of communities; while another still larger class, which con.-
cern the moral and spiritual being of man, are capable of being
tried and veriﬁed in the life of every Christian, whether he be
given to outward action, or whether activities of an inward char-
acter, have been his chief occupation upon earth? To deny
their author this practical knowledge and experience would be a
satire on his personal character rather than a review of his phil-
osophical mind. All the poetry, all the poetical criticism which
my Father produced has a practical end ; for poetry is a visible
creation, the ﬁnal aim of which is to beneﬁt man by means of
delight. As for his moral and religious writings, if practical
wisdom is not in them, they-are empty indeed, for their whole
aim is practical usefulness—the regulation of action, the actions
of the heart and mind with their appropriate manifestations—the
furtherance of man’s well-being here and hereafter. This remark,
that my Father lived a life of thinking for thinking’s sake is either

r ‘R-«h‘n.

cxviii INTRODUCTION.

the severest of judgments, more severe than his worst and most
prejudiced enemies ever passed on him in the heat of conﬂict, or
it is no censure at all, but rather a commendation; inasmuch as
the soul is better than the body, and mental activity nobler than
corporeal.

It may interest the reader to see, in conclusion, Mr. Coleridge’s
own opinion of an excessive pmctz'cality, or what is commonly
so called, for the term is commonly, though I believe incorrectly,
applied to a mere outward activity.* Thus he spoke of an ex-
cellent man, whom he deeply honored and loved. to his friend
Mr. Stutﬁeld :

“I was at first much amused with your clever account of our
old and valued friend’s occupations—but, after a genial laugh, I
read it again and was affected by its truth, and by the judicious
view you have taken. My poetical predilections have not, I
trust, indisposed me to value utility, or to reverence the benevo-
lence, which leads a man of superior talents to devote himself to
the furtherance of the Useful, however coarse or homely a form
it may wear, provided, I am convinced that it is, ﬁrst, actually
useful in itself, and secondly, comparatively so, in reference to
the objects in which he would or might otherwise employ him
self ...... It seems to me impossible but that this incessan’
bustle about little things, and earnestness in the removal of stu-
pid impediments, with the irritations arising out of them, mus.

9* Men who are given to outward action think all else idleness or worse.
while men of thought can estimate their usefulness and do them honor,
when they are consistent and at one with themselves. But thought is the
active business of a certain part of mankind. Literary men and teachers
who affect to be men of the world and unite a great deal of ordinary prac-
ticality with their peculiar vocation, are apt to become low in their aims
and superﬁcial in execution. A poet is, in my opinion, far better employed
in perfecting an ode, if it be worth writing at all, or conforming a drama
to the rules of art, than in directing a farm or regulating a railway or ar
ranging a public spectacle. If his poetry is what poetry ought to be, it is
worth the devotion of all his time and energies, save what are required for
the charities of life, or for procuring the means of subsistence.

The article in the Quarterly, referred to above, speaks so well and pow-
erfully of Mr. Wordsworth, that I the more regret its containing any thing
calculated to strengthen misunderstandings in regard to my Father. They
who best understand the Poet and Philosopher best understand the Philo-
sophie Poet his Friend. Let them not be contrasted, but set si 1e by side to
throw light and lustre upon each other.

INTRODUCTION. cxix '

have an undesirable effect on any mind constituted for noble]
aims ;——-and this unquiet routine is, in my judgment, the very
contrary to what I should deem a salutary alterative to the qual-
ities 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 CONDUCT-
ING 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 chap-
ter 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 re-
printed. 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

CXX INTRODUCTION.

them, simply because they are personal, and now also be.
cause 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 maybe inaccurate in the letter: the speeches referred to
may 110V er 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 cordialz'ty, 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 anec-
dotes, true or false, would never have convinced men of the party
which he had opposed, or brought them to confess, that the criti-
cisms 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 sup-
pressed passages to be neither mistaken nor untruthful as to their

main d/iﬂ, whiehI understand to be this. that t
ms expressed a degree of contem it for the oetical )ro

tions of thei1 opponents in politics, which it is scaicel c01
that they could have iezﬂly e , , 1ave 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 ofa 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

 

  
 

 

 

 
   

INTRODUCTION. cxxi

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 man-
ner 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 reasonress 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 pro-
duced on the poetic mind of the community. Before this proof
was complete he in some sort assumed the point at issue g—he
1{new 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 pre-
sented 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, High-
land Girl, Yarrow revisited, Ruth, Landamin, The Brothers,
Female Vagrant, Forsaken Indian Womanﬁ“ The two April

9* This Complaint of the perishing mother may be compared with Schil
ler’s admired Nadowessische Todtenlclage ; 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. In. F

_0XXii IN TROD UCTION.

Mornings, The Fountain, Yew-trees, Nut-ting, Peel Castle,
’ Tis thought that some have died for love, Lines to H. M. ;——
such sonnets as that Composed on Westminster: Bridge, 0n the
Eve of a Friend’s Marriage, the World is too much with its,
ZVIilton .’ 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 en-
titled 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 in-
deed ! I have not mentioned all the most admirable of Mr. Words-
worth’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 tho
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 rhyth-
mical 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. . 7

INTRODUCTION. cxxiii

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) T—penned
by one, who had scanned the author narrowly, in order to abuse
him scientiﬁcally, and with a certain air of verisimilitudeﬁ“ 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 ex-
tolled his talents when others saw no lustre in the rough dia-
mond ; 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

*9 This air of verisimilitude is less in that article than in the parent lam-
poon (in M1. 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 in-
dependence of mind,” in which there was no truth at all, was carefully
transfused,—the spirit cf it at least,—into the second portrait. Both con-
tain the same insinuation respecting my Father’s fundamental religious
principles——the same attempt to cast them into suspicion with the unphilo-
sophic worldJ—upon which I need make no remark. At that time it may
perhaps have brought some additional discredit upon his name, that he im-
puted catholicity to his mother church. “ The Church of England, which
he sometimes, by an hyperbole of affeetation, affects to call the Catholic
Church”—! I I

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 P01. Essays, to be the same person. Either they a1e
identical, or the one is a close copyist of the other,_his spleen the same.
only colder and more unrelenting. . - . .

cxxiv INTRODUCTION.

circumstances my Father was to be excused for supposing that
this gentleman of “ judgment and talents” had been employed to
run down the Lay Sermon in the E. Review, on account of his
known talents for satire, and the severe judgments he had al-
ready published on himself in particular; but, as this has been
denied, I have withdrawn two expressions which contain the im-
putation ; the passage concerning the satirist himself I have not
thought ﬁt to withdraw.

Mr. J eﬂi‘ey’s demeanor at the Lakes in 1810 should never
have been brought into this question ; but from a natural wish to
maintain the general truthfulness, if not the prudence and pro-
priety, of my Father’s language on the subject, I can not help
saying, that Lord J effrey’s own account of it serves quite as well
as Mr. Coleridge’s, to illustrate the difference,—I think I may
say the discrepancy,—between the gentleman conducting himself
kindly and courteously in social life, and the same gentleman per-
forming his duty as a reviewer. My Father had undergone no
essential change, in the interval, either as a poet, a politician, or
a man, nor had he shown any. The Friend was before the pub-
lic. To pay compliments, even when they are no more than the
genuine overﬂow of the soul, is a mark of complacency; but to
have made eﬂbrts to “ gratify” a gentleman under a notion that
he “liked to receive compliments,” was a still greater exercise of
politeness. The critique of C/w'istabel did not seem quite sym-
phonious with compliments paid to the poetic mind of him who
was best known to the public as the author of The Ancient JVIar-
iner, a poem which, equally with that and on very similar grounds,
deserved to be called a “mixture of raving and drivelling.”* “ I

9" An article on Coleridge in the Penny Cyclopedia, which, together with
some misstatements of fact, contains the Ed. Review opinions on my Father’s
merits as an author, to wit, that he had next to none at all, and seems to
have been written by a disciple of the critic who pronounced Christabel
worthless with the exception of one passage, after referring to what was
pointed out on this subject by Mr. Dequincey, proceeds thus: “ Of this
habit (that of ‘ trusting to others for suggestions which be improved, and
for ideas which he elaborated’), another instance is supplied by Alvar’s dun-
geon soliloquy in the Remorse (Act v. Scene 1), the ideas, and, to a certain
extent, the words of- which are derived from Caleb’s prison soliloquy in
Caleb Williams.” Impressive writer in his own line as I knew Mr. God-
win to be, I was surprised to learn that he had written any thing so poetical
(as Alvar’s dungeon soliloquy. Anxious however to give him his due I took

INTRODUCTION. cxxv

cheerfully acquit” the writer of any the least perception of merit
in the poem; although Scott and Byron, the most admired poets
of the day, were known to have expressed admiration of it, he

up Caleb Williams, and for pleasure as well as duty, read it all through for
the second time in my life. I perused with special care the three powerful
chapters in which Caleb describes his imprisonment; I found that he dwells
upon the “ squalid solitude” of his forced abode, and Alvar mentions
“friendless solitude ;” that he speaks of a “groan” uttered in sleep, and
Alvar speaks of “ groaning and tears ;” but with these exceptions I found
neither the ideas nor the words of Alvar’s soliloquy in Caleb le'llz'ams.
My Father may possibly have been led to make the reﬂections and form
the images of that soliloquy by Godwin’s striking novel, as Thomson was
led to write The Seasons by the perusal of Nature; but he certainly did
not borrow them ready-made therefrom. The closest resemblance to Caleb
le’llz’ams that I can ﬁnd in the Remorse is not in Act v. but in Act i. where
Alvar says, _
“My own life wearied me!
And but for the imperative voice within,
With mine own hand I had thrown oﬂ‘ the burthen.”

At the end of chap. xi. vol. ii. Caleb says, “ I meditated suicide, and rum:-
nated, in the bitterness of my soul, upon the different means of escaping
from the load of existence.” Caleb is restrained from self-murder, not by
“ an imperative voice within,” a voice which “ calmed” while it “ quelled ;”
his words are, “Still some inexplicable suggestion withheld my hand. I
clung with desperate fondness to this shadow of existence, its mysterious
attractions, and its hopeless prospects.” The three preceding pages are
very ﬁne in their way, but have nothing in common with the Remorse ex«
cept of the most general description. Indeed unless my Father had been
the ﬁrst man that ever described imprisonment, he could not have avoided
some general similarity with former describers.

The whole article I would recommend as a study to those who are desi-
rous of acquiring the art of depreciation; the principle of which rests on the
force of contrast with a pretence of candor, and may be thus thrown into the
form of a. rule: give the man praise d minorz' in order to take away all the
credit commonly given him at majori : exalt other men, in order to pull him
down from his seat, although these other men would themselves be the ﬁrst
to replace him in it. The Cyclopaedist denies my Father’s originality of mind
on plausible grounds, perhaps, and yet, I think, on insufﬁcient ones. The
habit of obtaining from others “ suggestions to improve” anc “ideas to
elaborate” may be almost called common to the genus vatum. Dante is es
teemed a vigorous and original writer : yet it has been clearly shown that
the vision of the boy monk Alberico, “served as a model for the entire edi-
ﬁce of his poem,” and furnished him with some of his striking detailsﬁ

 

9“ See the Essay on this subject, extractel from an ancient manuscript,
preﬁxed to Zotti’s Dante, pp. 19-42.

cxxvi INTRODUCTION.

naturally preferred his own judgment; but I will take upon me
to say, however true this may be, that no mere poetical demerits
ever called forth such a vehement explosion of hisses as that with
which C'lw‘istaoel was greeted in the E. Review; that the hisses
were at the author, because his “daily prose” was “understood

Dante adopted every thing in the Vision that he could turn to advantage,
and left it to his commentators to make his acknowledgments to the youth-
ful Visionary. Milton borrowed from all quarters as may be seen in Todd’s
edition of his works. Tasso took wholesale from preceding Italian poets
and from the Classics. Gray’s Elegy in a 00: ntrg/ Churchyard contains
scarcely a single image or sentiment that is entirely new, and in all his
other poems he helps himself without scruple to the ideas and sometimes
to the words of other poets. Shakspeare is full of borrowed pegs to hang
his thoughts upon. Lord Byron declared that these charges of plagiarism
against particular poets were a folly, since all poets are guilty of it. I
think that almost all poets borrow a good deal in one way or another ; but
there is a difference in the mode of their borrowing; some take the thoughts
and images of other writers and combine them with new matter; some take
a great deal of what constitutes the substance and brilliancy of their com-
positions from historical or descriptive books in prose. \Vriters of a rich
and ornate style borrow more than those of a severer cast: Byron borrowed
far more from books than Crabbe, and Mr. Wordsworth has borrowed less,
I believe, than any other great poet. Nature is the book that he has studied
the most. The Penny Cyclopaedist has added nothing but a mare’s nest to
Mr. Dequincey’s instances of borrowing in my Father, of which Mr. De-
quincey himself thought so little, that in spite of them all, he “most hear.
tily believed” my Father “as entirely original in all his capital preten-
sions, as any one man that ever has existed ; as Archimedes in ancient days,
or as Shakspeare in modern.”

An author is to be judged, in respect of original power, by the total re-
sult of his productions. Is the whole a new thing, or is there in the whole
a something new interfused? Can you ﬁnd the like elsewhere? By this
test my Father’s writings must be tried, and perhaps they will be found
to stand it better than those of many an author, who has carefully abstained
from any formal or avoidable borrowing. That his are “the works of
one who requires something from another whereon to hang whatever he
may himself have to say,” is just such a specious objection as the former
But it should be considered that every writer, in moral or religious disqui~
sition, starts in fact from previous thought, whether he expressly produces
it or not. In the Aids to Reﬂection and in the Remains my Father has
given his thoughts in the form of comments on passages in the works of
other men ; and this he did, not from want of originality of mind, but from
physical languor,—the want of continuous energy,—together with the er
haustive intensity, with which he entered into that particular portion of
a subject to which his attention was directed. I do not believe, however,
that the value of what he has left behind is so much impaired by its im

INTRODUCTION. cxxvii

to be dedicated to the support of all that courtiers think should
be supported :”* what Mr. Coleridge endeavored to support being
ﬁrst, the war against the would-be invader and subjugator of
his country .° secondly, the Church of England. N o matter for
the “ compliments, "’ now in 1847; no, nor the disparagements
either; “ not of a pin; ”—as the tediOus man says in JVIeasu/e
for Measure I do not not recur to them on their own account
Perhaps an editor may “lawfully” make himself pleasant to gen-
tlemen whom afterwards he shall be obliged to expose as “ whin-
ing and hypochondriacal poets” in his review: but it does seem
rather a special, and somewhat pliant and elastic law, that can
permit a gentleman to be sociable and friendly in his private be-
havior toward persons, whom, some years afterwards, casting his
eye back 011 their literary and political career, it will be his duty
to stigmatize, not only as men of “inordinate vanity and habit-
ual effeminacy,”——that is a triﬂe,——but—-upon Whose heads he
is bound to pour that dark ﬂood of politico- personal accusations
which may be seen and analyzed at this day 111 pages 314—15 of
WW Utter disregard of consequences
to the public,—vanity and effeminacy,—-violence and vulgarity,
—fantastic trickery,—a morbid appetite for infamy with an ar-
lent love of corruption,—folly that reels with a sickening motion

methodical form as people at ﬁrst sight imagine. The method and general
plan of a literary work are often quite arbitrary, and sometimes, for the
sake of preserving regularity of structure in the architecture of a book, a
writer is obliged to say a great deal which is but introductory to that of
his own which he has to impart.

* Ed. Review, vol. xxvii. p. 67.

f This ﬁne specimen of a modern Philippic,—an Edinboro’, Anti-Lakiad,
—-is contained in the review of the Literary Life of August, 1817. I would
wish any reader who has the opportunity, to compare it with the language,
tone, and character of Remarks on the present mode of conducting Critical
Journals, contained in chapter xxi. of this work. The reviewer adds, “ This
is the true history of our reformed Anti-Jacobin poets, the life of one of

whom is here recorded ;” and then takes up Mr. C. by himself again, still ~'

more in that style, which is desc1 ibed in the B. L., where it speaks of the

critic losing himself in the pasquillant.
The readers of the E. R. of that day wele not fond of subtleties or ﬁne-

drawn sketches; othe1 Wise we might say of the writels:
Nﬁmm, 013K. Zoaaw 50g.) 7r7téov mam) mimog‘.

Such criticism prevents the assailed from seeing their real faults, While
1: precludes others from any knowledge of their excellencies.

. - 1...... ”P-

cxxviii INTRODUCTION.

from one absurdity to another,—adherence to notiOns that are au«
dacious and insane, revolting and 11onsensical,—-entire want of
charity, common sense, wisdom and humanity,
ity,——heartless vice,——-these are attributes of the man—they can
not be confined solely to the politician. We may charitably pre-
sume, indeed, that he who penned this tirade {one stroke of which
I have passed by as too ‘Wined
that the characters he was blackening in eﬂigy would look a
single shade the darker to any one who beheld them as a neigh-
bor of ﬂesh and blood in actual life—the life of truth and reality;
but is it not a strange state of things, when we must believe re-
specting an organ of public opinion, that it is not most unconsci-
entious only because it is out of the domain of conscience alto-
gether, and declaims upon virtue and vice, wisdom and folly,—
the vice and folly of individuals—without any earnest feeling or
belief 011 subjects, which demand the utmost earnestness and
carefulness from all who think or speak of them ? Thirty years
ago many things were done by honorable men which hon-
orable men would not do now, or would gain great dishonor by
doing; money intended for the beneﬁt of the Public, especially
for making men living members of the Church and followers of
Christ, public functionaries too often thought they might employ
according to their own private fancies; and such a notion has
even been acted 011 by men undoubtedly public-spirited and disin-
terested. A dimness of vision 011 the subject of duty prevailed
among the servants of the public in general ; and reviewers were
not more clear-sighted than the rest; they thought themselves

                   

quite at liberty to make the public taste in literature subservient _

to their own purposes as members of a party ; to choke up with
rubbish and weeds the streams of Parnassus, if a political adver~
sary might be annoyed thereby, though all. parties alike had an
interest in the water ;—to bring the most sweeping and frightful
charges against their opponents in general terms, whethc1 they
had or had not the slightest power to verify them in particulars
Against this system the Bzom Li tains

protest, a protest to which p1ivate feeling has Given a piquancy,
but which 111 the main 1t 1as n ot o'oriupte 01 falsiﬁed. I legret
that my Fathei, in exposing what he held to be W1ong methods
of acting on the public mind, should have been betray ed into any
degree of discomposure 111 his own; but I feel conﬁdent, that he

 

“uh“

INTRODUCTION. cxxix

would not have given way to indignation on these subjects, if he
had not believed his cause to be the cause of the public also;
that the things of which he complained were parts of a system,
the offences of which against principle it was matter'of principle
to point out.

I have not brought forward these grounds of complaint out of
any resentment against those who showed so much against my
lFather, or—(I say it for my own sake, not as deeming it impor-
tant to others)—in any feeling of disrespect for their characters
in the main. I make no doubt of their possessing all the wit,
worth, and wisdom which their friends ascribe to them, and am
better pleased to think that my Father was, beset and hindered on
his way by lions than by assailants of a more ignoble kind. I have
recurred to those grounds of complaint in justiﬁcation of the lan-
guage used in this work on the 5‘ present mode of conducting pub-
lic journals,” and also to justify the children of Coleridge in re-
publishing it, aware as we are, that it will have an interest and
even an importance as a voice from the grave of one whom, now
that he is removed from all eyes in this world, many desire to
have heard and to have looked upon, which it had not when the
author was still struggling through his earthly career. Some
persons will say, that hostility which so little succeeded in its ob-
ject, of casting my Father’s works into general contempt and ob-
livion, is unworthy of present regard. But there is a little ana-
chronism in this. It is like saying, that because a few storms or
an inclement season did not ruin a nascent colony, and years af-
terwards the colony is in aﬂourishing state, it was therefore of
no consequence to the colonist and not worth mentioning in his
history. The colony lives and blooms, like the bay-tree by the
river-side, while the poor worn colonist moulders in the grave.
What is literary reputation now to the author of Christabel and
the Lay Sermon ?* Those works are read by many at this
time, with as much pleasure as if they had never been declared

* My Father has observed, that an insigniﬁcant work was sometimes re
viewed for the sake of attacking the author; on the other hand the more
important works of obnoxious authors were often absolutely unnoticed.
Some of his own were never reviewed in any leading journal; but Christw
bel, the Lay Sermon, and the Biographz'a, were caught up and violently
twisted into whip-cord to lash him who had written them, and drive him
if possible out of the temple.

F7x‘

cxxx INTRODUCTION.

worse than waste paper by the E. Review; they could not be
slain by arrows of criticism if they had any vitality of their
own; if they had it not, who would wish to give them a gal-
vanized life the only life which some productions ever have to
sustain them—a mere emanation from the hot orb of party
spirit? But he who wrote those works wanted a “little here
below” ere he went hence and was no more seen ; he wanted a
little encouragement from friends, a little fair play from adver-
saries, a little sympathy, and a little money. That he wanted
these things was at least a grievance, whether it was most the
fault of others or chieﬂy his own. But I think it will be granted
by impartial persons, that there was some fault and deficiency on
this score in others ; an honest argumentative review, if ever so
severe, would have done my Father’s works good, had the re-
viewer strained every nerve to convict them of absurdity. .311
he was reviewed in a wa ' not to ex ose his errors r
Whom atten ing to Wag.
stood, but tosTsTrer upon hirn a character f hopeless unintelligi-
bility ; with an artful show of contempt, and a sort of ridicule,
x that might have been employed with equal success upon Plato
~. or upon Shakspeare. A searching criticism, even from a deter-
Imined opponent, would have been to him like that excellent oil
of reproof, concerning which the Psalmist says that it breaks not
the head nor depresses it.*
A few words, in conclusion, on Mr. Coleridge’s “abuse of his
contemporaries ;” for on this score he _was assailed in the r§w

 

 
  
 

     

 

of the Biographia, with a particulzfrfreference to his critiq’ on
Bertram ,' though without a syllable to show that the cens es
it contained were unjust, or not rather a service to his contempo-
raries in general. This “abuse” was not, I think, of the same

* The same method of shooting at him from a distance and declining
close ﬁght is practised even now by writers of a newer school, who dispose
of him en passant, in their way to other objects of attack, by settling that
he was certainly a man of some genius, and had a modicum of light to dis .
pense, going before the torch-bearers of their party with his little fancy-
lamp in his hand; but that he is by no means a safe or sound writer ; though
where, how, and why, he is unsafe and unsound they are far too much in a
hurry to state. They seem indeed to consider him not only unsafe, but so
dangerous, that prudence requires them to keep a good way off ; as if the :
poor old steed, though unsound and superannuated, might still give an um I
comfortable kick, if you came too close to his heels.

INTRODUCTION. cxxxi

nature as that which he condemned in others. It was of two or
three different kinds: the ﬁrst, to which belong the Letters to
Fox, Letters to Fletcher, strictures on Lord Grenville, character
of Pitt, sketches of Bonaparte, consists in examinations of the A
public conduct and published opinions of eminent men under the
light of principles; not a prejudging of their acts and opinions
by supposed circumstances made to cast their coloring upon the
former, as stained lamps dye the radiance of the ﬂames they in-
close ; but an examination of the acts and opinions themselves,
and only in due subordination to the former, if at all, a notice
of circmnstarzces which may have tended to produce their pecu—
liar character."‘ These treatises are chieﬂy composed of close
reasoning and illustration; the censures they contain are ex-
pressed in stern and vehement, but not in coarse or bitter lan-
guage ; and they burst forth from a carefully constructed argu-
ment like strong keen ﬂames from a well-heaped funeral pile.
If they quiver as they stream upward—those ﬂames of censure—
it is from a meditative emotion, not from the turbulence of a
spirit agitated by personal or party rage. Could any specimen
of “abuse” be extracted from his writings at all similar to that
.4131.“ ' e historyhf: the Anti-Jacobin poets,” referred to above, in
which three men of different characters and courses of life are
put into a heap and conjointly accused of every turpitude which
a politician can be guilty of, the language of the E. Review re-
specting his “ abuse of his contemporaries” would so far not be

9* The Character of 1:713; whic 1 like the least of my Father’s political
writings, except certain passages against the same minister in his youthful
Conciones ad Populum, the general drift of which, however, he has shown
to be strictly in consonance with all his later politics,—and in these passages
it is the tone and language, not the opinions that he would ever have wished
to retract,—commences with an account of Mr. Pitt’s education and the ef-
fect on the formation of his mind; “ he was cast,” my Father says, “rather
than grew.” But this is only a subordinate part of a general survey of his
character as evinced in his public conduct. There is no attempt to charac-
iterize opinions not under examination by conjectures respecting the circum-
stances under which they may have been formed. The Character contains
also a few sentences relating to Mr. Pitt’s private life; but it should be re-
membered that some parts of a Prime Minister’s private life, or what is pri-
vate life in other cases, are necessarily before the public. My Father refer-
red to tastes and habits of Mr. Pitt which were matters of notoriety. Still
that passage is a. blot in the essay, and I doubt not that, though interesting
as a psychological analysis, the whole Character is too unmodiﬁed and severe,

cxxxii INTRODUCTION.

unmerited. The strictures on that Journal in this work are also
pieces of reasoning, and, wher. cleared from a few excrescences
of personal anecdote and complaint, are not unworthy of a
writer who ever strove to keep principle in view. Of the Cri-
tique of Bertram l. have spoken elsewhere.

The second sort of “ abuse” that he dealt in, and which it were
to be wished that all men would refr am from, consisted in pointed
remarks, made in private respecting private things and persons
Some of these were as strictly true as they were clever and re-
memberable ; some were just in themselves, but sounded unjust
as well as unkind, when repeated unaccompanied by what should
have gone along with them to take off their edge, expressed or
understood by the utterer. Some, I dare say, were not wholly
just : few men are wise or just at all hours ; my Father had ﬁts
of satirizing with a habit of praising. I have heard a friend of
his and mine remark, that some men “ talk their gall cleverly,”
while there are others, who will show their cleverness though at
the expense of being, for the moment, ill-natured. My Father’s
sharp speeches were not mere improvements of gall. But I do
not defend them. Psychological analysis on the living individual
subject is an operation that can with difficulty be kept within the
bounds of Christian justice and charity ; even if we have a right
to cut the pound of ﬂesh at all, how can we be sure of cutting it
exactly ? But most to be blamed are they who repeat these
keen sayings,-—treasuring up the darts which they have not the
skill to forge,-—and bring them to the ears of those very persons,
who are least likely to see their truth and most liable to feel their
sharpness—the persons of whom they are said.

There is a third part of this subject, respecting which I re-
fer the reader to an apology by Mr. C. himself, placed at the
end of his Poetical Works; I mean his ﬂights of extravagant
satire, the real objects of which existed nowhere but in the.
Limbo of wild imagination. These extravagancies of his early
day, though I believe his own account of them to be strictly
true—indeed can see the truth of it on the face of the productiom
themselves,—have given me great pain; not for the vials of
wrath that have been poured forth on occasion of them; they
were filled, I well knew, mainly from another cistern ;* but be-

* It. is not my Father’s rash sayings, but his conscientious and well-
weighed ones, his warm opposition to the “anti-national” policy, his free

INTRODUCTION. cxxxiii

cause I see in these productions, though inspired by a petulant
fancy rather than by an angry heart, the one stain upon the face
of my Father’s literary character. Yet though I deeply regret in
regard to both, but by far the most in regard to one of them, that
he should ever have penned such pieces or suffered them to get

opinion of the philosophy of certain Northern schools,—his venturing to
ﬁnd fault with some of their Most Profound and Irrefragable Doctors—that
ever has excited, and still does excite, the animosity of the Northern critics
against him. His politics were a reproach, his philosophijdisparagement
to theirs, and the B. L. added vinegar to the bitters oTthe cup. What my

a- er said of Hume in the Lay Sermon, I. p. 448, is styled by the E. Re-
viewer (who puts on the Scotch mantle for the nonce), “a mean and malig-
nant fabrication,” “ a transition from cant to calumny,” “a sting, the venom
of which returned into his own bosom, to exhaust itself in a bloated passage,”
dzc. Supposing the anecdote untrue, of which the reviewer gives no proof
(his calling it a fabrication of my Father’s is a“ gratuitous assertion” on his
own part), where was the deep malignély of ascribing to W
a sentiment undeni consonant " 1 of ' u? The reviewer
could not deny that he “devoted his life to undermining the Christian re
ligion;” why then should he r. 0'e so at the second clause of the sentence,
“expended his last breath in a blasphemous regret that he had not survived
it t” Was it more discreditable to wish Christianity extinct than to have
deliberately endeavored to destroy it? However if there be no authority
for the anecdote reported in the Lay Sermon, a mark shall be set against it
.n future.

Mr. Coleridge’s “ignorant petulance” on the subject of Hume’s history has
been amply conﬁrmed by examiners on opposite sides in politics since the
opinion was expressed. If that history be faulty at all, it is not superﬁcially
so but internally and radically—it is to a considerable extent virtually
faithless and misleading; no one less cool, calm, and able than Hume could
have given so misleading a representation of a certain most important part
of English history. Like Hobbes, because he had no eye fora spiritual law,
and because man must ﬁnd ﬁrm ground to rest on somewhere, Hume rested
his whole weight on human authority and kingship an earthly divine right.
Every one must admire his ﬁne talents, must like his kindly and gentle na‘
ture; but is not an Inﬁdel writer’s hand against every Christian, and must
not every Christian's hand be against him,—not of course to write a word
that is untrue concerning his life and actions, but to struggle with him when
he strives against eternal hopes,—nay to trample on him, when, like Caiaphas
in Dante’s penal realm, he lies across the way—if that be the way of faith
and salvation? Surely the Scotch may well afford to let Hume be judged
according to his works,—I should rather say to let his works be judged ac.
cording to their contents. They are not so deﬁcient in worthies whom a
Christian can approve that they must vehemently patronize the patron of
despotism and inﬁdelity. My Father did not abuse him because he was a
Scot-chman; he had contended warmly against Inﬁdels in Germany, partial

 

cxxxiv INTRODUCTION.

abroad, I do not blame him for including them in his works when
it was plain that they could not be suppressed. The wine was
coarse and burning, but it was the same, however bad a sample,
as that which glows in Kubla Khan and The Ancient ﬂIaTine'r,
and no production, marked with a peculiar genius, if short and
rememberable, will perish, though of small merit,—especially
when other more considerable fruits of that genius are before the
World. It will ever be a grief to those interested in my Father’s
name that, when a young man, he wrote a lampoon, in sport,
upon a good and gifted contemporary : but I scarce know what
he could do more, after shooting off an arrow, which others would
preserve on account of its curious make or some fantastic plumage
with which its shaft was adorned, than try to blunt its point, and
beg that it might be considered only as a plaything.

The Apologetic Preface has been much misrepresented: it has
been represented as a defence and a sophistical one ; if it were in-
tended as a defence or vindication it would be sophistical indeed ;
but it is no such thing : it is an apology in the modern sense of

as he was to Germans and German writers. One thing I regret in Mr.
Carlyle’s admirable essay on Johnson, that deep-hearted essay l—the parallel
at the end between Johnson and Hume. Oh! surely Hume should not have
‘been set over against Johnson, who could not have looked him in the face
without shuddering, and turning pale for sorrow!

Right loth should I be to consider these Boreal blasts and Scotch mists;
that have so outraged and obscured the Exteesian domain, as coming from
bonny Scotland at large. The man of genius—the wise and liberal critic—
is always a true Briton—neither English, Irish, nor Scotch. Acer Septen-
trio to S. T. C.—but this is a syneedoche—part for the whole. I have
necessarily been looking of late more at the bad weather of my Father’s .
literary life,—the rough gales and chilling snow-falls,—than at its calm and
sunshine: but these were not present always, and I trust they will hence-
forth be infrequent.

Non semper imbres dulce-poeticos
Manant in agros ; nee mare lucidum
Vexant inzequales procellze
Usque ; nec (etheriis in oris,

Esteese Parens, stat glacies iners

Menses per omnes; aut Aquilonibus
Zlfyrteta Colerigi laborant
Vitibus et viduantur ulmz'.

The twining vines are popularity and usefulness : the elms literary pro-
ductions of slow growth and stately character.

INTRODUCTION. cxxxv

the term: that is an excuse. “ It was not my intention, I said,
to justify the publication, whatever its author’s feelings might
have been at the time of composing it. That they are calculated
to call forth so severe a reprobation from a good man, is not the
worst feature of such poems. Their moral deformity is aggravated
in proportion to the pleasure which they are capable of affording
to vindictive, turbulent and unprincipled readers.”* Notwith-
standing this declaration, an admirer of Mr. Pitt has afﬁrmed
that “the Apology is throughout defensive.” As this charge is
made in the shape of mere assertion, “ to refute it with not” will
perhaps be sufﬁcient. This and other assertions of the Pittite
may be met with the counter-assertion, that the Preface contains
neither “metaphysical jargon,” “ unphilosophical sentimentality,”
nor “ Wire-drawn argumentation,” but expresses in clear lan-
guage, and illustrates, I think, with some eloquence, the simple
but not uninteresting psychological fact, that the wilder and more
extravagant a satire appears, the more it contains of devious
irrelevant fancy, and the less of individual application, or any at-
‘ tempt to give an air of reality and truth of fact to the represen-
tation, the less harm it does and the less of deliberate malice it
shows.’r Such attacks may indeed be insults, but they are very
seldom injuries, except so far as the one is the other. Had no
one said worse of Mr. Coleridge himself than that the Old One
was sure of him 'at last, he would never have complained so bit-
terly as he sometimes did of the mischiefs of the tongue. When
Mr. Hatelight and Mr. Enmity employ a skilful artist to paint
their enemy’sportrait, he does not take a plain likeness of Satan

* Poet. Works, VII. p. 207. The next sentence shows impliedly that
palliation is the writer’s aim. See also p 209.

f Mere outward marks for the identifying of the object, as “letters four
do form his name,” are distinct from individualizing features of mind.

The admirer of Mr. Pitt, who is so dissatisﬁed with the Apologetic
Preface, is highly displeased because Mr. Coleridge did not express the
deepest contrition for his censures of that minister, Without sufﬁciently con-
sidering, that, as Mr. Coleridge’s opinion of the Pitt policy continued pretty
much the same throughout his life, he could not repent of it, to please Mr.
Pitt’s devotees; and that he expressed quite as much regret for, and disap-
proval of, his “ﬂame-colored” language on the subject as may sufﬁce to sat-
isfy any but partisans and bigots, Whom he never considered it his duty to
eonciliate. Let them pour out their streams of “trash,” “nonsense,” “jar-
gon,” “ muddy metaphysics” over his pages; of the abundance of the head
the mouth speaketh when it speaks at” this rate.

cxxx vi INTRODUCTION.

and put the enemy’s name under it ; he takes the enemy’s face
as a foundation and superinduces that of Satan upon it; there
are perhaps few strongly marked minds that may not, with pains
and skill, be made to assume somewhat of a Satanic aspect. On
these points I think indeed that my Father, upon the whole, was
more sinned against than sinning ;' but I should be far from at-
tempting to vindicate all the condemnatory parts even of his
serious writings. Since he was laid in the grave there have been
vehement renewals of former attacks upon him ; but if I had not
been called upon to republish his Literary Life, personalities of
this sort would not have engaged my thoughts for more than a
passing moment. He is at rest; no longer to be disquieted by
injustice or capable of being harmed by it ; “the storms, re-
proaches and vilifyings” of this angry world come not nigh his
dwelling. But some willingly hear his voice, as it yet speaks in
his written remains, and will read with pleasure the following
extract from the Aids to Reflection, “ on the keen and poisoned
shafts of the tongue,” which I give in conclusion, as applicable to
the subject that has been discussed, but without intending any
particular application whatever.

“ The slanders, perchance, may not be altogether forged or un
true ; they may be the implements, not the inventions of malice.
But they do not on this account escape the guilt of detraction.
Rather it is characteristic of the evil spirit in question, to work
by the advantage of real faults ; but these stretched and aggra-
vated to the utmost. It is not expressible how deep a wound a
tongue sharpened to the work will give, with no noise and a very
little word. This is the true white gunpowder, which the dream-
ing projectors of silent mischiefs and insensible poisons sought for
in the laboratories of art and nature, in a world of good; but
which was to be found in its most destructive form, in ‘the

World of Evil, the Tongue.’ ”’3

 

I have heard it said that the lives and characters of men ought
never to be handled by near relations and friends, whose pride
and partial affection are sure to corrupt their testimony. This is
like saying that animal food should never come to table because

* £34.77.

INTRODUCTION. cxxxvii

it is liable, in warm weather, to bezome tainted ; reports 'of friends
and relations are the ﬂesh diet of the Biographical Muse, whereby
she is kept in health and strength ; without them her form would
become attenuated and her complexion sallow and wan. Con-
temporary biography can only proceed either from friends, from
enemies, or from indifferent persons; the last class may be the
most unbiased in their testimony, but for the most part they have
little testimony to give; they know nothing and care nothing
about him whose life is to be recorded, till. the task of writing it
falls into their hands. It should be remembered too that a man’s
enemies,—(and it is wonderful how many enemies men of mark
are sure to acquire—among the vulgar-minded, who hate genius,
for its own sake, while they envy its outward rewards—among
the high-minded and strong-headed, who are in violent antag-
onism to an individual genius through the bent of their own),—
that these will give their testimony against him gratuitously,
and that unconcerned persons will adopt it for mere amusement’s
sake,——will carelessly repeat the severest judgments, insensible
as the “ two-handed engine” itself, that cares not whether it de-
scends upon a reprobate or a royal martyr. The testimony of
friends is needed, if only to balance that of adversaries : and in-
deed what better grounds for judging of a man’s character, upon
the whole, can the world have, than the impression it has made
on those who have come the nearest to him, and known him the
longest and the best? I, for my part, have not striven to con-
ceal any of my natural partialities, or to separate my love of my
Father from my moral and intellectual sympathy with his mode
of thought. I have endeavored to give the genuine impressions of
my mind respecting him, believing that if reporters will but be
honest, and study to say that and that alone, which they really
think and feel, the color, which their opinions and feelings may
cast upon the subject they have to treat of, will not ﬁnally ob-
scure the truth. Of this I am sure, that no one ever studied my
Father’s writings earnestly and so as to imbibe the author’s spirit,
who did not learn to care still more for Truth than for him, what-
ever interest in him such a study may have inspired.

These few lines are an attempt to bring out a sentiment, which
my Father once expressed to me on the common saying that
" Love is blind.”

cxxxviii INTRODUCTION.

Passion is blind, not Love: her wond’rous might
Informs with three-fold pow’r man’s inward sight :-
To her deep glance the soul at large display’d
Shows all its mingled mass of light and shade :—
Men call her blind when she but turns her head,
Nor scans the fault for which her tears are shed.
Can dull Indifference or Hate’s troubled gaze

See through the secret heart’s mysterious maze 3—-
Can Scorn and Envy pierce that “ dread abode,”
Where true faults rest beneath the eye of God?
Not their’s, ’mid inward darkness, to discern

The spiritual splendors how they shine and burn.
All bright endowments of a noble mind

They, who with joy behold them, soonest ﬁnd;
And better none its stains of frailty know

Than they who fain would see it white as snow.

OMISSA.

. . . “ p11nc1ples 1n no danger of being exagge1ated.” Introu.
p. xxxix. P11nc1ples can not go too fa1, because they have the boundless
realm of spi1it to move in: manifestations sH—thoughts words, deeds (for
thoughts are manifestations to the mind of the subject)—are in that other
kingdom of Space and Time, which is essentially limited; and hence they
may exceed in degree, even if they correspond to what is right. We can
not really possess any virtue in excess. Rashness, for example, is not exag-
gerated courage; it is courage unattended by" good sense, consequently
wrong in the mode, and possibly extreme in the measure of its manifesta-
tions; and the same may be said of every vice which appears to be the
wrong side of a virtue; it is a vice, not from intensity of degree, but from
the want of true discernment and just feeling, guoad hoe, in the subject.
For surely the prodigal giver is not more liberal than the generous man;
neither are the rash more courageous than the truly brave. T o be rash is
to be fool-hardy; to be prodigal is to be a spendthrift. The truth is, that
the matter of every virtue and vice is simply indifferent; it is the form
alone that constitutes it good or evil. The mere natural disposition, which
may be called the base of a virtue or a vice, is neutral; it becomes good by
the direction which it receives from the Practical Reason; or evil from the
obliquity which it is sure to assume in the silence of the Divine Light.
Compare with our 9th and 13th A1 ticles

“ \Vate1land modernizes Te1tull1anIb.p.lxx.D1.
Pusey does the same, I think, when he a1 ones that the ancient W1 iter
could not have separated the new birth from reception of the Spi] it. (Script.
Views, pp. 152—4 and Lib. of the Fathers, 10, p. 263.) _ From T.’s own lan-
guage it seems clear enough that he did separate them; that he believed
Jhe soul to be reformed by water and supernatural virtue ﬁrst, informed
bv the Snirit afterwards' the tenement to be prepared before the Divine

INTRODUCTION. . ' cxxxix

Tenant entered. His words are (I give Dr. P.’s own translation, only
changing water for waters, as more literal), “ Thus man, who had aforetime
been in the image of God, will be restored to God after his likeness, &c.
For he receiveth again that Spirit of God, which he had then received by
his breathing upon him, but had afterwards lost by sin. Not that we obtain
the Holy Spirit in the waters, but being cleansed in the water, under the
Angel, we are prepared for the Holy Spirit.” To make his plain meaning
doubly plain he adds, “For thus was John aforetime the forerunner of the
Lord, preparing his way.” I do not forget that, in those days, Anointing
and Imposition of hands were immediate adjuncts of Baptism, and T. afﬁrms
that in them, “the Spirit descends upon the ﬂesh ;” but to call them parts
of Baptism, is surely to use a deceptive phrase; if they were component
parts, the Church could not have detached them from that which they
helped to constitute ; they are either distinct sacraments or no sacraments,
in the higher sense here in question, at all. On this and other points Ter-
tullian’s doctrine of baptism differs essentially, as it seems to me, from that
which is now set forth as the doctrine of the Fathers,——which was the doc—
trine of some of them. True it is, that such a separation of ideas as I have
ascribed to Tertullian, argues an utter want of metaphysical insight into the
ideas themselves; but I believe that in the early times of Christianity there
was this want of insight in Christian writers ; Hermas, the inspired Shep-
herd, as Irenaeus and others then thought him, separates ideas still more
strangely, and his strange separation seems to be adopted by Clemens
Alexandrinusl (Hefele’s edit. p. 224, with extract in note from Strom. II.
p.452.) I

. .‘ “tacit establishment.” Ib. p.1xxviii. I mean silent as to its
coincidence with Luthe1’ s doctrine. But Mr. N. exp1 essly admits that Lu-
ther 1s “in the right” with regard to “ the exact and philosophical relation
of justiﬁcation to sanctiﬁeation,” and “prefers” his statement scientifically
considered, to that of St. Austin; Luther himself considered St. Augustine
to be substantially of his mind in the matter. See Table Tat/c, p. 211.
Truly as now Mr. N. teaches a “rationalistic Romanism,” so formerly he
taught a Lutherano-Anglicanism: he never has succeeded in blinding his
mind’s eye to one whole side of truth. His literary genius and intellectual
power are as apparent in his last work as ever; but it is one thing to
walk in the high road, and quite another to make paths in an untrodden
territory.

“ faith justiﬁes befo1e and without charity.’ Ib. lxxxviii

In Gal. ii. 16, the grace, charity, is so connected with deeds of cha1ity, hona
opera, that it is not easy to tell, f1 om the author’s me1e wo1ds, whethe1 he
meant the former by itself, or as incarnated in the latter, when he says
hcec ﬁdes sine et ante charitatem justiﬁcat. But even if helmeant that faith
justiﬁes before the inward grace of charity, this is but asserting that prior
ity of faith, in the order of thought, which the mind can not reject,—whicl1
is involved in the Tridentine saying, that faith is the root of all justiﬁcation
for the root is before the stem and branches. Faith justiﬁes before outward
charity in time; before inward charity in order of nature. Mr. Newman
asks, in reference to Melancthon’s and Calvin’s statements on this point

cxl INTRODUCTION.

“ what is the difference between saying, that faith is not justifying unless
love or holiness be with it, or with Bellarmine that it is not so, unless love
be in it ?” Answer, none at all, if in be taken merely to denote the relative
situation of love and faith in the human mind. But that is not the point;
the point is, does the justifying power belong to faith, as faith, or does love
help it to justify ? By denying that faith is informed with charity, Luther
only meant to deny that it is rendered justifying by charity. Mr. N. him~
self teaches that faith has the exclusive privilege of connecting the soul
with Christ, and thus implicitly denies, that love is in it for the purpose of
such connection; while to works he seems to ascribe another sort of justify
ing power. “What Luther meant to insist upon is, that it is the apprehen-
sion of Christ that justiﬁes rather than any quality of the mind considered
as such.

. “ substituted fo1 general 1enm at1on ” Ib. p. lxxxv. Mr ‘Wa1d
holds it a suie sign of moral couuptness in Luthel’ s doct1ine of faith that
it is p1 oposed as affm ding 1elief to the conscience. But how does it pro-
pose this ? By deadening the conscience? N 0, but by giving it rest. He
giveth his beloved rest ; but they must be His beloved who can obtain this
rest, according to Luther. It proposes to relieve the conscience by substi-
tuting simple faith in Christ as the means and instrument of justiﬁcation,
which includes righteousness and spiritual peace, for outward works of pen-
ance as the preparatory means. His opponents aﬂirm that such perfor-
mances are the way to true Faith ; but this Luther denied; he thought that
men might go on all their lives obeying a priest’s prescriptions, yet never
turn to God with their whole heart and soul, but be kept walking to and
fro in a vain shadow; he saw too that spiritual physicians often acted sel-
ﬁshly, making a worldly proﬁt of the means without the least real desire
to promote the end, or render the patient independent of their costly ser-
vices ; that they even hid the Gospel, lest men should see by its light how,
under God, to heal themselves. He denounced the whole system not merely
as liable to corruption, but as certainly, in the long run, involving it, being
based on untruth and mere human policy. The cross of the Christian pro-
fession, in the Bible, is wrapped up in Christian duty strictly performed;
the Papist makes a separate thing of it, and thus converts it into an en-
gine of superstition.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. _

So wem'g er auch bestimmt seyn mag, andere 2n belehren, so wunscht er doc]:
sich denen mitzutheilcn, die er sich gleic/cgesinnt weiss (oder hof‘ft), deren An-
zahl aber in der Breite der lVelt zerstrent ist; er wilnsclzt sein Verhdltniss
zu den dltesten Freunden dadurc/a wieder anzuknilpfen, mit neuen es fortzu-
setzen, und in der letzen Generation sic/L wieder andcrefilr seine ilbrige Lebens~
zeit zu gewinnen. Er witnsc/zt der Jugend die Umwege zu ersparen, auf de-
nen er sick selbst verirrte. (Goethe. Einleitung in die Propyléien.)

\TRANSLATION. Little call as he may have to instruct others, he wishes
nevertheless to open out his heart to such as he either knows or hopes to
be of like mind with himself, but who are Widely scattered in the world:
he wishes to knit anew his connections with his oldest friends, to continue
those recently formed, and to win other friends among the rising generation
for the remaining course of his life. He wishes to spare the young those
circuitous paths. on which he himself had lost his way.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

————-——+++—_

OHAPTERI.

MOTIVES TO THE PRESENT WORK—RECEPTION OF THE AUTHOR'S
FIRST PUBLICATION—DISCIPLINE OF HIS TASTE AT SCHOOL——
EFFECT OF CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON YOUTHFUL MINDS-—
BOVVLES,S SONNETS—COMPARISON BETWEEN THE POETS BE-
FORE AND SINCE POPE.

IT has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in
conversation and in print, more frequently than I ﬁnd it easy to
explain, whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and lim-
ited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance,
in which I have lived, both from the literary and political world.
Most often it has been connected with some charge which I could
not acknowledge,’ or some principle which I had never enter-
tained. Nevertheless, had I had no other motive or incitement,
the reader would not have been troubled with this exculpation.
What my additional purposes were, will be seen in the follow-
ing pages. It will be found, that the least of what I have writ-
ten concerns myself personally. I have used the narration chieﬂy
for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part for the
sake of the miscellaneous reﬂections suggested to me by particular
events, but still more as introductory to a statement of my prin- g
ciples in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy, and an application of ,
the rules, deduced from philosophical principles, to poetry and l,
criticism. But of the objects which I proposed to myself, it was
not the least important to effect, as far as possible, a settlement
of the long-continued controversy concerning the true nature of
'poeticdiction ; and at the Same time to 'divine with the utmost

144 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

impartiality the real poetic character of the poet, by whose
writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been since
fuelled and fanned.*

In the spring of 1796, when I had but little passed the verge
of manhood, I published a small volume of juvenile poemsrl‘
They were received with a degree of favor, which, young asI
was, I well know was bestowed on them not so much for any
positive merit, as because they were considered buds of hope, and
promises of better works to come. The critics of that day, the
most flattering, equally with the severest, concurred in objecting
to them obscurity, a general tnrgidness of diction, and a profu-
‘ sion of new coined double epithetsi The ﬁrst is the fault which

* [The first volume of the Lyrical Ballads was published in the summer
of 1798, by Mr. Joseph C-ottle, of Bristol, who purchased the copyright for
thirty gnineas. That copyright was afterwards transferred with others to
Messrs. Longinau & Co. And it is related by Mr. Cottle, that in estimating
the value the Lyrical Ballads were reckoned as nothing by the head of that
ﬁrm. This copyright was subsequently given back to Mr. Cottle, and by
him restored to Mr. \Vordsworth. \Vould that he and his might hold it
forever 1

The second Volume, with Mr. Wordsworth’s Preface, appeared in 1800.—
1:11.]

1 [This volume was published by Mr. Cottle at Bristol in the Spring of
1796, in conjunction with the Messrs. Robinson in London. It contained
ﬁfty-one small pieces, of which the best known at the present day are the
Religious Musings, Monody on Chatterton, Song of the Pixies, and the ex-
quisite lines written at Clevcdon, beginning, “ My pensive Sara, &c.” To
this poem Mr. Coleridge many years afterwards added the magniﬁcent pas-
sage—

O the one life within us and abroad,
at are * a: as * as

we * * *x" d the mute still air
Is Music slumberin on her instrument.
’ ' Poet. \Vorks, p. 147.

He was then twenty-three years and a half old—1511.]

i. The authority of Milton and Shakspeare may be usefully pointed out
'to young authors. In the Comus and other early poems of Milton there is
a snpertlnity of double epithets; while in the Paradise Lost we ﬁnd very
few, in the Paradise Regained scarce any. The same remark holds almos.
equally true of the Love‘s Labor Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Venus and Ado-
nis, and Lucrece, compared with Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet of our
great Dramatist. The rule. for the admission of double epithets seems to
be this: either that they should be already denizens of our language, such
as blood-stained, terror-stricken, selfapplauding : or when a new epithet m-

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 145‘

a writer is the least able to detect in his own compositions : and
my mind was not then sufﬁciently disciplined to receive the au-
thority of others, as a substitute for my own conviction. Satis-
fied that the thoughts, such as they were, could not have been
expressed otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, I forgot to in-
quire, whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a degree
of attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry. This
remark however applies chieﬂy, though not exclusively, to the
Religious Musings. The remainder of the charge I admitted to
its full extent, and not without sincere acknowledgments both to
my private and public censors for their friendly admonitions. In
the after editions,* I pruned the double epithets with no sparing
hand, and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both
of thought and diction ; though. in truth, these parasite plants of
youthful poetry had insinuated themselves into my longer poems
with such intricacy of union, that Iwas often obliged to omit
disentangling the weed, from the fear of snapping the ﬂower.

one found in books only, is hazarded, that it, at least, be one word, not two
words made one by mere virtue of the printer’s hyphen. A language
which, like the English, is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius
unﬁtted for compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word sug-
gests itself to him, would seek for some other mode of expressing the same
sense, the chances are always greatly in favor of his ﬁnding a better word.
U 6 tanquam scopulum sicfugz'as insolens verbum, is the wise advice of Caesar
to the Roman Oratorsﬁ‘E and the precept applies with double force to the
writ 3rs in our own language. But it must not be forgotten, that the same
Caesar wrote a Treatise+ for the purpose of reforming the ordinary lan-
guage by bringing it to a greater accordance with the principles of logic or
universal grammar.

9* [The second edition appeared in May, 17 97, with the same publishers’
names. Upwards of twenty of the pieces contained in the ﬁrst edition were
omitted in this, and ten new poems were added. Amongst these latter were
the Dedication to his brother, the Reverend George Coleridge, the Ode on
the Departing Year, and the Reﬂections on having left a place of Retire-
ment. (Poet. W'orks.) The volume comprised poems by Lamb and Lloyd,
and on the title-page was printed the prophetic aspiration :—Duplex nobis
vz'nculum, et amicititejmwtarumque Camdenarum ;—qu0d utinam negue mars
solvat ; neque temporis longinquitas .’——Ed.]

 

* [The expression is so given by A. Gellius (N oct. Att. i. 10). Macrobius
says, infrequens alque insolens verbum. (Saturn, i. 5.)——Ed.

1 [De Analogia Libri duo, the ﬁrst cf which contained the precept above
mentioned—Ed]

\IOL. IU. G

l46 BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARIA.

From that period to the date of the present work I have pub
lished nothing, with my name, which could by any possibility
have come before the board of anonymous criticism?“E Even the
three or four poems, printed with the works of a friendd‘ as far
as they were censured at all, were charged with the same or
.similar detects (though I am persuaded not with equal justice),
—with an excess of ornament, in addition to strained and elabo-
rate diction. Imust be permitted to add, that, even at the early
period of my juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the superiority
of an austerer and more natural style, with an insight not less
clear, than I at present possess. My judgment was stronger than
were my powers of realizing its dictates ; and the'faults of my
language, though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of sub-
jects, and the desire of giving a poetic coloring to abstract and
metaphysical truths, in which a new world then seemed to open
upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in unfeigned difﬁ-
' dence of my own comparative talent.—During several years of
my youth and early manhood, I reverenced those who had re-
introduced the manly simplicity of the Greek, and of our own elder
poets, with such enthusiasm as made the hope seem presumptu-
ous of writing successfully in the same style. Perhaps a similar
process has happened to others; but my earliest. poems were
marked by an ease and simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps
with inferior success, to impress on my later compositions.

At school (Christ’s Hospital), I enjoyed the inestimable advan-
tage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe

9* [This is certainly not strictly accurate, if the date of the publication
of the Biographia (1817) be taken as the period intended. The Remorse
appeared in 1813, and Christabel in 1816. Zapolya, the two Lay Sermons,
and the, Sibylline Leaves, all came out nearly contemporaneously with this
work. I believe the fact to be, that Mr. Coleridge wrote the pass. 0'e in the
text several years before 1817, and never observed' the misstatement which
lapse of time had caused at the date of publication. The ﬁrst Essays of The
Friend, indeed, came out in 1809 ; but he probably did not consider them
as constituting a published work in the ordinary sense of the term.—Ed.]

1- See the criticisms on the Ancient Mariner, in the Monthly and Critical
Reviews of the ﬁrst volume of the Lyrical Ballads.*

 

* [The ﬁrst volume of the Lyrical Ballads contained The Ancient Mari
ner, Love, The Nightingale, and The Foster Mother’s Tale.—-—E¢l.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 147

master, the Reverend James Bowyer.* [He early moulded my
taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and
Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated
me to compare Lucretius (in such extracts as I then read), Ter-
ence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with
the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but
with even those of the Augustan zera: and on grounds of plain
sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the
former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and
diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek
tragic poets, he made us read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons :
and they were the lessons too, which required most time and
trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learned from
him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of
the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of
science; and more difﬁcult, because more subtle, more complex,
and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly '
great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only
for every word, but for the position of every word; and I well
remember that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer
of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each,
why it would not have answered the same purpose ; and wherein
consisted the peculiar ﬁtness of the word in the original text.

In our own English compositions (at least for the last three
years of our school education), he showed no mercy to phrase,
metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the .
same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and
dignity in plainer wordsqL Lute, harp, and lyre, JVIuse, Muses,
and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Iiippocrene were all
an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now,
exclaiming “Harp ? Harp? Lyre ? Pen and ink, boy, you mean '
Muse, boy, Muse? Your nurse’s daughter, you mean ! Pierian
Spring? Oh aye ! the Cloister-pump, I suppose I” Nay certain
introductions, similes, and examples, were placed by name on a.

* [See the Table Talk, VI. p. 413, and Lamb’s exquisite Essay, Christ’s
Hospital ﬁve-and—thirty years ago. Prose Works, II. p. 26.—E’d.]

1- This is worthy of ranking as a maxim (regula maxima) of criticism.
Whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the same language,
without loss of sense or dignity, is bad. N. B. By dignity I mean the ab
sence of ludicrous and debasing associations.

148 BIOGRAPHIA LII‘ERARIA.

list of interdiction. Among the similes, there was, I remember
that of the manchineel fruit, as suiting equally well with too
many subjects ; in which however it yielded the palm at once to
the example of Alexander and Clytus, which was equally good
and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was it ambition?
Alexander and Clytus l—Flattery ? Alexander and Clytus I—
An ger — drunkenness —— pride—fricndship—in gratitude—late re-
pentance 1”)“ Still, still Alexander and Clytus ! At length, the
praises of agriculture having been exempliﬁed in the sagacious
observation that, had Alexander been holding the plow, he would
not have run his friend Clytus through with a spear, this tried,
and serviceable old friend was banished by public edict in scecula
sazculorum. I havd sometimes ventured to think, that a list of
this kin , or an index erupm‘gatorius of certain well-known and
ever-returning phrases, both introductory, and transitional, in-
cluding a large assortment of modest cgoisms, and ﬂattering
illeisms, and the like, might be hung up in our Law-courts, and
both Houses of Parliament, with great advantage to the public,
as an important saving of national time, an incalculable relief to
his Majesty’s ministers, but above all, as insuring the thanks of
country attorneys, and their clients, who have private bills to
carry through the House.

Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master’s, which
[can not pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and
worthy of imitation. He would often permit our exercises, under
some pretext of want of time, to accumulate, till each lad had
four or ﬁve to be looked over. Then placing the whole number
abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that
sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this
or that other thesis : and if no satisfying answer could be returned,
and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the
irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another
on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the

9* [“This lecture he enriched with many valuable quotations from the
ancients, particularly from Seneca; who hath, indeed, so well handled this
passion, that none but a very angry man can read him without great pleas-
ure and proﬁt. The Doctor concluded his harangue with the famous story
of Alexander and Clytus; but, as I ﬁnd that entered in my Common-place
under title Drunkmmcss, I shall not insert it here.” The History of a
Foundling, by Henry Fielding, Book vi. chap. ix.—Ed.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 149

day. The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection
to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the
dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the
mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither
lessen nor dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obli-
gations. He sent us to the University excellent Latin and Greek
scholars, and tolerable Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge
was the least of the good gifts, which we derived from his zealous
and conscientious tutorage. He is now gone to his ﬁnal reward,
full of years, and full of honors, even of those honors, which were
dearest to his heart, as gratefully bestowed by that school, and
still binding him to the interests of that school, in which he had
been himself educated, and to which duringihis whole life he was
a dedicated thing.

From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no
models of past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid
effect on the youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary
genius. The discipline, my mind had undergone, lVe falleretw'
rotunda 307w ct 'L'erszmm cu'rsu, cincinnis, et ﬂm'ibzcs; 36d w) _
inspiceret quidnam subessct, qucc scales, quad ﬁrmamemum, quis
fundus verbis; (m ﬁgure assent mam armature ct oratiom's
fucus; 'vcl sanguim's e materice ipsius corde eﬂuentis Tuba?
quidam nations et incalescemm genuinaﬁ—removed all obsta-
cles to the appreciation of excellence in style without diminish-
ing my delight. That I was thus prepared for the perusal of
Mr. Bowles’s sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased their
inﬂuence, and my enthusiasm. The great works of past ages
seem to a young man things of another race, in respect of which
his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the
stars and mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, per-
haps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same
circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a
reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a
man. His very admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his ,
hope. The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and
blood. To recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the pay-
ment of a debt due to one, who exists to receive it.

9* [I presume this Latin to be Mr. Coleridge’s own—not being able to ﬁnd

the passage in any other author, and believing that incalescentz’a is a good
word not countenanced by any classic writer of Rome—Ed]

150 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

There are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and
are producing, youths of a very different stamp ; modes of teach-
ing, in comparison with which we have been called on to despise
our great public schools, and universities,

in whose halls are hung
Armory of the invincible knights of old—*

modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into prodi-
gies. And prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus pro-
duced ;—prodigics of self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and in-
ﬁdelity 3 Instead of storing the memory, during the period when
the memory is the predominant faculty, with facts for the after
exercise of the judgment; and instead of awakening by the no-
blest models the fond and unmixed love and admiration, which
is the natural and graceful temper of early youth ; these nurslings
of improved pedagogy are taught to dispute and decide ; to sus-
pect all but their own and their lecturer’s wisdom ; and to hold
nothing sacred from their contempt, but their own contemptible
arrogance ;—boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in all the
dirty passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. To such
dispositions alone can the admonition of Pliny be requisite, ZVeque
em'm debet operibus cy’us obesse, quad vivit. An si inter eos,
quos mmquam 'vz'dz'mus, ﬂomisset, 72072 solum [views (37263, ee-rum
etiam imagines c07vzqui¢eremus, ejusdcm mmc honor pyrescntis,
et gratia quasi satiemte Zanguescet? At hoc pmvum, 722a5ig-
manque est, 7207a admi'rm'i hominem admzb'atz'one dignissimzmz,
quiet videre, complecti, ncc Zaudm'e tantum, verum elz'am amare
contingitq‘

I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets
of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a
quarto pamphlet; were ﬁrst made known and presented to me,
by a schoolfellow who had quitted us for_ the University, and
who, during the whole time that he was in our ﬁrst form, (or in
our school language a Grecian,) had been my patron and pro-

* [\Vordsworth. Poet. TV. iii. p.190.—Ed.]

f [Epist i. p. 16 —Ed.]

1. [The volume here mentioned appears to have been the second edition
of Mr. Bowles’s Sonnets, published in 17 89, and containing twenty—one in
number. The ﬁrst edition with fourteen sonnets only had been published
half a year previously.—-Ed.]

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. . 151

teeter. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned, and every
way excellent Bishop of Calcutta :

qui laudibus amplis
Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat,
Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terrae
Obruta; vivit amor, vivit dolor; ora negatm‘
Dulcia conspicere ; at ﬂe're ez‘ memim'sse relictum est.”e

It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender rec-
ollection, that I should have received from a friend so revered
the ﬁrst knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I
was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest ac-
quaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness
and impetuous zeal, with which I labored to make proselytes, not
only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of
whatever rank, and in whatever place. As my school ﬁnances
did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a
year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best pres-
ents I could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard.
And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four
following publications of the same author.

Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well
aware, that I shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it
will be well, ifI subject myself to no worse charge than that of
oingularity; I am not therefore deterred from avowing, that I
regard, and ever have regarded the obligations of intellect among
the most sacred of the claims of gratitude. A valuable thought,
or a particular train of thoughts, gives me additional pleasure,
when I can safely refer and attribute it to the conversation or
correspondence of another. My obligations to Mr. Bowles were
indeedimportant, and for radical good. At a very premature
age, even before my ﬁfteenth year, I had bewildered myself in
metaphysics, and in theological controversy? Nothing else

* [Petrarc Epist. I. 1. Barbato Subnonensi. Bishop Middleton left
Christ’s Hospital on the 26th of September, 17 88, on having been elected to
Pembroke College, Cambridge—Ed]

+ [“ Come back into memory,” says Lamb, “like as thou wast in the day-
spring of thy fancies, with hope like a ﬁery column before thee—the dark
pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge.—Logician, Metaphysician,
Bard l—How have I seen the casual passer through the cloister stand still,
entranced with admiration (while he weighed the-disproportion between

152 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

pleased me. History, and particular facts, lost all interest in my
mind. Poetry—(though for a school-boy of that age, I was
above par in English versiﬁcation, and had already produced two
or three compositions which, I may venture to say, without refer-
ence to my age, were somewhat above mediocrityfxand which
had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old
master was at all pleased with)—poetry itself, yea, novels and
romances, became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings
on our leave-day.“L (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any
H connections in London), highly was I delighted, if any passenger,

especially if he were dressed in black, would enter into conversa-
tion with me. For I soon found the means of directing it to my
favorite subjects

Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,

Fixed fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute,

And found no end in wandering mazes lost.

This preposterous pursuit was, beyond dc abt, injurious both to my
natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would
perhaps have been destructive had it been continued ; but from
this I was anspieiunsly withdrawn, partly indeed by an acciden-
tal introduction to an amiable family, chieﬂy however by the
genial inﬂuence of a style of poetry, so tender and yet so manly,
so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the
sonnets and other early poems of Mr. Bowles. Well would it
1/ have been for me perhaps had Inever relapsed into the same
mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flowers and
reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving
in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And
if in after-time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mis-

the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy
deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus (for
even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or
reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar,—whi1e the walls of the old Grey
Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy !”—Prose W'orks,
ii. p. 46.—Ed.] '

2* [See amongst his Juvenile Poems the lines entitled, Time real and
imaginary (Poet. \Vorks, p. 19), which is the ﬁrst decided indication of his
poetic and metaphysical genius together, and was written in his sixteenth
yearn—Ed]

f The Christ’s Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether. but for those
on which the boys are permitted to go beyond the precincts of the school.

BIOGRAPH IA LITE RARIA. 153

managed sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the

strength and subtilty of the understanding without awakening

the feelings of the heart ; still there was a long and blessed in-

terval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to ex-

pand, and my original tendencies to develop themselves ;—my
/1

Kaaney, and 5e love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms

ml sound

[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.
Poet. Works, p. 181.

The passage in the text has been more than once cited by those who cite
nothing else from the writings of Coleridge, as warning authority against
the pursuit of metaphysic science. With what candor or good sense let
those judge, who know and appreciate the persistent labor of his life, and
recollect that all the great verities of religion are ideas. the practical ap-
prehension of, and faith in which, have in every age of the Church been, as
from the constitution of the human mind they must necessarily be, vitally
affected by the metaphysic systems from time to time prevailing. It is in-
deed to be observed, that those who are so zealous in decrying metaphysic,
and more especially psychological investigations, and spend entire sermons
in reasoning . (rainst reason, have nevertheless invariably a particular sys-
tem of metaphysics and even of psychology of their own, which they will
as little surrender as examine. And what system ?——In nine cases out of
ten, a patchwork of empirical positions, known historically to be directly
repugnant to the principles maintained as well by the Reformers as the
Fathers of the Catholic Church, and leading legitimately to conclusions sub—
versive of the fundamental articles of the Christian faith. That those con-
clusions indeed have not been able to obtain a ﬁxed footing within our
. Church, as they have long since done to a fearful extent elsewhere, is, under
God’s providence, mainly attributable to the reading of the Liturgy and
Scriptures in the ears of the people. Yet who will not tremble at the di-
lemma in the case of an individual clergyman, who either sees the contra
riety between his philosophical and r eligious er eeds, and continues to hold
both, or not seeing it, is at the mercy of the ﬁi st Socinian- 1easoner who
helps him to perceive it?
This vulgar scorn of the science of the human mind, its powers, capaCI-
-ties, and objects, as an essential part or fore-ground of the science of theol-
ogy, is to be found passim in the written and oral teaching of those who,
to use a confesscdly inaccurate but very signiﬁcant phrase, lead the Calvin
istic and Arminian parties within the Church in England. To the former
G‘Jk

I54: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

The second advant rre, which I owe to my early perusal, and
admiration of these poems (to which let me add, though known
to me at a somewhat later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr.
Crowe*), bears more immediately on my present subject. [IX/mong

it seems more natural in respect of their being, upon the whole, men of
lower education, meancr attainments, and more limited abilities ; in the lat«
ter, and especially in the most eminent of the latter, it is self-contradiction,
and has the appearance, to calm observers, of mere wilfulness. For in the
perusal of the many eloquent volumes which have proceeded of late years
from the latter, there may be found metaphysic and even psychological ar-
guments, which show a knowledge of Aristotle, and also—quad minime
reris—an acquaintance with Coleridge,—the last, however, without recog-
nition by name, and speedily atoned for in a following page by some reli-
gious dehortation, or sullen dogma of contrary import. It is evident,
therefore, that the particular system is the object of dislike. \Vould it not
be more agreeable to the sincerity of lovers of truth, and to the courtesy
of men of letters, to meet, commend, or censure, adopt or reject, what
stands in their path in a perfectly questionable shape, than to pass by on
the other side in affected ignorance or contempt? Can the Aids to Reﬂec-
tion be honestly pretermitted by a divine of this day, or ought the only
use made of it by a gentleman to bes—to borrow from it without acknowl-
edgment? But it is a true saying, that they who begin by loving Christi-
anity better than truth, will proceed by loving their own sect or church
better than Christianity, and end in loving themselves better than all.

This is something of a digression, but it is needed.

It can hardly be necessary to remark, that Mr. Coleridge is only speaking
relatively to his youth, and his vocation as a poet, and the proportion which
metaphysical studies should bear in awell-ordered education to the exercise
of the imagination, and the observation of external nature. Something
also was, no doubt, intended against particular books and lines of research,
which, in his almost limitless range, he had perused or followed. There
are unwholesome books in metaphysics as there are in divinity and r0-
mance, but not so many or so injurious by half ; and it is just as wise to
proscribe the former on account of Spinoza or Hume, as it would be to pro-
hibit the latter for Socinus or Paul de Kock. No man could be a great
metaphysician, or make an epoch in the history of the science, without an
acquaintance as extensive as Mr. .C.’s with all that had been done or at-
. tempted before him; but such a course is not more necessary to the educa-
tion of the mind in general, to which the elements of metaphysic knowl-
edge are essential, than ﬁve years’ attendance at the State Paper Ofﬁce to
the accomplishment of a gentleman in the history of England; and it may
perhaps be admitted that the philosophic spell which overmastered Cole-
ridge’s advancing manhood forever slacked the strings of the enchanting
lyre of his youth. But on this we can only speculate:—de.]

9“ [Lewesdon Hill was ﬁrst published in 1786; there was a second edi«
tion in 17 88, and a third in 1804.—.E’d.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 155

those with whom I conversed, there were, of course, very many
who had formed their taste, and their notions of poetry, from the
writings of Pope and his followers ; or, to speak more generally,
in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by‘
English understanding, which had predominated from the last‘
century. I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as
from inexperience of the world, and consequent want of sym-
pathy with the general subjects of these poems, they gave me
little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the
presumption of youth withheld from its masters the legitimate
name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted
in just and acute observations on men and manners in an arti-
ﬁcial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the
logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic coup-
lets, as its form : that even when the subject was addressed to
the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the
Essay on Man ; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in
that astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity, Pope’s
Translation of the Iliad ; still a point was looked for at the end
of each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a smites, or,
if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a con-
junction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime, the matter and
diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts,
as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this
last point I had occasion to render my. own thoughts gradually
more and more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes
concerning Darwin’s Botanic Garden,* which, for some years,
was greatly extolled, not only by the reading public in general,
but even by those whose genius and natural robustness of under-
standing enablcd them afterwards to act foremost in dissipating
these “painted mists” that occasionally rise from the marshes at
the foot of Parnassus. During my ﬁrst Cambridge vacation,1‘ I
assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society in Devon-
shire : and in this I remember to have compared Darwin’s workl/
to the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold, and transitory. In,
the same essay too,I I assigned sundry reasons, chieﬂy drawn

”-5 [The Botanic Garden was published in 1781.—E(1.]

f [Mn Coleridge entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, on the 5th of Feb
ruary, 1791.—Ed.]

.t [I have never been able to discover any traces of this essay, which I
presume was not printed—Ed]

tinrr

156 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

from a comparison of passages from the Latin poets with the
original Greek, from which they were borrowed, for the prefer-
ence of Collins’s odes to those of Gray : and of the simile in
Shakspeare

How like a younker or a prodigal,

The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,

Hugg’d and embraced by the strumpet wiud !

How like the prodigal doth she return,

\Vith over-weather’d ribs and ragged sails,

Lean, rent 1111C. beggar’d by the strumpet wind!
(Merch. of Ven. Act ii. 80. 6.)

to the imitation in the Bard ;

Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
While proudly riding o’er the azure realm

In gallant trim. the gilded vessel goes,

Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm ;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind‘s sway,

That hush’d in grim repose, expects its evening prey.

(in which, by—the-bye, the words “ realm” and “ sway” are
rhymes dearly purchased)—I preferred the original on the ground
that in the imitation it depended wholly on the compositor’s put-

D, or not putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many
other passages of the same poet, whether the words should be
personiﬁcations, or mere abstractions. I mention this, because,
in referring various lines in Gray to their original in Shakspeare
and Milton, and in the clear perception how completely all the
propriety was lost in the transfer, I was, at that early period, led
to a conjecture, which, many years afterwards, was recalled to
me from the same thought having been started in conversation,
but far more ably, and developed more fully, by Mr. Wordsworth;

——namely, that this style of poetry, which I have characterized

above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic language, had

i been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of

writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to these
exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been
the case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin
tongue was so general among learned men, that Erasmus is said
to have forgotten his native language ; yet in the present day it
is not to be supposed, that a youth can think in Latin, or that
he can have any other reliance on the force or ﬁtness of his

i‘e‘w -

‘_
m

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 157

phrases, but the authority of the writer from whom he has adopted
them. Consequently he must ﬁrst prepare his thoughts, and
then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more com-
pendiously from his Grradusf‘fi< halves and quarters of lines, in
which to embody them.‘r

I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young
man from the age of seventeen to that of four or ﬁve—and-twenty,
provided I ﬁnd him always arguing on one side of the question.
The controversies, occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honor
of a favorite contemporary, then known to me only by his works,
were of great advantage in the formation and establishment of
my taste and critical opinions. {In my defence of the lines run-
ning into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of

* [In the Rusticus of Politian* there occurs this line :
Pura coloratos interstv'epit mzda lapz'llos.
Casting my eye on a University prize-poem, I met this line :
Lactca purpurcos interstrcpit unda lapillos.

Now look out in the Gradus for paws, and you ﬁnd as the ﬁrst syn
onyme, lacteus; for coloratus, and the ﬁrst synonyme is purpureus. I
mention this by way of elucidating one of the most ordinary processes in
the ferrmnz'nation of these centos.]

Jr [The description in the text may be true of those who never in any
proper sense succeed in writing Latin verse. But the experience of many
scholars in England, amongst boys, would enable them with sincerity to

deny its universal application. The chief direct use of the practice of Latin

verse composition consists in the mastery which it gives over the vocabulary
and constructive powers of the language. But it is, perhaps, greatly to be

regretted that spoken and written Latin has to so great a degree ceased '

to be a mean of communication between liberally educated Europeans. The
pretence that the extended knowledge of modern languages is an adequate
substitute, is in ﬁve cases out of ten generally, and in the pre-eminent in-
stances of Germany and England, in three out of four, notoriously untrue.
Mere school editions of the Classics may properly enough be accompanied
with notes in a modern language, but every work designed for the promo-
tion of scholarship generally ought, by literary eomity, to be published in
a language which every scholar can read. This remark does not touch the
question of dictionaries; as to which nothing but necessity can justify the
ordinary use of any interpretation but into the native idiom of the student

——Ed.]

 

* Angelus Politianus was born July 14, 1454, at Monte Pulciano in Tus-
cany; died at Florence, September 24, 1494. The line quoted is the four
teenth of the Silva cui tlitulus Rusticus.—S. C. -

e“?

158 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

natural language, neither bookish nor vulgar, neither redolent oi
the lamp nor of the kennel, such as I will remember thee; in‘
stead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair ﬁnery of.

 

thy 1magc on her Wing
Before my fancy’s eye shall memory bring,—

I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek
poets, from Homer to Thcocritus inclusively; and still more of
our elder English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this
all. But as it was my constant reply to authorities brought
against me from later poets of great name, that no authority
could avail in opposition to Truth, Nature, Logic, and the Laws
of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my former passion for
metaphysical investigations ; I labored at a solid foundation, on
which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component
faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dig
nity and importance. According to the faculty or source, from
which the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived,
I estimated the merit of such poem or passage. As the result
of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical,-
aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and criteria
tof poetic style ;—ﬁrst, that not the poem which we have read,
but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses
the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry ;—
secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other words
of the same language, without diminution of their significance, ,
either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far
vicious in their diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded
from the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere
novelty in the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at
his powers in the author. Oftentimes since then, in perusing
French tragedies, l have fancied two marks of admiration at the
end of each line, as hieroglyphics of the author’s own admira-
tion at his own cleverness. Our genuine admiration of a great
poet is a continuous under-current of feeling; it is everywhere
present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement. I was
wont boldly to afﬁrm, that it would be scarcely more difﬁcult to
push a stone out from the Pyramids with the bare hand, than
to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or ShaksPeare
in their most important works at least), without making the

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 159

poet say something else, or something worse, than lie does say.

ne reat distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between
even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false
beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley,,’
we ﬁnd the most fantastic, out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the;
most pure and genuine mother English ; in the latter, the most
obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitraryl
Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate ﬂow
of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the starts of Wit;
the moderns, to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken
and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something,
made up, half of image, and half of abstract* meaning. The
one sacriﬁced the heat to e head; the other both heart and
head to point and drapery. 3

The reader must make himself acquainted with the general
style of composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order
to understand and account for the effect produced on me by the

Sonnets, the Monody at Matlock, and the Hope,’r of Mr. Bowles ;

for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less striking, .

.in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgment
of its contemporaries. The poems of West,i indeed, had the

3‘ I remember a ludicrous instance in the poem of a young tradesman '

“ N o more will I endure love’s pleasing pain,
Or round my heart’s leg tie his galling chain.”

1- [The Monody at Matlock was published in 1791, and the Vision of H ope
in 1796.—Ed.]

1: [Meaning, of course, Gilbert West, the Translator of Pindar; to whose
merit as a poet, it may be doubted whether the author does full justice in
the text. West’s two imitations of Spenser are excellent, not merely, as
Johnson seems to say, for their ingenuity, but for their fulness of thought
and vigor of expression. The following stanza is but one of many other
passages of equal felicity :—

Custom he hight, and aye in every land
Usurp’d dominion with despotic sway
O’er all he holds; and to his high command
Constrains e’en stubborn Nature to obey ;
Whom dispossessing oft he doth assay
To govern in her right; and with a pace
So soft and gentle doth he win his way
That she unawares is caught in his embrace,
And tho’ deﬂower’d and thrall’d naught feels her foul disgrace.
Education.-- Ed] .

— :n a" ‘ .

160 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

merit of chaste and manly diction ; but they were cold, and, if 1
may so express it, only dead-colored ; while in the best of War. .'
'ton’s* there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the ap-
pearance of imitations from the Greekﬂhatever relation, there-
fore, of cause or impulse Percy’s collection of Ballads may bear to
the most popular poems of the present day ; yet in a more sus-
, tained and elevated style, of the then living poets Cowper and
Bowles’r were, to the best of my knowledge, the ﬁrst who com-

* [Thomas \Varton; whose English poems, taken generally, seem as in-
ferior to G. West’s in correctness of diction as in strength of conception.
Some of his Latin verse is beautiful ; and, if he had written nothing else,
his epigram addressed to Sleep wouLd perpetuate his name at least among
scholars:—

Somne veni ; et quanguam certissima mortis imago es,
Consortem cupio te tamen esse tori.

Hue ades, haud abiture cito : 7mm sic sine vita
Vivere guam suave est—sic sine morte mori !

A few stray lines of VVarton’s have crept into familiar use and application
without ever being attributed to their author, such as :—

 

while with uplifted arm
Death stands prepared, but still delays to strike.
Ode to Sleep.

0 what’s a table richly spread
Without a woman at its head l
Progress of Discontent.

N or rough, ndr barren are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity, but strown with ﬂowers.
In Dugdale’s Jllonasticon.

Warton’s best poem, as a whole, is the Inscription in a Hermitage :—
Beneath this stony roof reclined, &c.

But his great work is the History of English Poesy, imperfect and inade
quate as it is : 76v rekoﬁvra ,uévet. ~

It is somewhat remarkable that Mr. C. should not upon this occasion have
mentioned Akensidc, and, as compared with \Varton, the beautiful Hymn to
the N aiads.—Ed.]

" Cowper’s Task* was published some time before the Sonnets of Mr
Bowles; but I was not familiar with it till many years afterwards. The
vein of satire which runs through that excellent poem, together with the

 

5* [Co‘wper’s Task was ﬁrst published in 1785—his Table Talk in 178:2.
Ed. Thomson was born in 1700; published his works, collected in 4to, in
17 30. The Castle of I-ndolence, his last piece, appeared in 1746.—-S. C.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 161

bmed natural thoughts with nat ral diction ; the ﬁrst who recon,,

eiled the heart with the head.

It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from difﬁdenee in
my own powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and ﬂorid
diction, which I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of
very inferior worth. Gradually, however, my practice conformed
to my better judgment ; and the compositions of my twenty-fourth
and twenty-ﬁfth years—(for example, the shorter blank verse
poems, the lines, which now form the middle and the conclusion
of the poem entitled the Destiny of N ations,* and the tragedy of
Remorseﬂ—are not more below my present ideal in respect of
the general issue of the style than those of the latest date. Their
faults were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among
the many who have done me the honor of putting my poems in
the same class with those of my betters, the one or two, who
have pretended to bring examples of aﬂected simplicity from my
volume, have been able to adduce but one instance, and that out
of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which I intended.
and had myself characterized, as sermom’ prepioml

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be car-
ried to an excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader
will excuse me for noticing, that I myself was the ﬁrst to expose
r733”. henesto the three sins of poetry, one or the other of which is
the most likely to beset a young writer. So long ago as the pub-
lication of the second number of the Monthly Magazine, under the
name of Nehemiah Higginbottom, I contributed three sonnets, the
ﬁrst of which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at
the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the recurrence of favorite

sombre hue of its religious opinions, would probably, at that time, have pre-
vented its laying any strong hold on my affections. The love of nature
seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion ; and a gloomy religion to
have led Cowper to a love of nature. The one would carry his fellow-men
along with him into nature; the other ﬂies to nature from his fellow-men.
In chastity of diction, however, and the harmony of blank verse, Cowper
leaves Thomson immeasurably below him ; yet still I feel the latter to have
been the born poet.

9* [Poet. Works, p. 83.—Ed.]

+ [Poet. Works, p. 327.~—Ed.]

1: [N ot meaning of course the exquisite reﬂections on having left a place
of Retirement, to which Coleridge himself afﬁxed the motto from Horace
Poet. Works, p. 149.—Ed.] ‘

- .- 'U‘.

162 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

phrases, with the double defect of being at once trite and licen-
tious ;—the second was on low creeping language and thoughts,
under the pretence of simplicity ; the third, the phrases of which
were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate
use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. The reader
will find them in the note’I's‘ below, and will I trust regard them

SONNET I.
Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused,
And my poor heart was sad ; so at the Moon
I gazed, and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon
Eve saddens into night I mine eyes perused
\Vith tearful vacancy the dampy grass
That wept and glittered in the paly ray:
And I did pause me on my lonely way
And mused me on the wretched ones that pass
O’er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas!
Most of myself I thought ! when it befell,
That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood
Breathed in mine car: “ All this is very well,
But much of one thing, is for nothing good.”
Oh my poor heart’s inexplicable swell!

soxxm‘ II.
Oh I do love thee, meek Simplicity !
For of thy lays the lnlling simpleness
Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress,
Distress though small, yet haply great to me.
’Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad
I ainble on; and yet I know not why
So sad I am! but should a friend and I
Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad.
And then with sonnets and with sympathy
My dreamy bosom’s mystic woes I pall ;
Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
Now raving at mankind in general;
But whether sad or ﬁerce, ’tis simple all, .
All very simple, meek Simplicity !

SONNET 111.

And this reft house is that, the which he built,
Lamented Jack! and here his malt he piled,
Cautions in vain ! these rats, that squeak so wild,
Squeak not unconscious of their father’s guilt.

Did he not see her gleaming through the gladel
Belike ’twas she, the maiden all forlorn.

\tht though she milk no cow with crumpled horn.

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 163

as reprinted f0] biographical purposes alone, and not for their
poetic merits. So general at that time, and so decided was the
opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style, that a
celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of me in
other respects with his usual kindness to a gentleman, who was
about to meet me at a dinner party, could not, however, resist
giving him a hint not to mention The House that Jae/c built in
my presence, for “ that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet ;”
he not knowing that I was myself the author of it.

Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she strayed:
And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight 1

Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,

And through those brogues, still tattered and betorn,

His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white.

Ah! thus through broken clouds at night’s high noon
Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orbed harvest-moon !

The following anecdote will not be wholly out of place here, and may per-
haps amuse the reader. An amateur performer in verse expressed to a.
common friend a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in ac-
cepting my friend’s immediate offer, on the score that "he was, he must ac-
knowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on my Ancient Illa?-
iner, which had given me great pain.” I assured my friend that, if the
epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire to become ac-
quainted with the author, and begged to hear it recited: when, to my no
less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which I had myself some
time before written and inserted in the Morning Post, to wit--

To the Author of the Ancient Mariner.
Your poem must eternal be,
Dear sir! it can not fail,
For ’tis incomprehensible,

And Without head or tail.

l
l

l
l

CHAPTER II.

SUPPOSED IRRITABILITY OF MEN OF GENIUS BROUGHT TO THE TEST
OF FACTS—CAUSES AND OCCASIONS OF THE CHARGE—ITS IN-
JUSTICE.

IHAVE often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive
nor unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct con-
sciousness, that complex feeling, with which readers in general
take part against the author, in favor of the critic ; and the read-
iness with which they apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace
upon the scribblers of his time :

genus irritabile vatum.

A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a conse-
quent necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the

Esenses, do, we know well, render the mind liable to superstition
land fanaticism. Having a deﬁcient portion of internal and proper

warmth, minds of this class seek in the crowd circum ﬁma for a
warmth in common, which they do not possess singly. Cold and
phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp hay, they heat and
inflame by co-acervation ; or like bees they become restless and
irritable through the increased temperature of collected multi-
tudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism (such at least

was its original import) is derived from the swarmng of bees/L,

namely, schzcdrmen, schwdrmercy. The passion being in an in-
verse proportion to the insight,——that the more vivid, as this the
less distinct—anger is the inevitable consequence. The absence
of all foundation within their own minds for that, which they
yet believe both true and indispensable to their safety and hap-
piness, can not but produce an uneasy state of feeling, an invol-
untary sense of fear from which nature has no means of rescuing
herself but by anger. Experience informs us that the ﬁrst de«

fence of weak minds is to recriminate.

:m‘

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIAJ, 1 ., ” ""165 g
\ ‘ . ‘2

There’s no philosopher but sees, \ -- ' ,

That rage and fear are one disease;
Though that may burn, and this may freeze,
They’re both alike the ague.

But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power
of combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections
blend more easily and intimately with these ideal creations than
with the objects of the senses ; the, mind is aﬂectedby thoughts,
ratherthan by. things ; and only then feels the requisite interest
even for the most important events and accidents, when by means
of meditation they have passed into thoughts. The sanity of the
mind is between superstition with fanaticism on the one hand.
and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased slowness to
action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be so
vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing
of them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who pos-
sess more than mere talent (or the faculty of appropriating and
applying the knowledge of 0thers),—yet still want something of
the creative, and self-suﬂicing power of absolute genius. For
this reason therefore, they are men of commanding genius.
While the former rest content between thought and reality,.as it
were in an intermzmdizmz, of which their own living spirit sup-
plies the substance, and their imagination the ever-varying form ;
the latter must impress their preconceptions on the world without,
in order to present them back to their own view with the satis-
fying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. These
in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace,
or temple, or landscape-garden ; or a tale of romance in canals
that join sea with sea, or in walks ofrock, which, shouldering
back the billows, imitate the power, and supply the benevolence
of nature to sheltered navies ; or in aqueducts that, arching the
wide vale from mountain to mountain, give a Palmyra to the
desert. But alas ! in times of tumult they are the men destined
to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin, to destroy the Wisdom
of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a day, and to change
kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds.‘

Of old things all are over old,

Of good things none are good enough :—
VVe’ll show that we can help to frame
A world of other stm‘f

.1‘
_ ... .- .‘z

1 66 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

The records of biography seem to confirm this theory. The men
of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge {in their own
iworks or from the accounts of their contemporar’es, appear tow/r):
ghave been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to \P'V/

jthemselves. In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they
seem to have been either indifferent or resigned with regard to
immediate reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer there

‘ reigns a cheerfulness, a. manly hilarity, which makes it almost
impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author

‘i himself.* Shakspeare’s evenness and sweetness of temper were
almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from
ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant
proof in his Sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to
PopenL when he asserted, that our great bard—

I too will have my kings, that take

From me the sign of life and death:

Kingdoms shall shift about, like clouds,

Obedient to my breath. lVordswortlI’s Rob Roy?

* [I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is es-
pecially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and
yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid
drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is
particularly remarkable in Shakspeare and Chaucer; but what the ﬁrst
effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last
does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his na-
ture. Table Talk, IV. p. 504.

1' Pope was under the common error of his age, an error far from being
sufﬁciently exploded even at the present day. It consists (as I explained at
large, and proved in detail in my public lectures),+ in mistaking for the es-
sentials of the Greek stage certain rules, which the wise poets imposed upon
themselves, in order to render all the remaining parts of the drama consis-
tent with those, that had been forced upon them by circumstances indepen-
dent of their will; out of which circumstances the drama itself arose. The
circumstances in the time of Shakspeare, which it was equally out of his
power to alter, were different, and such as, in my opinion, allowed a far
wider sphere, and a deeper and more human interest. Critics are too apt
to forvet, that rules are but means to an end' consequently, where the ends

are different, the rules must e 1kew1sc so. We must have ascertained

what the end is, before we can determine what the rules ought to be.

 

*5 Poetical “forks, vol. iii. 1). 127. .
f [See the Author’s Lectures on Shakspeare, IV. p. 35, and generally the

fragments of his lectures and notes on Shakspeare collected in that volume
—Ed.] “

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 167
-—grew immortal in his own despiteﬁ‘“

Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the
duration of his works with that of his personal existence, Shak-
speare adds :

Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Tho’ I once gone to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
\Vhen all the breathers‘ of this world are dead:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, e’en in the mouth of men.
SONNE’I‘ LXXX'.1'

l have taken the ﬁrst that occurred ; but Shakspeare’s readiness
to praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the conﬁdence of his own
equality with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise,
are alike manifested in another Sonnet.

Judging under this impression, I did not hesitate to declare my full convic
tion, that the consummate judgment of Shakspeare, not only in the general
construction, but in all the details, of his dramas, impressed me with greater
wonder, than even the might of his genius, or the depth of his philosophy.l
The substance of these lectures I hope soon to publish ; and it is but a debt
of justice to myself and my friends to notice, that the ﬁrst course of lectures,
which differed from the following courses only, by occasionally varying the
illustrations of the same thoughts, was addressed to very numerous, and I
need not add, respectable audiences at the Royal Institution, before Mr.
Schlegel gave his lectures on the same subjects at Vienna.

9* Epist. to Augustus.

1 [These extraordinary sonnets form, in fact, a poem of so many stanzas
of fourteen lines each ;- and, like the passion which inspired them, the son-
nets are always the same, with a variety of expression,—-continuous, if you
regard the lover’s soul,—distinet_. if you listen to him, as he heaves them
sigh after sigh.

These sonnets, like The Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, are
characterized by boundless fertility, and labored condensation of thought,
with perfection of sweetness in rhythm and metre. These are the essentials
in the budding of a great poet. Afterwards habit and consciousness of
power teach more ease—proscipitandum liberum spiritum. Table Talk,
VI. 1'). 453.—Ed.

 

‘ See J[note on preceding page.

168 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,

That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
\Vas it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compcers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.

He, nor that affable familiar ghost,

Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors ofmy silence can not boast;

I was not sick of any fear from thence!

But when your countenance ﬁll’d up his line,
T hen lack’d I matter, that enfccbled mine. S. LXXXVI.

In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender,
delicate, and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had
almost said, cfleminate; and this additionally saddened by the
unjust persecution of Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which
overwhelmed his latter days. These causes have diflhsed over
all his compositions “ a melancholy grace,” and have drawn forth
occasional strains, the more pathetic from their gentleness. But

ll nowhere do we ﬁnd the least trace of irritability, and still less of
lquarrelsome or affected contempt of his censurers.

The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be
afﬁrmed of Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are
concerned. He reserved his anger for the enemies of religion,
freedom, and his country. My mind is not capable of forming a
more august conception, than arises from the contemplation of
this great man in his latter days ;———poor, sick, old, blind, slan-
dered, persecuted,-—*

Darkness before, and danger’s voice behind,—

in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for

* [In illustration of Milton’s magnanimity of patience I can not refrain
from quoting the conclusion of his letter to Leonard Philaras, the Athenian :

“ At present every species of illumination being, as it were, extinguished,
there is diﬁ'used around me nothing but darkness, or darkness mingled and
streaked with an ashy brown. Yet the darkness in which I am perpetually
immersed, seems always, both by night and day, to approach nearer to
white than black, and when the eye is rolling in its socket, it admits a little
particle of light as through a Chink. And though this may perhaps offer
to your physician a like ray of hope, yet I make up my mind to the malady
as quite incurable; and I often reﬂect, that as the wise man admonishes,

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 169

whom, as by that against whom, he had contended: and among
men before whom he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the dis-
tance ; yet still listening to the music of his own thoughts, or if
additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of
two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless

. argue not
Against Heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer’d
Right onward

From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in hls
latter day, had his scorners and detractors ; and even in his day
of youth and hope, that he had enemies would have been un-
known to us, had they not been likewise the enemies of his
country?“<

days of darkness are destined to each of us, the darkness which I experi-
ence, less oppressive than that of the tomb, is owing to the singular good-
ness of the Deity, passed amid the pursuits of literature and the cheering
salutations of friendship. But if, as is written, man shall not live by bread
alone, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God, why may
not any one acquiesce in the privation of his sight, when God has so amply
furnished his mind and his conscience with eyes? While He so tenderly
provides for me, while He so graciously leads me by the hand and conducts
me on the way, Iwill, since it is his pleasure, rather rejoice than repine at
being blind. And, my dear Philaras, whatever may be the event, I wish
you adieu with no less courage and composure than if I had the eyes of a
lyL x.”
Westminster. September 28, 1654.

What a proof is it of the ﬁrmness of Milton‘s mind to the last that, when
driven into a late marriage by the ill treatment of his daughters, who, in-
heriting, as appears, their mother’s unworthy temper,—without either de-
votion of spirit or even the commoner sense of duty,—tyrannized over him
in his days of darkness; though blind and inﬁrm and in all the dependence
which blindness brings, he could yet resist the entreaties of awife whom he
loved, and who was properly indulgent to him, that he should accept the
royal olfer of the restitution of his place—because he must “ live and die an
honest man!”

See Symmons‘s Life of Milton, conﬁrmed on these points by Todd, in his
edition of the great man’s Poetical Works of 1926.—S. 0.]

" [“ InMilton’s mind there were purity and piety absolute,—an imagina—
tion towhich neither the past nor the presem were interesting, except as
far as they called forth and enlivened the great ideal in which and for which
he lived; a keen love of truth, which, after many weary pursuits, found a
harbor in 9. sublime listening to the still voice in his own spirit, and as keen

VOL. m. - ll

170 BIOGRAPHIDA LITERARIA.

I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when
there exist many and excellent models, a high degree of talent
combined with taste and judgment, and employed in works of -
imagination, will acquire for a man the name of a great genius;
though even that analogon of genius, which, in certain states of!
society, may even render his writings more popular than the ab-
solute reality could have done, would be sought for in vain in the
mind and temper of the author himself. Yet even in instances
of this kind, a close examination will often detect, that the irri-
tability, which has been attributed to the author’s genius as its
cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse
Hpain, or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. What is

l 'lcharged to the author, belongs to the man, who would probably
have been still m01e impatient, but for the humanizing inﬂuences
of the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame of his irritability.

How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given
to this charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavored
to show, supported by experience ? This seems to me of no very
difﬁcult solution. In whatever country literature is widely dif-
ifused, there will be many who mistake an intense desire to pos-
sess the reputation of poetic genius, for the actual powers, and
original tendencies which constitute it. But men, whose dearest
wishes are ﬁxed on objects wholly out of their own power, he-
come in all cases more or less impatient and prone to anger.
Besides, though it may be paradoxical to assert, that a man can
know one thing and believe the opposite, yet assuredly a vain

1 person may have so habitually indulged the wish, and persevered
‘ in the attempt, to appear what he is not, as to become himself

a love of his country, which, after a disappointment still more depressive,
expanded and scared into a love of man as a probationer of immortality.
These were, these alone could be, the conditions under which such a work
as the P31 adise Lost could be conceived and accomplished. By a life—long
study, Milton had known—

-——what was of use to know,
What best to say could say, to do had done.
His actions to his words agreed, his words '
To his large heart gave utterance due, his heart
Contain’d of good, wise, fair the perfect shape:

and he left the impeiishable total, as a bequest to the ages coming, 11) the
Paradise Lost. ” Lectmes on Shaks‘p.ea1-e,- --IV-. p,_- 300 .—-'—Ed]

BIOGRAPHIA LITE‘RARIA. 171

one of his own p'roselytes. Still, as this counterfeit and artiﬁcial
persuasion must differ, even in the person’s own feelings, from a
real sense of inward power, what can be more natural, than that
this difference should betray itself in suspicious and jealous irri-
tability ? Even as the ﬂowery sod, which covers a hollow, may
be-often detected by its shaking and trembling.

But, alas l the multitude of books, and the general diffusion
of literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects
in the world of letters, and such as are abundant to explain,
though by no means to justify, the contempt with which the best
grounded complaints of injured genius are rejected as frivolous,
or entertained as matter of mei'riment. In the days of Chaucer
and Grower, our language might (with due allowance for the im-
perfections of a simile) be compared to a wilderness of vocal reeds,
from which the favorites only of Pan or Apollo could construct
even the rude syrinx; and from this the constructors alone could
elicit strains of music. But now, partly by the labors of succes-
sive poets, and in part by the more artiﬁcial state of society and
social intercourse, language, mechanized as it were into a barrel-
organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune. _ Thus even
the deaf may play, so as to delight the many. Sometimes (for it
is with similes, as it is with jests at a wine table, one is sure to
suggest another) I have attempted to illustrate the present state
of our language, in relation to literature, by a press-room of larger
and smaller stereotype pieces, which, in the present Anglo-Galli-
can fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but
an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely, and yet still
produce something, which, if not sense, will be so like it as to do
as well. Perhaps better: for it spares the reader the trouble
of thinking ; prevents vacancy, while it indulges indolence ; and
secures the memory from all danger of an intellectual plethora.
Hence, of all trades, literature at present demands the least tal- ‘2
ent. or information; and, of all modes of literature, the manuw
facturing of poems. The difference indeed between these and
the works of genius is not less than between an egg and an egg-
shell ; yet at a distance they both look alike.

Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little ex-
am ‘uation works of polite literature are commonly perused, not
onl by the. mass of readers, but by men of ﬁrst-rate ability, till

172 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

some accident or chance* discussion have roused their attention,
and put them on their guard. And hence individuals below
mediocrity, not less in natural power than in acquired knowledge ;
nay, bunglers who have failed in the lowest mechanic crafts, and
whose presumption is in due proportion to their want of sense and

* In the course of one of my Lectures, I had occasion to point out the
almost faultless position and choice of words, in Pope’s original composi-
tions, particularly in his Satires and moral Essays, for the purpose of com-
paring them with his translation of Homer, which, I do not stand alone in
regarding as the main source of our pseudo-poetic diction. And this, by-
the-bye, is an additional conﬁrmation of a remark made, I believe, by Sir
Joshua Reynolds, that next to the man who forms and elevates the taste
of the public, he that corrupts it, is commonly the greatest genius. Among
other passages, I analyzed sentence by sentence, and almost word by word,
the popular lines,

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, dzc.

(Iliad, B. viii.)
much in the same way as has been since done, in an excellent article on
Chalmers’s British Poets in the Quarterly Review.1 The impression on the
audience in general was sudden and evident: and a number of enlightened
and highly educated persons, who at different times afterwards addressed
me on the subject, expressed their wonder, that truth so obvious should
not have struck them before; but at the same time acknowledged—{so much
had they been accustomed, in reading poetry, to receive pleasure from the
separate images and phrases successively, without asking themselves
Whether the collective meaning was sense or nonsense)—that they might
in all probability have read the same passage again twenty times with un-
diminished admiration, and without once reﬂecting, that

dorpa oaetvﬁv d/upZ deli/mi)
(paiver’ dpmpems’a—
{that is, the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre-eminently bright)
—conveys a just and happy image of a moonlight sky : while it is difﬁcult
to determine whether, in the lines,

Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumber’d gild the glowing pole,

the sense or the diction be the more absurd. ‘My answer was; that,
though I had derived peculiar advantages from my school discipline, and
though my general theory of poetry was the same then as now, I had yet
experienced the same sensations myself, and felt almost as if I had been

 

‘ [The article to which the Author refers was written by Mr. Southey,
and may be found in vol. xi. of the Quarterly Review, p. 480. But it con-
tains nothing corresponding to Mr. Coleridge’s remark, whose reference is
evidently mistaken—Ed]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 173

sensibility; men, who being ﬁrst scribblers from idleness and
ignorance, next become libellers from envy and malevolence,—
have been able to drive a successful trade in the employment of
the booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into temporary name
and reputation with the public at large, bythat most powerful

newly couched, when, by Mr. Wordsworth’s conversation, I had been in-
duced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray’s celebrated Elegy.‘ I
had long before detected the defects in The Bard; but the Elegy I had con-
sidered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this day I can not read
either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm. At all events, what-
ever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer perception of the faults in
certain passages, has been more than repaid to me by the additional de-
light with which I read the remainder.

Another instance in conﬁrmation of these remarks occurs to me in the
Faithful Shcpherdess. Seward ﬁrst traces Fletcher’s lines ;

More foul diseases than e’er yet the hot

Sun bred thro’ his burnings, while the dog
Pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog
And deadly vapor from his angry breath,
Filling the lower world with plague and death,

to Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar,

The rampant lion hunts he fast
With dogs of noisome breath ;
Whose baleful barking brings, in haste,
Pines, plagues, and dreary death!

He then takes occasion to introduce Homer’s simile of the appearance 0!
Achilles’ mail to Priam compared with the Dog Star ; literally thus—-

“For this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an evil sign, and
brings many a consuming disease to wretched mortals.”l Nothing can be
morevsimple as a description, or more accurate as a simile; which (says
Seward) is thus ﬁnely translated by Mr. Pope:

Terriﬁc Glory! for his burning breath '
Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death!

Now here—(not to mention the tremendous bombast)—the Dog Star, so
called, is turned into a real dog, a very odd dog, a ﬁre, fever, plague, and
deathbreathing, red-air-tainting dog: and the whole visual likeness is lost,
while the likeness in the effects is rendered absurd by the exaggeration. In
Spenser and Fletcher the thought is justiﬁable: for the images are at least
consistent, and it was the intention of the writers to mark the seasons by
this allegory of visualized puns.

 

’ [lapvrpérarog ,uév 56’ e’o‘ri, Icam‘w 615 T8 aﬁlua Térvrcmc,
mu’ 78 clips; 71-01161) mperbv dstloZaL ﬂporoZaw.
~ Iliad xxii. 30.——S. 0.]

I74 BIO GRA PHI‘A 'LITERARIA;

of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant passions
of mankind.* But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and all
malignant propensities, to require a quick change of objects, such
writers are sure, souier or later, to awake from their dream of
vanity to disappointment and neglect, with embittered and en-
venomed feelings. Even during their short-lived success, sensi-
ble in spite of themselves on what a shifting foundation it rests,
they resent the mere refusal of praise as a robbery, and at the
justest censures kindle at once into violent and undisciplined
abuse ; till the acute disease changing into chronical, the more
deadly as the less violent, they become the ﬁt instruments of lit-
erary detraction and moral slander. They are then no longer
0 be questioned without exposing the complainant to ridicule, be-
ause, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and authorized, in
Andrew Marvell’s phrase, as “ synodical individuals,” to speak
of themselves plitrali majestatico.’ As if literature formed a
caste, like that of the Paras in Hindostan, who, however mal-
treated, must not dare to deem themselves wronged ! As if that,
which in all other cases adds a deeper dye to slander, the cirgv
cumstance of its being anonymous, here acted only to make the
slanderer inviolable 31‘ Thus, in part, from the accidental tem-
pers of individuals—(men of undoubted talent, but not men of

*5 Especially in this age of personality, this age of literary and political
gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshiped with a sort of Egyptian
superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of per-
sonal malignity in the tail ;——when the most vapid satires have become the
objects of a keen public interest, purely from the number of contemporary
characters named in the patch-work notes (which possess, however, the
comparative merit of being more poetical than the text), and because, to
Increase the stimulus, the author has sagaciously left his own name for
whispers and conjectures LFrom The Friend, Essay V. 072. the Errors of
Party Spirit, II. p. 192.—b. 0.]

1' If it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients, half the anec-
dotes which I either myself know to be true, or which I have received from
men incapable of intentional falsehood, concerning the characters, qualiﬁca-
tions, and motives of our anonymous critics, whose decisions are oracles for
our reading public; I might safely borrow the words of the apocryphal
Daniel; “ Give me leave, 0 SOVEREIGN PUBLIC, and I shall slay this dragon
Ewithout sword or staff.” For the compound would be as the “pitch, and fat,
and hair, which Daniel took, and did seethe them together, and made lumps
thereof; this he put in the dragon‘s mouth, and so the dragon burst in sun.
der : and Daniel said, Lo, THESE ARE THE Gons YE WORSHIP.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 175 ‘

genius)—tempers rendered yet more irritable by their desire to
appear men of genius ; but still more effectively by the excesses
of the mere counterfeits both of talent and genius ; the number
too being so incomparably greater of those who are thought to be,
than of those who really are men of genius; and in part from
the natural, but not therefore the less partial and unjust distinc-
tion, made by the public itself between literary and all other
property ;——I believe the prejudice to have arisen, which considers
an unusual irascibility concerning the reception of its products
as characteristic of genius.

It might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of
readers, to suppose a Review set on foot, the object of which
should be to criticize all the chief works presented to the public
by our ribbon-weavers, calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and china-
manufacturers; which should be conducted in the same spirit,
and take the same freedom with personal character, as our lit-
erary journals. They would scarcely, I think, deny their belief,
not. only that the genus irritabile would be found to include many
other species besides that of bards; but that the irritability [of
trade would soon reduce the resentmcnts of poets into mere
shadow-ﬁghts in the comparison. Or is wealth the only rational
object of human interest? . Or even if this were, admitted, has
the poet no property in his works ? Or is it a rare, 'or culpable
case, that he who serves at the altar of the Muses, should be
compelled to derive his maintenance from the altar, when too he
has perhaps deliberately abandoned the fairest prospects of rank
and opulence in order to devote himself, an entire and undis-
tracted man, to the instruction or reﬁnement of his fellow-citi-
zens ?, Or, should we pass by all higher objects and motives, all
disinterested benevolence, and even that ambition of lasting praise
which is at once the crutch and ornament, which at once sup-
ports and betrays, the infirmity of human virtue,—is the charac-
ter and property of the man, who labors for our intellectual
pleasure, less entitled to a share of our fellow-feeling,-than that
of the wine-merchant or milliner? Sensibility indeed, both quick
and deep, is not only a characteristic feature, but may be deemed
a componentpart, of genius. But it is not less an essential mark
of true genius, that its sensibility is excited by any other cause
more powerfully than by its own personal interests ; for this plain
reason, that the man of genius lives most in the ideal world,

176 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA .

in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past;
and because his feelings have been habitually associated with
thoughts and images, to the number, clearness, and vivaeity of
which the sensation of self is always in an inverse proportion.
And yet, should he perehance have occasion to repel some false
charge, or to rectify some erroneous censure, nothing is more com-
mon than for the many to mistake the general liveliness of his
manner and language, whatever is the subject, for the effects of
peculiar irritation from its accidental relation to himself.*

For myself, if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious
test of the observations of others, I had been made aware of any
literary testiness or jealousy , I trust, that I should have been,
h‘owevei, neither silly nor arrogant enough to have burthened the
imperfection on genius. But an experience—(and I should not
need documents in abundance to prove my words, if I added)—a
tried experience of twenty years, has taught me, that the original
sin of my character consists in a careless indifference to public
opinion, and to the attacks of those who inﬂuence it; that praise
and admiration have become yearly less and less desirable, except

1% marks of sympathy , nay that it is difficult and distressing to
me to think with any interest even about the sale and proﬁt of
my works, important as, in my present circumstances, such con-
siderations must needs be. Yet it never occurred to me to believe
or fancy, that the quantum of intellectual power bestowed on me
by nature or education was in any way connected with this habit
of my feelings ; or that it needed any other parents or fosterers

* This is one instance among many of deception, by the telling the half
of a fact, and omitting the other half, when it is from their mutual counter-
action and neutralization, that the whole truth arises, as a tertium aliquz’d
different from either. Thus in Dryden’s famous line

Great Wit (meaning genius) to madness sure is near allied.

Now if the profound sensibility, which is doubtless one of the components
of genius, were alone considered, single and unbalanced, it might be fairly
described as exposing the individual to a greater chance of mental derange~
incnt; but then a more than usual rapidity of association, 3. more than usual
power of passing from thought to thought, and image to image, is a compo-
nent equally essential; and in the due modiﬁcation of each by the other the
genius itself consists; so that it would be just as fair to describe the earth,
as in imminent danger of exorbitating, or of falling into the sun, according
as the assertor of the absurdity conﬁned his attention either to the projectile
or to the attractive force exclusively.

BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARIA. 177

than constitutional indolence, aggravated into langucr by ill-
health ; the accumulating embarrassments of procrastination;
the mental cowardice, which is the inseparable companion of
procrastination, and which makes us anxious to think and con-
verse on any thing rather than on what concerns ourselves; in
ﬁne, all those close vexations, whether chargeable on my faults
or my fortunes, which leave me but little grief to spare for evils
comparatively distant and alien.

Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under hap-
pier stars. I oan not afford it. But so far from condemning
those who can, I deem it a writer’s duty, and think it creditable
to his heart, to feel and express a resentment proportioned to the
grossness of the provocation, and the importance of the object.
There is no profession on earth, which requires an attention- so
early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of poetry; and indeed
as that of literary composition in general, if it be such as at all
satisﬁes the demands both of taste and of sound logic. How difﬁ-
cult and delicate a task even the mere mechanism of verse is.
may be conjectured from the failure of those, who have attemptec
poetry late in life. jWhere then a man has, from his earliest
youth, devoted his whole being to an object, which by the admis~
sion of all civilized nations, in all ages is honorable as a pursuit,
and glorious as an attainment ; what of all that relates to him-
self and his family, if only we except his moral character, can
have fairer claims to his protection, or more authorize acts of ,
self-defence, than the elaborate products of his intellect and intel-f
lectual industry? Prudence itself would command us to show,
even if defect or diversion of natural sensibility had prevented us
from feeling, a due interest and qualiﬁed anxiety for the offspring
and representatives of our nobler being. I know it, alas! by
woful experience. I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands
of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich
oblivion. The greater part indeed have been trod under foot,
and are forgotten ; but yet no small number have crept forth into
life, some to furnish feathers for the caps of others, and still more
to plume the shafts in the quivers of my enemies, of them that
unprovoked have lain in wait against my soul.

Sic cos, non 'vobz's, mellz'ﬁcatis, apes 1*

*‘ [“ He was one of those Who with long andlarge arm still collected pro

cious armfuls, in Whatever direction be pressed forward, yet still took up 5
z’“ '

1
l

\

CHAPTER III.

THE AUTHOR’S OBLIGATIONS TO CRITICS, AND THE PROBABLE DC‘
CASION—PRINCIPLES OF MODERN CRITICISM—MR. SOUTHEY’S
WORKS AND CHARACTER.

To anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and news-journals
of various name and rank, and. to satirists with or without a.
name, in verse or prose, or in verse-text aided by prose-comment,
I do seriously believe and profess, that I owe full two thirds of
whatever reputation and publicity I happen to possess. For when
the name of an individual has occurred so frequently, in so many
works, for so great a length of time, the readers of these works—
‘(which with a shelf or two of Beauties, elegant Extracts and
Arias, form nine tenths of the reading of the reading Public*)——

much more than he could keep together, that those who followed him
gleaned more from his continual droppings than he himself brought home;
——nay, made stately corn-ricks therewith, while the reaper himself was still
seen only with his armful of newly-cut sheaves.” Works, IV. p. 12.——Ed.]

l 9" For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not compli~
{ment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it

rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the

dreamer furnishes for itselfpothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensi-
bility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab ex-
tra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing-ofﬁce,
which pro tempore ﬁxes, reﬂects, and transmits the moving phantasms of
one man’s delirium, so as to people the barrennessof a hundred other brains
afﬂicted with the same trance or suspension of all common Sense and all
deﬁnite purpose. We should therefore transfer this species of amusement,
~—(if indeed those can be said to retire a musis, who were never in their
company, or relaxation be attributable to those, whose bows are never
oent)——from the genus, reading, to that comprehensive class characterized
by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet co-existing propensities
of hmnan nature, namely, indulgence of sloth, and hatred of vacancy. In
addition to novels and tales of chivalry in prose or rhyme (by which last I
mean neither rhythm nor metre) this genus comprises as its species, gam-

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 179

can not but be familiar with the name, without distinctly remem-
bering whether it was introduced for eulogy or for censure. And
this becomes the more likely, if (as I believe) the habit of perusing
. periodical works may be properly added to Averroes’* catalogue
of Anti-Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memoryd‘ But where
this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt to suspect,
that there must be something more than usually strong and ex-
tensive in a reputation, that could either require or stand so mer-
ciless and long- continued a cannonading. Without any feeling
of anger therefore—(for which indeed, 011 my own account, I have
no pretext)—I may yet be allowed to express some degree of
u1pr1se that, after having run the c1itical gauntlet for a certain
class of faults which I had, nothing having come before the
judgment- -seat in the inteiim, I should, yea1 after year, quarter
after quarter, month after month—(not to mention sundry petty
periodicals of still quicker revolution, “ or weekly or diurnal”)—
have been, for at least seventeen years consecutively, dragged
forthby them into the foremost ranks of the proscribed, and
forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults directly opposite, and
which I certainly had not. How shall I explain this?
-- Whatever may have been the case with others, I' certainly can
not attribute this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy,‘or to
feelings of vindictive animosity. Not to the former, for, with the
exception of a very few who are my intimate friends, and were so

ing, swinging, 01 swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smok-
ing; snuff taking, téte—d-téte quarrels after dinner between husband and
wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of a daily newspaper
in a public house on a 1ainy day, &c. &c. ((10.

9* [The true polyonomous appellative of Av e1roes was Abul Walid Mo-
hammed Ebn Achmed Ebn Mohammed Ebn Raschid. He was bow at 001--
dova about 1150, and died in Morocco in 1206 or 1207.—Ed.]

+ Ex. gr. Pcdiculos e capillz's excerptos in arenam jacere incontusos;
eating of unripe fruit; gazing on the clouds, and (in genera) on movable
things suspended in the air; riding among a multitude of camels ; frequent
laughter; listening to a series of jests and humorous anecdotes,—-as when
(so to modernize the learned Saracen’s meaning) one man’s droll story of an
Irishman inevitably occasions another’s droll story of a Scotchman, which
'again, by the same sort of conjunction disjunctive, leads to some étourderz'e
of a Welshman, andjthat again to some sly hit of a Yorkshiren1an;-—the
habit of reading tombstones in church— —ya1ds, (510. By- -the- -bye, this cata-
logue, st1a11ge as it may appear, is not insusceptible of a sound psychologi
cal commentary . . . . . .

180 BIOGRAPHIA 'LITERARIA.

before they were known as authors, I have had little other ac-
quaintance with literary characters, than what may be implied
in an accidental introduction, or casual meeting in a mixed com-
pany. And as far as words and looks can be trusted, I must be-
lieve that, even in these instances, I had excited no unfriendly
t disposition. Neither by letter, nor in conversation, have I ever
jghad dispute or controversy beyond the common social interchange
llof opinions. Nay, where I had reason to suppose my convictions
fundamentally different, it has been my habit, and I may add, the
impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief, rather
than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till I could
establish some points of complete sympathy, some grounds com-

i mon to both sides, from which to commence its explanation.

Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The
few pages which I have published, are of too distant a date,
and the extent of their sale a proof too conclusive against their
having been popular at any time, to render probable, I had al-
most said possible, the excitement of envy on their account; and
the man who should envy me on any other,—verily he must be
envy-mad 3

Lastly, with as little semblance of reason, could I suspect any
animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I
have before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has
been limited and distant; and that I have had neither dispute
nor controversy. From my ﬁrst entrance into life, I have, with
few and short intervals, lived either abroad or in retirement.
My different essays on subjects of national interest, published at
different times, ﬁrst in the Morning Post and then in the Courier,
with my courses of Lectures on the principles of criticism as ap-
plied to Shakspeare and Miltonﬂ‘< constitute my whole publicity;

* [“ Mr. Coleridge’s courses of Lectures on literary and other subjects
between 1800 and 1819 were numerous, but the Editor is unable to record
them accurately. They were delivered at the Royal Institution, the Crown
and Anchor, the Surrey Institution, the London Philosophical Society, Wil-
lis’s Rooms, and, it is believed, in several other places in London. The sub-
jects were Shakspeare and the Drama generally, particularly plays of
Shakspeare, the history of English and Italian Literature, the history of
Philosophy, Education of Women, connection of the Fine Arts with educa
tion and improvement of the mind, and many others of which the Editor
can learn nothing certain. The most remarkable of his contributions
to the newspapers mentioned in the text, were the character of Mr

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 18].

the only occasions on which I could offend any member of the re-
public of letters. With one solitary exception in which my words
were ﬁrst misstated and then wantonly applied to an individual,
I could never learn that I had excited the displeasure of any
among my literary contemporaries. Having announced my in-
tention to give a course of Lectures on the characteristic merits
and defects of English poetry in its different aeras ;* ﬁrst, from
Chaucer to Milton ; second, from Dryden inclusively to Thomson;
and third, from Cowper to the present day ; I changed my plan,
and conﬁned my disquisition to the former two periods, that I
might furnish no possible pretext for the unthinking to miscon-
strue, or the malignant to misapply my words, and having
stamped their own meaning on them, to pass them as current
coin in the marts of garrulity or detraction.

Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies
of the deserving ° and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon,

 

D 3
O O O w\
Hﬁmngton, Machiavel, and Splnoza, are not read, because Hume,
. . ”—7—, . M
00% and Voltaire are. But in promlscuous company no

prudent man wmug’n the merits of a contemporary in his
own supposed department; contenting himself with praising in
his turn those whom he deems excellent. If I should ever deem
it my duty at all to oppose the pretensions of individuals, I would
oppose them in books which could be weighed and answered, in
which I could evolve the whole of my reasons and feelings, with
their requisite limits and modiﬁcations ; not in irrecoverable con-
versation, where however strong the reasons might be, the feel~
ings that prompted them would assuredly be attributed by some
one or other to envy and discontent. Besides I well know, and,
I trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must be the igno-
rant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; and the eulogies
of critics without taste or judgment are the natural reward of
Pitt in the Morning Post in 1800, and the Series of Letters on the Spanish
War in the Courier in 1809. What the Author says as to these exertions
constituting his whole publicity,_must not be taken too strictly; for besides
The Friend, the Remorse, Christabel and his other Poems published before
the date of this work, Mr. Coleridge had made his name well known long
before by his courses of Lectures at Bristol on the French Revolution,
Christianity, Slavery, and other subjects, some of which were printed.
—Ed.

V [’Il'his alludes to the Lectures at the London Philosophical Society,
which began on the 18th of November 1811—1521.]

182 . BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

authors without feeling or genius._ Sim unicaique sua pw=

mia.

How then, dismissing, as I do, these thlee causes, am I to ac-
count 101 attacks, the long continuance and invetelacy of which
1t would require all three to explain ? The solution seems to be
this :—I was in habits of intimacy with 1117'. in‘chworth and
M71; Southey! This, however, transfers rather than removes
the difﬁculty. Be it, that, by an unconscionable extension of the
old adage, noscita) a socio, my literaly f1iends are never unde1
the wate1- fall of criticism, but I must be wet through with the
spray , yet how came the torrent to descend upon them ?

First, then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the
general reception of his earlier publications ; namely, the poems
published with Mr. Lovell under the names of Moschus and Bion ;
the two volumes of poems under his own name, and the Joan of
Arcﬂ“ The censures of the critics by profession are extant, and
may be easily referred to :—careless lines, inequality in the merit
of the different poems, and (in the lighter works) a predilection

'for the strange and whimsical; in short, such faults as might
have been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were indeed
sufﬁciently enf01ced.NQ1__was them at that time wanting» a
paltvspirit to aggravate the defects Who, with all the
courage of uncorrupted youth, had avowed lS zeal for a cause,
which he deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppres-
sion by whatever name consecrated. But it was as little object
ed by others, as dreamed of by the poet himself, that he pre-
ferred careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or
indeed that he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic dic-
tion, except that which we may all learn from Horace, Quinc-
tilian, the admirable dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally attrib-

 

uted to Tacitus, or Strada’s Prolusions; if indeed natural good ‘

sense and the early study of the best models in his own language
had not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may
venture the expression, more vitally. All that could have been
fairly deduced was, that in his taste and estimation of writers,

Mr. Southe aoreed far ' h Thomas Warton than with
-,

"“ [The joint volume appeared in 17 95. Bion was Southey, Moschus, Lov-
ell. It contained “the Retrospect,” in its original form. Joan of Arc ap
peared 1n 1796—the “two volumes” in 1 797—both published by Mr. Cattle.
-—-Ed l

”1'13!

,BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA'. 188

"\,-"

Nor do I mean to deny, that at all times Mr
Southey was 01 the same mind with Sir Philip Sidney”)F 1n pre-
fcrr ng an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry to
twenty indiﬁﬂerent poems that strutted in the highest. And by
what have his works, published since then, been characterized,
each more strikingly than the preceding, but by greater Splendor,
a deeper pathos, profounder reﬂections, and a more sustained
dignity of language and of metre ? Distant may the period be,‘
but whenever the time shall come, when all his works shall be
collected by some editor worthy to be his biographer, I trust that
an appendix of excerpta, of all the passages, in which his writ~
ings, name, and character have been attacked, from the path-
phlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be. an
accompaniment. Yet that it would prove mediCinal in after-
times I dare not hope ; for as long as there are readers to be de-
lighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calum-
'niate. And such readers will become in all probability more
numerous, in proportion as a still greater diffusion of literature
shall produce an increase of sciolists, and sciolism bring with it
petulance and presumptionﬂ In times of old, books were as reli-
gious oracles ; as literature advanced, they next became venera-
ble preceptors; they then descended to the rank of instructive
friends ; and, as their number increased, they sank still lower to
that of entertaining companions ; and at present they seem de-
graded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every
self-elected, yet not'the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to
'write from humor or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to
abide the decision “of him that reads in malice, or him that
reads after dinner.” .

The same retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation
which the authors themselves have assumed towards their read-
ers. From the lofty address of Bacon: “these are the medita
tions of Francis of Verulam, which that posterity should be pos-
sessed of, he deemed their interest 9’1” or from dedication to

*5 [“I never heard the old song of Percie and Douglas that I found
not my heart moved more than with a trumpet.” Defence of Poetic.—
Ed]

1' [§ Franciscus de Vcrulamz'o sic cogz'tavz't; talemque apud £6 rationem
,instituz't, quam m'ventz'bus et posterz's notam ﬁerz', z'psorum interesse put‘avit
Nov. Org. —E41.] »

184 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Monarch or Pontifi, in which the honor given was asserted in
equipoise to the patronage acknowledged : from Pindar’s

’e7r’ (alloc-

-GL (5’ (221m lug/(22m: 7'6 6’ éoxarov Kopv-
-¢Qrat ,Baotlévot' Mnxén

miarrawe wépatov.
8Z7; oé re rérov
131,128 xpévov ware-Zr, éué
78 7000668 vucagbépmg
optlelv, wpégbavrov oo¢£gw Ka6’ ”EZ-
Jtavag éovra navrd. OLYMP. OD. 1.

there was a gradual sinking in the etiquette or allowed style of
pretension.

Poets and Philosophers, rendered difﬁdent by their very num-
ers, addressed themselves to “learned readers ;” then aimed to
onciliate the graces of the “candid reader ;” till, the critic still
ising as the author sank, the amateurs of literature collectively
ere erected into a municipality of judges, and addressed as the

Town 3 ' And now, ﬁnally, all men being supposed able to read,
, and all readers able to judge, the multitudinous Public, shaped
into personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal
despot on the throne of criticism. But, alas! as in other des'
potisms, it but echoes the decisions of its invisible ministers,

,- whose intellectual claims to the guardianship of the Muses seem,
for the greater part, analogous to the physical qualiﬁcations
which adapt their oriental brethren for the superintendence of
the Harem. Thus it is said, that St. Nepomuc was installed the
guardian of bridges, because he had fallen over one, and sunk
out of sight ; thus too St. Cecilia is said to have been ﬁrst pro-
pitiated by musicians, because, having failed in her own at-
tempts, she had taken a dislike to the art and all its successful
professors. But I shall probably have occasion hereafter to de?
liver my convictions more at large concerning this'state of things,
and the inﬂuence on taste, genius, and morality.

In the Thalaba, the Madoc, and still more evidently in the.

unique* Cid, in the Kehama, and, as last, so best, the Roderick,

*9 I have ventured to call it unique , not only because I know no work of
the kind in our language (if we except a few chapters of the old translation
of Froissart)-—none, which uniting the charms of romance and history, keeps
the imagination so constantly on the wing, and yet leaves so much for after-

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 1 85

Southey has given abundant proof, se cogz'tme quam sit magnum
dame aliquzd 7'72 manus hominum. 7zec 77673276552676 sibi posse,
72077, srepe chtcmdmn quad placere 65 367721267 ct omnibus cupiat.*
But on the other hand, I conceive, that Mr. Southey was quite
unable to comprehend, wherein could consist the crime or mis-
chief of printing half a dozen or more playful poems; or to speak
more generally, compositions which would be enjoyed or passed
Over, according as the taste and humor of the reader might chance
to be ; provided they contained nothing immoral. In the present
age peritmw parcere Charla? is emphatically an unreasonable de-
mand. The merest triﬂe he ever sent abroad had tenfold better
claims to its ink and paper than all the silly criticisms on it,j
which proved no more than that the critic was not one of those,
for whom the triﬂe was written ; and than all the grave exhorta—
tions to a greater reverence for the public—as if the passive page
of a book, by having an epigram or doggrel tale impressed on it,
instantly assumed at once locomotive power and a sort of ubi-
quity, so as to ﬂutter and buzz in the ear of the public to the sore
annoyance of the said mysterious personage. But what gives an
additional and more ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations is
the curious fact, that if in a volume of poetry the critic should
find poem or passage which he deems more especially worthless,
he is sure to select and reprint it in the review; by which, on
his own grounds, he wastes as much more paper than the author,
as the copies of a fashionable review are more numerous than
those of the original book; in some, and those the most promi-
nent instances, as ten thousand to ﬁve hundred. I know nothing
that surpasses the vileness of deciding on the merits of a poet or
painter—(not by characteristic defects ; for where there is genius,
these always point to his characteristic beauties, but)—by acci- t
dental failures or faulty passages; except the impudence of de- =.
fending it, as the proper duty, and most instructive pa1t, of criti- ‘
cism. Omit or pass slightly over the expression, grace, and
grouping of Raffael’s ﬁgures; but ridicule in detail the knitting-
necdles and broom-twigs, that are to represent trees in his back-

reﬂectiou; but likewise, and chieﬂy, because it is a compilation, which, in
the various excellencies of translation, selection, and arrangement, required
and proves greater genius in the compiler, as living in the present state of
society, than in the original composers.

* [Accommodated from Plinv the younger. L. vii. Ep. 11—11713]

186 BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA.

grounds ; and never let him hear the last of his gallipots I Ads
mit that the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton are not without
merit; but repay yourself for 'this concession, by reprinting at
length the two poems on the University Carrier! As a fair
specimen of his Sonnets, quote

“ A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon ;"

I

and as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal.
translation of the ﬁrst and second Psalm! In order to justify
yourself, you need only assert, that had you dwelt chieﬂy on the
beauties and excellencies of the poet, the admiration of these
might seduce the attention of future writers from the objects of
their love and wonder, to "an imitation of the few poems and pas-
sages in which the poet was most unlike himself.

But till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with
far other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and
petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference
to ﬁxed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced
from the nature of man ; reﬂecting minds will pronounce it arro-
gance in them thus to announce themselves to men of letters, as
the guides of“ their taste and judgment. To the purchaser and
mere reader it is, at all events, an injustice. He who. tells me that
there are defects in a new work, tells me nothing which I should
not have taken for granted without his information. But he, who
points out and elucidates the' beauties of an original work, does
indeed give me interesting information, such as experience would
not have authorized me in anticipating, And as to compositions
which the authors themselves announce with

Haze {psi novimus esse nihil,*
why should we judge by a different rule two printed works, only

because the one author is alive, and the other in his grave?
What literary man has not regretted the prudery of Spratt in re-

g fusing to let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing

gown? I am not perhaps the only one who has derived an
innocent amusement from the riddles, conundrums, tri-syllable
lines, and the like, of Swift and his correspondents, in hours of
languor, when to have read his more finished works would have
been useless to myself, and in some sort an act of injustice to the

’* [The motto preﬁxed by Mr. Southey to his Minor Poems—Ed]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 187:

author. But Iam at a loss to conceive by what perversity of

judgment, these relaxations of his genius could be emplOyed to
diminish his fame as the writer of Gulliver, or the Tale of a Tub.
Had Mr. Southey written twice as many poems of inferior merit,
or partial interest, as have enlivened the journals of the day, they
would have added to his honor with good and wise men, not
merely or principally as proving the versatility of his talents, but
as. evidences of the purity of that mind, which even in its levities
never dictated a line which it need regret on any moral account.

I have in imagination transferred to the future biographer the
duty of contrasting Southey’s ﬁxed and well-earned fame, with
the abuse and indefatigable hostility of his anonymous critics from
his ea1ly youth to his ripest manhood. But I can not think so ill
of human nature as not to believe, that these critics have already
taken shame to themselves, whether they consider the object of
their abuse in his moral or his literary character. For reﬂect
but on the variety and extent of his acquirements! He stands
second to no man, either as an historian or as a bibliographer '
and when I regard him as a popular essayist—(for the articles
of his compositions in the reviews are, for the greater part, essays
on subjects of deep or curious interest rather than criticisms on
particular works)—I look in vain for any writer, who has con-
veyed so much information, from so many and such recondite
sources, with so many just and original reﬂections, in a styleso
lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous ;
no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom with so
much wit ; so much truth and knowledge with so much life and
fancy. His prose is always intelligible and always entertaining.
In poetry he has attempted almost every species of composition
known before, and he has added new ones ; and if we except the
highest lyric—(in which how few, how very few even of the
greatest minds have been fortunate)—he has attempted every
species successfully ; ‘i rom the political song of the day, thrown
off in the playful over ow of honest joy and patriotic exultation,
to the wild ballad ; from epistolary ease and graceful narrative,
to austere and impetuous moral declamation; from the pastoral
charms and wild streaming lights of the Thalaba, in which senti-
ment and imagery have given permanence even to the excitement
of curiosity ; and from the full blaze of the Kehama—(a gallery
:f ﬁnished pictures in One splendid fancy piece, in which, not with-

“ﬂu...

188 BIOGRAPH 1A LITERABIA.

standing, the moral grandeur rises gradually above the brilliance
of the coloring and the boldness and novelty of the machinery)—
to the more sober beauties of the Madoe ; and lastly, from the
Madoc to his Roderick, in which, retaining all his former excel-
lencies of a poet eminently inventive and picturesque, he has sur‘
passed himself in language and metre, in the construction of the
whole, and in the splendor of particular passages)

Here then shall I conclude '3 No l The characters of the de-
ceased, like the encomia on tombstones, as they are described with
religious tenderness, so are they read, with allowing sympathy in-
deed, but yet with rational deduction. There are men, who de-
serve a higher record; men with whose characters it is the inter-
est of their contemporaries, no less than that of posterity, to be
made acquainted ; While it is yet possible for impartial censure,
and even for quick-sighted envy, to cross-examine the tale with-
out offence to the courtesies of humanity ; and while the eulogist,
detected in exaggeration or falsehood, must pay the full penalty of
his baseness in the contempt which brands the convicted ﬂatterer.
Publicly has Mr. Southey been reviled by men, who, as I would
fain hope for the honor of human nature, hurled ﬁre-brands against
a ﬁgure of their own imagination ; publicly have his talents been
depreciated, his principles denounced ; as publicly do I therefore,
who have known him intimately, deem it my duty to leave re-
corded, that it is Southey’s almost unexampled felicity, to possess
the best gifts of talent and genius free from all their characteristic
defects. To those who remember the state of our public schools
and universities some twenty years past, it will appearno ordi-
nary praise in any man to have passed from innocence into virtue,
not only free from all vicious habit, but unstained by one act of
intemperance, or the degradations akin to intemperance. That
scheme of head, heart, and habitual demeanor, which in his early
manhood. and ﬁrst controversial writings, Milton, claiming the
privilege of self-defence, asserts of himself, 'and challenges his
calumniators to disprove ;"‘ this will his school-mates, his fellow-

* [Ad me quad attinet, te tester, Deus, mantis z'ntima: cogz'tationumgue om-
nium indagator, me nullius 'rei (guanquam hoe apud me satpz'us et, guam
maximc potui, serio quesivi, et recessus vim omnes excussi,) nullius vel recens
vcl olim commissi milu'met conscium esse, cujus atrocitas hanc mihi pm caterz's
calamitatem creare, aut accersisse merito potuerit.—Def. Sec.

Tu senties eam esse m'tce mew co apud me conscientiam, et apud bonos ea:

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ' 189

' collegians, and his maturer friends, with a conﬁdence proportioned
to the intimacy of their Knowledge, bear witness to, as again rea-
1ized in W But still more striking to
thOSe, who by biography or by their own experience are familiar
with the general habits of genius, will appear the poet’s match-
less industry and perseverance in his pursuits; the worthiness
and dignity of those pursuits ; his generous submission to tasks of
transitory interest, or such as his genius alone could make other-
wise ; and that having thus more than satisﬁed the claims of af«
fection or prudence, he should yet have made for himself time
and power, to achieve more, and in more various departments,
than almost any other writer has done, though employed wholly
on subjects of his own choice and ambition. But as Southey pos-
sesses, and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is he master
even of his virtues. The regular and methodical tenor of his
daily labors, which would be deemed rare in the most mechanical
pursuits, and might be envied by the mere man of business,
loses all semblance of formality in the digniﬁed simplicity of his
manners, in the spring and healthful cheerfulness of his spirits.
Always en is friends ﬁnd him T . ur . No
less punctual in triﬂes, than steadfast 1n the performance of high-
est duties, he inﬂicts none of those Small pains and discomforts
which irregular men scatter about them, and which in the aggre-
gate so often become formidable obstacles both to happiness and
utility; while on the contrary he bestows all the pleasures, and
inspires all that ease of mind on those around him or connected
with him, which perfect consistency, and (if such a word might
be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small as in great con-
cerns, can not but inspire and bestow ; when this too is softened
without being weakened by kindness and gentleness. I know
few men who so well deserve the character which an ancient
attributes tMWWA—MW
as much as he seemed to act aright, not in obedience to any law
or outward motive, but by the necessity of a happy nature, whic‘I
could not act otherwise.* As son, brother, husband, father, mas.-
istz’matz’onem, eam case et preterim ﬁduciam et reliqure spem bonam, ut nihz'l
impedire me, and absterrere possit, quo minus ﬂagz'tz'a tua, si pergz's lacessere,
etiam liberius adhuc et diligentius persequar.—Def. cont. Alex. Morum.—Ed.]
* [ homo virtuti simillimus, at par omnia ingenio .Diis guam hominibm

propior, aui nunquam rectefecz'l. utfacere videretur, sed quia aliterfaccﬂ
non soterat.-—Vell. Patel-c. II. 35.-—-Ed.]

 

71'9'0 JBI'OGRA'PH‘IA LITERARIA.

iter, friend, he moves with ﬁrm, yet light steps, alike unostenta
‘tious, and alike exemplary. As a writer, he has uniformly made
his talents subservient to the best interests of humanity, of public
'virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been the cause of
'pure religion and of liberty, of national independence and of na-
tional illumination. When future critics shall weigh out his
guerdon of praise and censure, it will be Southey the poet only,
that will supply them with the scanty materials for the latter.
They will likewise not fall to record, that as no man was ever a
more constant friend, never had poet more friends and honorers
among the good of all parties; and that quacks in education,
‘quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism were his only ene-

\niesﬁ’t

* It is not easy to estimate the effects which the example of a young man
as highly distinguished for strict purity of disposition and conduct, as for
intellectual power and literary acquirements, may produce 011 those of the
same 1 0c with himself, especially 011 those of similar pursuits and congenial
minds. For many years, my opportunities of intercourse with Mr. Southey
have been rare, and at long intervals; but I dwell with unabated pleasure
on the strong and sudden, y ct I tr ust not ﬂeetinW

110' unde1we11t on my acquaintance with him at Oxfo1d, whithe1 I had
gone at the 00111111encenm1 Can1b1idge v acation on a visit to an old
scl1ool-fellow.* Not indeed on my moral or religious p1inciples, for they
had never been contaminated; but in awakening the sense of the duty and
dignity of making my actions accord with those principles, both in word
and deed. The irregularities only not universal among the young men of
my standing, which I always knew to be W10n0' I then learned to feel as
deg1ading; learned to know that an opposite 0conduct, which was at that
time conSIdu ed by us as the easy virtue of cold and selﬁsh p1 udenee might
originate in the noblest emotions, in views the most disinterested and imagi—
native. It is not, however, from grateful recollections only, that I have
been impelled thus to leave these my deliberate sentiments on record; but
in some sense as a debt of justice to the man. whose name has been so often
connected with mine fo1 evil to which he is a st1 antrei As a specimen 1
subjoin part of a note, f1 0111 The Beauties of the Anti jacobin. in which hav-
Hing previously infolmed the public that I had been dishonored at 0am-
b11d0‘e for p1 eaclnna Deism, at a time when, for my youthful a1 d01 in 'de-
=fence of Chlistianity, I was decried as a bigot'by the pi oselyte~ of French
phi- (01 to speak mo1e t1 ulv psi- ) -losophy, the write1 concludes with these
wo1ds “since this time he has left his native country, commenced citizen
of the wo1ld, left his p007 chzldrenfatherless and/12's wife destitute. Ex his

 

* [ Mr. Cole1idge fn st became acquainted with M1. Southey, then an un
der graduate at Baliol College, 1n June, 17 94 —.Ed.]

\- '

CHAPTER IV.

THE LYRICAL BALLADS WITH THE PREFACE—MR. WORDSWORTH’S
EARLIER POEMS—ON FANCY AND IMAGINATION—~THE INVESTIGA-
TION OF THE DISTINCTION IMPORTANT TO THE FINE ARTS.

I HAVE wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied
to myself readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted
me from the main road ; so I dare calculate on not a few, who
will warmly sympathize with them. At present it will be suf-
ﬁcient for my purpose, if I have proved, that Mr. Southey’s wri-

disce hisfriends, LAMB and SOUTHEY.”* With seve1 est t1 uth it may be as-
serted, that it would not be easy to select two men mor e exemplm y in their
domestic affections than those whose names were thus p1inted at full length
as in the same rank of morals with a denounced inﬁdel and fugitive, who
had left his children fatherless, and his wife destitute! Is it surprising, that
many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have
done adverse to a party, which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors
of such atrocious calumnies i Qualz's es, nescz'o; sed per guales agis, scio et
doleo.

 

* [Of this now harmless injustice Mr. 'l‘alfourd speaks as follows, in his
interesting sketch of the life, accompanying the delightful Letters of Charles
Lamb. “ It was surely rather too much, even for partisans, when denoun-
cing their political opponents,”—(in the poem'of the ‘New Morality’ pub
lished in the ‘Anti-Jacobin,’)—“ as men who ‘dirt on private worth and
virtue threw,’ thus to slander two young men of the most exemplary char~
acter—one of an almost puritanical exactness of demeanor and conduct—-
and the other persevering in a life of noble self-sacriﬁce, chequered only by
the frailties of a sweet nature, which endeared him even to those who were
not admitted to the intimacy necessary to appreciate the touching example
of his severer virtues.” Vol. i p. 120.

This passage I quote not, of course, for the sake of refuting The Anti-
Jacobin of 17 98, but for its warm testimony to the virtues of my father’s
friend, Mr. Lamb. Having quoted it, I can not but observe, as regards the
terms in which it speaks of Mr. Southey (my revered uncle), that his
purity,—a pureness of heart and spi1 it far beyond any that mere exacti-
tude of demeanor and conduct could evidence or express, ——was utterly un
mixed, as to me it seems, with puritanism, either in opinion or in‘ spi1it

192 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

tings no more than my own furnished the original occasion to
this ﬁction of a new school of poetry, and to the clamors against
its supposed founders and proselytes

As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads
were in themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two
volumes so entitledﬁ'F A careful and repeated examination of
these conﬁrms me in the belief, that the omission of less than a
hundred lines would have precluded nine tenths of the criticism
on this work. I hazard this declaration, however, on the sup-
position, that the reader has taken it up, as he. would any other
collection of poems purporting to derive their subjects or inter-
ests from the incidents of domestic or ordinary life, intermingled
with higher strains of meditation which the poet utters in his
own person and character; with the proviso, that these poems
were perused without knowledge of, or referenceto, the author’s
peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his attention
previously directed to those peculiarities. In that case, as actu-
ally happened with Mr. Southey’s earlier works, the lines and
passages which might have offended the general taste, would
have been considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to in-
attention, not to perversity of judgment. The men of business
who had passed their lives chieﬂy in cities, and who might there-
fore be expected to derive the highest pleasure from acute no-
tices of men and manners conveyed in easy, yet correct and pointed
language ; and all those who, reading but little poetry, are most
stimulated with that species of it, which seems most distant from
prose, would probably have passed by the volumes altogether.

9* [See ante, note, p. 144.——Ed.]

 

May we not say that the deepest and most pervading purity is preclusive
of puritanism .3 On this point he might be favorably contrasted with Cow-
per, as well as honorably compared to him in moral strictness, and perhaps
raised above him on the score of that deeper purity which is a nature
rather than a principle.

Of Mr. Lamb’s character in this respect Mr. Coleridge gave a brief de-
scription which has been preserved in the specimens of his Table Talk. It
was of Charles Lamb that he said, “ Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle
creature’s mind, which looked upon the degraded men and things around
him like moonshine on a dunghill, which shines and takes no pollution. All
things are shadows to him, except those which move his affections.”

Some further account of Mr. Lamb will be found in the biographical sup
plement at the end of the volume—S. C. i

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 193

Others more. catholic .in their taste, and yet habituated to be
_ most pleased when most excited, would have contented them-
selves with deciding, that the author had been successful in pro-
portion to the elevation of his style and subject. Not a few,
perhaps, might, by their admiration of the Lines written near
Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Wye, those Left upon a Yew
Tree Seat, The Old Cumberland Beggar, and Ruth, have been
gradually led to peruse with kindred feeling The Brothers, the
Hart-leap Well, and whatever other poems in that collection may
be described as-holding a middle place between those written in
the highest and those in the humblest style ; as for instance be-
tween the Tintern Abbey, and The Thorn, or Simon Lee.*
Should their taste submit to no further change, and still remain
unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them,
that are, more or less, scattered through the class last mentioned;
yet even from the small number of the latter, they would have
deemed them but an inconsiderable subtraction from the merit
of the whole work ; or, whatis sometimes not unpleasing in the
publication of a new writer, as .serving to ascertain the natural
tendency, and consequently the proper direction of the author’s
genius.

In the critical remarks, therefore, preﬁxed and annexed to the ‘-
Lvrical BalladsjL I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin
of the unexampled opposition which Mr. VVordsworth’s writings
have been since doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in
the poems themselves were dwelt on and cited to justify the re-
jection of the theory. What in and for themselves would have
been either forgotten or forgiven as imperfections, or at least
comparative failures, provoked direct hostility when announced as
intentional, as the result of choice after full deliberation. Thus
the poems, admitted by all as excellent, joined with those which
had pleased the far greater number, though they formed two
thirds of the whole work, instead of being deemed (as in all right
they should have been, even if we take for granted that the
reader judged aright) an atonement for the few exceptions, gave
Wind and fuel to the animosity against both the poems and the

* [The poems here mentioned are now found in the collected edition of
Mr Wordsworth’s Works as follows: II. p. 161. V. p. 7—p. 282. II. p.
106. I. p. 109. II. p. 141—p. 124. V. p. 17.—Ed.] '

f [This Preface, published in 1800, is now printed II.‘ p. 303.—Ed.]

VOL . III

194 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

poet. In all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which prediSv
poses the mind to anger. Not able to deny that the author pos-
sessed both genius and a powerful intellect, they felt very positive,
t—but yet were not quite certain that he might not be in the
éright, and they themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of
mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of
it, and by wondering at the perverscness of the man, who had
written a long and argumentative essay to persuade them, that

Fair is foul, and foul is fair;

m other words, that they had been all their lives admiring Without
judgment, and were now about to censure Without reasonﬁ“

9* In opinions of long continuance, and in which we have never before
been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced of an error, is
almost like being convinced of a fault. There is a state of mind, which is
the direct antithesis of that, which takes place when we make a bull. The
hull mainly consists in the bringing together two incompatible thoughts,
with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connection. The psycho-
logical condition, or that which constitutes the possibility, of this state,
being such disproportionate vividness of two distant thoughts, as ex-
tinguishes or obscures the consciousness of the intermediate images or con-
eeptions, or wholly abstracts the attention from them. Thus in the well-
known bull, “ I was a ﬁne child, but they changed me ;” the ﬁrst conception
expressed in the word “ I,” is that of personal identity—Ego contemplans:
the second expressed in the word “me,” is the visual image or object by
which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its per-
sonal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have
existed—Ego contemplatus. N ow the change of one visual image for
another involves in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd only by its im
mediate juxtaposition with the ﬁrst thought, which is rendered possible by
the whole attention being successively absorbed in each singly, so as not to
notice the interjaccnt notion, changed, which by its incongruity with the
ﬁrst thought, I, constitutes the bull. Add only, that this process is facili-
tated by the circumstance of the words I, and me, being sometimes equiva-
lent, aud sometimes having a distinct meaning; sometimes, namely, signi-
fying the act of self-consciousness, sometimes the external image in and by
which the mind represents that act to itself, the result and symbol of its
individuality. Now suppose the direct contrary state, and you will have a
distinct sense of the connection between two conceptions, without that sen-
sation of such connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels as if
he were standing on his head, though he can not but see that he is truly
standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a
tendency to associate itself with him who occasions it; even as persons.
who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are known to
feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician.

BIGGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 195

That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced
to believe from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own
knowledge, that the same eneral censure has been grounded by
almost every differenmpoem. Among
those, whose candor and judgment I estimate highly, I distinctly
remember six who expressed their objections to the Lyrical Bal-
.ads almost in the same words, and altogether to the same pure
port, at the same time admitting, that several of the poems had
given them great pleasure; and, strange as it might seem, the
composition which one cited as execrable, another quoted as his
favorite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind, that could
the same experiment have been tried with these volumes, as was
made in the well-known story of the picture, the result would
have been the same : the parts which had been covered by black
spots on the one day, would be found equally albo lapide notata
on the succeeding.

However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to ﬁx
the attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much
aversion, as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole
work, instead of passing them over in silence, as so much blank
paper, or leaves of a bookseller’s catalogue ; especially, as no one
pretended in them any immW
and the poems, therefore, at the worst, could only be regarded as
so many light or inferior coins in a rouleau of gold, not as so much
alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend whose talents I hold in
the highest respect, but whose judgment and strdng sound sense
I have had almost continued occasion to revere, making the usual
complaints to me concerning both the style and subjects of Mr
Wordsworth’s minor poems; I admitted that there were some
few of the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself ﬁnd a
sufﬁcient cause for their having been recorded in metre. I men-
tioned Alice Fell* as an instance; “Nay,” replied my friend
with more than usual quickness of manner, “I can not agree
with you there l—that, I own, does seem to me a remarkably
pleasing poem.” In the Lyrical Ballads (for my experience does
not enable me to extend the remark equally unqualiﬁed to the
two subsequent volumes), I have heard at different times, and
from different individuals, every single poem extolled and repro-
bated, with the exception of those of lofticr kind, which, as was

9* [ Poet. Works, P. 13.—-—Ed.l

196 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

before observed, seem to have won universal praise. This fact
of itself would have made me difﬁdent in my censures, had not a
still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of the
heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of
the faults stated as justifying it. The seductive faults, the dulcia
vitia, of Cowley, Marini,* or Darwin might reasonably be thought
capable of corrupting the public judgment for half a century, and
require a twenty years’ war, campaign after campaign, in order
to dethrone the usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste. But
that a downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity,
prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases,
and a preference of mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations
and characters, should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a
company of almost religious admirers, and this too among young
men of ardent minds, liberal education, and not

with academic laurels unbestowed '

 

and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is char
acterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have
well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt
of review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph ;—this is
indeed matter of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest
should still continue as1L undecided as that between Bacchus and

* [John Baptist Marini or Marino, a celebrated poet, known by the name
’of 11 Cavalier Marino, was born at Naples, Oct. 18, 1569, died in the same
city, March 21, 1625. He wrote a poem called Adonice, which was dedi-
cated to Louis XIII. and ﬁrst published at Paris in folio, 1651. He left
many other poems, among them, La. Strange de gl’Innocenti, Ven. 1633, 4to.
and La Lira, Rime Amorose, JIIaritime, Boscherecce, dze. 16to. Ven. 1629.—
S. C.

1' iVithout however the apprehensions attributed to the Pagan reformer
of the poetic republic. If we may judge from the preface to the recent col-
lection of his poems, Mr. W. would have answered with Xantbias—

0'1) (5’ élc Edetaag‘ ‘rc‘w wéoov T01) Ion/mirror),
Kai ng‘ (ZTrELng‘; SAN. é Iud AZ, 86’ égbpévrwa.‘

 

1 Rante, 492-3.

[“And if, bearing in mind the many Poets distinguished by this prime
quality, whose names I omit to mention; yet justiﬁed by recollection of the
msults which the ignorant, the incapable, and the presumptuous, have heaped
upon these and my other writings, I may be permitted to anticipate the
judgment of posterity upon myself,.I shall declare (censurable, I grant. 1f

BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARIA. 197

the frogs in Aristophanes; when the former descended to the'
realms of the departed to bring back the spirit of old and genu-
me poesy ;—-
X. Bpexexslcsf, Kodf, Icodé’.
A. (211’ écfélowﬂ’ u’v'ra”) K065.
gas-v yap é’g’ (21W, 7? Kodé.
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3363 ‘uév fuel; 02) miv‘rwg.
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oz’jdévrore. nexpdéoluat yelp,

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£09 (iv 13va é‘rrucpa‘rviow 7'05 [(065 I
X. ,BpexeKEIcE‘E, KO‘AE, KOA’EI !*

During the last year of my residence at Cambrdge, 1794, I

And here let me hint to the authors of the numerous parodies, and pre-
tended imitations of Mr. Wordsworth’s style, that at once to conceal and
convey wit and wisdom in the semblance of folly and dulness, as is done in
the Clowns and Fools, nay even in the Dogberry, of our Shakspeare, is
doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events of satiric talent; but that the
attempt to ridicule a silly and childish poem, by writing another still sillier
and still more childish, can only prove (if it prove any thing at all) that the
parodist is a still greater blockhead than the original writer, and, what is
far worse, a malignant coxcomb to boot. The talent for mimicry seems
strongest where the human race are most degraded. The poor, naked half-
human savages of New Holland were found excellent mimics: and, in civil-
ized society, minds of the very lowest stamp alone satirize by copying. At
least the difference which must blend with and balance the likeness, in order
to constitute a just imitation, existing here merely in caricature, detracts
from the libeller’s heart, without adding an iota to the credit of his under-
standing.
9* [180mm, 225-7, 257—66.——Ed.]

the notoriety of the fact above stated does not justify me) that I have given
in these unfavorable times, evidence of exertions of this faculty upon its
worthiest objects, the external universe, the moral and religious sentiments
of Man, his natural affections, and his acquired passions; which have the
same ennobling tendency as the productions of men, in this kind, worthy to
be holden in undying remembrance.”—Pneface to Wordsworth’s Poems.

1815.—Ed.]

..
‘ ‘ .,
”5;":
, .

198 BIOGRAﬁIIA LITERARIA.

became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth’s ﬁrst publication, en-
titled Descriptive Sketches ;*and seldom, if ever, was the emer~
gencc of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more
evidently announced. In the form, style, and manner of the
whole poem, and in the structure of the particular lines and peri-
ods, there is a harshness and acerbity connected and combined
with words and images all a-glow, which might recall those pro-
ducts of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of
a hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit is
elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong, but
at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength;
While the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in con-
junction with the difficulties of the style, demands always a
greater closeness of attention, than poetry—at all events, than
descriptive poetry—has a right to claim. It not seldom there- .
fore justiﬁed the complaint of obscurity. In the following ex-
tract I have sometimes fancied, that I saw an emblem of the
poem itself, and of the author’s genius as it was then displayed.—

’Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,

All day the ﬂoods a deepening murmur pour;

The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight:

Dark is the region as with coming night;

Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering lightl

Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,

Glances the ﬁre—clad eagle’s wheeling form; _

Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine

The wood—crowned cliffs that o’er the lake recline;

Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,

At once to pillars turned that ﬂame with gold;

Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun

The west, that burns like one dilated sun,

\Vhere in a mighty crucible expire

The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of ﬁre.”
' The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, under-
goes as many changes as its Greek namesake, the butterﬂyT

’* [Published in 1793.——Ed.] .
f The Butterﬂy the ancient Greeians made
The soul’s fair emblem, and its only name-—
But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
Of mortal life ! For in this earthly frame
Ours is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame,
Manifold motions making little speed.
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.

av

BIOGRAPHIA LI'TERARIA. 199

And it is remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itsell
from the faults and errors of its earliest products ; faults which.
in its earliest compositions, are the more obtrusive and conﬂuent
because as heterogeneous elements, which had only a temporary
use, they constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are
carried off. Or we may compare them to some diseases, which
must work on the humors, and be thrown out on the surface, in
order to secure the patient from their future recurrence. I was
in my twenty-fourth year, when I had the happiness of knowing
Mr. Wordsworth personally, and while memory lasts, I shall
hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, by his reci-
tation of a manuscript poem, which still remains unpublished,
but of which the stanza and tone of style were the same as those
of The Female Vagrant, as originally printed in the first volume
of the Lyrical Ballads.* There was here no mark of strained!
thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery,; '3
and, as the poet hath himself well described in his Lines on re-{
visiting the Wye, manly reﬂection and human associations hadl
given both variety, and an additional interest to natural objects
which, in the passion and appetite of the ﬁrst love, they hadg
seemed to him neither to need nor pe1mit.1‘ The occasional ob

9“ [The poem to which reference is here made was intituled “ A11 Adven-
ture on Salisbury Plain.” Mr. Wordsworth afterwards broke it up, and
" The Female Vagrant” is composed out of it.——Ed ]

[For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I can not paint
What then I was. The sounding cata1 act
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colo1s and thei1 forms, we1e then to me
An appetite, a feeling, and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour

200 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

scurities, which had risen from an imperfect control over the re
sources of his native language, had almost wholly disappeared,
together with that worse defect of arbitrary and illogical phrases,
at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so distinguished a
place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will, more or less,
alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the attention
has been speciﬁcally directed to their worthlessness and incon
gruity.* I did not perceive any thing particular in the mere

Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
.Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

\Vhose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. II. pp. 164—5.—Ed j

9* Mr. Wordsworth, even in his two earliest poems, The Evening \Valk
and the Descriptive Sketches, is more free from this latter defect than most
of the young poets his contemporaries. It may, however, be exempliﬁed,
together with the harsh and obscure construction, in which he more often
offended, in the following lines :—

“’Mid stormy vapors ever driving by,
\Vhere ospreys. cormorants, and herons cry;
Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer,
Denied the bread of life the foodful ear,
Dwindles the pear on autumn’s latest spray,
And apple sickens pale in summer’s ray;
.Ev’n here content has ﬁxed her smiling reign
lVith independence, child of high disdain.”

I hope, I need not say, that I have quoted these lines for no other purpose
than to make my meaning fully understood. It is to be regretted that Mr
Wordsworth has not republished these two poems entire.1

 

1 [The pass (re stands thus in the last and corrected edition :—

Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry,
’Mid stormy vapors ever driving by.

Or hovering over wastes too bleak to rear
That common growth of earth the foodful ear;

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 201

8 *le of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed
such difference as was not separable from the thought and man-
ner; and the Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, re-
calls to the reader’s mind Spenser’s own style, would doubtless
have authorized, in my'then opinion, a more frequent descent to
the phrases of ordinary life, than could without an ill effect have
been hazarded in the heroic couplet. It was not, however, the
freedom from false taste, whether as to common defects, or to
those more properly his own, which made so unusual an impres-
sion on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judg-
ment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought;
the ﬁne balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative fac-
ulty in modifying, the objects observed ; and above all the origi-
nal gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the
lepth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and
situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedim-
med all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew-drops.
This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth’s writings i'
more or less predominant, and which constitutes the character 0
his mind, I no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeater
meditations led me ﬁrst to suspect—(and a more intimate anal
ysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, function:
and effects matured my conjecture into full conviction)—-tha1
Fame and Ima inat' were two distinct and widely differen'
faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, eithex
two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and.
higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I own, easy
to conceive a more opposite translation of the Greek qmvwou'a
than the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all so-
cieties there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, un-
conscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize”?

9* This is effected either by giving to the one word a general, and to the
other an exclusive use: as “ to put on the back” and “to indorse ;” or by an
actual distinction of meanings, as “ naturalist,” and “physician ;” or by dif-
ference of relation, as “ I” and“ Me” (each of which the rustics of our differ

ent provinces still use in all the cases singular of the ﬁrst personal pro-

—-—

 

Where the green apple shrivels on the spray,

And pines the unripened pear in summer’s kindliest ray;

Even here Content has ﬁxed her smiling reign

With Independence, child of high Disdain. , I. p. 80.—Ed.]

202 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

those words originally of the same meaning, which the conﬂux
of dialects supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as the
Greek and German : and which the same cause, joined with ac-
cidents of translation from original works of different countries,
occasion in mixed languages like our own. The ﬁrst and most
important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly
distinct are confused under one and the same word, and—this
done—to appropriate that word exclusively to the one meaning,
and the synonyme, should there be one, to the other. But if—
(as will he often the case in the arts and sciences)——no synonyme
exists, we must either invent or borrow a word. In the present
instance the appropriation has already begun, and been legiti-
mated in the derivative adjective : Milton had a highly imagi-
native, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should suc-
ceed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties gen-
erally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined.
To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should
conﬁne the term ‘ imagination ;’ while the other would be con
tra-distinguished as ‘fancy.’ N ow were it once fully ascer
tained, that this division is no less grounded in nature than that
of delirium from 77mm'a,* or Otway’s

noun). Even the mere difference, or corruption, in the pronunciation of
the same word, if it have become general, will produce a new word with a
distinct signiﬁcation: thus “ property” and “ propriety ;” the latter of
which, even to the time of Charles II. was the written word for all the
senses of both. There is a sort of minim immortal among the animalcula
mfusoria, which has not naturally either birth, or death. absolute begin-
ning, or absolute end: for at a certain period a small point appears on its
back, which deepens and lengthens till the creature divides into two, and
the same process recommences in each of the halves now become integral.
This may be a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad emblem of the forma-
tion of words, and may facilitate the conception, how immense a nomencla-
ture may be organized from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a so-
cial state. For each new application, or excitement of the same sound, will
call forth a different sensation, which can not but affect the pronunciation.
The after recollection of the sound, without the same vivid sensation, will
modify it still further; till at length all trace of the original likeness is
Worn away.

9* [“ You may conceive the difference in kind between the Fancy and the
Imagination in this way ;—-that, if the check of the senses and the reason
were withdrawn, the ﬁrst would become delirium and the last mania. The
{fancy brings together images which have no connection natural or moral:

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 208

Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,*
from Shakspeare’s

What ! have his daughters brought him to this pass 3+

or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements ; the theory of
the ﬁne arts, and of poetry in particular, could not but derive
some additional and important light. It would in its immediate
eﬁects furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic; and
ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth soon
changes by domestication into power ; and from directing in the
discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes 'inﬂuencive
in the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to
imitate without loss of originality.

 

but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coinc1-
dence; as in the well-known passage in Hudibras ;—

The Sun had long since in the lap
Of Thetis taken out his nap,

And like a lobster boil’d, the mom
From black to red began to turn.

The Imagination modiﬁes images, and gives unity to variety: it sees all
things in- one, 7'1 p621 nell’ uno. There is the epic imagination, the perfection
of which is in Milton; and the dramatic, of which Shakspearé‘is the abso-
lute master. The ﬁrst gives unity by throwing back into the distance, as
after the magniﬁcent approach of the Messiah to battle, the poet, by one
touch from himself,

 

Far off their coming shone

makes the whole one image. And so at the conclusion of the description
of the entranced Angels, in which every sort of image from all the regions
of earth and air is introduced to diversify and illustrate, the reader is
brought back to the simple image by—

He called so loud, that all the hollow deep
Of Hell resounded.

The dramatic imagination does not throw back but b1 incrs close; it
stamps all nature with one, and that its own, meaning, as in Lear though
out.” Table Talk, VI. p. 517.

There 18 more of imagination in it—that power which d1 aws all things to
one, —which makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attri-
butes, subjects and theirb accessories, take one color and serve to one effect 1
Lamb’s Essay on the Genius of Hogarth. Prose Works, i. pp. 189.—Ed.]

[See also Mr. Wordsworth’s Preface, pp 29—30.—S. 0.]

* [Venice Preserved. Act v.——Ed.]

f [Lear. Act iii. sc. 4.—1.—Ed.]

p

204 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

l” It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology
lhave long been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and
~t6 be vain of it, are so commonly found together, that they pass
almost for the same. I trust, therefore, that there will be more
good-humor than contempt, in the Smile with which the reader
chastises my self-complacency, if I confess myself uncertain,
whether the satisfaction from the perception of a truth new to
myself may not have been rendered more poignant by the conceit,
that it would be equally so to the public. There was a time,
certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself, in the be-
lief that I had been the ﬁrst of my countrymen, who had pointed
out the diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable,
and analyzed the faculties to which they should be appropriated.
Mr. W. Taylor’s recent volume of synonymes”? I have not yet
seen ,1” but his specification of the terms in question has been

*6 [“ British Synonymes discriminated, by \V. Taylor.”—Ed.]

f I ought to have added, with the exception of a single sheet which I ac~
cidentally met with at the printer’s. Even from this scanty specimen, I
found it impossible to doubt the talent, or not to admire the ingenuity, of
the author. That his distinctions were for the greater part unsatisfactory
to my mind, proves nothing against their accuracy ; but it may possibly be
serviceable to him, in case of a second edition, if I take this opportunity of
suggesting the query ; whether he may not have been occasionally misled,
by having assumed, as to me he appears to have done, the non-existence of ‘
any absolute synonymes in our language? N ow I can not but think, that
there are many which remain for our posterity to distinguish and appro-
priate, and which I regard as so much reversionary wealth in our mother
tongue. When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more
words—{and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progres-
sive and of course imperfect)—erroneous consequences will be drawn, and
what is true in one sense of the word will be afﬁrmed as true in toto. Men
of research, startled by the consequences, seek in the things themselves—
(whether in or out of the mind)—for a knowledge of the fact, and having
discovered the difference, remove the equivocation either by the substitu-
tion of a new word, or by the appropriation of one of the two or more
words, which had before been used promiscuously. \Vhen this distinction
has been so naturalized and of such general currency that the language does
as it were think for us—(like the sliding rule which‘ is the mechanic’s safe
substitute for arithmetical knowledge)—we then say, that it is evident to
common sense. Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages. What
was born and christened in the Schools passes by degrees into the world at
large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table. At least
I can discover no other meaning of the term, common sense, if it is to con-
vey any speciﬁc difference from sense and judgment in genere, and where it

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 205

clearly shown to be both insufﬁcient and erroneous by Mr. Words-
worth in the Preface added to the late collection of his Poems.
The explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given, will
be found to differ from mine, chieﬂy, perhaps, as our objects are
different. It couldjscarcely indeed happen otherwise, from the

is not used scholastically for the universal reason. Thus in the reign of
Charles II. the philosophic world was called to arms by the moral sophisms
of Hobbes, and the ablest writers exerted themselves in the detection of an
error, which a school-boy would now be able to confute by the mere recol-
lection, that compulsion and obligation conveyed two ideas perfectly dis-
parate, and that what appertained to the one, had been falsely transferred
to the other by a mere confusion of termsﬁ‘e

 

9“ [See Hobbes’s Treatise on Liberty and Necessity. (Eng. Works. IV.
Sir W. Molesworth’s edit.) The term obligation is not used by Hobbes.
His position is that some actions are not compelled, but that all are ne-
cessitated. (pp. 261—2.) “Natural efﬁcacy of objects,” he says, “ does de-
termine voluntary agents, and necessitates the Will and consequently the
Action; but for moral efﬁcacy, I understand not what he means. (p. 247.)
—“ When ﬁrst a man hath an appetite or will to something, to which im-
mediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his will is not
the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing. So that whereas
it is out of controversy that of voluntary actions the will is the necessary
cause, and by this which is said, the will is also caused by other things
whereof it disposeth not, it followeth that voluntary actions have all of
them necessary causes, and therefore are necessitated.” (p. 274.)

A voluntary action, therefore, with Hobbes, is an action necessarily con-
sequent on or identical with, the last opinion, judgment, or dictate of the
understanding,—which last opinion, judgment, or dictate of the understand
ing is necessarily determined by the presentation of certain “ external ob—
jects to a man of such or such a temperature.” (p. 267.) Of course Obli-
gation, or a law of Duty grounded on conviction of a universal Right and
Wrong, True and False, has no place in Hobbcs’s system; nor can that sys~
tem be consistently defended against the charge that it destroys the very
foundations of all morality properly understood. It is true that Hobbes
himself in this Treatise denies the imputed consequence; but his reasoning
in this respect is so weak—depending upon a covert use of the terms “will”
and “willingly” in a sense inconsistent with that necessarily attached to
them in the previous positions, —that it can not but be suspected that

Hobbes himself feltth e legitimacy of the charge that uponw his sp1 inciple s

W any shape but that of positive Law, was an empt 1 name:
racti ‘

cally, what other conclus1on can 5
'I'li1 ls 1ea 1se 1s 0 e east agreeable of all Hobbes’s Woiks. It

contains in all its naked tei rors that frightful dogma, which, strange to say,
has with scarcely any modiﬁcationbut in form been reproduced and advo-
cated with zealous reiteration in the sermons and other writings of those

:\

206 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

advantage I have enjoyed of frequent conversation with him or
a subject to which a poem of his own first directed my attention,
and my conclusions concerning which he had made more lucid to
myself by many happy instances drawn from the operation of
natural objects on the mind. But it wasglﬁr. VVordsworth’s pur.
pose to consider the inﬂuences of fancy and imagination as the};w
are manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude
tm while it is myanestigate the
seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree.
My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with
their poetic fruitage. Iwish to add the trunk, and even the
roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible
to the naked eye of our common consciousness.

Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged
to draw more largely on the reader’s attention, than so imme-
thodical a miscellany as this can authorize ; when in such a work
(the Ecclesiastical Policy) of such a mind as Hooker’s, the judi-
cious author, though no less admirable for the perspicuity than
for the port and dignity of his language,—and though he wrote
for men of learning in a learned age,—saw nevertheless occasion
to anticipate and guard against “complaints of obscurity,” as
often as he was to trace his subject “to the highest well-spring
and fountain.” Which (continues he), “because men are not ac-
customed to, the pains we take are more needful a great deal,
than acceptable ; and the matters we handle, seem by reason of
newness (till the mind grow better acquainted with them) dark
and intricate.”* I would gladly therefore spare both myself and
others this labor, if I knew how without it to present an intelli-
gible statement of my poetic creed,—not as my opinions, which
weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established premises

popular divines who have so largely inﬂuenced the public mind for the last
seven or eight years. “ I say," says'Hobbes, “ that the power of God alone,
without other helps, is sufﬁcient justiﬁcation of any action he doth.” (p.
249.) “ Power irresistible justiﬁes all actions, really and properly, in
whomsoever it be foun( .”—“This I kn0W;—G0d can not sin, because his
doing a thing makes it just, and consequently no sin—and therefore it is
blasphemy to say, God can sin: but to say God can so order the world, as a
sin may be necessarily caused thereby in a man, I do not see how it is any
dishonor to Him.” (pp. 250—1.) If this is true, God—the Good—differs
from Moloeh in nothing but powers—Ed]
* [B. i. eh. i. s. ‘2.——Ed.] 5’

BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. 207

conveyed in such a form as is calculated either to effect a funda-
mental conviction or to receive a fundamental confutation. If I
may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker, “They unto“?
whom we shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, be-
cause it is in their own hands to spare that labor, which they are
not'willing to endure.” Those at least, let me be permitted to i
add, who have taken so much pains to render me ridiculous for
a perversion of taste, and have supported the charge by attribu-
tilrgmstrange notions to me on no other authority than their own
conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as to me not to refuse
their attention to my own statement of the theory which Ido
acknowledge ; or shrink from the trouble of examining the ground
on which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in itsvjustiﬁ-
cation.

 

CHAPTER V.

ON THE LAW OF ASSOCIATION—ITS HISTORY TRACED FROM
ARISTOTLE TO HARTLEY.

THERE have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as
by an instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and
who devote their attempts to its solution. The ﬁrst step was to
construct a table of distinctions, which they seem to have formed
on the principle of the absence or presence of the Will. Our
various sensations, perceptions, and movements, were classed as
active or passive, or as media, partaking of both. A still ﬁner
distinction was soon established between the voluntary and the
spontaneous. In our perception we seem to ourselves merely
passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reﬂecting the
landscape, or as a blank canvas on which some unknown hand
paints it. For it is worthy of notice, that the latter, or the sys-
tem of Idealism, may be traced to sources equally remote with
the former, or Materialism ; and Berkeley can boast an ancestry

‘

 

is [13. i. eh. i. s. 2.—Ed.]

208 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

at least as venerable as Gassendi’f or Hobbesﬂr These conjec-
tures, however, concerning the mole in which our perceptions
originated, could not alter the natural difference of Things and
Thoughts. In the former, the cause appeared wholly external,
while in the latter, sometimes our will interfered as the produ-
cing or determining cause, and sometimes our nature seemed to
act by a mechanism of its own, without any conscious eﬂbrt of
the will, or even against it. Our inward experiences were thus
arranged in three separate classes, the passive sense, or what the
School-men call the merely receptive quality of the mind; the
voluntary ; and the spontaneous, which holds the middle place
between both. But it is not in human nature to meditate on any
mode of action, without inquiring after the law that governs it;
and in the explanation of the spontaneous movements of our be-
ing, the metaphysician took the lead of the anatomist and natu-
ral philosopher. In Egypt, Palestine, Greece,__;1.1;iclelLab the
analysis of the mind had reached its noon and manhood, while
experimental research was still in its dawn and infancy. For
many, very many centuries, it has been difﬁcult to advance a
new truth, or even a new error, in the philosophy of the intellect
or morals. With regard, however, to the laws that direct the
spontaneous movements of thought and the principle of their in-
tellectual mechanism there exists, it has been asserted, an impor-
tant exception most honorable to the modems, and in the merit
of which our own country claims the largest share. Sir James

* [Pierre Gassendi, a philosopher whose aim it was to revive, reform,
and improve the system of Epicurus, and who wrote against Des Cartes,
was born in 1592, at Chantersier in Provence, and died at Paris in 1656.—
b. 0.]

Jr [Thomas Hobbes was born at Malmesbury, in 1588, died 1679, aged
ninety-one. His works, which are philosophical and political, moral and
mathematical, and translations, are now ﬁrst collected and edited by Sir
\Vm. Molesworth—the Latin works in ﬁve vols. 8v0.; 0f the English, nine
vols. 8vo., have appeared. Cousin observes that the speculative philosophy
of Hobbes, who was a materialist in doctrine, has not attracted as much
attention as the practical. His style is very excellent, condensed, yet with
all the ease and freedom of diffuse writing. It is sharp and sparkling as a
diamond. Sir James Mackintosh praises it highly in his well-known Dis
sertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy. He says of it: “Short,
clear, precise, pithy, his language never has more than one meaning, which
never requires a second thought to ﬁnd.” See his whole character of it at
p. 40 ——S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 209'

Mackintosh—(who, amid the variety of his talents and attain-
ments, 1s not of less repute for the depth and accuracy ofhis
philosophical inquiries than for the eloquence with which he is
said to render their most difﬁcult results perspicuous, and the
driest attractive)—atﬁrmed in the Lectures delivered by him in
the Lincoln’s Inn Hall, that the law of association as established
in the contemporaneity of the original impressions, tamer—the
basis of all true psychology ; and that any ontological or meta-
physical science, not contained in such (that is,‘ an empirical)
psychology, was but a web of abstractions and generalizations.
Of this proliﬁc truth, of this great fundamental law, he declared
Hobbes to have been the original discoverer, while its full appli-
cation to the whole intellectual system we owed to Hartley ; who
stood in the same relation to Hobbes as Newton to Kepler ; the
law of association being that to the mind which gravitation is to
matter.

Of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the com-
parative merits of the ancient metaphysicians, including their
commentators, the School-men, and of the modern British and
French philosophers from [Hobbes to Hume, Hartley, and Con-

dillac, this is not the place to speak. So wide indeed is the.“
WJames Mackintosh’s_philosophical creed and F

ine. that so ' ' from being abTe to join hands, we could scarce y
make our voices intelligible to each other : and to bridge it over
would require more time, skill, and power than I believe myself
to possess. But the latter clause involves for the greater part a
mere question of fact and history, and the accuracy of the state-
ment is to be tried by documents rather than reasoning.

First then, I deny Hobbes’s claim in toto; for he had been
anticipated by Des Cartes, whose work De Methodo, preceded
Hobbes’s De Natm'a flumana, by more than a year.* But

 

 

“‘ [Hobbes’s Treatise, “Human Nature,” written by him in English, was
published in 1650, although his dedication of it to the Earl of Newcastle is
dated in 1640. Des Cartes (born at La Haye, in Touraine, in 1596) died in
Sweden, to which country he had been called by Queen Christina, in 1650.
His treatise, De .Metlcodo, was originally written in French, and published
in 1637 ; the Latin version, revised and augmented by Des Cartes himself,
appeared in 1644. But neither the one nor the other contains any thing
upon the subject mentioned in the text. The incident, to which Mr. Cole-
ridge afterwards refers, as told in the De rlfetlwdo, is to be found in the
Principz'a Philosophiaz, Part iv. 8. 196. This latter work was published

210 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

what is of much more importance, Hobbes builds nothing on the
principle which he had announced. He does not even announce
it, as differing in any respect from the general laws of material
motion and impact : nor was it, indeed, possible for him so to do,
compatibly with his system, which was exclusively material and
mechanical. liar otherwise is it with Des Cartes; greatly as he
too in his after-writings (and still more egregiously his followers
De la Forge, and others) obscured the truth by their attempts to
explain it on the theory of nervous ﬂuids, and material configura-

in 1644. But neither in the Principia, is the law of the contemporaneity
of impressions stated. In another and posthumous work, however, Tracta-
tus de Homine, Part v. s. '7 3, Des Cartes certainly does, in a short inciden-
tal paragraph, mention the fact and the ground of it :—

Quinetiam notandmn est, quod si tantum aliqua (jusmodi foramina reclu-
derentur, at A. et 13., hoe unum in causa esse posset, ut etiam alia. pitta C. et
D. eodem tempore recludantur ; prrecipue si swpius omnia simul 'reclusa
fuissent, nee solita sint una sine aliis seorsum aperiri. Quod ostendit, guo
pacto recordatio rei unius excitari possit per recordationem alterius, qua ali-
quando ima cum ea memorize impressa fuit. Ut si videam duos oculos cum
naso, continua frontem, et 03, omnesgue alias faciei partes imaginor, qnia
assuetus non sum. unas sine aliis videre. Et cum video ignem, recordor
colorem ejus, quem viso igne percepi aliquando.

That Hobbes was not the discoverer or ﬁrst propounder of this law of
association is, indeed, clear enough; but it does not appear that he was in-
debted to Des Cartes for his knowledge of it ; and it must be admitted that
he states the rule with distinctness.

“ The cause of the coherence or consequence of one conception to another,
is their ﬁrst coherence or consequence at that time when they are produced
by sense.” H. N. c. iv. 2. See also Leviathan, Pt. i. 6. iii.

Neither is it, perhaps, quite correct to say that Hobbes builds nothing on
this law. He at least clearly saw its connection with speech.

“ It is the nature almost of every corporal thing, being often moved in
one and the same manner, to receive continually a greater and greater easi-
ness and aptitude to the same motion, insomuch as in time the same be-
,cometh so habitual, that to beget it there needs no more than to begin it.

e passions of man, as they are the beginning of voluntary motions, so are
ﬁli‘ey the beginning of speech, which is the motion of the tongue. And men
desiring to show others the knowledge, opinions, conceptions, and passions,
'which are in themselves, and to that end having invented language, have by
that means transferred all that discursion of their mind mentioned in the
former chapter, by the motion of their tongues, into discourse of words:
and ratio now is but oratio, for the most part, wherein custom hath so
great a p3wer, that the mind suggesteth only the ﬁrst word; the rest
follow habitually, and are not followed by the mind,” &c. H. N. c. v. 14.
—Ed.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 21]

tionsﬁ“r But, in his interesting work, De Methada, Des Cartes
relates the circumstance which ﬁrst led him to meditate on this
subject, and which since then has been often noticed and em-
ployed as an instance and illustration of the law. A child who
with its eyes bandaged had last several of his ﬁngers by am puta-
tion, continued to complain for many days successively of pains,
now in this joint and now in that, of the very ﬁngers which had
been cut ofﬁ’r Des Cartes was led by this incident to reﬂect on
the uncertainty with which we attribute any particular place to
any inward pain or uneasiness, and proceeded after long considera-
tion to establish it as a general law ; that contemporaneous im-
pressions, whether images or sensations, recall each other me-
chanically. On this principle, as a ground-work, he built up the
whole system of human language, as one continued process of
association. He showed in what sense not only general terms,

*6 [It may well be doubted whether Mr. Coleridge is not more indulgent
here to Des Cartes than the truth of the case warrants. The Tractatus de
Homine is, no doubt, a part of the great Work of which he gives an account
in his De Methodo, as being then written; and in_it the nervous ﬂuids and
material conﬁgurations are displayed as precisely, if not as copiously, as by
his commentator De la Forge himself. The “ animal spirits” move mind and
body. See De Ham. P. iv. s. 55, 850. See even in the De Methoda itself.
Denique id quad Icic super omnia observari meretur, generatio est spirituum
animalium, qua; aut instar venti subtilissimi, aut patiusﬂammce purissima’;
qua: continue a corde magna copia in cerebrum ascendens, inde per narvas in
musculos penetrat, et omnibus membris motum dat, die. P. 30, edit. 1664.
See Spectator, No. 417. And indeed their agency is distinctly recognized
in the same part of the Principia, in which the story of the child is rela-
ted—Ed]

1' This story is told by Des Cartes in these words as one of many proofs
that animam, nan quatenus est in singulis membris, sad tantum quatenus est
in cerebra, ea qua? corpari accidunt in singulis membris, nervarum ope sen-
tire.—

Cum puellw cuidam, manum gravi morba aﬁectam Izabenti, velarentur oculi,
quaties chirurgus accedebat, ne curationis apparatu turbaretur, eique, past
aliquot dies brachium ad cubitum usque, ab gangrenam in ea serpentem, fuis-
set amputatam, et panni in ejus locum ita substituti, ut ea 88 privatam esse
plane ignoraret, ipsa interim varios clalares, mum in mm ejus manus quce
abscissa erat digiio, nunc in alio se scntire querebatur. Quad sane aliunde
contingere non paterat, quam ex ea, quad nervi, qui prius ex cerebra ad ma-
num descendebant, tuncque in brachia juxta cubitum terminabantur, eadem
moda z'bi moverentur, ac prizes maveri debuissent in manu, ad sensum kujus
val illius, digiti dolentis animce in cerebro residenti imprimendum. Princ.

v. 196,—EdJ

212 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA:

but generic images,—under the name of abstract ideas,—-actually
existed, and in what consist their nature and power. As one
word may become the general exponent of many, so by associa-
tion a simple image may represent a whole class.* But in truth
Hobbes himself makes no claims to any discovery, and introduces
this law of association, or (in his own language) discursion of
mind, as an admitted fact, in the solution alone of which, and
this by causes purely physiological, he arrogates any originality.
lEHlS system is brieﬂy this ;’r whenever the senses are impinged on
llby external objects, whether by the rays of light reﬂected from
llthem, or by efﬂuxes of their ﬁner particles, there results a corres
lpondent motion of the innermost and subtlest organs. This mc
tion constitutes a representation, and there remains an impressior
of the same, or a certain disposition to repeat the same motion.
Whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the impres-
sions that are left (or in the language of Mr. Hume, the ideas)
are linked together. Whenever therefore any one of the move-
ments, which constitute a complex impression, is renewed through
the senses, the others succeed mechanically. _It follows of ne-
cessity, therefore, that Hobbes, as well as Hartley and all others
who derive association from the connection and interdependence
of the supposed matter, the movements of Which constitute our
thoughts, must have reduced all its forms to the one law of Time.
But even the merit of announcing this law with philosophic pre-
cision can not be fairly conceded to him. For the objects of any
two ideasi need not have co-existed in the same sensation in order

9* [The Editor has never been able to ﬁnd in the writings of Des Cartes
any thing coming up to the statement in the text. Certainly nothing of the
sort follows the paragraph containing the story of the amputated hand.
That Des Cartes was a N ominalist is clear from the following pass; O'e :—

Et optime comprehendimus, qua pacto a varia magnitudine,ﬁgura et molu
particularum unius corporis, varii motus locales in alio corpore excitentur ;
mcllo antem mode possumus intellige-re, quo pacto ab z'z'sdem (magnitudine
scilz'cet, ﬁgura, et motu), aliqm'd. aliud producatur, omni-no diverse: ab ipsz's
naturce, quales sunt illazformce substantiales et gualitates reales, quas in re-
bus esse multi supponunt ; nee etiam quo pacto postea ism gualitates autfor-
ma: vim Izabeant in aliis corporibus motus locales excitandz'. Princip. iv.
198.—Ed.]

+ [See Human Nature. C. ii. 111. Leviathan ubi supra—Ed]

1 I here use the word idea in Mr. Hume’s sense on account of its general
currency amongst the English metaphysicians; though against my own
judgment, for I believe that the vague use of this word has been the cause

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 213

to become mutually associable. The same result will follow
when one only of the two ideas has been represented by the
senses, and the other by the memory.

of much error and more confusion. The word, giéghin its original sense as
used by Pindar, Aristophanes, and in the Gospel of St. Matthew, represented
the vi_sual abstraction of a distant objggt, when we see the whole without
distinguishing its parts.1 Plato adopted it as a technical term, and as the
WW; the transient and perishable em-
blem, or mental word, of the idea. Ideas themselves he considered as mys-
terious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time.2 In this
sense the word Idea became the property of the Platonic school; and it
seldom occurs in Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as ac-
cording to Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of the
reign of Charles II. or somewhat later, employed it either in the original
sense, or Platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondth to our present
use of the substantive, Ideal ; always however opposing it, more or less to
image, whether of present or absent objects. The reader will not be dis-
pleased with the following interesting exempliﬁcation from Bishop Jeremy
Taylor. “ St. Lewis the King sent Ivo Bishop of Chartres on an embassy,
and he told, that he met a grave and stately matron on the way with a cen-
ser of ﬁre in one hand, and a vessel of water in the other; and observing
her to have a melancholy, religious, and phantastic deportment and look,

 

 

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IC8Zvov Kan) xpovov y‘ Zdéa 7'8 Ica7tov
({5ng 7'8 K8Kpaluévov.—-Olymp. XI. (X.) 121.

 

 

07’) ywéoxwv, 57L 7'07} IIZoﬁ‘rov aapéxw ﬁ87t7'iovag (lvdpag,
Kai 777v yvo’wnv, Kai T777) Zdéav.—Aristoph. Plut. 558—9.

7772 (58 7'] Zdéa ain'oﬁ dig dorpam), IcaZ 7'6 Evdvpa abroﬁ lav/c512 (1)082 patina—-
Matt. xxviii. 3.—Ed.]

2 [See the Timaeua. (Bekk. III. ii. 23.) 6707) ,uév 07512 (27) 6 dn/zcovpyog
77'pr To Kara rain-(2 8x01) Bléawv (185, Totoﬁrgo 7'th apooxpépevog 7rapa68Zy/ta7'c,
777v Zdéav aoroﬁ IcaZ (invaluw d7r8p7c2§777at, was» 85 dvdyxng 0737's); d7r07'87L8Z0-
6m adv. But the word Zdéa is used by Plato in several senses, modiﬁed
according to the natures, divine or human, in which he represents the ideas
as placed. See the ﬁne moral passage in the Republic (vii. 3.)—£~v 7'93 va-
07'9”) Televraia 7'] 7'01) dyadoz‘) idéa IcaZ péytg (spasm, 6¢65wa (58‘ avlloywréa
8ivat (I); dpa mien wdvrwv (173777 6726751! 7'8 KaZ Kaldv alria, 8’7) 7'8 6pa7'g‘) (1)77);-
Kal 7'67) 7'0757'07) Kuptov Telcoﬁo'a, 8’7) 7'8 7207777,") (1737-7) Icvaa u’lﬁﬂetav va 120771)
wapaoxopévn, lull (in (382 T067771) ZdeZv 7'57) ,uéllovra éprppovwg 7rp<2§58w 7’} Mia
ﬁ dﬁyooigz.

The notes appended by the enthusiastic Thomas Taylor to his translation
of the Metaphysics of Aristotle are full of learned illustration upon this
subject-Ed]

: _ — - ”‘ -.
“'b ~'.-'-‘£ﬂ-‘:".'

. ”1437..

214 BIOGRAPHIA‘ LITERARIA.

Long“ however before either Hobbes or Des Cartes the law of
association had been deﬁned, and its important functions set forth

he asked her what those symbols meant, and what she meant to do with
her ﬁre and water; she answered, My purpose is with the ﬁre to burn
paradise, and with my water to quench the ﬂames of hell, that men may
serve God purely for the love of God. But we rarely meet with such spir-
its which love virtue so metaphysically as to abstract from her all sensible
compositions, and love the purity of the idea.”1 Des Cartes having intro—
duced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis of material ideas,——or cer-
tain conﬁgurations of the brain, which were as so many moulds to the in-
ﬂuxes of the external world,—Locke adopted the term, but extended its
signiﬁcation to whatever is the immediate object of the mind’s attention or
consciousness.2 Hume, distinguishing those representations which are ac-
companied with a sense of a present object from those reproduced by the
mind itself, designated the former by impressions, and conﬁned the word
idea to the latter.3

* [For the substance of the following paragraph, and in part for the re-
marks upon the doctrine of association of ideas as represented in the writ-
ings of Aristotle, Mr. Coleridge is indebted to the very interesting and ex-
cellent treatise of J. G. E. Maasz, On the Imagination, Versuch ilber die
Einbildungskraft, pp. 343—4—5—6. A copy of this work (17 97 ), richly an-
notated on the margins and blank spaces, was found amongst Mr. Coleridge’s
books; and in so “ immethodical a miscellany of literary opinions” as this
the insertion of these notes may not be out of place.

“In Maasz’s introductory chapters,” says Mr. Coleridge, “my mind has
been perplexed by the division of things into matter (sensatio ab extra) and
form (i. e. per-et-con-ceptio ab intra). Now as Time and Space are evidently
only the universals, or modi communes, of sensation and sensuous Form,
and consequently appertain exclusively to the sensuous Einbildungsquft
(=Eisemplasy, wharrsw sly 3:12) which we call Imagination, Fancy, &c. all

 

‘ [The passage here ascribed to Bishop Taylor I can not ﬁnd in his works
nor have I been able to light upon the expression, “him that reads in mal
ice or him that reads after dinner,” also attributed to him by Mr.‘Coleridge,
in any of his writings—S. C.]

9 [" It (Idea) being the term which, I think, serves best to stand for what-
soever is the object of the understanding, when a man thinks ; I have used
it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever
it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking.” Human Under-
stand. I. i. s. 8.—Ed.] .

3 [“ By the term, Impression, then, I mean all our more lively percep-
tions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will. And
impressions are distinguished from Ideas, which are the less lively percep-
tions, of which we are conscious, when we reﬂect on any of those sensations
or movements above-mentioned.” Inquiry concerning the Hum. Under.
5. 2.—Ed.] ‘

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 215

by Ludovicus Vives.”“ Phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by
Vives to express the mental power of comprehension, or the actwe
function of the mind ; and imaginatio for the receptivity (vis re-

poor and inadequate terms, far inferior to the German Ez’nbz’ldu-ng, the Law
of Association derived ab extra from the contemporaneity of the impres-
sions, or indeed any other difference of the characterless Manifold (das M'an-
niclrfaltige) except that of plus and minus 0f impingence, becomes incom-
prehensible, if not absurd. I see at one instant of time a Rose and a Lily.
-—Chemistry teaches me that they differ only in form, being both reducible
to the same elements. If then form be not an external active power, if it

be wholly transfused into the object by the esem las ic or imaginative '2

faculty of the percipient, or rather creator, where and wherein shall I ﬁnd
the ground of my perception, that this is the Rose and that the Lily. In
order to render the creative activity of the imagination at all conceivable,
we must necessarily have recourse to the Harmonia pra’stabilita of Spinoza
and Leibnitz : in which case the automatism of the Imagination and J udg-
ment would be perception in the same sense as a self-conscious watch would
be a percipient of Time, and inclusively 0f the apparent motion of the sun
and stars. But, as the whole is but a choice of ineomprehensibles, till the
natural doctrine of physical inﬂux, or modiﬁcation of each by all, have been
proved absurd, I shall still prefer it: and not doubt, that the pencil of rays
forms pictures on the retina, because I can not comprehend how this picture
can excite a mental fac-simile.”

Maasz, Introd. s. 1. Dem; die ﬂierkmale, wodurch ein Objekt angestellt ‘

wird, miissen entwedcr individualle oder gemeinsame scyn.

Coleridge. “ Deceptive. The mark in itself is always individual. By
an act of the reﬂex understanding it may be rendered a sign or general
term. The word Vorstellung has been as often mischievous as useful in
German philosophy.”—Ed.]

* [Originally thus-—“ by Melanethon, Armnerbach, and L. Vives; more
especially by the last ;”—part of which statement appears to have been an
imperfect recollection by Mr. C. of the words of Maasz, who, after observ-
ing that in the sixteenth century the spirit of inquiry took a new turn, and
that men then came forth who knew the value of empirical psychology, and
took pains to enforce and elucidate its truths, proceeds as follows:

“ Among the ﬁrst to whom this merit belongs were Melanethon, Ammer
bach, and Lud. Vives, whose psychological writings were published all to-
gether by Getzner (Zurich, 1662). But far the most was done by Vives.
He has brought together many important observations upon the human
soul, and made striking remarks thereon. More especially in the theory of
the association of representations, which Melancthon and Ammerbach do
not bring forward at all, he displays no ordinary knowledge.” Transl. p. 343.

Philip Melanethon, a Reformer in Philosophy as well as in Religion, pub-
lished, among bther philosophical works, a book .De Anima, 1540, in 8vo.

Vitus Ammerbach, a learned author and Professor of I hilosophy at In-
golstadt,-—was; born at Wedinguen in Bavaria, and died in 1557 at the age

a» "xi-
A 14.. ..

£4.21."

~... ”'3”

21 6 BIOGRAPHIA. - LITERARIA.

cepti'va) of impressions, or for the passive perception.* The
power of combination he appropriates to the former : “ qua sin-
gula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea conjungit et disjun-
git plzuwitasia.”1L And the laW by which the thoughts are spon-
taneously presented follows thus : “ gum simul sunt a pliantasia
comprehensa, si altervutruni occur-rat, solet sec'um alterum repre-

of seventy. He also published, amongst other works, one on the Soul.—
De Anima, lib. iv. Lugd. Bat. 1555, 8vo. and one on Natural Philosophy—
.De Philosophia Naturali, lib vi. 8v0.

John Lewis Vives was born in 1492 at Valencia in Spain, died at Bruges,
according to Thuanus, in 1541 : was ﬁrst patronized by Henry VIII. of
England, who made him preceptor in Latin to the Princess Mary, and af-
terwards persecuted by him for opposing his divorce. He was a follower
of Erasmus, and opponent of the Scholastic Philosophy. His works, which
are of various kinds, theological, devotional, grammatical, critical, aswell
as philosophical, were printed at Baslc in 1555, in two vols. fol. The
Treatise .De Anima et Vita is contained in vol. ii. pp. 497-593.-—S. 0.]

9* [Et guemadmodum in altricefacultate videre est inesse vim quandam,
quce cibum recipiat, aliam qua? contineat, aliam guee conﬁciat, quceque dis-
tribuat et disPenset : ita in animis et hominum et brutorum est functio, quaa
imagines sensibus impressas recipit, quae inde Imaginativa dicitur: est qua—3
continet haee, Memoria; quee conﬁcit, Phantasia: quae distribuit ad assensum
aut dissensum, Extrimatrix. Sunt enim spiritalia imagines Dei. corporalia
vero Spiritalium qua’dam veluti simulachra: ut mirandum non sit, ex corpo-
ralib-us spiritalia colligi, ceu ab umbris aut picturis corpora expressa. Imagi—
nativze actio est in animo, qua: oculi in corpore, recipere im. gines intuendo:
estque vclut oriﬁcium quoddam oasis, guod est JIIemoria. Phantasia vero
eonjungit et disjungit ea, quae singula et simplieia Imaginatio acceperat.
Equidem [Laud sum nescius, confundi duo hwc a plerisgue, ut Imaginationem
P/iantasiam, et vice versa hanc Imaginationem nominent, et eandem essefunc-
tionem guidam arbitrentur. Sed nobis tum ad rem aptius, tum ad docendum
accommodatius visum est ita partiri: propterea guod aetiones videmus dis-
tinctas, undefacultates censentur. Tametsi niltil erit quandogue periculi, si
istis utamur promiscue. Accedit his sensus, qui ab Aristotele communis
dicitur, quo judicantur sensilia absentia : et discernuntur ea, qua: variorum
sunt sensuum : hie sub Imaginationem et Phantasiam venire potest. Phan-
tasia est miriﬁce expedita et libera : quicquid collibitum est, ﬁngit, reﬁngit,
componit, divincit, dissolvit, res disjunctissimas connectit, conjunctissimas au-
teni longissime separat. Itague nisi regatur, et cokibeatur a ratione, haud
sseus animum percellit ac perturbat, quam procella mare. Jo. Ludovici
Vivis, De Anima et Vita. Lib. i. Opera, tom. ii. p. 509. Basil, 1555—8. 0.]

1‘ [Maasz, p. 344. Note. Vives De Anim. i. s. d. cogn. intern. Phan-
tasia conjungit et disjungit ea, qua: singula et simpliciter, acreperat imagi-
natio. Imagination, according to Vives, says Maasz, is the capability of
perceiving an impression—S. C.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 217

sentare.”* TWmau the gther ex-
citing causes of association; The soul proceeds “ a caasa ad ef—
fectum, mﬁob'ad'ih‘siﬁimentum, a part6 ad totam ;’"l‘ thence
to the place, from place to person, and from this to whatever
preceded or followed, all as being parts of a total impression, each
of which may recall the other. The apparent springs “saltas
vel transitas etiam Z0ngissimos,”i he explains by the same
thought having been a component part of two or more total im-
pressions. Thus “ ea; Scipione mate in cogitalimzem potentire
Ta’rcicaa, propter victm'ias ejas de Asia, in qua rcgnabat A72-
tioc/zas.’ ’ §

But from Vives I pass at once to the source of his doctrines,
and (as far as we can judge from the remains yet extant of Greek
philosophy) as to the ﬁrst, so to the fullest and most perfect
enunciation of the associative principle, namely, to the writings
ofAristotle ; and of these in particular to the treatises De Anima,
and “ De Memoria,” which last belongs to the series of Essays
entitled in the old translations Parva Nataralz'a.” In as much
- as later writers have either deviated from, or added to his doc-
trines, they appear to me to have introduced either error or
groundless supposition.

9* [De Anima i. sect. d. cited by Maasz in a note ibid. Vives proceeds
thus—unde sedes illw existunt in artiﬁcio memorioe, quippc ad aspectmn 1002'
de eo venit in mentcm, quod in loco scimus evcnisse, aut situm esse: 'quando
etiam cum voce aut sono aliguo guz'ppz'am contingz't latam, eodem sono audito
delectamur: sz' triste tristamur. and in brutis guoguc est annotare : qua:
8i quo sono vocata gratum aliquid accipiant, rm'smn ad candem 807mm facile
ac libenter accurrunt : sin cadantur, sonitum cundem dcinceps rqformidant, ea;
plagarum recordatz'one.—Lib. ii. Opera, tom. ii. p. 519.—S. 0.]

1* [De Anima ii. sect. d. mem. et record—Cited by Maasz in a note, Ibid.
—S. 0.]

1 [Ibid—ibid. See Maasz, pp. 345—6. That the springs are only “ap‘
parent” is explained by Maasz, commenting on the words of V ivcs, Sunt
(in phantasia) transitus quidam longissz'mi, immo saints—S. 0.]

§ [Cited by Maasz from the same place, p. 34'6.——S. 0.]

[I [This collection, rd ,uucpa Kalozilueva «puma, which is connected with
the treatise in three books, on the Soul (as Trendelenburg distinctly shows
in the Preface to his elaborate commentary‘on that work of Aristotle), con~
tains the books On Sense and Things Sensible, On Memory and Recollec-
tion On Sleep, On Dreams, On Divination in Sleep (Kaﬁ’ tavov), On Length
and Shortness of Life, On Youth and Old Age, On Respiration, and On
Life and Death—S. 0.]

VOL. 111. K

21 8 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

In the ﬁrst place it is to be observed, thatAristotle’s positions
on this subject are unmixed with ﬁctionﬁ“ The wise Stagyrite
speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard-
balls, as Hobbes ;’r not of nervous or animal spirits, where inani-
mate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or fil-
trated by ascension, into living and intelligent ﬂuids,'that etch
and re-etch engravings on the brain, as the followers of Des
Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general ; 'nor of an oscil-
lating ether which was to effect the same service for the nenres
of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal spirits per-
form for them under the notion of hollow tubes, as Hartley teaches
—nor ﬁnally (with yet more recent dreamers), of chemical com
positions by elective afﬁnity, or of an electric light at once the
immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which
rises to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there, disporting
in various shapes,—as the balance of plus and minus, or nega-
tive and positive, is destroyed or reestablished—images out both
past and present. Aristotle delivers a just theory without pre-
tending to an hypothesis; or in other words a comprehensive
survey of the diﬂerent facts, and of their relations to each other
without supposition, that is, a fact placed under a number of
facts, as their common support and explanation : though in the
majority of instances these hypotheses or suppositions better. de-

* [Maasz has also said (p. 345) speaking of Vivcs, that, though he set
forth correctly the theory of association, he yet did not exhibit it with such
entire purity as Aristotle. Mr. Coleridge, however, is comparing the wise
Stagyrite with Hobbes, Dcs Cartes, Hartley and others—Mansz is comparing
him with Vives—observing that this author not only came after Aristotle
in perceiving and expressing the general law of im. o'ination, but, what is
the principal thing, did not state the theory of association so consistently
and purely as the former, because he made exceptions to the same, which
are such in appearance only : though he thinks it may be assumed in his
favor, that his language is incorrect rather than his conception of the sub-
j ect. Mr. Coleridge, on the other hand, is objecting to the physical dreams,
which modern metaphysicians introduced into the survey of psychological
facts delivered by the sager ancient. He imputes to them an error in prin-
ciple, while Maasz remarks upon a statement at variance with a law cor-
rectly laid down—S. (3.]

1' [See Human Nature, chaps. ii. and iii. Hobbes does not use the ex—
pressions in which Mr. 0. describes his doctrine, but speaks much of motions
nroduced in the brain by objects—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 219

serve the name 01' énozoanaetg, or suﬂictions.* He uses indeed
the word xuqastg, to express what we call representations or
ideas, but he carefully distinguishes them from material motion,
designating the latter always by annexing the words 51/ 10719
xatc‘c tenant On the contrary in his treatise De Anima, he ex-
cludes place and motion from all the operations of thought,
whether representations or volitions, as attributes utterly and ab-
surdly heterogeneousi

The general law of association, or, more accurately, the com-
mon condition under which all exciting causes act, and in which
they may be generalized, according to Aristotle is this.§ LId/eas

* [The discussion of Maasz on the part performed by Aristotle in ex-
plaining the general law of the Imagination extends from p. 319 to p. 335,
from sect. 90 to 94 inclusively.—-S. 0.]

f [See Maasz, p. 321. He refers generally to the treatise De Anima,
Lib. ii. cap. iii. and in particular to the words in s. 3, ’Eviocg as «pa; 701370;;
ﬁadpxec [cal 76 Kara 7671-012 mvnrmév. “But some, beside these things, have
also the faculty of motion according to place.”

In the third and fourth chapters of the ﬁrst book the subject of motion,
nan) mirror, is discussed, and the opinions of other philosophers that it is
properly attributable to the soul refuted. Sections 3 and 4 of Lib. i. cap.
iii. speak distinctly on this point: and so do sections 8—11 of cap. iv. In the
latter the philosopher says: “That the soul can not possibly be harmony,
neither can be turned about in a circle is manifest, from the aforesaid. But
that it may be removed per accidens—contingently,—may so move itself,
even as we have declared, is possible: inasmuch as that, in which it is, is
capable of being moved, and that (in which it is) may be moved by the soul:
but in no other way is it possible for the soul to be moved according to
place.”

Maasz discusses Aristotle’s use of the term KL‘VﬁO'Lg‘ in sections 91—2, pp.
321—333. He observes that it was not unusual with the Greek philosophers
to use the word for changes of the soul, and that Plato, for example, says
expressly, Kivnatg [card re thug/772; [cal Ica‘rd Gaga, in the Theaetetus, § 27.
(Opera Bekker. Loud. Sumpt. R. Priestley, 1826. Vol. iii. p. 412.)—S. 0.]

i [1.0. 3 in initio. Zowg‘ ydp 01’; porov $813669 éon Ta Tﬁv 013mm) az’n'ﬁg
“rower-77v elvat, oZ'av (,baoiv oi léyov‘reg rbvxfyv staZ To xwoﬁv éavro, 7“] dvvé—
uevov xweZv, (2MB 51) n 7131) u’dwdrwv To uwdpxew aim“; Kivnaw.—Cited by
Maasz, p. 322.—Ed.

[For perhaps not only it is false that the being of the soul is such as they
suppose, who afﬁrm that it is a thing which moves or is able to move itself;
but it may be that it is a thing to which motion can not posSibly belong.
Translation ..—S C. ]

§ [See Maasz, pp. 324-5- 6. In proof that Aristotle had a right concep-
tion of the common law of Association, though he did not call it by that-
name, and had not discovered all its fruitfulness, he cites from the treatise

220 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

by having been together acquire a power of recalling each other;
or every partial representation awakes the total representation of
which it had been a part.*‘ In the practical determination of this
common principle to particular recollections, he admits ﬁve
agents or occasioning causes; lst, connection in time, whether
simultaneous, preceding, or successive; 2d, vicinity or connec-
tion in space ; 3d, interdependence or necessary connection, as

De .Memorz'a, cap. ii. the following sentences :—ov/t,8at'vovot 6’ at drapmioerg,
énetdr‘y wéovlcev 7’7 m’vmng i268 ,uevéoﬂat ,uerci rﬁvde—thus translated or para-
phrased by Maasz-—“ The Representations come after one another to the
consciousness, when the changes” (or movements) “of the soul thereto be-
longing are of such a nature that one arises after the other.” (I believe the
stricter rendering to be—Recollections take place because it is the nature
of the mind that its motions follow;one another.)—~Evra ldévreg dwaé’ ,udllor
ymyrovstioluev, 77 é’Tepa walla/(Lg.

—“ But such a connection among the changes of the soul, whereby one
succeeds another, arises, though it be not necessary, through a kind of cus-
tom. For the production of this, however, it is sufﬁcient, if we haVe only
once perceived the objects of the representation together.” (This is a col-
lection from the words of Aristotle rather than their direct sense, which
seems to be as follows: “ The sequence of the mental motions is sometimes
a necessary one, and this, as is evident, must always take place ; sometimes
it is one that arises from custom, and this takes place only for the most
part. Some men, by once thinking of a thing, acquire a habit more than
others by thinking ever so often. Therefore we remember some things, that
we have seen but once, better than other things, that we have seen many a
time”)

“Still plainer, perhaps,” says he, “speaks the place which follows the
above; as thus: (fray 023v dva/rL/LvnoxéyeOa, [twat/1819a 70v nporépwv fwd
Ktvﬁoewv,§w§ (2v KwnﬁO/zev, ,uei9’ 7'72) éxet’vn Ewan—“A representation is
called up (we remember it), as soon as changes of the soul arise, with which
that” (change or movement) “ belonging to the said representation has been
associated.”—S. 0.] -

* [See Maasz, p. 326. “ Thus, representations which have been together,

call forth each other, or: Every partial representation awakens its total
representation.”

“This rule holds good for the succession of representations generally, as
well when we reﬂect upon a thing and strive to remember it, as when
that is not the case; it avails, as I have just now expressed, for the volun-
tary and involuntary series of imaginations. This 'Aristotle expressly as-
serts, and hereby we see, in what universality he had conceived the law of
association.” He quotes in support of this the following sentence from the
treatise De llfemorz'a, cap. ii. Zm-oﬂo-t p81) 01312 0579), Kai ,ur) {nroﬂvrsg 6’
01'5ng dvalzupvriorcovrat, 67m) ,ueﬁ’ érépwv Kit/770w else/Cm) yt'vn‘rat. In this
way men try to recollect, and, when not trying, it is thus they remember
some particular movement (of mind) arising after some other.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 221

cause and effect; 4th,llikeness ; and 5th,contrast.* As an additional
solution of the occasional seeming chasms in the continuity of
reproduction he proves, that movements or ideas possessing one
or the other of these ﬁve characters had passed through the mind
as intermediate links, sufﬁciently clear to recall other parts of the
same total impressions with which they had co-existed, though
not vivid enough to excite that degree of attention which is requi-
site for distinct recollection, or as we may aptly express it, after
consciousnesst In association then consists the whole mechan-
ism of the reproduction of impressions, in the Aristotelian Psy-
chology. It is the universal law of the passive fancy and me-

* [Maasz (at p. 327) shows that Aristotle gives “four distinct rules for
Association”——that is to say, connection in time, in space, resemblance, and
opposition or contrast—in proof of which he cites the following passage—
du‘) 1m? 70 édeEf/g‘ Onps'éopev voﬁaavreg (i770 7013 12131), 7’} (ﬁlm) 7020;; Kai dgb’
opoiov, 77 évavn’ov, 7’) 7017 oﬁveyyvg. Au) 701770 yivemt 7) dvdpvnatg. There-
fore in trying to remember we search (our minds) in regular order,
proceeding from the present or some other time (to the time in which what
we want to recollect occurred) ; or from something like, or directly oppo-
site, or near in place—De Jllcm. cap. ii.

At pp. 27—8, Maasz writes thus : “ That B. should be really immediately
associated with A. it is not necessary, that the whole representation B.
should have been together with the whole representation A. ; if only some
mark of A., say M., has been associated with some mark of B., that is sufﬁ-
cient. If then A. being given, m. is consequently represented, n. is like-
wise associated therewith, because both have been already together; and
then with n. are associated the remaining marks belonging to B. because
these have been already together with m. in the representation B. Thus
the whole representation B. is called up through A.” “ This seems to me a
proof,” says Mr. Coleridge in a marginal note on the passage, “that Like
ness, as co—ordinate with, but not always subordinate to, Time, exerts an
inﬂuence per se on the association. Thus too as to Cause and Effect ;-—they
can not of course be separated from Contemporaneity, but yet they act dis-
tinctly from it. Thus too, Contrast, and even Order. In short, whatever
makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct will deter~
mine the mind to recall these rather than others. Contemporaneity seems
to me the common condition under which all the determining powers act
rather than itself the effective law. Maasz sometimes forgets,——as Hartley
seems never to have remembered,—-—that all our images are abstractions
and that in many cases of likeness the association is merely an act of recog~
nition.”—.MS. note—S. C.]

1- [This is set forth at some length by Maasz, whose expositions of the
present subject Mr. Coleridge seems to have mixed up in his mind with
those of Aristotle. See Ve-rsuch fiber die Einbz'ldungskraﬂ, p. 27.—S. 0.]

222 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

chanicajmory; that which supplies to all other faculties
their objects, to all thought the elements of its materials.

In consulting the excellent commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas
on the Pam/n Natm'alz'a of Aristotle, I was struck at once with
glib close resemblance to Hume’s Essay on Association. The
{main thoughts were the same in both, the order of the thoughts
was the same, and even the illustration differed only by Hume’s
occasional substitution of more modern examples. I mentioned
the circumstance to several of my literary acquaintances, who
admitted the closeness of the resemblance,,and that it seemed
too great to be explained by mere coincidence ; but they thought
it improbable that Hume should have held the pages of the An-
gelic Doctor worth turning over. But some time after Mr. Payne
showed Sir James Mackintosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas
Aquinas, partly perhaps from having heard that he had in his
Lectures passed a high encomium on this canonized philosopher;
but chieﬂy from the fact, that the volumes had belonged to Mr.
Hume, and had here and there marginal marks and notes of
reference in his own hand-writing. Among these volumes was
that which contains the Parva lVatumlz’a, in the old Latin ver-
sion, swathcd and swaddled in the commentary aforc-mentioned 3*

* [This Commentary of Aquinas is contained in the third volume of the
edition of his works, printed at Venice in 1593—4, and in the Antwerp edi-
tion of 1612, end of tom. iii. It surrounds two translations of the text, one
of which is the Antigua Translatio.

\Vhen Mr. 0. spoke of “ Hume’s Essay on Association,” as closely resem-
bling it, he must have had in his mind, not merely the short section on
the Association of Ideas, but generally whatever relates to the subject in
the Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, from sections ii. to vii. in-
clusively. The similar thoughts and ancient illustrations are to be found
in that part of the commentary which belongs to the treatise De ﬁfemoria,
et Reminiscentia (the second of the Parva Naturalia), particularly in sec-
tions v. and vi. pp. 25—6 of the Antwerp edit.

There the principles of connection amongst ideas, and “the method and
regularity” with which they present themselves to the mind, are set forth
at some length, for the purpose of explaining the nature of memory and
describing our mental processes in voluntary recollection and unintentional
remembrance. I think, however, that the likeness to Hume’s treatise,
wherein Association of Ideas is subordinate and introductory to another
speculation, which it was the author’s principal aim to bring forward, may
have been somewhat magniﬁed in Mr. C.’s mind from the circumstance, that
the commentary, in addition to what it sets forth on connections of ideas,
dwells much on certain other topics which are dwelt upon also in the In.

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 7 223

It remains then for me, ﬁrst to state wherein Hartley differs
from Aristotle; then, to exhibit the grounds of my conviction
that he differed only to err ; and next as the result, to show, b
what inﬂuencesof the choiceandjudgment the associative powe
becomes either memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appro-

quiry— -as, the inﬂuence of custom in producing mental habits and becoming
a sort of second nature; the liveliness and force of phantasmata, or images
impressed on the mind by sensible things; and the distinctness and order-
liness of mathematical theorems. These topics Hume handles somewhat
differently from Aquinas, as his drift was different; but it is possible that
the older disquisition may have suggested his thoughts on these points,
though it can not have exactly formed them.

It is rather remarkable, if Hume had indeed read this commentary be-
fore composing his own work, that he should have expressed himself thus
at p. 22 :—“ Though it be too obvious to escape observation, that different
ideas are connected together, I do notﬁnd that any philosopher has attempted
to enumerate or class all the principles of Association, a subject, however,
that seems worthy of curiosity.” Aquinas, in the commentary, does cer-
tainly attempt to enumerate them, though he does not classify them exactly
as Hume and other modern philosophers have done. He does not make
Cause and Effect a principle of Association over and above Contiguity in
Time and Place; and he mentions, as a separate inﬂuence, direct Dissimi-
larity or Contrast, which Hume refers to Causation and Resemblance, as a
mixture of the two: in both which particulars he does but follow the lead-
ing of his text.

I will just add that, in commenting on two sentences of Aristotle, quoted
in a former note,——explaining why some men remember, and some things
are remembered, better than others under similar circumstances of associa—
tion,—Aquinas observes, that this may happen through closer attention
and profounder knowledge, because whatever we most earnestly attend to
remains most ﬁrmly impressed on the memory; and again, in accounting
for false and imperfect remembrance, he states the converse fact, that by
distraction of the imagination the mental impression is weakened. Lects.
v. a. and vi. h. These remarks tend the same way with those in the Bio-
graphia, toward the end of chap. vii. concerning the superior vividness of
certain parts of a total impression, and the power of the will to give vivid
ness to any object whatsoever by intensifying the attention. Mr. Coleridge’s
aim was to show that these agents or occasioning causes of particular
thoughts which have been speciﬁed, are themselves subject to a deeper
law,—to the determination of the will, reason, judgment, understanding.—
S. C.

[ItI was not till the new edition of this work was in the press that I be-
came aware of a note, relating to chap. v. of' the B. L. at the end of the Dis-
sertation on the progress of Ethical Philosophy, by Sir J. Mackintosh, in
which the author speaks as follows: “I have already acknowledged the
striking resemblance of Mr. Hume’s principles of Association to those of

2 y
- l
' l

224: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

’ .

priate the remaining ofﬁces of the mind to the reason, and the
imagination. With my best efforts to be as perspicuous as the
nature of language will permit on such a subject, I earnestly so-
lieit the good wishes and friendly patience of my readers, while
Ithus go “ sounding on my dim and perilous way.”

Aristotle.” After showing that the story of Mr. Hume was a mistake, and
how the mistake arose, he proceeds to say: “It is certain that *5 5* * *
Aristotle explains recollection as depending on a general law,—that the
idea of an object will remind us of the objects which immediately preceded
or followed when originally perceived. But whatMr. Coleridge has not
told us is, that the Stagyrite conﬁnes the application of this law exclusively
to the phenomena of recollection alone, without any glimpse of a more gen.
eral operation extending to all connections of thought and feeling,—a won-
derful proof, indeed, even so limited, of the sagacity of the great philoso-
pher, but which for many ages continued barren of further consequences.”
Perhaps Mr. C. thought, as Maasz appears to have done, that to discover
the associative principle in respect of memory was obviously to discover
the general law of mental association, since all connections of thought and
feeling are dependent on memory. It is difﬁcult to conceive a man writing
a treatise on Memory and Recollection without hitting on this law of asso-
ciation, by observing the manner in which he hunts in his mind for any
thing forgotten: but perhaps this remark savors of simplicity, for simple
folks, when a truth is once clearly presented to them, can never again so
abstract their minds from it as to conceive the possibility of its being un-
recognized. “The illustrations of Aquinas,” Sir James adds, “ throw
light on the original doctrine, and show that it was unenlarged in his time,
&c.” (Yet Aquinas almost touches the doctrine of Hobbes when he says
reminiscentia habec similitudlnem czg’usdam syllogz'smz', guare sicut in sylla-
gz'smo pervenitur ad eonelusionem ea; aliguibus principiz's, ita etiam in re-
miniscendo aliguz’s guodammodo s‘I/llogizat, &e.) “Those of L. Vives, as
quoted by Mr. C., extend no farther.”

“But if Mr. Coleridge will compare the parts of Hobbes on Human N'a
ture, which relate to this subject, with those which explain general terms,
he will perceive that the philosopher of Malmesbury builds on these two
foundations a general theory of the hmnan understanding, of which rea-
soning is only a particular case.” This has been already admitted in note 2.
Sir James seems to refer tb the whole of chap. v., which begins thus : “ See-
ing the succession of conceptions in the mind are caused * *5 ’* by the suc-
cession they had one to another when they were produced by the senses,”
&c. He points out the forgetful statements of Mr. C. . respecting the
De .Methodo, and expresses an opinion that Hobbes,l and Hume might

 

1 The language of Hobbes has somewhat of a Peripatetical sound, and
when he discourses of the motions of the mind, reminds one of the Aristo-
telian commentator—Oausa autem reminiscendi est ordo motuum, qui relin-
quuntur in am'ma ex prima impressione ejus, quod primo apprehendimus.

CHAPTER VI.

THAT HARTLEY’S SYSTEM, AS FAR AS IT DIFFERS FROM THAT OF
ARISTOTLE, IS NEITHER TENABLE IN THEORY, NOR FOUNDED IN
FACTS.

0F Hartley’s hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical oscilla-
ting ether of the nerves,* which is the ﬁrst and most obvious dis-
tinction between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little.
This, with all other similar attempts to render that an object of
the sight which has no relation to sight, has been already sufﬁ-
ciently exposed by the younger Reimarusj Maasz, and others, as
outraging the very axioms of mechanics in a scheme, the merit
of which consists in its being mechanicali Whether any other
philosophy be possible, but the mechanical ; and again, whether

each have been unconscious that the doctrine of association was not origi-
nally his own. Either, I should think, had quite sagacity enough to dis
cover it for himself ; but the question is whether Hobbes was more s. 0a
cious on this part of the subject than any preceding philosopher.

Sir James makes an interesting reply to Mr. C.’s remark that he was un-
able to bridge over the chasm between their philosophical creeds, which
I do not quote only from want of space. That Sir James was one of
Mr. C.’s most intelligent readers is undeniable ; yet I think it is not quite
conclusive against the German doctrines,-—either as to their internal char-
acter or the mode in which, they have been enunciated,—that they found no
entrance into his mind; or at least no welcome there, or entire approval;
('01 are not all new doctrines, even such as are ultimately established, op.
posed, on thei1 ﬁrst promulgation, by some of the st1 ougest-headed persons
of the age ?—S. 0.]

9* [Hm tley, 068822). on Man, c. l. s. 1. props. 4 and 5.—Ed.]

+ [John Albert H. Reimarus.—Ed. See Note in the Appendix—S. 0.]

1 [See Maasz, pp. 41—2.-—E’d.]

 

Sir James says “the term ﬂnpeﬁw is as signiﬁcant as if iii/had been chosen
by Hobbes.” This term may have led Hobbes to talk about “hunting,"
“tracing.” and “ran0'1n0"in the Human Aature.

K33

“ a
226 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

the mechanical system can have any claim to be called philoso
phy; are questions for another place. It is, however, certain,
that as long as we deny the former, and afﬁrm the latter, we
must bewilder ourselves, whenever we would pierce into the
aclyta, of causation; and all that laborious conjecture can do, is
to ﬁll up the gaps of fancy. Under that despotism of the eye
(the emancipation from Which Pythagoras by his numeral, and
Plato by his musical, symbols, and both by geometric discipline,
aimed at, as the ﬁrst noonaldsvya of the mind)—under this strong
sensuous influence, we are restless because invisible things are not

the objects of vision; and meta h sical S'stems for st

part, become popular, not for their truth, but in proportion as
them seen, if only our
visual organs were sufficiently powerful.

From a hundred possible confutations let one sufﬁce. Accord-
ing to this system the idea or vibration a from the external object
A becomes associable with the idea or vibration m from the ex
ternal object M, because the oscillation a propagated itself so as
to re-producc the oscillation m. But the original impression from
M was essentially different from the impression A : unless there-
fore different causes may produce the same effect, the vibration
a, could never produce the vibration m : and this therefore could
never be the means, by which a and m are associated.*m:l‘o
understand this, the attentive reader need only be reminded, that
the ideas are themselves, in Hartley’s system, nothing more than
their appropriate configurative vibrations. It is a mere delusion
of the fancy to conceive the pre-existence of the ideas, in any
chain of association, as so many differently colored billiard-balls
in contact, so that when an object, the billiard-stick, strikes the
first or white ball, the same motion propagates itself through the
red, green, blue and black, and sets the whole in motion. N o I
, we must suppose the very same force, which constitutes the white
“ ‘ ball, to constitute the red or black; or the idea of a circle to

 

 

 

I ‘ constitute the idea of a triangle ; which is impossible.

But it may be said, that by the sensations from the objects A
and M, the nerves have acquired a disposition to the vibrations a
and m, and therefore a need only be repeated in order to re-pro~
duce 975.1" Now we will grant, for a moment, the possibility of
such a disposition in a material nerve, which yet seems scarcely

* [Maasz, pp. 32—3.—Ed.] f [Maasz, p. 33.—Ed.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 2277

less absurd than-to say, that a weather-cock had acquired a habit
of turning to the east, from the wind having been so long in that
quarter: for if it be replied, that we must take in the circum-
stance of life, what then becomes of the mechanical philosophy ?
And what is the nerve, but the ﬂint which the wag placed in the
pot as the ﬁrst ingredient of his stone-broth, requiring only salt,
turnips, and mutton, for the remainder ! *But if we waive this,
and pre-suppose the actual existence of such a disposition ; two
' cases are possible. Either, every idea has its own nerve and
correspondent oscillation, or this is not the case. If the latter be
the truth, we should gain nothing by these di8positions ; for then,
every nerve having several dispositions, when the motion of any
other nerve is propagated into it, there will be no ground or cause
present, why exactly the oscillation m should ai/isgzrither than
any other to which it was equallyx .pie- disposed‘ ut H‘We‘takeﬂ-
the former, and let every idea have a nerve of its own, then every
nervamust'be capable of propagatingiitsmotion into many other
nerves; and again, there is no reason assignable, why the vibra-
tion 972 should arise, rather than any other ad libitum.

It is fashionable to smile at Hartley’s vibrations and vibratiq
uncles; and his work has been re-edited by Priestley, with the
omission of the material hypothesis-t But Hartley was too great
a man, too coherent a thinker, for this to have been done, either
consistently or to any wise purpose. For all other parts of his
system, as far as they are peculiar "to that system, once removed
from their mechanical ba‘sis, not only lose their main support, but
the very motive which led to their adoption. Thus the principle

*‘ [For the rest of this paragraph see Maasz, pp. 33—4.—Ed.]

1- [Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Associa-
tion of Ideas ; with Essays relating to the subject of it. By Joseph Priest
ley, LL D. F.R.S. London, 17 7 5

Priestley explains and defends the doctrine of vibrations in his ﬁrst In-
troductory Essay; the object of his publication, as he states in the Preface.
is to exhibit Hartley’s theory of the Human Mind, as far as it relates to the
doctrine of association of ideas only, apart from the system of moral and re-
ligious knowledge, originally connected with it, which rendered the work
too extensive,—and the material foundation of theory, which rendered it too
difﬁcult and intricate,—for general reading.

“ Haller has shown that the doctrine of vibrations attributes properties
to the medullary substance of the brain and nerves, which are totally in-
compatible with their nature.” Quoted from Rees’s Encyc. Art. Hartley
~--S. 0.]

228 BIOGRAPHIA LITERAhiA.

of contemporaneity, which Aristotle had made the common con-
dition of all the laws of association, Hartley was constrained to
represent as being itself the sole law.* For to what law can the
action of material atoms be subject, but that of proximity in
place ? And to what law can their motions be subjected, but that
of time? Again, from this results inevitably, that the will, the
reason, the judgment, and the understanding, instead of being the
determining causes of association, must needs be represented as
- its creatures, and among its mechanical deﬂects. Conceive, for
instance, a broad stream, winding through a mountainous coun-
try with an indeﬁnite number of currents, vaiying and running
into each other according as the gusts chance to blow from the
‘ opening of the mountains. :The temporary union of several cur-
§:rents in one, so as to form the main current of the moment, wou /
'ipresent an accurate image of Hartley’s theory of the Wlll.§W
Had this been really the case, the consequence would have
been, that our whole life would be divided between the despot-
ism of outward impressions, and that of senseless and passive
memory. Take his law in its highest abstraction and most phil-
osophical form, namely, that everyipartial representation recalls
the total representation of which it was a part ;1' and the law be-
comes nugatory, were it only for its universality. In practice it
would indeed be mere lawlessness. Consider, how immense
must be the sphere of a total impression from the top of St.
Paul’s church ; and how rapid and continuous the series of such
total impressions. If, therefore, we suppose the absence of all in-
terference of the will, reason, and judgment, one or other of two
consequences must result. Either the ideas, or reliques of such
impression, will exactly imitate the order of the impression itself
which would be absolute (lelirimn .° or any one part of that impres-
sion might recall any other part, and—(as from the law of con-
tinuity, there must exist in every total impression, some one or
'1‘ [Hartleyz Observ. on Man, chap. i. s. ii. prop. 10.——-}t':l.]
1‘ [At p. 29, Maasz thus expresses the common law of Association: “ With
a given representation all” (representations) “ can be associated, which be-
long with it to a total representation, but those only immediately ; or, as is
also said, Every representation calls back into the mind its total represen
tation.” “Rather,” says Mr. Coleridge in the margin, “-is capable, under
given conditions, of recalling; or else our whole life would be divided be-

tween the despotism of outward impressions and that of senseless memmy.”
S. 0.]

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 229

more parts, which are components of some oth er following total
impression, and so on ad mﬁmtum) —amy part of any impres-
sion might recall any part of any other, without a cause present
to determine what it should be. For to bring in the will, or rea-
son, as causes of their own cause, that is, as at once causes and
effects, can satisfy those only who, in their pretended evidences of
a God, having ﬁrst demanded organization, as the sole cause and
ground of intellect, will then coolly demand the pre-existence of
intellect, as the cause and ground-work of organization. "There
is in truth but one state to which this theory applies at all,
namely, that of —-complete"‘lightsheade‘dne‘ss’; and." even .to. this it
applies but partially, because the will and reason are perhaps
never wholly suSpended.

A case of this kind occurred in a Roman Catholic town in Ger-
many a year or two before my arrival at G6ttingen,* and had not
then ceased to be a frequent subject of conversation. A young
woman of four or ﬁve and twenty, who could neither read nor
write, was seized with a nervous fever ; during which, according
to the asseverations of all the priests and monks of the neighbor-
hood, she became possessed, and, as it appeared, by a very learned
devil. ‘She continued incessantly talking Latin, Greek, and He-
brew, in very pompous tones and with most distinct enunciation. ,1
This possession was rendered more probable by the known fact?" '
that she was or had been a heretic. Voltaire humorously ad-
vises the devil to decline all acquaintance with medical men;
and it would have been more to his reputation, if he had taken
this advice in the present instance. The case had attracted the
particular attention of a young physician, and by his statement
many eminent physiologists and psychologists visited the town,
and cross-examined the case on the spot. Sheets full of her rav-
ings were taken down from her own mouth, and were found to
consist of sentences, coherent and intelligible each for itself, but
with little or no connection with each other. Of the Hebrew, a
small portion only could be traced to the Bible ; the remainder
seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick or conspiracy
was out of the question. Not only had the young woman ever
been a harmless, simple creature ; but she was evidently labor-
ing under a nervous fever. In the town, in which she had been
resident for many years as a servant in different families, no so-

* [In February, 1799.—Ed.]

230 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

lution presented itself. The young physician, however, deter-
mined to trace her past life step by step ; for the patient herself
was incapable of returning a rational answer. He at length
succeeded in discovering the place, where her parents had lived :
travelled thither, found them dead, but an uncle surviving; and
from him learned, that the patient had been charitably taken by
an old Protestant pastor at nine years old, and had remained
with him some years, even till the old man’s death. Of this
pastor the uncle knew nothing, but that he was a very good
man. With great difﬁculty, and after much search, our young
medical philosopher discovered a niece of the pastor’s, who had
lived with him as his housekeeper, and had inherited his effects.
She remembered the girl ; related, that her venerable uncle had
been too indulgent, and could not bear to hear the girl scolded ;
that she was willing to have kept her, but that, after her patron’s
death, the girl herself refused to stay. Anxious inquiries were
then, of course, made concerning the pastor’s habits; and the so-
lution of the phenomenon was soon obtained. For it appeared,
that it had been the old man’s custom, for years, to walk up and
down a passage of his house into which the kitchen door opened.
and to read to himself with a loud voice, out of his favorite books.
A considerable number of these were still in the niece’s possession
She added, that he was a very learned man and a great Hebraist
Among the books were found a collection of Rabbinical writings,
together with several of the Greek and Latin Fathers ; and the
physician succeeded in identifying so many passages with those
taken down at the young woman’s bedside, that no doubt could
remain in any rational mind concerning the true origin of the
impressions made on her nervous system.

This authenticated case furnishes both proof and instance, that
reliques of sensation may exist for an indeﬁnite time in a latent
state, in the very same order in which they were originally im-
pressed ; and as we can not rationally suppose the feverish state
of the brain t3 act in any other way than as .a stimulus, this fact
(and it would not be difﬁcult to adduce several of the same kind)
contributes to make it even probable, that all thoughts are in
themselves imperishable ; and, that if the intelligent faculty
should be rendered more comprehensive, it would require only a
different and apportioned organization,—the body celestial in-
stead of the body terrestrial—to bring before every human soul

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 23]

the zollective experience of its whole past existence. And this,
this, perchance, is the dread book of judgment, in the mysterious
hieroglyphics of which every idle word is recorded! Yea, in the
very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible that
heaven and earth should pass away, than that a single act, a
single thought, should be loosened or lost from that living chain
of causes, with all the links of which, conscious or unconscious,
the free-will, our only absolute Self, is co-extensive and co-pres
ent. But not now dare I longer discourse of this, waiting for a
loftier mood, and a nobler subject, warned from within and from
without, that it is profanation to speak of these mysteries mtg
Mas (partaaﬁetaw, (f); xalov 16 IT]; dixatomjwlg xal owcpgooﬁi-qg
agoownor, and 5:8 ganegog {its 2?wa 51w xalc‘t. To 7&9 696)» 7196;
16 ogeiyevou avyysvég xai Quota)! nomoo’wevov (56? a’mﬁc’zllsw 1?? 66¢.
on} 7&9 div noinore elder 6m6alyog "711L011, ﬁlcosidr‘lg ,m‘l yeyempévog-
adds 16 xalov 62» 1'57] l/JUXT‘I, ,uiz xaln‘] yewopévn*—“ to those to whose
imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is the
countenance of justice and wisdom ; and that neither the morn-
ing nor the evening star are so fair. For in order to direct the
view aright, it behooves that the beholder should have made him-
self congenerous and similar to the object beheld. Never could
the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soli-
form,” (i. e. w'e-conﬁguiecl to light by a similarity of essence
with that of light) “ neither can a soul not beautiful attain to
an intuition of beauty.”

 

CHAPTER VII.

OF THE NECESSARY CONSEQUENCES OF THE HARTLEIAN THEORY
—-OF THE ORIGINAL MISTAKE OR EQUIVOCATION WHICH PRO-
CURED ITS ADMISSION—MEMORIA TECHNICA.

WE will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law—if
law it mty be called, which would itself be the slave of chances
—with even that appearance of rationality forced upon us by the
outward phanomem of human conduct, abstracted from our own

* [Plotinua Enn. I. Lib. vi. ss. 4 and 9.—-Ed.]

232 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

consciousness. We will agree to forget this for the moment, In
order to ﬁx our attention on that subordination of ﬁnal to efﬁ-
cient causes in the human being, which ﬂows of necessity from
the assumption, that the will and, with the will, all acts of
thought and attention are parts and products of this blind me-
chanism, instead of being distinct powers, the function of which
it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of
association. The soul becomes a more ens logicum; for, as a
real separable being, it would be more worthless and ludicrous
than the Grimalkins in the cat-harpsichord, described in the
Spectator. For these did form a part of the process; but, in
Hartley’s scheme, the soul is present only to be pinched or
stroked, while the very squeals or purring are produced by an
agency wholly independent and alien. It involves all the diffi-
culties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be not indeed, (f); é’ymys
60x51, the absurdity), of intercommunion between substances
that have no one property in common, without any of the conve-
nient consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of
the Dualistic hypothesis. Qccordingly, this caput mortuum of
the Hartleian process has been rejected by his followers, and the
consciousness considered as a result, as a *tune, the common pro-
duct of the breeze and the harp. though this again is the mere
remotion of one absurdity to make way for another, equally pre-
poster.ous For what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very
6336 of which is pri ?—an 6723 mlionale, which pre- supposes
the power, that by perceiving creates it. Q The razor’ s edge be-
comes a saw to the almed vision , and the delicious melodies of
Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed stammerings to a bearer,
whose partition of time should be a thousand times subtler than
ours. But this obstacle too let us imagine ourselves to have sur-
mounted, and “ at one bound high overleap all bound.” Yet ac-
cording to this hypothesis the disquisition, to which I am at pres-
ent soliciting the reader’s attention, may be as truly said. to be
written by St. Paul’s church, as by me: {01 it is the mere motion
of my muscles and nerves; and these again are set in motion
from external causes equally passive, which external causes stand
themselves in interdepe dent connection with every thing that
exists or has existed. Thusythe whole universe co-operates to
produce the minutest stroke of _ every letter, save only that I my-
self, and I alone. have nothing to do with it, but merely the

 

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 233

causeless and eHectless beholding of it when it is (1ng Yet
scarcely can it be called a beholding : for it is neither an act nor
an effect ; but an impossible creation of a something-nothing out
of its very contrary ! It is the mere quicksilver plating behind
a looking-glass ; and in this alone consists the poor worthless I 3
The sum total of my moral and intellectual intercourse, dissolved
into its elements, is reduced to extension, motion, degrees of ve-
locity, and those diminished copies of configurative motion, which
form what we call notions, and notions of notions. Of such phi-
losophy well might Butler say—

The metaphysic’s but a puppet motion

That goes with screws, the notion of a notion;
The copy of a copy and lame draught
Unnaturally taken from a thought :

That counterfeits all pantomimie tricks,

And turns the eyes, like an old cruciﬁx ;

That counterchanges whatsoe’er it calls

By another name, and makes it true or false;
Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth,
By virtue of the Babylonian’s tooth.*’

The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, did not in
reality invent it ; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the
only true artist, were unfolding themselves. So must it have
been too with my friend Allston, when he sketched his picture
of the dead man revived by the bones of the prophet Elijah-l

9“ [Miscellaneous Thoughts—Ed]

1' [This expression of regard for the great painter of America may well
justify the publication of the following beautiful sonnet, which Mr. All-
lton, a master at either pencil, did the Editor the honor to send to him:

SON N ET

ON THE LATE SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

And thou art gone—most lov’d, most honor’d Friend!
N o—never more thy gentle voice shall blend

With air of earth its pure, ideal tones,—

Binding in one, as with harmonious zones,

The heart and intellect. And I no more

Shall with Thee gaze on that unfathom’d deep,

The human soul ;—as when, push’d off the shore,

Thy mystic bark would thro’ the darkness sweep,
Itself the while so bright! For oft we seem’d

234 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

So must it have been with Mr. Southey and Lord Byron, when
the one fancied himself composing his Roderick, and the other
his Childe Harold. The same must hold good of all systems
' of philosophy ; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and by
land; in short, of all things that ever have been or that ever
will be produced. For, according to this system, it is not the
affections and passions that are at work in as far as they are
sensations or thoughts. We only fancy, that we act from rational
resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or
generosity. In all these cases the real agent is a something-
nothing-everything, which does all of which we know, and knows
nothing of all that itself does.

The existence of an inﬁnite spirit, of an intelligent and holy
will, must, on this system, be mere articulated motions of the air.
For as the function of the human understanding is no other than
merely to appear to itself to combine and to apply the phenom-
ena of the association ; and as these derive all their reality from
the primary sensations ; and the sensations again all their reality
from the impressions ab extra; a God not visible, audible, or tangi-
ble, can exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and
attributes. If in ourselves there be no such faculties as those of
the will, and the scientific reason, we must either have an innate
idea of them, which would overthrow the whole system ; or we
can have no idea at all. The process, by which Hume degraded
the notion of cause and ellect into a blind product of delusion
and habit, into the mere sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis)
associated with the images of the memory ;* this same process
must be repeated to the equal degradation of every fundamental
idea in ethics or theology. '

Far, very far am I from burthening with the odium of these
consequences the moral characters of those who ﬁrst formed, or
have since adopted the system! It is most noticeable of the
excellent and pious Hartley, that, in the proofs of the exist/nice

As on some starless sea—all dark above,
All dark below—yet, onward as we drove,
To plough up light that ever round us stream’d.
But he who mourns is not as one bereft
Of all he lov’d :—Thy living Truths are left.
Cambridge Port, Massachusetts, America—EJJ

’ [Sec Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding. Sect. vii_.—.Ed.l

BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARIA. 235

and attributes of God, with which his second volume commences,
he makes no reference to the principle or results of the ﬁrst.
Nay, he assumes, as his foundations, ideas which, if we embrace
the doctrines of his ﬁrst volume, can exist nowhere but in the
vibrations of the ethereal medium common to the nerves and
to the atmosphere. Indeed the whole of the second volume is,
with the fewest possible exceptions, independent of his peculiar
system. So true is it, that the faith, which saves and sanctiﬂes,
is a collective energy, a total act of the whole moral being ; that
its living sensom‘um is in the heart; and that no errors of the
understanding can be morally arraigned unless they have pro-
ceeded from the heart. But whether they be such, no man can
be certain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps even in his

own. gHence it follows by inevitable consequence, that man may '

perchance determine what 1s a heresy , but God only can know
who is a heretic It does not, however, by any means follow
that opinions fundamentally false are harmless. A hundred
causes may co-exist to form one complex antidote. Yet the sting
of the adder remains venomous, though there are many who have
taken 11p the evil thing, and it hurted them not. QSome indeed)
there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbor nation at
least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all ital

moral and religious consequences ; some— ‘

who deem themselves most f1 ee, /

When they Within this gross and visible sphele
Chain down the Winged thought, scoﬂing ascent,

Min thei1 $219318}; and themselves they cheat V/
'With noisy emptiness of learned ph1ase, ‘

Their subtle ﬂuids, impacts, essences,

Self-wor k1n0' tools, uncaus’d effects, and all
ll Those blind omniscients. those almighty slaves,
llUntenanting c1eation of its God. P“

Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made
better men, before they can become wiser.

The attention will be more proﬁtably employed in attempting
to discover and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which
such a faith could ﬁnd admission into minds framed for a nobler
creed. These, it appears to me, may be all reduced to one so-
phism as their common genus ; the mistaking the conditions of

* [Destiny of Nations. Poet Works, V1]. p. 83.—Ed.]

J"—>-_“

236 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

a thing for its causes and essence , and the process, by which we
arrive at the knowledge of a faculty, for the faculty itself. ) The
air I breathe is the condition of my life, not its cause. WE could
never have learned that we had eyes but by the process of seeing ;
yet having seen, we know that the eyes must have pre-existed in
order to render the process of sight possible. Let us cross-examv
ine Hartley’s scheme under the guidance of this distinction ; and
we shall discover that contemporaneity (Leibnitz’s Lex Con—
tinui*) 's ' ' condition of the laws of mind, itself
being rather a law of matter, at least of phanomeua considered
as material. At the utmost, it is to thought the same, as the law
of gravitation is to locomotion. In every voluntary movement
we ﬁrst counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it.
It must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted,
and which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is exerted to
resist it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We ﬁrst
resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then
by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to light
on the spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves.
N ow let a man watch his mind while he is composing ; or, to
take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a
name ; and he will ﬁnd the process completely analogous. Most
of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the sur-
iace of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed
with prismatic colors on the sunny bottom of the brook; and
will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against
the stream by alternative pulses of active and passive motion,
now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to
' gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propul-

* [This principle of a continuum, cette belle [02' de la continuité. as Leib.
nitz calls it in his lively style, which is even gay for that of a. deep philos-
opher, intent on discovering the composition of the Universe, was intro-
duced by him and ﬁrst announced, as he mentions himself, in the Nouvelles
de la Républigue des Lettres de jlfr. Bag/1e, which forms Art. xxiv. of Erd-
mann’s edition of his works, under the title of Ewtrait d’zme Lettre 6. 2117'.
Eagle, &c. He dwells upon this law in many of his philosophical writings.
“ C’est une de mes grandes maximes,” says he, “ et des plus vériﬁées, que la
nature nefaitjamais des sauts.” (Natura non agit saltatz’m.) “ J’appellois
cela la loi de la continuité, &c., et l’usage de cette lois est trés considerable
dans la Physique.” Nouveaux Essais. Avcmt propos, p. 198, of Erdmann’s
edit.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. “237

sion. [ibis is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self- -experience in
the act of thinking. Themre evidently two powers at work, r
which 1elatively to each other are :10qu
not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at oncebgth .
active and passive.* In philosophical language, we must denomi-
nate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations,
the IMAGINATIONII' But, in common language, and especially on
the-Wary, we appropriate the name to a superior de-
gree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary control oveth—A
Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the
laws of association, and a component element in the material.
subjecta, the parts of which are to be associated, must needs be
00- present with all. Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than
to pass off on an incautious mind this constant compamon of eaeh,
for the essential substance of all But if we appeal to our own
consciousness,.we shall ﬁnd that even time itself, as the cause of
a particular act of association, is distinct from contemporaneity,
as the condition of all association. Seeing a mackerel, it may
happen, that I immediately think of gooseberries, because I at the
same time ate mackerel with gooseberries as the sauce. The ﬁrst
syllable of the latter word, being that which had co-existed with
the image of the bird so called, I may then think of a goose. In
the next moment the image of a swan may arise before me,
though I had never seen the two birds together. In the ﬁrst two
instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in time was the
circumstance, that enabled me to recollect them ; and equally
conscious am I that the latter was recalled to me by the joint
operation of likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect;
so too with order. So I am able to distinguish whether it was
proximity in time, or continuity in space, that occasioned me to
recall B. on the mention of A. They can not be indeed separa-

 

 

* [Schelling describes an activity and passivity which reciprocally pre-
suppose, or are conditioned through, one another. But he is endeavoring
to solve the problem how the I beholds itself as perceptive. Tram °sc. Id.
p. 136, et passim.—S. 0.]

1- [Maasz thus deﬁnes the Imagination at p. 2 : “But all representations
and modiﬁcations of the sense” (receptivity of impressions), “which are
not really in it, so far as it is affected by an object, must be produced
through an active faculty of the same, which is distinguished from the
Senses, and may be called the Imagination in the Widest sense. Transl—

s. 0.]

238 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

ted from contemporaneity; for that would be to separate them
from the mind itself. The act of consciousness is indeed identical
with time considered in its essence. I mean time per 86, as con-
tra-distinguished from our notion of time ; for this is always
blended with the idea of space, which, as the opposite of time, is
therefore its measure.* Nevertheless ill? accident 0f seeing tWC
objects atthe same moment, and the accident of seeing them in
the same place are“ two’distinct' or distinguishable causes : and
‘the true practical general law of association is this ; that what-
ever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or dis-
tinct than the rest, will determine the mind to recall these in pref-
erence to others equally linked together by the common condition
of contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more appropriate and
philosophical term) of continuity. But the will itself by conﬁn-
ing and intensifying’r the attention may arbitrarily give vividness
or distinctness to any object whatsoever; and from hence we
may deduce the uselessness, if not the absurdity, of certain recent
schemes which promise an artiﬁcial memory, but which in reality
can only produce a confusion and debasement of the fancy.
Sound logic, as the habitual subordination of the individual to the
species, and of the species to the genus ; philosophical knowledge
of facts under the relation of cause and effect; a cheerful and
communicative temper disposing us to notice the similarities and
contrasts of things, that we may be able to illustrate the one by

he other; a quiet conscience; a condition free from anxieties;

ound health, and above all (as far as relates to passive remem-

rance) a healthy digestion; these are the best, these are the

Y

nly Arts of Memory. 'x
._./”

9" [Schelling teaches that the most original measure of Time is Space, of
Space Time; and that both are opposed to each other for this reason that
they mutually limit one another. Transsc. Id. Tiibingen, 1800, pp. 216—17.
See also Idem, 325—6.—S. 0.]

f I am aware, that this word occurs neither in Johnson’s Dictionary nor
in any classical writer. But the word, to intend, which Newton and others
before him employ in this sense, is now so completely appropriated to
another meaning, that I could not use it without ambiguity: while to para-
phrase the sense, as by render intense, would often break up the sentence
and destroy that harmony of the position of the words with the logical
position of the thoughts, which is a beauty in all composition, and-more
especially desirable in a close philosophical investigation. I have therefore
hazarded the word intensify ; though, I confess, it sounds uncouth to my
own car.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SYSTEM OF DUALISM INTRODUCED BY DES CARTES—REFINED
FIRST BY SPINOZA AND AFTERWARDS BY LEIBNITZ INTO THE
DOCTRINE OF HARMONIA PRJESTABILITA—HYLOZOISM—MATERIAL-
ISM—NONE OF THESE SYSTEMS, OR ANY POSSIBLE THEORY OF
ASSOCIATION, SUPPLIES OR SUPERSEDES A THEORY OF PERCEP-
TION, OR EXPLAINS THE FORMATION OF THE ASSOCIABLE.

To the best of my knowledge Des Cartes was the ﬁrst philoso-
pher, who, introduced the absolute and essential heterogeneity 0f
the soul as intelligence, and the body as matter.* Thej._§suinp-
tion, and the form of speaking have remained, though the denial
01 all other properties to matter but that of extension, on which
denial the whole system of Dualism is grounded, has been long
exploded. For since impenetrability 1s intelligible only as a mode
of resistance; its admission places the essence of (mattgr in an act
or power, which it possesses in common with spziit ;T and body
and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but
may without any absurdity be supposed to be different modes, or
degrees in perfection, of a common substratum. To this possi-
bility, however, it was not the fashion to advert. The soul was
a thinking substance, and body a space-filling substance. Yet
the apparent action of each on the other pressed heavy 011 the
philosopher on the one hand ; and no less heavily on the other

* [Principia Philosophiaz, P. i. §§ 52-3, 63—4.—S. 0.]

+ [Compare with Schelling’s Abhandlungen zur Erlduterzmg des Ideal
ismus der Wéssenschaftslehre—Philosophische Schriften. Landshut, 1809.
(See note infra.) Compare also with what Leibnitz lays down on this point
in the last paragraph of his paper De Primal: Philosophies Emendatione—
which forms Art. xxxiv. of Erdmann’s edition of his works, Bcrol. 1840, and
with the Nouveaux Essais (Liv. ii. 0. xi. § 2, Erdmann, p. 250), where he
says that matter has not only mobility, which is the receptivity or capacity
of movement, but also resistance, which comprehends impenetrability and
inertia—S. 0.] i

240 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

hand pressed the evident truth, that the law of causality holds
only between homogeneous things, that is, things having some
common property; and can not extend from one world into
another, its contrary."‘ A close analysis evinced it to be no less
absurd than the question whether a man’s affection for his wife
lay North-east, or South-west of the love he bore towards his
child. Leibnitz’s doctrine of a pre-established harmony ;‘,t which
he certainly borrowed from Spinoza, who had himself taken the
hint from Des Cartes’s animal machines; was in its common in-

* [System des transscendentalen Idealismus, pp. 112—113. See the next
note but two—S. 0.]

+ [This theory Leibnitz unfolds in his Systéme nouveau de la nature et de
(a. communication des substances, 1695. Opp. ed. Erdmann, p. 124, in his
Eclaircissanens du nouveau systéme. I. II. and III. Ibid. pp. 131—3, 4.
Réplz’que aux Réﬂexions de Bag/1e, &c. 1702. Ibid. 183. He speaks of it
also in his .Monadologz'e, 1714, ibid. 702, and many of his other writings.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz was born at Leipzig, June 2-1, 1746, died Nov.
14, 1716. This great man, whose intellectual powers and attainments were
so various and considerable that he has been ranked among the universal
geniuses of the world, appears to have been the principal founder of that
modern school of philosophy which succeeded to the scholastic. He seems
to have united the profundity of a German in the matter of his disquisitions,
with something of the Frenchman’s polish and lightness of touch in the
manner of them; which may be accounted for, in some measure, by his
Teutonic birth on the one hand, and his use of the French language on the
other.—S. 0.]

f; [Specimina Philosophim—Diss. de Meth. g V. pp. 30—3, edit. 1664. Des
Cartes thought it a pious opinion to hold that brute creatures are mere
automata, set in motion by animal spirits acting on the nerves and muscles
—becausc such a view widens the interval betwixt man and the beasts that
perish. Wesley thought it'a pious opinion to suppose that they have souls
capable of salvation. Leibnitz comments upon the Cartesian notion on this
subject, in his essay De Anima Brutorum, wherein he distinguishes ad-
mirably between the intelligence of brutes and the reasonable souls of men.
(§ 14. Opp. ed. Erdmann, pp. 464—5.) Mr. Coleridge remarks upon Wesley’s
opinion in a note printed in the new edition of Southey’s Life of Wesley.
chap. xx. Des Cartes compares the souls or quasi-souls of brutes to a well-
made watch, arguing from the uniformity, certainty, and limitedness of
their actions, that nature acts in them according to the disposition of their
organs. Leibnitz—(in his Troisz'éme Eclaz'rcz'ssement, and elsewhere)——com-
pares the body and soul of man to two well-made watches, which perfectly
agree with one another. It is easy to see how the latter, while he was re
futing his predecessor’s opinion as a whole, may have borrowed something
from it. The likeness to Spinoza’s doctrine is more recondite, but may be
traced in Part ii. of the Ethics, on the nature and origin of the mind—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 241

, terpretation too strange to survive the inventor—too repugnant
to our common sense ; which is not indeed entitled to a judicial
voice in the courts of scientiﬁc philosophy ; but whose whispers

,still exert a strong secret inﬂuence. Even Wolf, the admirer
and illustrious systematizer of the Leibnitzian doctrine, contents
himself with defending the possibility of the idea, but does not
adopt it as a part of the ediﬁce.

The hypothesis of H lozoism, on the other side, is the death of
all rational physiology, and indeed of all physical science; for
that requires a limitation of terms, and can not consist with the
arbitrary power of multiplying attributes by occult qualities.
Besides, it answers no purpose; unless, indeed, a difﬁculty can
be solved by multiplying it, or we can acquire a clearer notion
of our soul by being told that we have a million of souls, and
that every atom of our bodies has a soul of its own. Far more
prudent is it to admit the difﬁculty once for all, and then let it
lie at rest. There is a sediment indeed at the bottom of the
vessel, but all the water above it is clear and transparent. The
Hylozoist only shakes it up, and renders the whole turbid.

But it is not either the nature of man, or the duty of the phi
losopher to despair concerning any important problem until, as in
the squaring of the circle, the impossibility of a solution has been
demonstrated. How the esse assumed as originally distinct
from the scire, can ever unite itself with it ;* how beingcan

* [A passage in the Transsc. Id. pp. 112—13—14, contains many thoughts
brought forward by Mr. Coleridge in this and the three following pages. A
translation of it is subjoined, with the borrowed passages marked in italics.
The last sentence is borrowed in chapter ix. of B. L. -

“The act, through which the I limits itself, is no other than that of the
self-consciousness, at which, as the explanation-ground of all Limitedness
(Begrdntztseyns) we come to a stand, and for this reason, that how any affec-
tion from without can transform itself into a representing or knowing is
absolutely inconceivable. Supposing even that an object could work upon
the I, as on an object, still such an affection could only bring forth some-
thing homogeneous, that is only an objective determinateness (Bestimmtseyn)
over again. Thus how an original Being can convert itself into a Knowing
would only be conceivable in case it could be shown that even Representation
itself (die Vorstellung selbst) is a kind of Being; which is indeed the expla-
nation of Materialism, a system that would be a boon to the philosopher, if it
really performed what it promises. But him, such as it has hitherto
been, is wholly unintelligible ; 'make it intelligible, ana it is no longer distin-
guisM‘inreality fromtransceudan; To explain thinking as :2

VOL. In. L'

212 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

transform tself into a knowing, becomes conceivable on one only '
condition , namely, if it can be shown that the iis representative,
or tthentient, is its elf a species of being: that is either as a
property or attribute, or as an hypostasis or self subsistence. The;
former—that thinking is a property of matter under particular
conditions—is, indeed the assumption of ‘materialism ; a system
which could not but be patronized‘ by the philosopher, if only i‘
actually perfo1med what it p1omises. But how any affection
from without can metam01 phose itself into perception or will, the
materialist has hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible as he
found it, but has aggravated it into a comprehensible absurdity.
For, grantthat an object from without could act upon the con-
scious self, as on a consubstantial object ; yet such an affection
could only engender something homogeneous with itself. Motion
could only propagate motion. Matter has no Inward: ' we re-
move one surface, but to meet with another.* We can but divide
a particle into particles; and each atom comprehends in itself

material phrenomenon is only possible in this way, that we reduce matter itself
to a spectra—t0 the mere modiﬁcation of an Intelligence whose common
functions are thinking and matter. Consequently Materialism itself is car-
ried back to the Intelligent (das Intelligente) as the original. And assuredly
just as little can we succeed in an attempt to explain Being out of Knowing,
so as to represent the former as the product of the latter; seeing that be-
twixt the two no casual relationship is possible, and they could never meet
together, were they not o1iginally one in the I. Being (\Iatter), considered
as productive, is a Knowing, Knowing considei ed as p1 oduet 3 Being. If
Knowing is productii e in ge11e1al, it must be wholly and th1ougl1out pro-
ductive, not in part only. Nothing can come from without into the Knowing,
for all that is is identical with the Knowing, and without it is nothing at all.
If the one Factor of Rep1esentation lies in the I, so must the other also;

ﬂu in the object the two are insepa1 able. Let it be supposed, for example,
that the stuﬂ (or mate1ial) belongs to the things, it follows that this stuﬁ‘ be-
fore it arrives at the I, at least in the transition from the thing to the repre
sentation, must be formless, which without doubt is inconceivable."—S. C.]

* Abhandlungen. Phil. Schrift. pp. 240-241. Translation. “ What mat
ter, that is the object of the external intuition, is, we may analyze forever—
may divide it mechanically or chemically: we never get further than to the
surfaces of bodies. That alone in matter which is indestructible is its in-
dwelling power, which discovers itself to feeling through impenetrability. But
this is a power which goes merely ad extra—only works contrary to the
outward impact ; thus it is no power that returns into itself. Only a power
that returns into itself makes to itself an Inward. Thence to matter belongs
no Inward. But the representing being behelds an inner world. This is
not pessible except through an activity which gives to itself its own sphere,

 

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 243

the properties of the material universe.* Let any reﬂecting
mind make the experiment of explaining to itself the evidence of
our sensuous intuitions, from the hypothesis that in any given
perception there is. a »-something which. has been communicated
to it by an impact, or an impression ab ext/m: In the-ﬁrst place,

or, in other words, returns into itself. But no activity goes back into itself,
which does not, on this very account and at the same time, also go outward.
There is no sphere without limitation, but just as little is there limitation
without space. which is limited.” _

See also Schelling’s Idem 2n einer th'losophie der Nam-r. Introd. 2d
edit. Landshut, 1803, p. 22.—~—S. 0.]

'* [For great part of the remainder of this paragraph see Schelling’s
Transsc. Id. pp. 149—50. Compare also with Ideen, Introd. p. ‘22.

Schelling concludes the former passage in the Transsc. Id. as follows:
Transl. “ The most consistent proceeding of Dogmatism”——(that is, the old
method of determining upon supersensible objects without a previous in-
quiry into the nature and scope of the faculties by which the inquiry is to
be carried on,—without “a pre-inquisition into the mind”)——“ is to have
recourse to the mysterious for the origin of representations of external
things, and to speak thereof as of a revelation, which renders all further
explanation impossible; or to make the inconceivable Origination of a thing
so dissimilar in kind, as the representation from the impulse of an outward
object, conceivable through a power, to which, as to the Deity (the only
immediate object of our knowledge, according to that system), even the
impossible is possible.”

Schelling seems to have had in his mind such doctrine as that which is
thus stated by Professor Stewart : “It is now, I think, pretty generally ac-
knowledged by physiologists, that the inﬂuence of the will over the body is
a mystery, which has never yet been unfolded ; but, singular as it may ap~
pear, Dr. Reid was the ﬁrst person who had courage to lay completely
aside all the common hypothetical langm 0‘e concerning perception, and to
exhibit the difﬁculty in all its magnitude, by a plain statement of the fact.
To what then, it may be asked, does this statement amount? Merely to
this; that the mind is so formed, that certain impressions produced on our
organs of sense by external objects, are followed by correspondent sensa-
tions; and that these sensations (which have no more resemblance to the
qualities of matter, than the words of a language have to the things they
denote), are followed by a perception of the existence and qualities of the
bodies by which the impressions are made; that all the steps of this pro-
cess are equally incomprehensible; and that, for any thing we can prove
to the contrary, the connection between the impression and the sensation
may be both arbitrary: that it is therefore by no means impossible, that
our sensations may be merely the occasions on which the correspondent per-
ceptions are excited; and that, at any rate, the consideration of these sero
sations, which are attributes of mind, can throw no light on the manner in
which we acquire our knowledge of the existence and qualities of body

244 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

by the impact on the percipient, or ens representans, not the ob-
ject itself, but only its. action or effect, will pass into the same.
Not the iron tongue, but its vibrations, pass into the metal of
the bell. Now in our immediate perception, it is not the mere
power or act of the object, but the object itself, which is imme-
diately present. We might indeed attempt to explain this result
by a chain of deductions and conclusions; but that, ﬁrst, the
very faculty of deducing and concluding would "equally demand
an explanation; and secondly, that there exists in fact no such
intermediations by logical notions, such as those of cause and
effect. It is the object itself, not the product of a syllogism,
which is present to our consciousness. Or would we explain
this supervention of the object to the sensation, by a productive
faculty set in motion by an impulse ; still the transition, into the
percipient, of the object itself, from which the impulse proceeded,
assumes a power that can permeate and wholly possess the soul.

And like a God by spiritual art,
Be all in all, and all in every part.*“

And how came the percipient here? And what is become of
the wonder-promising Matter, that was to perform all these mar-
vels by force of mere ﬁgure, weight and motion '3 The most con-
sistent proceeding of the dogmatic materialist is to fall back into

From this view of the subject it follows, that it is external objects them
aelves, and not any species or images of these objects, that the mind per
:eives; and that, although, by the constitution of our nature, certain sensa-
tions are rendered the constant antecedents of our perceptions, yet it is
just as difﬁcult to explain how our perceptions are obtained by their
means, as it would be, upon the supposition, that the mind were all at once
inspired with them, without any concomitant sensations whatever.”—Ele-
:nents of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, pp. 69—70.

Such statements, in the view of the Transcendentalist, involve a contra-
diction—namely, that the soul can penetrate, by perception, into that
which is without itself : or that the human soul, by divine power, has pres-
ent to it,'or takes in essential properties not of mind, but of something alien
from mind and directly contrary to it; which is impossible. The exploded
hypothesis of species and images was an attempt to do away the contradic-
tion; the doctrine found wanting by Schelling shows the futility of that at-
tempt; but in assuming the real outness orseparatcness of the objects of
perception—~that they are, as things in themselves, apart from and extrin~
sic to our mind, appears to set up the contradiction again, or at least to
keep it rip—S. 0.]

* [Altered from Cowley’s All over Love. II.——-Ed.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 245

the common rank of soul-and-bodyists ; to affect the mysterious,
and declare the whole process a revelation given, and not to be
understood, which it would be profane to examine too closely.
Datm‘ 7207c intelligitur. But a revelation unconﬁrmed by mira-
cles, and a faith not commanded by the conscience, a philosopher
may venture to pass by, without suspecting himself of" any irreli-
gious tendency.

Thus, as materialism has been generally taughW

unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity so
./———————r .- .. .

 

common among men, to mistake distinct images for clear 0011p_ep~
tions; and vice versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from
its own nature is unimaginablE“ But as soon as it becomes in-
telligible, it ceases to be materialism. In ”order‘to explain think-~
z'ng as a material phaenomenon, it is necessary to reﬁne matter
into a mere modiﬁcation of intelligence, with the two- fold func-
tion of apjied¢zng and percewmg. Even so did Priestley 1n his
contloversy with Price. He stripped matter of all its material-
properties ; substituted Spiritual powers ; and when we expected
to ﬁnd a body, behold ! we had nothing but its ghost—the appa-
rition of a defunct substance !

Ishall not dilate further 011 this subject; because it will (if
God grant health and permission) be treated of at large and sys
tematically in a work, which I have many years been preparing,
011 the Productive Logos human and divine; with, and as the
introduction to, a full commentary on the Gospel of St. John.
To make myself intelligible as far as my present subjectrequires
it qufHCIW y to observe—1. That all- association de
mands and presupposes the existence of the thoughts and 1magei
to be associated.— That the hypothésis of an external workJ
exatPtTy correspondent to those 1mages or modiﬁcations of our own
being, which alone, according to this system, we actually behold,
is as thorough idealism as Berkeley’s, inasmuch as it equally, per-
haps in a more perfect degree, removes all reality and immediate-
ness of perception, and places 11s in a dream-world of phantoms
and spectres,* the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation
of motions in our own brains—3. That this hypothesis neither
involves the explanation, nor precludes the necessity, of a mechan-'

 

 

9* [See Abhandlungen, Phil. Schrz'ft. p. 217. “ The Idealist in this sense
is left lonely and forsaken in the midst of the world, surrounded on all sides
by spectres. For him the1e is nothing immediate, and Intuition itself, in
which spirit and object meet. is to him but a dead thought” T1 ansl —§ 0.]

246 BIOGRAPHIA LITERAR IA.

ism and eo-adequate forces in the percipient, which at the more
than magic touch of the impulse from without is to create anew
for itself the correspondent object. The formation of a copy is
not solved by the mere pre-existence of an original ; the copyist
0f Raffael’s Transﬁguration must repeat more or less perfectly
the process of Raflael. It would be easy to explain a thought
from the image on the retina, and that from the geometry of
light, if this very light did not present the very same difficulty.*‘
We might as rationally chant the Brahmin ere-ed-of'the tortoise
that supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that sup-
ported the world, to the tune of“This is the house that Jack
built.” The sic D00 placitmn 636 we all admit as the sufﬁcient
cause, and the divine goodness as the sufﬁcient reason ; but an
answer to the Whence and Why is no answer to the How, which
alone is the physiologist’s concern. It is a sophisma pigrmn, and
(as Bacon hath said) the arrogance of pusillanimity, which lifts
up the idol of a mortal’s fancy and commands us to fall down and
worship it, as a work of divine wisdom, an ancile or palladium
fallen from heaven. By the very same argument the supporters
of the Ptolemaic system might have rebuffed the Newtonian,
and pointing to thith self-complacent grint‘ have appealed
to common sense, whet r the sun did not move and the earth
stand still.

9* [The reasoning here appears to be the same as in the Idcen. Introd. pp.
22—3. Schelling says—“ You curiously inquire how the light, radiated back
from bodies, works on your optic nerves; also how the image inverted on
the retina, appears in your soul not inverted but straight. But again, what
is that in you which itself sees this image on the retina, and inquires how ‘
it can have come into the soul. Evidently something which so far is wholly
independent of the outward impression and to which, however, this impres—
sion is not unknown. How then came the impression to this region of your
soul, in which you feel yourself entirely free and independent of impres~
sions? If you interpose between the affection of your nerves, your brain
and so forth, and the representation of an outward thing ever so many in-
tervening links, you do but cheat yourself: for the passage over from body
to soul can not, according to your peculiar representations” (mode of per-
ceiving), “ take place continuously, but only through a leap,—which yet you
propose to avoid." Transl. Compare this chapter with the remarks on
the Philosophy of the Dualists in Jdeen. 57.—Ed.]

1' And Coxcombs Vanquish Berkeley by a grin.1

 

‘ [Dr. John Brown’s Essay 0!. Satire (which was published in vol. ii. of
Warbur ton’s edit. of Pope, and in vol. iii. of Dodsley’s Collection), Part ii. 1.
294. —S. 0.1

CHAPTER IX.

IS PHILOSOPHY POSSIBLE AS A SCIENCE, AND WHAT ARE ITS CONDI-
TIONS ?—GIORDANO BRUNO—LITERARY ARISTOCRACY, OR THE
EXISTENCE OF A TACIT COMPACT AMONG TIIE LEARNED AS A
PRIVILEGED ORDER—THE AUTHOR’S OBLIGATIONS TO THE MYS*
TICS—TO IMMANUEL KANT—THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE
LETTER AND THE SPIRIT OF KANT,S WRITINGS, AND A VINDICA-
TION OF PRUDENCE IN THE TEACHING OF PIIILOSOPHY—FICHTE’S
ATTEMPT TO COMPLETE THE CRITICAL SYSTEM—ITS PARTIAL
SUCCESS AND ULTIMATE FAILURE—OBLIGATIONS TO SCHELLING:
AND AMONG ENGLISH \VRITERS TO SAUMAREZ.

AFTER I had successively studied in the schools of Loglgg.
Berkeley, Leibnitz and Hartley, and could find in none of them
anWr my reason, I began to ask myself; isasys:
tem of philosophy, as, different from mere history and historic
classiﬁcation],possible? If possible, what are its necessary con-
ditions-{’ﬁ-I was for a while disposed to answer the ﬁrst question
in the negative, and to admit that the sole practicable employ- *
ment for the human mind was to observe, to collect, and to clas-
sify. But I soon felt, that human nature itself fought up against
this wilful resignation of intellect ; and as soon did I ﬁnd, that
the scheme, taken with all its consequences and cleared of all in-
consistencies, was not less impracticable than contra-natural.
Assume in its full extent the position, ni/zz'l in intellectu quad non
prius in sensw, assume it without Leibnitz’s qualifying prceter
ipsum intellectum,* and in the same sense, in which the position

9* [“ On ln’opposcra cet axiome, regu parmi les Philosophes: que rieu
n’est dans l'ainc qui ne vienne des sens. Mais i1 faut excepter I‘ame méme
et ses affections. Nz’hil est in intellectu, quad non fuerit in sensu, excipe:
nisi ipse intellectus. Or I’ame renferme I’étre, Ia substance, l’un, Ie méme, Ia
cause, Ia perception, 1e raisonnement, et quantité d’autres notions que lea
tens nc sauroient donner. Cela s’accorde assez avec votre Auteur de l’cssai.

248 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

was understood by Hartley and Condillac: and then what Hume
had demonstratively deduced from this concession concerning
cause and effect, will apply with equal and crushing force to all
the other eleven categorical forms,* and the logical functions cor-
responding to them. How can we make bricks without straw ;—
or build without cement ? We learn all things indeed by occa-
sion of experience ; but the very facts so learned force us inward
on the antecedents, that must be presupposed in order to render
experience itself possible. The ﬁrst book of Locke’s Essay (if
the supposed error, which it labors to subvert, be not a mere

qui cherche une bonne partie des Idées dans la réﬂexion de l’esprit sur sa
propre nature.”——Nouveau.v Essais s-ur Z’Entendcment Hmnain, liv. ii. 0. 1.
Erdmann, p. 223. Leibnitz refutes Locke, as commonly understood, on his
own showing, and he maintained that if ideas come to us only by sensation
or reﬂection, this is to be understood of their actual perception, but that
they are in us before they are perceived. See also his Réﬂexions sur I’Essa.i
de Locke—Art. xli. and Meditatz'ones dc cognitione, veritate, et ideis, Art. ix.
of Erdmann’s edition of his works—S. 0.]

9* Videlicet; Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Mode, each consisting of
three subdivisions. See Ii'rz'ti/c dcr rcinen V crmmft.‘ See too the judicious
remarks on L *cke and Hume.2

 

‘ [Pp. 104 and 110—11, vol. ii. Works. Leipzig, 1838 —Ed.]

2 [1b. pp. 125—6. “ The celebrated Locke, from want of this consideration,
and because he met with pure conceptions of the understanding in experi-
ence, has also derived them from experience; and moreover he proceeded
So inconsequently, that he ventured therewith upon attempts at eognitions.
which far transcend all limits of experience. Hume acknowledged that, in
order to the last, these conceptions must necessarily have their origin 6.
priori. But, as he could not explain how it is that the understanding should
think conceptions, not in themselves united in the understanding, yet as
necessarily united in the object,—and not hitting upon this, that probably
the understanding by means of these (c2 prioré) conceptions was itself the
author of the experience, wherein its objects are found—he was forced to
derive these conceptions from experience, that is to say, from subjective
necessity arising from frequent association in experience, erroneously con-
sidered to be objective :—I mean from habit: although afterwards he acted
very consistently in declaring it to be impossible with these conceptions
and the principles to which they give birth to transcend the limits of ex-
perience. However the empirical derivation, on which both Locke and
Hume fell, is not reconcilable with the reality of those scientiﬁc cognitions
d priori which we possess, namely, pure Mathematics and General Physics,
and is therefore refuted by the fact.”—Ed. See also the whole Section en-
titled, Uebergang zur transsccndentalen Deduction der Ifategorien, pp. 123—6
——S. 0.]

x

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 249

thing of straw, an absurdity which, no man ever did, (.I‘ indeed
ever could, believe) is formed on a (toque/m é:ego§1;rrjoewg,* and
involves the old mistake of Cum hoe : ergo, propter hoe.

The term, Philosophy, deﬁnes itself as an affectionate seeking
after the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This
again is no way conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate,
that both are ab initio, identical and co-inherent ; that intelli-
gence and being are reciprocally each other’s substrate. I pre-
sumed that this was a possible conception (i. e. that it involved
no logical inconsonance), from the length of time during which
the scholastic deﬁnition of the Supreme Being, as actns puris—
simus sine nlla potentialitale, was received in the schools of
Theology, both by the Pontiﬁcian and the Reformed divines.
The early study of Plato and of Plotinus, with the commentaries
and the THEOLOGIA PLATONICA of the illustrious Florentine ;‘l‘ of
Proclusj: and Gemistius Pletho ;§ and at a later period of the
De Immense et Innnmembili,” and the “De la; causa, principio
et nno,” of the philosopher of Nola, who could boast of a Sir
Philip Sidney and Fulke Grevillc among his patrons, and Whom
the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in the year 1600 ; had
all contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and we]-
coming of the Cogito quiz; Sum, et Simizia Q'Qgito; a philos-
ophy of seeming hardihoodjbut Sega—rinly the most ancient, and
therefore presumptively the most natural.

Why need I be afraid ? Say rather how dare I be ashamed
of the Teutonic theosophist, Jacob Behmen HT Many, indeed,

9* [See Maasz, ubi supra, p. 366.—Ed.]

1- [Marsilii Ficini Theologia Platonica, seu de immortalitate animorum
ac aeternafelicitate. Ficinus was born at Florence, 1433, and died in 1499
-—Ed.]

1 [Proclus was born at Constantinople in 412, and died in 485.—Ed.]

{3 [G. Gemistius Pletho, a Constantinopolitan. He came to Florence in
1438. De Platonicw atgue Aristotelian philosop/zice dlﬁ'erentia.—Ed.]

H [De Innumerabilibus, Jmmenso et biﬁgurabili, seu de Universo et 1mm.
dis, libb. viii.—S. C.

T. Giordano Bruno was burnt at Rome on the 17th of February, 1599-
1600. See note in The Friend, II. p. 110, for some account of the titles
of his works. He particularly mentions Sidney in that curious work. La
.Oena de la (Jenni—Ed]

1T Boehm was born near Goerlitz in Upper Lusatia in 1575. The ele-
ments of his theology may be collected from his Aurora, and his treatise
“On the Three Principles of the Divine Essence.” A little book about

If)?

250 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

and gross were his delusions ; and such as furnish frequent and
ample occasion for the triumph of the learned over the poor ig-
norant shoemaker, who had dared think for himself. But while
we remember that these delusions were such, as might be antici-
pated from his utter want of all intellectual discipline, and from.
his ignorance of rational psychology, let it not be forgotten that
the latter defect he had in common With the most learned theo-
logians of his age. Neither with books nor with book-learned
men was he conversant. A meek and shy quietist, his intellec-
tual powers were never stimulated into feverous energy by
crowds of proselytes, or by the ambition of proselyting. Jacob
Bebmen was an enthusiast, in the strictest sense, as not merely
distinguished, but as contra-distinguished, from a fanatic. While
I in part translate the following observations from a contempo-
rary writer of the Continent, let me be permitted to premise, that
I might have transcribed the substance from memoranda of my
own, which were written many years before his pamphlet was
given to the world; and that I prefer another’s words to my
own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication ; but still
more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence
only was possible.”“

mystic writers, Theologize llIysticze Idea Generalior, mentions that the son
of Gr. Richter, the minister of Goerlitz, who wrote and preached against
Boehm and silenced him for seven years by procuring an order against him
from the senate of the city, after the decease of both the persecutor and
the persecuted, undertook to answer, for the honor of his father’s memory,
an effective reply of the theosophist to a violent publication against his
doctrine from the pen of his pastor. But that, contrary to all expecta-
tion, on reading and considering the books of our author, he not only aban-
doned his intention, but was constrained by conscience to take up the pen
on his side, against his own father. Boehm was a Lutheran, and died in
the communion of that church, in 1624. His most famous English follower
was John Pordage, a physician, born in 1625, who tried to reduce his theos-
ophy to a system, declaring himself to have recognized the truth of it by
revelations made to himself. He published several works in favor of
Behmen’s opinions, which were read in Germany, and are said to have be.
come the standard books of all enthusiasts—S. 0.]

'*' [By “the following observations” Mr. Coleridge meant those contained
in the two next paragraphs, as far as the words “William Law,” part of
which are freely translated from pages 154—56 of Schelling’s Darlegung
des walrren V erhdltm'sses der Natur-philosophie zu der verbesserten Iiichte'v
when Lehre, Tubingen, 1806.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 251

Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during
the last two or three centuries, can not but admit that there ap-.
pears to have existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among
the learned, not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative
science. The privilege of free thought, so highly extolled, has
at no time been held valid in actual practice, except within this
limit; and not a single stride beyond it has ever been ventured
without bringing obloquy 011 the transgressor. The few men of '
genius among the learned class, who actually did overstep this
boundary, anxiously avoided the appearance of having so done.
Therefore the true depth of science, and the penetration to the
inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to
their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate
and the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebul-
liency of spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling
and living ground of all things. These, then, because their names
had never been enrolled in the guilds of the learned, were perse
cuted by the registered livery-men as interlopers on their rights
and privileges. All without distinction were branded as fanatics
and phantasts ; not only those, whose wild and exorbitant imagi-
nations had actually engendered only extravagant and grotesque
phantasms, and whose productions were, for the most part, poor
copies and gross caricatures of genuine inspiration ; but the truly
inspired likewise, the, originals themselves. And this for no
other reason, but because they were the unlearned, men of hum-
ble and obscure occupations. When, and from whom among the
literati by profession, have we ever heard the divine doxology re-

The whole of the ﬁrst paragraph is thus taken from Schelling, except
the last sentence but one, and the third clause of the fourth.

For parts at the beginning and at the end of the second, he was indebted
to the following sentence of the Dmlegmtg, pp. 155— 6.

“ So now too may He1r Fichte speak of these enthusiasts with the most
heartfelt scholar’ s pride, although it is not easy to see why he exalts him-
self so altogether above them, unless it is because he can write orthographi-
cally, can form periods, and has the fashions of authorship at command;
while they, according to their simplicity, just as they found it, so gave it
utterance. No one, thinks Herr Fichte, that is not already wiser than
these men, could learn any thing from the perusal of their writings; and
so he thinks himself much wiser than they: nevertheless Herr Fichte
might give his whole rhetoric, if in all his books put together he had
shown the spirit and heart-fulness, which often a single page of many so-
called enthusiasts discovers.” T ranslation.—S. 0.]

252 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

peated, I thank thee 0 Father -‘ Lord of Heaven and Earth.’ he-
cause thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and
hast revealed them unto babesﬂt N o ; the haughty priests of learn-
ing not only banished from the Schools and marts of science all
who had dared draw living waters from the fountain, but drove
them out of the very Temple, which meantime the buyers, and
sellers, and money-changers were suffered to make a den of
thieves. “"'

And yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground
for this contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most dis—
tinguished themselves by their scorn of Behmen, Thaulerusj

* St. Luke x. 21.

f [I have ventured to substitute “ Thaulerus” for “De Thoyras” in the
text, having reason to suppose that the latter name was a mistake or mis-
print for the former.

John Thaulerus or Taulerus, sometimes called Dr. Thaulerus, was a cele-
brated mystic divine of the fourteenth century, the time and place of whose
birth is uncertain. He became a monk of the Dominican order, and died at
Strasbourg, according to the epitaph on his tomb, on the 17th of May, 1361.

He wrote several books of divinity in his own native language; the origi-
nal edition is very rarely found, but they were translated into Latin by Su-
rius, and published at Cologne in 1548. Among them are Exercises on the
Life and Passion of Christ, Institutions and Sermons. The T/zeologia Ger-
manica, also entitled, in the English translation, a little Golden Manual, has
been ascribed to him.

Very different judgments have been formed of the character and value of
his writings, as is commonly the case with respect to mystical productions,
the thoughts and language of which are in a state of glowing fusion, and
therefore capable of assuming different appearances, according to the moulds
of mind into which they are received. Some behold in them heresy and
fanaticism ; some hold them good in substance but too capable of perversion;
whilst on the other hand. many authors of weight and note, both Romanist
and Protestant, especially the latter, as Arnd, Muller, Melancthon, and oth-
ers, have commended them highly and unreservedly. Blosius the Abbot
styled their author a sincere maintainer of the Catholic faith. By Luther
this Mystic is spoken of in a spirit very similar to that manifested by Schel-
ling and Coleridge respecting the illiterate enthusiasts, whom they uphold
against the “literati by profession.” “ I know,” says he, “that this Doctor is
unknown to the schools of Divines, and therefore perhaps much despised ; but
I have found in him, though his writings are all in the German language,
more solid and true divinity than 5 found in all the Doctors of all the Uni-
versities, or than can be foUnd in their opinions.” (Luther, tom. i. Latin.
Jenens., page 86, 6, apud Heupelium, folio B. verso.) Dr. Henry More’s
opinion of him is thus given in the Gen. Biog. Dictionary, whence this ac-
count, with the quotation from Luther, is taken :

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 253

George Fox, and others ; unless it be, that they could write or.
thographically, make smooth periods, and had the fashions of au~
thorship almost literally at their ﬁngers’ ends, while the latter, in
simplicity of soul, made their words immediate echoes of their.
feelings. Hence the frequency of these phrases among them,
which have been mistaken for pretences to immediate inspiration ;
as for instance, “ It was delivered unto me ;”—“ I strove not to
3 male ;”—“ I said, I ’i‘b’ill be silent ;”—“ But the word was in
my heart as a burning ﬁre,"’—“and I could not forbear.”
Ilence too the unwillingness to give offence ; hence the foresight,
and the dread of the clamors, which would be raised against
them, so frequently avowed in the writings of these men, and
expressed, as was natural, in the words of the only book, with
which they were familiar.”“ “Woe is me that I am become a
man of strife, and a man of contention,—I love peace : the souls
of men are dear unto me : yet because I seek for light every one
of them doth curse me l” O 3 it requires deeper feeling, and a
stronger imagination, than belong to most of those, to whom
reasoning and ﬂuent expressions have been as a trade learnt in
boyhood, to conceive with what might, with what inward striv-
ings and commotion, the perception of a new and vital truth
takes possession of an uneducated man of genius. His medita-
tions are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, or the ever-
lasting ; for “ the world is not his friend, nor the world’s law.”

“ But amongst all the writings of this kind there was none which so af-
fected him, as that little book, with which Luther was so prodigiously
pleased, entitled, ‘ Theologica Germanica ;’ though he discovered in it, even
at that time, several marks of a deep melancholy, and no small errors in
matters of philos0phy. ‘But that,’ says our author, ‘ which he doth so
mightily inculcate, viz. that we should thoroughly put of and extinguish our
own (proper will, that being thus dead to ourselves, we may live alone to God,
and do all things whatsoever by his instinct and plenary permission, was so
connatnral, as it were, and agreeable to my most intimate reason and cone
science, that I could not of any thing whatsoever be more clearly and cer-
tainly eonvinced.’ ”—S. 0.]

* An American Indian with little variety of images, and a still scanticr
stock of language, is obliged to turn his few words to many purposes, by
likenesses so clear and analogies so remote as to give his language the sem-
blance and character of lyric poetry interspersed with grotesques. Some
thing not unlike this was the case of such men as Behmen and Fox with re~
gard to the Bible. It was their sole armory of expressions, their only organ
of thought.

254 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

Need we then be surprised, that, under an excitement at once so
strong and so unusual, the man’s body should sympathize with
the struggles of his mind ; or that he should at times be so far
deluded, as to mistake the tumultuous sensations of his nerves.
and the co-existing spectres of his fancy, as parts or symbols of
the truths which were opening on him? It has indeed been
plausibly observed, that in order to derive any advantage, or to
collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings of these igno-
rant Mystics, the reader must bring with him a Spirit and judg-
ment superior to that of the writers themselves :

And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?*

—a sophism, which I fully agree with Warburton, is unworthy
of Milton; how much more so of the awful Person, in whose
mouth he has placed it? One assertion I will venture to make,
as suggested by my own experience, that there exist folios on the
human understanding, and the nature of man, which would have
a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if in the whole
huge volume there could be found as much fulness of heart and
intellect, as burst forth in many a simple page of George Fox,
Jacob Behmen, and even of Behmen’s commentator, the pious

and fervid William Law-.i‘

*5 [Paradise Regained, B. iv. 1. 325—8. 0.] -

1- [William Law was born at King’s Cliffe, Northamptonshire, in 1688,
lied April 9, 1761. A list of seventeen religious works written by him is
given in the Gent. Mag. Nov. .1800. Toward the latter end of his life he
adopted “ the mystic enthusiasm of Jacob Behmen,” which tinctured his later
writings; and of that author’s works he prepared _an English edition.-
(Bchmen’s, Jacob, Works, to which is preﬁxed the Life of the Author, with
ﬁgures illustrating his principles. Left by the Rev. \Villiam Law, M.A.
London, 1764—81. 4 vols. 4to.)

Mr. Southey has the following passage on Law in his Life of \Vesley:

“About this time \Vesley became personally acquainted with William
Law, a man whose writings completed what Jeremy Taylor, and the trea-
tise De Imitatione Christ-2‘, had begun. When ﬁrst he visited him, he was
prepared to object to his views of Christian duty as too elevated to be at—
tainable; but Law silenced and satisﬁed him by replying, ‘ \Ve shall do well
to aim at the highest degrees of perfection, if wve may thereby at least at-
tain to mediocrity.’ Law is a powerful writer: it is said that few books
have ever made so many religious enthusiasts as his Christian Perfection
and his Serious Call: indeed, the youth who should read them without being
perilously affected, must have either a light mind or an unusually strong
one. But Law himself, who has shaken so many intelleets, sacriﬁced his

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 255

The feeling__of_ gratitude, which I cherish toward these men, .
has caused me to digress further than I had foreseen oriproposed ;
but to have passed them over in an historical sketch of my
literary life and opinions, would have seemed to me like the de-
nial of a debt, the concealment of a boon. For the writings-92
these Mystics actedin no. slight degree to prevent my--mind from
being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic sys-
tem. They contributed to keep alive the heart in the head;
gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentiment, that
all the products of the mere reﬂective faculty partook of death,
and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter, into which
a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had not
penetrated, if they were to aﬂbrd my soul either food or shelter.
If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet
they were always a pillar of ﬁre throughout the night, during my
Wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to
skirt, without crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. That
the system is capable of being converted into an irreligious Pan-
theism, I well know. The Ethics of Spinozaf‘ may, or may not,

own at last to the reveries and rhapsodies of Jacob Behmen. Perhaps the-
art of engraving was never applied to a more extraordinary purpose, nor in
a more extraordinary manner, than when the nonsense of the German shoe«
maker was elucidated in a series of prints after Law’s designs, representing
the anatomy of the spiritual man. His own happiness, however, was cer—
tainly not diminished by the change: the system of the ascetic is dark and
eheerless; but mysticism lives in a sunshine of its own, and dreams of the
light of heaven; while the visions of the ascetic are such as the fear of the
devil produces, rather than the love of God.” Vol. i. pp. 57—8.

The forthcoming new edition of the Life of Wesley contains numerous
marginal notes by Mr. Coleridge. Among these are two, explaining and de-,
fending some of the German shoemaker’s and his commentator’s sense or
“nonsense.”——S. 0.]

* [Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata. Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza
was born at Amsterdam, N ov. 24, 1632, was the son of a Portuguese Jew;
died at the Hague, Feb. 21, 1677.

Cousin positively denies the charge of atheism, in the form in which it
was laid, against Spinoza, declaring it to have originated in personal animos
ity, as did a similar one against Wolf. He aﬁirms that Spinoza’s is by no
means, either in terms, or in the spirit of the author, an atheistie system,
but rather a pantheism (formal and not material like that of the Eleatics)
containing and unfolding a high and worthy notion of God. “ Ce n’est qu’zi
unei époque récente,” says he, “ qu’on a commence a traiter avec plus dejus-
tice la personne et la doctrine de ce grand homme, et en meme temps on a

25G BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

be an instance. But at no time could I believe, that in itself and
essentially it is incompatible with religion, natural or revealed :
and now I am most thoroughly persuaded of the contrary. The
writings of the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the founder of the
Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigora-
ted and disciplined my understanding. we originality, the depth,
and the compression of the thoughts; e novelty and subtlety,
yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine
chain of the logic; and I will venture to add—(paradox as it
will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel
Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen)—the clearness and evi-

découvert, par la méthode critique (the method of Kant), le coté foible du
systéme.” Spinoza must indeed have been a most elaborate hypocrite if he
was consciously and intentionally an atheist. How strange it appears that
Christians, who are commanded to hope and believe all things favorably of
others, should have such an appetite for discovering unbelief and misbelief
even in those who manifest no evil heart or godless temper! It would
seem as if some men’s faith could not be kept alive and properly exercised,
unless, like the passionate Lord in the play, it were

allow’d a carcass to insult on,1

 

the vile body, to wit, of some other man’s inﬁdelity and irreligion.

“I have often thought,” says Mr. Coleridge, in his Notes on N oble's Ap-
peal, “ of writing a work to be entitled Vimlicicc Heterodoxce, sive celebrium
virorum ﬁapadoyluariﬁovmv defensio ,- that is, Vindication of Great Men un-
justly branded; and at such times the names prominent to my mind’s eye
have been Giordano Bruno, Jacob Behmen, Benedict Spinoza, and Emanuel
Swedenhorg.”

Still it was Mr. Coleridge’s ultimate opinion, that Spinoza’s system ex
eluded or wanted the true ground of faith in God as the Supreme Intelli-
gence and Absolute Will, to whom man owes religious fealty. He speaks
thus in The Friend, Essay Xi. H. p. 470.

“ The inevitable result of all consequent reasoning, in which the intellect
refuses to acknowledge a higher or deeper ground than it can itself supply,
and weens to possess within itself the centre of its own system, is—and
from Zeno the Eleatic to Spinoza, and from Spinoza to the Schellings,
Okens, and their adherents of the present day, ever has been—pantheism
under one or other of its modes, the least repulsive of which differs from the
rest, not in its consequences, which are one and the same in all, and in all
alike are practically atheistie, but only as it may express the striving of the
philosopher himself to hide these consequences from his own min .”—S. 0.]

 

1 This line, from The Nice Valor or The Passionate Madman of Beau~
mont and Fletcher, I ﬁrst saw quoted by Mr. Southey in a letter to Mr.
Murray.

BIOGRAPHIA LI'I‘ERARIA. 257

dence, of the Critique of the Pure Reason; and. Critique of the
Judgment ; of the Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy ;
and of his Religion within the bounds of Pure Reason, took
possession of me as With a giant’s hand.* After ﬁfteen years’
familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other produc-
tions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. The
few passages that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of
thought (as the chapter on original appercept’ion’r), and the ap-

* [The Critique of the pure Reason, Kr'ité/c der reinen Vemunﬂ, occupies
vol. ii. of the collective edition of the works of Kant in ten vols. Leipzig,
1838. -It ﬁrst appeared in 1781. The Critique of the Judgment, Kritik
der Urthez'lskraft, 1790, is contained in vol. vii. The Met. E1. of N. Philos-
ophy, ﬂfetaplzysisclae Anfangsgrilnde dcr Naturwissenschnft, 1786, may be
found in vol. viii. at p. 439. Religion within the bounds of pure Reason
-——R€ligion innerhalb der Grenzen der blosen Vernun ft, 1793, in vol. vi.
p. 159.

Immanuel Kant was born at Koenigsberg in 17 24, was appointed Rector
of the University there in 1786, after having declined repeated offers from
the King of Prussia, of a Professorship in the Universities of Jena, Erlan-
gen, Mittau, and Belle, with the rank of privy counsellor ; and died at his
native place, nearly 80 years old, Feb. 12, 1804.—S. C.

The following note is pencilled in Mr. C.’s copy of Schelling’s Philos-
ophische Schrz'ften, but the date does not appear.

“ I believe in my depth of being, that the three great works since the
introduction of Christianity are,—Bacon’s Novum Organum, and his other
works, as far as they are commentaries on it 2—Spinoza’s Ethical, with his
Letters and othe1 pieces, as far as they are comments on his Ethics: and
Kaut’s Critique of the Pule Reason, and his other wo1ks as commentaries
on, and applications of the same. ”--—E(l.]

+ [K rmk der rcz’nen Ve7 mmft. T1 anssc. Elementarlehre ii. Th. 1, Abth-
i. Buch. 2, Hauptst. 2, Abschn. Transsc. Deduction der reinen Verstandes-
begriffe. § 16 Von der urspritnglz'ch-synthetischen Einhez't der A pperception.
Works, Leipzig, 1838, vol. ii. p. 129. Apperception is treated of, or refer-
red to generally, throughout the division of the work entitled, Transcen-
dental Deduction of the pure conceptions of the Understanding, ending at

. 153.

P Apperception is thus deﬁned by Dr. Willich, in his Elements of the Crit
ical Philosophy, p.143.

“Apperception or Consciousness, or the faculty of becoming conscious,
signiﬁes

1. In general, the same as representation, or the faculty of representing:

2. In particular, the representation as distinct from the subject that rep
resents, and from the object that is represented,

3. Self-consciousness, for which we have two faculties,

a. The empirical. the internal sense, 2'. e. the consciousness of our state

258 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

parent contradictions which occur, I soon found were hmls and
insinuations referring to ideas, which KANT either did not think
it prudent to avow, or which he considered as consistently left
behind, in a pure analysis, not of human nature in toto, but of the
speculative intellect alone. Here therefore he was constrained to
commence at the point of reﬂection, or natural consciousness .
while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a higher
ground (the autonomy of the will) as a postulate deducible from
the unconditional command, or (in the technical language of his
school) the categorical imperative, of the conscience. ~He had
‘\ been in imminent danger of persecution during the reign of the
lateking of Prussia, that strange compound of lawless debauchery
‘ and priest-ridden superstition? and it is probable that he had
little inclination, in his old age, to act over again the fortunes,
and hair-breadth escapes of VVolf.* The expulsion of the first
among Kant’s disciples, who attempted to complete his system,
from the University of Jena, with the conﬁscation and prohibition
of the obnoxious work by the joint efforts of the courts of Saxony
and Hanover, supplied experimental proof, that the venerable old
man’s caution was not groundless. In spite therefore of his own
declarations, I could never believe, that it was possible for him
to have meant no more by his .Noumenon, or Thing in itself,
than his more words express ; or that in his own conception he
confined the whole plastic power to the forms of the intellect,
leaving for the external cause, for the 922ate7‘iale of our sensations,

at any time of our observations. This is as subject to change as the
observations themselves; considered in itself, it is not conﬁned to
any one place, and does not relate to the identity of the subject.

6. The transcendental, pure, original, 7'. e. the consciousness of the iden-
tity of ourselves, with all the variety of empirical consciousness. It
is that self-consciousness, which generates the bare idea ‘1,’ or ‘1
tltz'n/c,’ as being the simple correlative of all-other ideas, and the con-
dition of their unity and necessary connection.”

See also Nitsch’s General and Introductory View of Professor Kant‘s
Principles, a very clear summary, pp. 111—113.—S. 0.]

9* [Christian \Volf, the most celebrated supporter of the school of Leib-
nitz, was born at Breslau in 1679. In 1707 he became Professor of Math-
ematics at Halle; was accused of atheism by his envious colleagues. was
driven from his employ by their cabals in 17 23, and went to teach at Mar-
burg, as Professor of Philosophy ; he was afterwards honorably recalled to
Halle in 1740, and died at that town, April 9, 17 54. From Victor Cousin’s
.Manuel de Z’Histoire de la Philosophie, ii. 17 3—4.—S. C.)

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA‘. 7 _ 259

a matter without form, which is doubtless inconceivable.* I
entertained doubts likewise, whether, in his own mind, he even
laid all the stress, which he appears to do, on the moral postu«
latesf.L

An idea, 111 the highest sense of that word, can not be conveyed
but by a symbol , and, except in geometry, all symbols of neces-
sity involve an apparent contradiction]: (1162/2708 ovrsroiow: and
for those who could not pierce through this symbolic husk, his
writings were not intended. Questions which can not be fully
answered without exposing the respondent to personal danger, are

*5 [Transsa Id. p. 114.

The reader may compare this passage with Schelling’s remarks on the
doctrine of Kant, in the third tract of the Phil. Salli-7ft. pp. 275—6, the title
of which has already been given, and to which Mr. 0. himself refers his
readers in chap. xii.

In the Introduction to the Mean, Schelling says of the Kantian philos-
ophy, on this particular point, that, as acute men have objected, “it makes
all conceptions of cause and effect arise in our mind,——in our representations
alone; and yet the representations themselves again, according to the law
of causality, operate upon us through outward things.”—]Vote at p. 10.

Thus the Idealism of Berkeley deprives us of Nature (or an objective
world) altogether, giving us, instead of it, a seeming copy of such-a world
in each individual mind :—the Idealism of Kant—l too literally understooa
on one point)-—leaves us Nature, but reduces her to a blank,—an unseen
cause of all we- see without us, although cause, by his own showing, exists
only within us :——the system of Locke cuts Nature in two—lets her retain
one half of her constituent properties, while it makes her but the unknown
cause in us of the other half :—the Scotch system (in the opinion of the
Transcendentalist), equally with the two last—mentioned, cuts us off from
Nature while it brings Nature to bear upon us as closely as possible; it
aﬂirms an evident absurdity, and calls it a hidden mystery ; it tries to be”
cautious, yet is ineautious enough to assume the whole matter in debate,
namely, that the objective and the subjective systems are distinct from,
and extrinsic to, one another; it teaches us to escape from a difﬁculty by
shutting our eyes: but eyes were made to be open and not to be shut,—
except for the sake of rest; when we unclose them again there is the same
diﬂiculty, staring us full in the face—S. 0.]

f [Kant’s doctrine on this head is fully explained in his Foundation for
the lifetaphysique of .Morals, ﬁrst published in 1785, and Critique of the
Practical Reason—17 88. Works, vol. iv. S. 0.]

:j: [“Now this supersensuous ground of all that is sensuous, Kant sym~
bolized by the expression things in themselves—which, like all other sym-
bolic expiessions, contains in itself a contradiction, because it seeks to 1ep«
resent the unconditioned through a conditioned, to make the. inﬁnite ﬁnite."
Abhandlungen. Phil. Scln 7 ft p.p 276—7. —S. 0.]

 

260 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

not entitled to a fair answer ; and yet to say this openly, would
in many cases furnish the very advantage, which the adversary
is insidiously seeking after. Veracity does not consist in saying,
but in the intention of communicating, truth ; and the philosopher
l'WhO can not utter the whole truth Without conveylng falsehood,
l and at the same time, perhaps, exciting the most malignant pas-
‘lsions,- is constrained to express himself either mythically or
llequivocally. When Kant therefore was importuned to settle the
disputes of his commentators himself, by declaring what he meant,
how could he decline the honors of martyrdom with less offence,
than by simply replying, “I meant what I said, and at the age
of near four-score, I have something else, and more important to
do, than to write a commentary on my own works.”

FICHTE’S Wfissenseimftslebefl"< or Lore of Ultimate Science,
was to add the key-stone of the arch ; and by commencing with
an act, instead of a thing or substance, Fichte assuredly gave
the ﬁrst mortal blow to Spinozism, as taught by Spinoza him-
self; and supplied the idea of a system truly metaphysical, and
of a metaphysique truly systematic (z. e. having its spring and
principle within itself). But this fundamental idea hevoverbuilt
with a heavy mass of mere notions, and psychological acts of
arbitrary reﬂection. Thus his theory degenerated into a crudeJr

9* [J. Gottlieb Fichte was born on the 19th of May, 17 62, at Ramme
nau, in Upper Lusatia, and died at Berlin, where he had occupied a Pro
fessor’s chair in the recently founded University, Jan. 29, 1814. The
Wisscnsc/Laftslehre was ﬁrst published at \Veimar in 17 96; afterwards
in an enlarged edition at Jena, 17 98. V. Cousin’s ﬂfanuel, ii. 27 2, 289.
—S. 0.]

+ The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoismus may, perhaps, be
amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to those who are un-
acquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness of Fichte’s idealism
as can be expected from an avowed caricature.

The Categorical Imperative, or the annunciation of the new Teutonic
God, ’EI‘SZENKAIHAN : a dithyrambic Ode, by QUEnKorF VON KLUBSTICK,
Grainmarian, and Sub'rector in Gymnasicf 5* 9"

Eu ! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divas,

(Speak English, Friend 1) the God Inmerativus,
Here on this market-cross aloud I cry :

I, I, I! Iitself I!

The form and the substance, the what and the why,
The when and the where, and the low and the high,
The inside and outside, the earth and the sky,

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 261

egoz'smus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as life-
less, godless, and altogether unholy ; while his religion consisted
in the assumption of a mere Ordo ordinans, which we were
permitted exoterz‘ce to call GOD; and his ethics in an ascetic,
and almost monkish, mortiﬁcation of the natural passions and
d.esires.*

I, you and he, and he, you and I,
All souls and all bodies are I itself I!
All I itself I!
(Fools ! a truce with this starting!)
All my I! all my I!
He’s a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!
Thus cried the God with high imperial tone ;
In robe of stiﬁ'est state, that scoffed at beauty,
A pronoun-verb imperative he shone—-
Then substantive and plural-singular grown
He thus Spake on! Behold in I alone
(For ethics boast a syntax of their own)
Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,
In 0 ! I, you, the vocativc of duty !
I of the world’s whole Lexicon the root!
Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight
The genitive and ablative to boot:
The accusative of wrong, the nom’native of right,
And in all cases the case absolute!
Self-construed, I all other moods decline:
Imperative, from nothing we derive us ;
Yet as a super-postulate of mine,
Unconstrued antecedenee I assign.

To X, Y, Z, the God Inﬁnitivus !

9* [This account of Fichte’s theory, however just, may convey to some
readers a very unjust notion of the man and of his teaching in general It
may lead them to imagine him cold, hard, and dry, and, in his turn of mind,
rather of the earth earthy, than heavenward tending; whereas he seems to
have been an ardent spiritualist, “a clear, calm enthusiast ;” and whatever
his system may have been, as mere metaphysics, yet in his thoughts on the
Divine Idea, to have arrived at the same point, as far as feeling is concerned,
and all that under God’s grace inspires the heart and moulds the plan and
course of action, with those who talk, in orthodox phraseology, of the Life
of God in the soul of man. Mr. Carlyle has spoken of Fichte in the “Hero
Worship,” and some of his striking Essays, with his usual force and felicity,
and power of casting an interest, either in the way of creation or of repre-
sentation, around certain characters—investing, as it were, with a royal
robe of glowing language and high attributions, whomsoever it delights
him to honor. But the best illustration of Fichte’s teaching is to be found
in his life. “ N 0 man of his time,”—says Mr. Smith, who has lat< ly published

262 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

fin Schelling’s Natur-P/Lilosophie,* and the System (Zes 1mm.

a translation of his work On the Nature of the Scholar, with a memoir of
the author—“ few perhaps of any time, exercised a more powerful spirit-
stirring inﬂuence over the minds of his fellow-countrymen. The ceaseless
effort of his life was to rouse men to a sense of the divinity of their own
nature—to ﬁx their thoughts upon a spiritual life as the only true and real
life—to teach them to look upon all else as mere show and unreality, and
thus to lead them to constant effort after the highest Ideal of purity, vir-
tue, independence, and self-denial. To this ennobling enterprise he conse-
crated his being, dzc. Truly indeed has he been described by one of our
own country’s brightest ornaments, as a ‘ colossal, adamantine spirit, stand-
ing erect and clear, like a Cato Major among degenerate men ; ﬁt to have
been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discoursed of beauty and virtue
in the groves of Academe.’ But the sublimity of his intellect casts no shade
on the soft current of his affections, which ﬂows, pure and unbroken, through
the whole course of his life, to enrich, fertilize, and adorn it. We prize
his philosophy deeply ; it is to us an invaluable possession, for it seems the
noblest exposition to which we have yet listened, of human nature and di-
vine truth; but with reverent thankfulness we acknowledge a still higher
debt, for he has left behind him the best gift which man can bequeath to
man—a brave, heroic, human life.”

“ In the ﬁrst churchyard from the Oranienburg gate of Berlin stands a
tall obelisk with this inscription :—

The teachers shall shine
As the brightness of the ﬁrmament ;
And they that turn many to righteousness
As the stars forever and ever.

It marks the grave of Fichte. The faithful partner of his life sleeps at his
feet.”

F iehte married a niece of Klopstock, a high~minded woman, by whom he
had an only son, the author of writings on religious philosophy of some
interest. Cousin speaks of the great inﬂuence which the Idealism of Fichte
exercised over his contemporaries, and its serious direction toward anti-
sensualistie doctrines, impressed on many minds by the masculine eloquence,
which was one of the attributes of the author’s talent. But he afﬁrms
that Fichte’s theory ﬁnally shared the common destiny of all systems, and
proved unable to acquire a general authority in philosophy. Pp. 113—115.
—S. C.]

*6 [On this title of Schelling’s, Mr. 0. makes the following remarks in a
marginal note in the Phil. Schriﬂ.

I can not approve Sehelling’s choice of the proper name, Natur—Philoso-
phie; because, in the ﬁrst place, it is a useless paradox; in the second
place, selected to make the difference between his own system and that of
his old master Fichte greater than it is; and lastly, because the phrase has
been long and universally appropriated to the knowledge which does not
include the peculia of Man; that is, to Physiology. The identity of the

265
BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 1.

sccndenmlen Idealismusﬁ I ﬁrst found a genial coincidence with
much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance
in what I had yet to do.

I have introduced this statement, as appropriate to the narrative
nature of this sketch ; yet rather in reference to the work which
I have announced in a preceding page, than to my present: subject.
It would be but a mere act of justice to myself, were I to wa1n
my futuie 1eade1s, that an identity of thought, or even similarity

of phrase, will not be at all times a ce1tain proof that the passage

has been borrowed from Schelling, or that the conceptions were
oliginally learnt from him. In this instance, as in the dramatic
lectures of Schlegel to whichI have before alluded, from the
same motive of self-defence against the charge of plagiarism,
many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the main and
fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I

one with the other is made to appear as the result of the system ; but for
its title, that is, its proper or appropriated name, quz’ bane dcstinguit, bane
docet. ——S. T. C.

Fichte speaks thus of the Na tur- -P/eilosoplu'e 1n the second of his seiies of
Lectures on the N atu1 e of the Scholal, containing the deﬁnition of the Di-
vine Idea. “ Hence we should not be blinded nor led astray by a philoso-
phy assuming the'name of na/ural, which pretends to excel all former phi-
losophy by striving to elevate Nature into absolute being and into the place
of God. In all ages the theoretical errors, as well as the moral corruptions
of humanity, have arisen from falsely bestowing the name of life on that
which in itself possesses neither absolute nor even ﬁnite being, and seeking
for life'and its enjoyments in that which in itself is dead. Very far there-
fore from being a step towards truth, that philosophy is only a return to
old and already most widely spread error.” Translation by Mr. Smith.—
S. 0.]

9* [Frieda Wilh. Joseph Schelling was born at Leonberg in Wurtemberg
on the 27th of January, 1775. He was Professor at Erlangen in 1829;
since that time he has moved about. During the last two years‘he has been
lecturing at Berlin, where he holds a Professorship, and has been endeavor-
ing to show the consistency of his philosophical views with a religious The-
ism: how far successfully or otherwise, I can not say, but I believe, not so
as to silence the great body of objectors. ‘

Schelling’s Idem zu eéner Philosop/‘rie der JValur (Natur-Pltilosophie),
was ﬁrst published at Leipzig in 1797 ; a second edition entirely recast, ap-
peared at Landshut, in 1803. The System des Transscendentalen Idealismus
was published at Tubingen in 1800. The early age at which Schelling put
forth his profound speculations, displaying so deep an insight into former
philosophies, and so much general knowledge, renders them one of the in
tellectual wonders of the world—S. 0.]

262 ,1 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

had ever seen a single page of the German Philosopher; and 1
might indeed afﬁrm with truth, before the more important Works
of Schelling had been written, or at least made public. Nor is
this coincidence at all to be wondered at. We had studied in
the same school; been disciplined by the same preparatory phi-
losophy, namely, the writings of Kant ; we had both equal obli-
gations to the polar logic and dynamic philosophy of Giordano
Bruno; and Schelling has lately, and, as of recent acqﬁiSition,
avowed that same affectionate reverence for the labors of Beh
men, and other mystics, which I had formed at a much earlier
period??? The coincidence of Schelling’s system with certain gen-
eral ideas of Behmen, he declares to have been mere coinci-
dence ; while my obligations have been more direct. He needs
give to Behmen only feelings of sympathy ; while I owe him a
debt of gratitude. God forbid! that I should be suspected of a
wish to enter into_a rivalry with Schelling for the honors so une-
quivocally his right, not only as a great and original genius, but
as the founder of the Philosophy of Nature, and as the most suc-
cessful improver of the DynamimL System which, begun by

9* [Archdeacon Hare says in regard to this statement: “ Sehelling’s pain
phlet” (in which this avowal is contained), “had appeared eleven years be-
fore; but, perhaps, it did not ﬁnd its way to England till the peace; and
Coleridge, having read it but recently, inferred that it was a recent publi-
cation.”—S. 0.]

1' It would be an act of high and almost criminal injustice to pass over
in silence the name of Mr. Richard Saumarez,l a gentleman equally well
known as a medical man and as a philanthropist, but who demands notice
on the present occasion as the author of “A new System of Physiology” in
two volumes oetavo, published 1797; and in 1812 of “ An Examination of
the natural and artiﬁcial Systems of Philosophy which now prevail” in one
volume, entitled, “The Principles of physiological and physical Science.”

 

1 [Richard Saumarez was a native of Guernsey, and became Surgeon to
the Magdalen Hospital, London. He published A Dissertation on the Uni-
verse in general, and on the procession of the Elements in particular, Lond.
1796, 8vo.—A new System of Physiology, comprehending the Laws by
which animated beings in general, and the human species in particular, are
governed in their several states of health and disease. Lond. 1798, 2 vols.
8vo.—-Principlcs and Ends of Philosophy. 1811, 8vo.—Principles of Physi-
ological and Physical Science, cOmprehending the ends for which animated
beings were created. Lond. 1812, 8vo.—Orations delivered before the
Medical Society of London. 1813, 8vo.—Observations on Generation and
the Principles of Life. Med. and Phys. Journ. II. p. 242. 17 99.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. 265

Bruno, was re-introduced (in a more philosophical form, and
freed from all its impurities and visionary accompaniments) by
Kant; in whom it was the native and necessary growth of his
own system. Kant’s followers, however, on whom (for the
greater part) their master’s cloak had fallen without, or with a
very scanty portion of, his spirit, had adopted his dynamic ideas,
only as a more reﬁned species of mechanics. With exception of
one or two fundamental ideas, which can not be withheld from
F ichte, to Schelling we owe the completion, and the most impor-
tant victories, of this revolution in philosophy. To me it will be
happiness and honor enough, should I succeed in rendering the
system itself intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application
of it to the most awful of subjects for the most important of pur-
poses. Whether a work is the offspring of a man’s own spirit,

The latter work is not quite equal to the former in style or arrangement

and there is a greater necessity of distinguishing the principles of the au
thor’s philosophy from his conjectures concerning color, the atmospheric
matter, comets, (ﬁre. which, whether just or erroneous, are by no means ne-
cessary consequences of that philosophy. Yet even in this department of
this volume, which I regard as comparatively the inferior work, the reason
ings by which Mr. Saumarez invalidates the immanence of an inﬁnite power
in any ﬁnite substance are the offspring of no common mind; and the ex-
periment on the expansibility of the air is at least plausible and highly in

genious. But the merit, which Will secure both to the book and to the
writer a High and honorable name with posterity, consists in the masterly
force of reasoning, and the copiousness of induction, with which he has as-
sailed, and (in my opinion) subverted the tyranny of the mechanic system
in physiology; established not only the existence of ﬁnal causes, but their
- necessity and efﬁciency in every system that merits the name of philosoph-
ical; and, substituting life and progressive power for the contradictory
incrtforce, has a right to be known and remembered as the ﬁrst instaurator
of the dynamic philosophy in England. The author’s views, as far as con
cerns himself, are unborrowed and completely his own, as be neither pos-
sessed, nor do his writings discover, the least acquaintance with the works
of Kant, in which the germs of the philosophy exist; and his volumes were
published many years before the full development of these germs by Schel-
ling. Mr. Saumarez’s detection of the Braunonian system was no light or
ordinary service at the time; and I scarcely remember in any work on any
subject a confutation so thoroughly satisfactory. It is sufﬁcient at this time
to have stated the fact; as in the preface to the work, which I have already
announced on the Logos, I have exhibited in detail the merits of this writer,
and genuine philosopher, who needed only have taken his foundations
somewhat deeper and wider to have superseded a considerable part of my
labors.

VOL. 111 M

266 BIOGRAPHIA LITERABIA.

and the product of original thinking, will be discovered by those
who are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests than the mere
reference to dates. For readers in general, let whatever shall be
found in this or any future work of mine, that resembles, or coin-
cides with, the doctrines of my German predecessor, though con-
temporary, be wholly attributed to him : provided, that the ab-
sence of distinct references to his books, which I could not at all
times make with truth as designating citations or thoughts actu~
ally derived from him ; and which, I trust, would, after this gen-
eral acknowledgment, be superfluous; be not charged on me as
an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiai'ism%1 have not
indeed (ekeu .’ 7‘68 angusta (Zomi .’) been hitherto able to procure
more than two of his books, viz. the 1st volume of his collected
Tracts,* and his System of Transcendental Idealism ; to which,
however, I must add a small pamphlet against FichtenL the spirit
of which was to my feelings painfully incongruous with the prin-
ciples, and which (with the usual allowance afforded to an an-
tithesis) displayed the love of wisdom rather than the wisdom of
love. I regardtruth as“ a divine ventriloquist : I care not from
whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the
words are audible and intelligible. “ Albeit, I must confess to be
half in doubt, whether I should bring it forth or no, it being so
contrary to the eye of the world, and the world so potent in most
men’s hearts, that I shall endanger either not to be regarded or
not to be understood.”i

And to conclude the subject of citation, with a cluster of cita
tions, which as taken from books, not in common use,'may cond

9* [F. W. J. Schelling’s Philosophz'sche Schriften, Erster Band. (First
volume.) Landshut, 1809.—S. 0.]

f [This is the Darlegung referred to in a previous note. The mutual
censures of Fichte and Schelling, and their quarrels about Nature and
the nature of Nature, are harsh breaks in the bright current of their
writings. ”

There is to my mind a great metaphysical sublimity in the ﬁrst part of
Fichte’s Bestz'mmung des ﬁfenschen, especially the passage beginning In
jedem Momente ihrer Dauer ist Natur ein zusammenhdngendes Gauze, and
the preceding paragraphs, from the words Das Princip der Thatz'ghez't, p. 11.
Very imaginative is the grand glimpse these passages give of the intercon-
nected movements of the universe, presenting to the mind universality in
unity, and a seeming inﬁnitude of the ﬁnite—S. 0.]

1; [Milton’s Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty. Boo}!
ii. chap. i.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 267

tribute to the reader’s amusement, as a voluntary before a ser-
mon :—“ Dolet mihi quidem deliciis literarum inescatos subito
jam homines adeo esse, preesertim qui C'hristianos se proﬁtentur,
e6 legere nisi guocl ad delectationemfacit, sustineant nihil : uncle
et disciplince severiores et philosophia ipsa jam .fere prorsus
etiam a doctis negliguntur. Quad guidem propositum studi-
orum, nisi mature corrigitur, tam magnum rebus incommodum
dabit, quam dedit barbaries olim. Pertinaa; res barbaries est,
fateor .' sed minus potest tamen, quam illa mollities et persuasa
prudentia literarum, si ratione caret, sapientia: virtutisque specie
mortales misere circumducens. Succedet igitur, ut arbitror,
haud ita multo post, pro rusticana seculi nostri ruditate capta-
trix iZZa communi-loquentia robur animi virilis omne, omnem
virtutem masculam, prry‘ligatura, nisi cavetur.”*

A too prophetic remark, which has been in fulfilment from the
year 1680, to the present, 1815. By persuasa prudentia, Gry-
nwus means self-complacent common sense as opposed to science
and philosophic reason.

Est meclius ordo, et oelut eguestris, ingeniorum guidem saga
cium, et commodorum rebus humanis, non tamen in primam
magnitudinem patentium. Eorum hominum, ut sic dicam,
major annona est. Seclulum esse, nilzil temere Zogui, assuescere
labori, et imagine prudentiae et modestiw tegere angustiores
partes captus, dum exercitationem ac usum, guo isti in civilibus
rebus pollent, pro natura et magnitudine ingenii plerigue acci-
piuntq‘

“ As therefore physicians are many times forced to leave such
methods of curing as themselves know to be the ﬁttest, and being
overruled by the patient’s impatiency, are fain to try the best
they can : in like sort, considering how the case doth stand With

9* [From “Symon Grynaeus’s premonition to the candid reader, preﬁxed
to Ficinus’s translation of Plato, published at Leyden, 1557.” See The
Friend, Essay iii. II. p. 33, Where also the same passage is quoted. In
the original, as I learn from the Editor’s note in that place, gulam stands
for delectationem.—S. 0.]

+ [Barclay’s Argenis, lib. i. Leyden, 1630, '12mo. pp. 63—4, With some
omissions. The original, after assuescere labori, runs thus: et imagini Sa-
pientice parere, tegere angustiores partes ingenii. Hac neque summum ho-
minem desiderant, et sola interdum sunt qua in laudatis Proceribus suspicias
Ut vel abesse cilia pro virtute sit; vel non invidiosus prudentia rims in
Oceanifamam se diﬂ'undat, dum eicercitationém, (Ea—S. 0.]

268 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

this present age, full of tongue and weak of brain, behold we
would (if our subject permitted at) yield to the stream thereof.
That way we would be contented to prove our thesis, which
being the worse in itself, is notwithstanding now by reason of
common imbecility the ﬁtter and likelier to be brooked.”*

If this fear could be rationally entertained in the controversial
age of Hooker, under the then robust discipline of the Scholastic
logic, pardonably may a writer of the present times anticipate a
scanty audience for abstrusest themes, and truths that can neither
be communicated nor received without effort of thought, as well
as patience of attention.

“ Che s’io non erro al calcolar de’ punti,
Par ch’ Asinina Stella a noi predomini,
E’l Somaro e’l Castron si sian congiunti.
Il tempo d’Apuleio piu non si nomini:
Che se allora un sol huom sembrava un Asino,
Mille Asini a’ miei di rassembran huomini l”+

 

NOTE TO CHAPTER IX.

IN the preceding chapter Mr. C. speaks of Schelling’s philosophy as if it
had his entire approbation, and had been adopted by him in its whole ex~
tent. Yet it is certain that, soon after the compos1tion of the B. L., he be-
came dissatisﬁed with the system, considered as a fundamental and compre-
hensive scheme, intended to exhibit the relations of God to the World and
Man. He objected to it as essentially pantheistie, though the author has
positively diselaimed this reproach, and made great efforts to free his sys-
tem from the appearance of deservingit. To Mr. C. however, it appeared.
as originally set forth, to labor under deep deﬁciencies—to be radically in
consistent with a belief in God, as Himself Moral and Intelligent—as be-
yond and above the world—as the Supreme Mind to which the human mind
owes homage and fealty—inconsistent with any just view and deep sense of
the moral and spiritual being of man. The imposing grandeur of this phi-
losophy, beheld from a distance, the narrowness into which it shrinks on a
nearer View, are thus set forth by Cousin in his clear trenchant‘style. “ La
philosophic de Schelling se recommande par l'originalité de son point de
vue, 1a profondeur du travail, la consequence des parties, et l’immense por
tée des applications. Elle rallie a une seule idée tous les étres de la nature.

 

* [Slightly altered, with omissions, from Hooker’s Eccles. Polity, B. i. 0.
viii s. 2.—S. C ]
f Satire di Salvator Rosa, [ton]. i. p. 34. La. JlIusz'ca, Sat. i. l. lD.—-—S- C]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 269

Par la elle écarte les barriéres qu’on avoit données a la connaissance hu-
maine, soutenant la possibilité pour l’homme non plus seulement d’unc rep-
réscntation subjective, mais d’une connaissance objective et scientiﬁque,
d’une science déterminée de Dieu et des choses divines, :1 cc tire quc l’esprit
humain et la substance de l’étre sont primitivement identiques. Cette phi-
losophic embrasse 1e cercle entier des connaissances spéculatives,” &c. Then
he states the difﬁculties which beset-.the scheme, and after suggesting sev-
, eral root objections, he exclaims: “Quel homme enﬁn pent avoir la témé
raire prétention de renfermer la nature de la Divinité dans l’idée de l’iden—
1 tité absoluc ?” He had previously observed, “ La forme de ce systéme est
111oins scientiﬁque en réalité qu’en apparence. Son probleme étoit dc dé—
duire, par une demonstration réelle (par construction), 10 ﬁni de l’inﬁni et
dc l’absolu, le pa1ticulier de l’universel. Or 06 probléme n’est point résolu
ct ne peut l’étre.” And he concludes—“ E11 un mot, le systcme tout entie
n’,est a proprement par ler, qu’ une poésie de l’esprit humain, séduisante p111 7 . 1
son apparente facilité pour tout expliquer, et par sa maniere de const1u1rc
la nature.”
~Iﬂthink, as far as I am able to judge, that Mr. Coleridge’s view of the sys-
tem, after long reﬂection upon it, coincided, as to its general character and re
sult, with that of Victor Cousin, deeply as he must have felt obliged to the
author for much that it contains. During the latter part of his life he was
ever applying his thoughts to the development of a philosophy which
should more satisfactorily perform what Schelling’s splendid scheme of
modern Platonism had seemed to promise, a solution of the most important
problems, which are presented to human contemplation, or at least an an-
swer to them sufﬁcient to set the human mind at rest. He sought to con-
struct a system really and rationally religious; and since, in his philosophi-
cal inquiries, he “neither could nor dared throw off a strong and awful
prepossession in favor”1 of that great main outline of doctrine which came
to us from the ﬁrst, in company with the highest and purest moral teach—
ings which the world has yet seen; which was felt after, if not found, by
the best and greatest minds before the preaching of the Gospel; which has
been received in substance, with whatever variations of form and language,
by a large portion of the civilized world ever since, and had actually been
to himself the vehicle of all the light and life of the higher and deeper kind,
which had been vouchsafed to him in his earthly career ;—he therefore set
outwith the desire to construct a philosophical system in which Christianity,
—-based on the Tri-une being of God, and embracing a Primal Fall and
Universal Redemption,—Christianity ideal, spiritual, eternal, but likewise
and necessarily historical,—-realized and manifested in time,—-should be
shown forth as accordant, or rather as one with ideas of reason, and the
demands of the spiritual and of the speculative mind, of the heart, con-
science, reason, should all be satisﬁed and reconciled in one bond of peace.
See what has been said of the labors of Mr. C.’s latter years in the Preface.

//

 

 

‘ This is said in regard to the Bible in the Confessions of an Inruiring
Spirit. Works, V. p. 5’7 9

270 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

I am not aware, however, that he, at any time, altered or set aside the
doctrine of Schelling put forth in the present work on Nature and the
Mind of Man, with their mutual relations ; or indeed that he discovered any
positive error or incompatibility with higher truth in such parts of his sys-
tem as are adopted in the Biographia Literaria, and which he believed him-
self in the main to have anticipated.l

 

1 [It is difﬁcult to reconcile the statement contained in this paragraph
with the preceding remark, that Coleridge ﬁnally regarded the system of
Schelling as “essentially pantheistic,” The doctrine of Schelling put forth
in the Biographia Literaria on the “mutual relations of Nature and the
Mind of Man” is, that there is aboriginally an identity of substance between
them, and that both are merely different modiﬁcations of one and the same
Essence or Being. (chording to this system—commonly called the System
of Identity—that which in one of its aspects is Nature, in the other aspect
is Spirit, and it is the peculiar power and prerogative of the philosophic, as
distinguished from the spontaneous or common, consciousness, to see this
identity, and thus to reduce back all the manifoldness both in the spheres
of Nature and Spirit to the absolute and primary unity whence it all ema-
nated and which it all is—to the One Substance, in the phraseology of
Spinoza; to the Absolute Subject-Object, in the phraseology of Schelling
to the Absolute Conception, in the phraseology of Hegel.

N ow we see not on what possible ground Schelling can e charged with
Pantheism, if not on that of this doctrine of the original Identity of Sub~
ject and Object. It certainly is the ground on which both his and Hegel’s
systems are now generally regarded as pantheistic, and is the doctrine by
which the later German philosophy differs from the earlier toto genere.
Kant left the Subject and Object apart from each other, [contemplating
them back of consciousness 2'. c.,] and it is the standing objection of the sys-
tem of Identity to the Critical philosophy, that it does not reduce all things
to that unity which Reason and Science are constantly seeking for, while it
is the constant reply of the latter that there can be no reduction of all
things to the merely speculative and wholly abstract unity of a unit, for
the good reason that there is no such unit. In other words, the Dogmatism
of the pantheist affirming a single substance of which both God and the
“World (so-called) are alike modiﬁcations, is met by the Dogmatism of the
theist afﬁrming a supra—mundane and spiritual Being, who creates the world
out of nothing—thus afﬁrming a primary and a secondary substance, the
latter immanent in the former it is true, but neither emanent from it, nor
identical with it. ~

It may be said that the system of Identity admits distinction in the one
universal substance, and only denies division or literal duality. But a mere
distinction in one and the same Essence does not constitute another Being.
To illustrate by reference to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity—the dis-
tinctions that exist in the one single Essence of the Godhead do not consti-
tute three Beings. The distinctions are consubstantial, and are in one sub-
stance only. If therefore tlze distinction between God and the World is

BIOGRAPHIA LI‘I‘ERARI A. 271

In the Table Talk he is reported to have said, “The metaphysical disqui~
sition at the end of the volume of the Biographia Literaria is unform-
ed and immature ;———it contains the fragments of the truth, but itis not fully
thought out. It is wonderful to myself to think how inﬁnitely more pro-
found my views now are, and yet how much clearer they are withal. The
circle is completing; the idea is coming round to, and to be, the common
sense.” VI. p. 520.

Some little insight into the progress of his reﬂections on philosophical
subjects, and on the treatment of those subjects by Schelling, will perhaps
be derived from his remarks on several tracts in that author’s Philosophiscke
Schrzften, which I have thought it best to place at the end of the volume.
—S. C.]

 

not metaphysically real and grounded in a duality of Essence—if the dis-
tinction is not allo Kat awn and not merely alloy Kai, alloy—it is no such
distinction as Theism aﬂirms, and Religion must afﬁrm, between the Creator
and Creation. It would be impossible that the self-consciousness of God
and that of man should be totally diverse from each other (and they must
be in order to the existence of the relations and affections of Religion) if the
spiritual essence which underlies each, when traced to its lowest metaphysi-
cal ground, is one and identically the same.

We are aware of the alleged difﬁculty of accounting for a knowledge of
the objective, on the hypothesis that there is no identity of substance be
tween it and the subjective intelligence, and of the conﬁdence with which it
is assumed that the mystery of knowing vanishes as soon as it is shown
that all consciousness is in reality self-consciousness. How the problem
will ultimately be solved, and how much Coleridge and Schelling have con-
tributed towards the true solution, remains to be seen. But it seems to us
very plain that neither of these minds ultimately rested in the doctrine of
Identity as the means of arriving at the true theory of perception. At any
rate, all such teaching of Coleridge as that the moral Reason is the highest
form of Reason, and that no merely speculative decisions can set aside those
of Conscience, are in the very vein and spirit of the Critical philosophy,
and a protest against a theory which obliterates all the ﬁxed lines and im-
mutable distinctions of Theism. Such teaching could not have come from
a mind included in the slowly-evolving and blindly~groping processes of the
philosophy of Identity—Am. Ed]

CHAPTER X.

A CHAPTER OF DIGRESSION AND ANECDOTES, AS AN INTERLUDE PRE-
CEDING THAT ON THE NATURE AND GENESIS OF THE IMAGINATIOP
OR PLASTIC POXVER—ON PEDANTRY AND PEDANTIC EXPRESSIONS
—ADVICE TO YOUNG AUTHORS RESPECTING PUBLICATION—VARIOUS
ANECDOTES OF THE AUTHOR’S LITERARY LIFE, AND THE PROGRESS
OF HIS OPINIONS IN RELIGION AND POLITICS.

“ ESEMPLASTIC. The word is not in Johnson, nor have I met
with it elsewhere.” Neither have I! Iconstructed it myself
from the Greek words, 82; .31! annew, to shape into one ;* be-
cause, having to convey a new sense, I thought that a new term
would both aid the recollection of my meaning, and prevent its
being confounded with the usual import of the word, imagination.
“But this is pedantry!” Not necessarily so, I hope. If I am
not misinformed, pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable
to the time, place, and company. The language of the market
would be in the schools as pedantic, though it might not be rep-
robated by that name, as the language of the schools in the mar-
ket. The mere man of the world, who insists that no other
terms but such as occur in common conversation should be em-
ployed in a scientiﬁc disquisition, and with no greater precision,
is as truly a pedant as the man of letters, who either over-rating
the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by his own familiarity
with technical or scholastic terms, converses at the wine-table
with his mind ﬁxed on his museum or laboratory ; even though
the latter pedant instead of desiring his wife to make the tea
should bid her add to the quant. suf of thea Sinensis the oxydc

* [Ist das Band die lebendige In~Eins-Bildung des Einen mz't dem Vieleu.
If the bond is the living formation-into-one of the one with the many. .Dar-
legung, pp. 61—2. Schelling also talks of the absolute, perfect In-Ez'ns-Bz'l—
dung of the Real and Ideal, toward the end of his Vorlesungem ﬁber die
Methode des Academischen Studium—p. 313.——-S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 273

of hydrogen saturated With caloric. To use the colloquial (and
in truth somewhat vulgar) metaphor, if the pedant of the cloister,
and the pedant of the lobby, both smell equally of the shop, yet
the odor from the Russian binding of good old authentic- lookmg
folios and quartos is less annoying than the steams from the
tavern or bagnio. Nay, though the pedantry of the scholar)
should betray a little ostentation, yet a well- conditioned mind!
would more easily, methinks, tolerate the fox brush of learned
vanity, than the sans culotterie of a contemptuous ignorance,‘

that assumes a merit from mutilation in the self- consoling sneer!

at the pompous incumbrance of tails.

The ﬁrst lesson of philosophic discipline is to wean the student’s
attention from the degrees of things, which alone form the vo-
cabulary of common life, and to direct it to the kind abstracted
from degree. Thus the chemical student is taught not to be
startled at the disquisitions on the heat in ice, or on latent and
ﬁxible light. In such discourse the instructor has no other alter-
native than either to use old words with new meanings (the plan
adopted by Darwin in his Zoonomia ;)* or to introduce new
terms, after the example of Linnaeus, and the framers of the pres-
ent chemical nomenclature. The latter mode is evidently prefer-
able, were it only that the former demands a twofold exertion of
thought in one and the same act. For the reader, or hearer, is .
required not only to learn and bear in mind the new deﬁnition ;
but to unlearn, and keep out of his View, the old and habitual
meaning , a far more difﬁcult and perplexing task, and for which
the mere semblance of eschewing pedantry seems to me an inade-
quate compensation. Where, indeed, it is in our power to recall
an appropriate term that had without sufﬁcient reason become
obsolete, it is doubtless a less evil to restore than to coin anew.
Thus to express in one word all that appertains to the perception,
considered as passive and merely recipient, I have adopted from
our elder classics the word sensuous ; because sensual is not at
present used, except in a bad sense, or at least as a moral dis-
tinction ; while sensitive and sensible would each convey a- dif-
ferent meaning. Thus too I have followed Hooker, Sanderson,
Milton and others, in designating the immediateness of any act

* [Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia, or Laws of Organic Life was published
Lond. 1794—6, 2 vols. 4to. - There was another edition in. 4 vols. Svo. in
[SOL—S. 0.]

M*

274 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

or object. of knowledge by the word intuition, used sometimes
subjectively, sometimes objectively, even as we use the word,
thought ; now as the thought, or act of thinking, and now as a.
thought, or the object of our reﬂection ; and we do this without
confusion or obscurity. The very words, objective and subjective,
of such constant recurrence in the schools of yore, I have ventured
to re-introduce, because I could not so brieﬂy or conveniently by
any more familiar terms distinguish the perce’pere from the per-
cipi. Lastly, I have cautiously discriminated the terms, the
' reason, and the understanding, encouraged and conﬁrmed by the
authority of our genuine divines and philosophers, before the
Revolution.
both life, and sense,

Fancy and understanding; whence the soul

Reason receives, and reason is her being,

Discursive or intuitive: discourse* '

Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,

Differing but in degree, in kind the same.‘r

I say, that I was conﬁrmed by authority so venerable :_ for I had
previous and higher motives in my own conviction of the im-
portance, nay, of the necessity of the distinction, as both an in-
dispensable condition and avital part of all sound speculation in
metaphysics, ethical or theological. To establish this distinction
was one main object of The Friend ;i if even in a biography of
my own literary life I can with propriety refer to a work, which
was printed rather than published, or so published that it had
been well for the unfortunate author, if it had remained in manu-
script. I have even at this time bitter cause for remembering
that, which a number of my subscribers have but a triﬂing motive
for forgetting. This effusion might have been spared ; but I
would fain ﬂatter myself, that the reader will be less austere

9* But for sundry notes on Shakspeare, and other pieces which have
fallen in my way, I should have deemed it unnecessary to observe, that dis-
course here, or elsewhere does not mean what we now call discoursing; but
the discursion of the mind, the processes of generalization and subsumption,
of deduction and conclusion. Thus, Philosophy has hitherto been discur-
aive , while Geometry is always and essentially intuitive.

+ [Paradise Lost. Book v. 1. 485.—S. 0.]

1 [M12 Coleridge here refers to The Friend as it ﬁrst came out in the
North of England, in 1809—10. See the Biog. Supplement at the end of
this volume—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 275

than an oriental professor of the bastin‘ado, who during an at-
tempt to extort per argumentum baculz'num a full confession
from a culprit, interrupted his outcry of pain by reminding him,

ya)

that it was “ a mere digression . “ All this noise, Sir l is nothing
to the point, and no sort of answer to my questions!” “ Ah!
out,” replied the sufferer, “it is the 'most pertinent reply in nature
to your blows.”

An imprudent man of common goodness of heart can not but
wish to turn even his imprudences to the beneﬁt of others, as
far as this is possible. If therefore any one of the readers of
this semi-narrative should be preparing or intending a periodical
work, I warn him, in the ﬁrst place, against trusting in the num-
ber of names on his subscription-list. For he can not be certain
that the names were put down by sufﬁcient authority ; or, should
that be ascertained, it still remains to be known, whether they
were not extorted by some over-zealous friend’s importunity ;
whether the subscriber had not yielded his name, merely from
want of courage to answer, no ; and with the intention of drop-
ping the work as soon as possible. One gentleman procured me
nearly a hundred names for THE FRIEND, and not only took fre-
quent opportunities to remind me of his success in his canvass.
but labored to impress my mind with the sense of the obligation,
I was under to the subscribers ; for (as he very pertinently ad-
monished me), “ ﬁfty-two shillings a year was a large sum to be
bestowed on one individual, where there were so many objects of
charity with strong claims to the assistance of the benevolent.”
Of these hundred patrons ninety threw up the publication before
the fourth number, without any notice ; though it was well
known to them, that in consequence of the distance, and the
slowness and irregularity of the conveyance, I was compelled to
lay in a stock of stamped paper for at least eight weeks before-
hand ; each sheet of which stood me in ﬁve-pence previously to
its arrival at my printer’s ; though the subscription money was
not to be received till the twenty-ﬁrst week after the commence-
ment of the work; and lastly, though it was in nine cases out
of ten impracticable for me to receive the money for two or three
numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage.

In conﬁrmation of my ﬁrst caveat, I will select one fact among
many. On my list of subscribers, among a considerable number
of names equally ﬂattering, was that of an Earl of Cork, with

276 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

his address. He might as well have been an Earl of Bottle,
for aught I knew of him, who had been content to reverence the
peerage in abstracto, rather than in conca'et'z's. Of course THE
FRIEND was regularly sent as far, if I remember right, as the
eighteenth number ; that is, till a fortnight before the subscrip-
tion was to be paid. And lo! just at this time I received a
letter from his Lordship, reprovin g me in language far more lordly
than courteous for my impudence in directing my pamphlets to
him, who knew nothing of me or my work ! Seventeen or
eighteen numbers of which, however, his Lordship was pleased

\\to retain, probably for the culinary or post-culinary conveniences
of his servants.

Secondly, I warn all others from the attempt to deviate from
the ordinary mode of publishing a work by the trade. I thought,
indeed, that to the purchaser it was indifferent, whether thirty
per cent. of the purchase-money went to the booksellers or to the
government ; and that the convenience of receiving the work by

g the post at his own door, would give the preference to the latter.
It is hard, I own, to have been laboring for years, in collecting
and arranging the materials ; to have spent every shilling that
could be spared after the necessaries of life had been furnished,
in buying books, or in journeys for the purpose of consulting them
or of acquiring facts at the fountain-head ; then to buy the paper,
pay for the printing, and the like, all at least ﬁfteen per cent.
beyond what the trade would have paid ; and then after all to
give thirty per cent. not of the net proﬁts, but of the gross results
of the sale, to a man who has merely to give the books shelf or
warehouse-room, and permit his apprentice to hand them over
the counter to those who may ask for them ; and this too copy
by copy, although, if the work be on any philosophical or scien-
tiﬁc subject, it may be years before the edition is sold off. All
this, I confess, must seem a hardship, and one, to which the
products of industry in no other mode of exertion are subject.
Yet even this is better, far better, than to attempt in any way
to unite the functions of author and publisher. But the most
prudent mode is to sell the copyright, at least of one or more
editions, for the most that the trade will offer. By few only can
a large remuneration be expected ; but ﬁfty pounds and ease of
mind are of more real advantage to a literary man, tnan the
chance of five hundred with the certainty of insult and degrading

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 277

anxieties. I shall have been grievously misunderstood, if this
statement should be interpreted as written with the desire of de-
tracting from the character of booksellers or publishers. The
individuals did not make the laws and customs of their trade, but,
as in every other trade, take them as they ﬁnd them. Till the
evil can be proved to be removable, and without the substitution
of an equal or greater inconvenience, it were neither wise nor
manly even to complain of it. But to use it as a pretext for
speaking, or even for thinking, or feeling, unkindly or oppro-
briously of the tradesmen, as individuals, would be something
worse than unwise or even than unmanly ; it would be immoral
and calumnious. My motives point in a far different direction,
and to far other objects, as will be seen in the conclusion of the
chapter.

A learned and exemplary old clergyman, who many years ago
went to his reward, followed by the regrets and blessings of his
ﬂock, published at his own expense two volumes octavo, entitled,

W. The work was most severely
handled in TWV, I forget which ;
and this unprovoked hostility became the good old man’s favorite
topic of conversation among his friends. Well ! (he used to ex«
claim) in the second edition, I shall have an opportunity of exposing
both the ignorance and the malignity of the anonymous critic.
Two or three years, however, passed by without any tidings from
the bookseller, who had undertaken the printing and publication
of the work, and who was perfectly at his ease, as the author
was known to be a man of large property. At length the ac-
counts were written for ; and in the course of a few weeks they
were presented by the rider for the house, in person. My old
friend put on his spectacles, and holding the scroll with no very
ﬁrm hand, began—“ Papei', so much: 0 moderate enough—not
at all beyond my expectation ! Printing, so much .' well ! mod-
erate enough ! Stitching, covers, advertisements, carriage, and
sofm‘th, so much.”—Still nothing amiss. Selleridge (for orthog-
raphy is no necessary part of a bookseller’s literary acquire-
inents) £3 33. “Bless me! only three guineas for the what
d’ye call it—the selleridge ?” . “ N o more, Sir I” replied the
rider. “ Nay, but that is‘too moderate l” rejoined my old friend.
“ Only three guineas for selling a thousand copies of a work in
two volumes 1’” “ 0, Sir !” (cries the young traveller) “ you

278 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

have mistaken the word. There have been none of them sold,
they have been sent back from London long ago ; and this £3 38.
is for the cellaria’ge, or warehouse-room in our book-cellar.” The
work was in consequence preferred from the ominous cellar of
the publisher’s to the author’s garret ; and, on presenting a copy
to an acquaintance, the old gentleman used to tell the anecdote
with great humor and still greater good-nature.

With equal lack of worldly knowledge, I was a far more than
‘equal sufferer for it, at the very outset of my authorshipﬁ“
Toward the close of the ﬁrst year from the time, that in an in-
auspicious hour I left the friendly Cloisters, and the happy grove
of’quiet, ever honored Jesus College, Cambridge, I was persuaded
by sundry philanthropists and Anti-polemists to set on foot a

‘ periodical work, entitled THE WATCHMAN, that, according to the
3‘ general motto of the work, all might know the truth, and that
the truth might make as ﬁ‘ee It In order to exempt it from the
stamp-tax, and likewise to contribute as little as possible to the
supposed guilt of a war against freedom, it was to be published
on every eighth day, thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely print-
ed, and price only four-pence. Accordingly with a ﬂaming
prospectus,—-“ Knowledge is Power,” “ To cry the state of the
political atmosphere,”-—and so forth, I set off on a tour to the
North, from Bristol to Shefﬁeld, for the purpose of procuring
customers, preaching by the way in most of the great towns, as
an hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not
a rag of the woman of Babylon might be seen on me. For I was
at that time and long after, though a Trinitarian (that is ad 7207‘-
mam Platonislin philosophy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion ;
more accurately, I was a Psilanthropist, one of those who believe
our Lord to have been the real son of Joseph, and who lay the
main stress on the resurrectionrrather than on the cruciﬁxion.
O I never can I remember those days with either shame or regret.
For I was most sincere, most disinterested. My opinions were
indeed in many and most important points. erroneous; but my
heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself then seemed cheap to
me, compared with the interests of what I believed to be the
truth, and the will of my Maker. I can not even accuse myself

* See the last chapter but one of the Biographical Supplement.—-S. C.]
+ [Michaelmas Term, 17 94, was the last he kept at Cambridge. The ﬁrst
number of The Watchman appeared March 1, 1796. See Biog. Sup—S. Q]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 279

of having been actuated by vanity ; for 1n the expansion of my
enthusiasm I did not think of myself at all.

My campaign commenced at Birmingham ;* and my ﬁrst
attack was on a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He
was a tall dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over
breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundery
poker. O that face I a face xat’ Emma“! ! I have it before me
at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair, pingui-nites-
cent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin
gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from
a last week’s shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison,
both of color and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which
I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at
the nape of the neck,—the only approach to ﬂexure in his whole
ﬁgure,—slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance
lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows,
gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a used
gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron ! But he was one of the
thorough- bred, a true lover of liberty, and, as I was informed, had
proved to the satisfaction of many, that Mr. Pitt was one of the "
horns of the second beast in THE REVELATIONS, that spa/c6 as (710
dragon. A person, to whom one of my letters of recommendation"
had been addressed, was my introducer. It was a new event in
my life, my ﬁrst stroke in the 11err business I had undertaken of
an author, yea, and of an author trading on his own account.
My companion after some imperfect sentences and a multitude of
hums and has abandoned the cause to his client ; and I commen-
ced an harangue of half an hour to Phileleutheros, the tallow-
chandler, varying my notes, through the whole gamut of elo«
quence, from the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and in the
latter from the pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described,
I promised, I prophesied; and beginning with the captivity of
nations I ended with the near approach of the millennium, ﬁnish-
ing the whole with some of my own verses describing that glori
ous state out of the Religious Musings :

 

Such delights
As ﬂoat to earth, permitted visitants !
When in some hour of solemn jubilee

 

" [This tour was made in January, 17 96. See Biog. Sup—S. 0.]

280 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.’

The massrvc gates of Paradise are thrown

Wide open, and forth come in fragments Wild
Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies,

And odors snatched from beds of amaranth,

And they, that from the crystal river of life
Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales !*

My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praise-
worthy patience, though, as I was afterwards told, on complain.
ing of certain gales that were not altogether ambrosial, it was a
melting day with him. “ And what, Sir,” he said, after a short
pause, “ might the cost be '3” “ Only four-pence,” —(O ! how I
felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four-pence l)—
“only four-pence, Sir, each number, to be published on every
eighth day.”—“ That comes to a deal of money at the end of a
year. And how much, did you say, there was to be for the
money?”—“ Thirty-two pages, Sir! large octavo, closely print-
ed.”——“ Thirty and two pages? Bless me! Why except what I
does in a family way on the Sabbath, that’s more than I ever
reads, Sir! all the year round. I am as great a one, as any man
in Brummagem, Sir! for liberty and truth and all them sort of
things, but as to this,—no offence, I hope, Sir,—I must beg to be
excused.”

So ended my ﬁrst canvass: from causes that I shall presently
mention, I made but one other application in person. This took
place at Manchester to a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in
cottons. He took my letter of introduction, and, having perused
it, measured me from head to foot and again from foot to head,
and then asked if I had any bill or invoice of the thing. I pre
sented my prospectus to him. He rapidly skimmed and hummed
over the ﬁrst side, and still more rapidly the second and conclud-
ing page; crushed it within his ﬁngers and the palm of his
hand ; then most deliberately and signiﬁcantly rubbed and
smoothed one part against the other ; and lastly putting it into
his pocket turned his back on me with an “ over-mm, with these
articles 3” and so without another syllable retired into his count-
ing-house. And, I can truly say, to my unspeakable amusement.

This, I have said, was my second and last attempt. On re-
turning bafﬂed from the ﬁrst, in which I had vainly essayed to
repeat the miracle of Orpheus with the Brummagem patriot, l

i" I Religious Musings. Poet. Works, VII. pp. 80, 81.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 281

dined with the tradesman who had introduced me to him After
dinner he importuned me to smoke a pipe with him, and two 01
three other illuminati of the' same rank. I objected, both be-
cause I was engaged to spendthe evening with a minister and
his friends, and because I had never smoked except once or twice
in my life-time, and then it was herb tobacco mixed with Oro-
nooko. On the assurance, however, that the tobacco was equal-
ly mild, and seeing too that it was of a yellow color,—not for
getting the lamentable difﬁculty I have always experienced inf!)
saying, “ N o, and in abstaining from what the people about mell/
were doing,——I took half a pipe, ﬁlling the lower half of the“
bole with salt. I was soon however compelled to resign it, in
consequence of a giddiness and distressful feeling in my eyes,
which, as I had drunk but a single glass of ale, must, I knew,
have been the effect of the tobacco. Soon after, deeming my-
self recovered, I sallied forth to my engagement ; but the walk
and the fresh air brought on all the symptoms again, and, I had
scarcely entered the minister’s drawing-room, and opened a small
pacquet of letters, which he had received from Bristol for me,
ere I sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather than sleep.
Fortunately I had found just time enough to inform him of the
confused state of my feelings, and of the occasion. For here-
and thus I lay, my face like a wall that is white-washing, deathy
pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it
from my forehead, while one after another there dropped in the
different gentlemen, who had been invited to meet, and spend
the evening with me, to the number of from ﬁfteen to twenty.
As the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length
awoke from insensibility, and looked round on the party, my eyes
dazzled by the candles which had been lighted in the interim.
By way of relieving my embarrassment one of the gentlemen
began the conversation, with "‘Have you seen a paper to-day,
Mr. Coleridge?” “Sir I” I replied, rubbing my eyes, “ I am far
from convinced, that a Christian is permitted to read either
newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary
interest.” This remark, so ludicrously inapposite to, or rather,
incongruous with, the purpose for which I was known to have
visited Birmingham, and to assist me in which they were all
then met, produced an involuntary and general burst of laugh-
ter ; and seldom indeed have I passed so many delightful hours,

H

282 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

as I enjoyed in that room from the moment of that laugh till an
early hour the next morning. Never, perhaps, in so mixed and
numerous a party, have I since 'heard conversation sustained
with such animation, enriched with such variety of information,
and enlivened with such a ﬂow of anecdote. Both then and af-
terwards they all joined in dissuading me from proceeding with
my scheme ; assured me in the most friendly and yet most ﬂat-
tering expressions, that neither was the employment ﬁt for me,
nor I ﬁt for the employment. Yet, if I determined on persever-
ing in it, they promised to exert themselves to the utmost to pro-
cure subscribers, and insisted that I should make no more appli-
cations in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy. The same
hospitable reception, the same dissuasion, and, that failing, the
same kind exertions in my behalf, I met with at Manchester,
Derby, Nottingham, Shefﬁeld,——indeed, at every place in which
I took up my sojourn. I often recall with affectionate pleasure
the many respectable men who interested themselves for me, a
perfect stranger to them, not a few of whom I can-still name

among my friends. They will bear witness foW
i .913“ then my principlengﬂyismbr even of.

I

l democracy, and‘can attest the strict accuracy of the statement
which I have left on record in the 10th and 11th numbers of
THE FRIEND.*

From this remarkable tour I returned with nearly a thousanu
names on the subscription list of THE WATCHMAN ; yet more than
half convinced, that prudence dictated the abandonment of the
scheme. But for this very reason I persevered in it ; for I was
at that period of my life so completely hag-ridden by the fear of
being inﬂuenced by selﬁsh motives, that to know a mode of con-
duct to be the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive
proof to my feelings, that the contrary was the dictate of duty.
Accordingly, I commenced the work, which was announced in
London by long bills in letters larger than had ever been seen
before, and which, I have been informed, for I did not see them
myself, eclipsed the glories even of the lottery puffs. But alas '
the publication of the very ﬁrst number was delayed beyond the
day announced for its appearance. In the second number an
essay against fast-days, with a most censurable application of a
text from Isaiah for its motto, lost me near ﬁve hundred of my

* [Essays V. and VI., II. pp. 187—207. See also Essay XVI, II. pp. 3004
BOL—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 285

subscribers at one blow. In the two following numbers I made
enemies of all my Jacobin and democratic patrons ; for, disgusted
by their inﬁdelity, and their adoption of French morals with
French psilosophy ; and perhaps thinking, 1h_at_ c_ha,1;i_ty nghiti_
begin nearest home' , instead of abusing the government and
the Aristocfatschieﬂy or entirely, as had been expected of me, I
levelled my attacks at “modern patriotism,” and even ventured
to declare my belief, that whatever the motives of ministers
might have been for the sedition, or as it was then the fashion
to call them, the WW
produce an effect to be desired by a e true friends of freedom,
as far as they should contribute to deter men from openly declaim-
ing on subjects, the principles of which they had never bottomed,
and from “pleading to the poor and ignorant, instead of pleading
for them." At the same time I avowed my conviction, mm
in ,ispensa e 0011.}. Wny true political me loratlon. Thus
by the time the seventh number was published, I had the morti-
ﬁcation—(but why should I say this, when in truth I cared too
little for any thing that concerned my worldly interests to be at
all mortiﬁed about it ?)—of seeing the preceding numbers exposed
in sundry old iron shops for a penny a piece. At the ninth num-
ber I dropt the work. But fiom the London publisher I could
not obtain a shilling ; he was a —— and set me at deﬁance.
From other places I procured but little, and after such delays as
rendered that little worth nothing ; and I should have been in
evitably thrown into jail by my Bristol printer, who refused to
wait even for a month, for a sum between eighty and ninety
pounds, if the money had not been paid for me by a man by no
means afﬂuent, a dear friendﬁ“ who attached himself to me from
my ﬁrst arrival at Bristol, who has continued my friend with a
ﬁdelity unconquered by time or even by my own apparent .neg-
lect ; a friend from whom I never received an advice that was
not wise, nor a remonstrance that was not gentle and affec-

. tionate.

\ Conscientiously an opponent of the ﬁrst reﬁvpglntionaryw war, yet /‘\

with my eyes thoroughly opened to the true character and impo-

tence of the favorers of revolutionary principles in England, prin

 

* [Josiah Wade. See the Biographical Supplement, Where this gentle
man is again spoken oil—S. 0.]

284 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

‘ ciples which I held in abhorrence—(for it was art of my 0-
Wm act a_s__an individualjy
making himself a member of ﬂy society not sanctioned by his
Government, forfeited the rights of a citizen)—a vehement Anti‘
Ministerlalist, ut after the invasion of Switzerland, a more vc-
hement Anti-Gallican, and still more intensely an Anti-Jacobin,
Iretired to a cottage at Stowey,* and provided for my scanty
maintenance by writing verses for a London Morning Papers}L I
saw plainly, that literature was not a profession, by which I could
expect to live; for I could not disguise from myself, that, what-
ever my talents might or might not be in other respects, yet they
were not of the sort that could enable me to become a popular
writer; and that whatever my opinions might be in themselves,
they were almost equi-distant from all the three prominent par-
ties, the Pittites, the Foxites, and the Democrats. Of the un-
salable nature of my writings I had an amusing memento one
morning from our own servant girl. For happening to rise at an
earlier hour than usual, I observed her putting an extravagant
quantity of paper into the grate in order to light the ﬁre, and
mildly checked her for her wastefulness ; “ La, Sir 3” (replied
poor Nanny) “ why, it is only Watchmen.”

I now devoted myself to poetry and to the study of ethics and
psychology ; and so profound was my admiration at this time of
Hartley’s ESSAY ON MANJ that I gave his name to my ﬁrst-bom.
In addition to the gentleman, my neighbor, whose garden joined
on to my little orchard, and the cultivation of whose friendship
had been my sole motive in choosing Stowey for my residence,§

 

 
   

* [In January, 1791—8. 0.]

1- [The Morning Post. See the last chapter but one of the Biographical
Supplement—S. 0.]

1 [OBSERVATIONS ON MAN, ms FRAME, HIS DUTY, AND HIS Exmmuaoxs, in
two parts, 8vo. published in 17 48. Dr. Hartley, son of the Vicar of Armley,
near Leeds, was born on the 30th of August, 1705, died at Bath in 1757.—-—-
S. 0.]

§ [The late Thomas Poole—“ a man whom I have seen now in his harvest
ﬁeld, or the market, now in a committee-room with the Rickmans and Ri-
cardos of the age; at another time with Davy, \Vollaston, and the Wedg-
woods; now with Wordsworth, Southey, and other friends not unheard of
in the republic of letters; now in the drawing-rooms of the rich and the
noble, and now presiding at the annual dinner of a village beneﬁt society;
and in each seeming to be in the very place he was intended for, and taking

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 285

Iwas so fortunate as to acquire, shortly after my settlement there,
an invaluable blessing in the society and neighborhood of one, to
whom I could look up with equal reverence, whether I regarded
him as a poet, a philosopher, or a man.”“ His conversation ex-

the part to which his tastes, talents, and attainments gave him an admitted
right. And yet this is not the most remarkable, not the individualizing,
trait of my friend’s character. It is almost overlooked in the originality
and raciness of his intellect; in the life, freshness, and practical value of
his remarks and notices, truths plucked as they are growing, and delivered
to you with the dew on them, the fair earnings of an observing eye, armed
and kept on the watch by thought and meditation; and above all, in the
integrity or entireness of his being (integrum et sine cera ms), the steadi-
ness of his attachments, and the activity and persistency of a benevolence,
which so graciously presses a warm temper into the service of a yet warmer
heart, and so lights up the little ﬂaws and imperfections incident to human-
ity in its choicest specimens, that were their removal at the option of his
friends (and few have or deserve to have so many), not a man among them
but would vote for leaving him as he is.” Note to the Church and State, VI.
p. 83.—-——S. C.

9* [The reader will recognize at once in this revered philosopher and

poet, that
' Friend of the wise and teacher of the good

'whose great name has been so frequently joined with the name of Coleridge,
ever since their association with each other in the lovely region of Quantock.
It was in those days that after hearing his

Song divine of high and passionate thoughts

To their own music chanted,
my father thus addressed him: ' i

- 0 great bard,

Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air,
With steadfast 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 linked lay of Truth,
Of Truth profound a sweet, continuous lay,
Not learnt but native, her own natural notes.

From the lines to WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, composed after 1118 recitation
of a poem on the growth of an Individual Mind .—-—.Poet Works, VII. pp
159.160..—S 0.] .

286 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

tended to almost all subjects, except physics and politics; with
the latter he never troubled himself. Yet neither my retirement
nor my utter abstraction from all the disputes of the day could
secure me in those jealous times from suspicion and obloquy,
which did not stop at me, but extended to my excellent friend,
whose perfect innocence was even adduced as a proof of his guilt.
One of the many busy sycophants of that day,—-—(I here use the
word sycophant in its original sense, as a wretch who ﬂattens the
prevailing party by informing against his neighbors, under pre-
tence that they are exporters of prohibited ﬁgs or fancies,—for
the moral application of the term it matters not which)—one of
these sycophantic law-mongrels, discoursing on the politics of the
neighborhood, uttered the following deep remark: “ As to Cole-
giridge, there is not so much harm in him, for he is a whirl-brain
gthat talks whatever comes uppermost; but that l he is the
l War/c traitor. You never hear HIM say a syllable on the subjecty ,
Now that the hand of Providence has disciplined all Europe
into sobriety, as men tame wild elephants, by alternate blows
and caresses ; now that Englishmen of all classes are restored to
their old English notions and feelings ; it will with difﬁculty be
credited, how great an inﬂuence was at that time possessed and
exerted by the spirit of secret defamation—(the too constant at-
tendant on party zeal)—during the restless interim from 1793 to
the commencement of the Addington administration, or the year
before the truce of Amiens. For by the latter period the minds
of the partisans, exhausted by excess of stimulation and humbled
by mutual disappointment, had become languid. The same
causes, that inclined the nation to peace, disposed the individuals
to reconciliation. Both parties had found themselves in the
wrong. The one had confessedly mistaken the moral character
of the revolution, and the other had miscalculated both its moral
and its physical resources. The experiment was made at the
price of great, almost, we may say, of humiliating sacriﬁces;
and wise men foresaw that it would fail, at least in its direct
and ostensible object. Yet it was purchased cheaply, and real-
ized an object of equal value, and, if possible, of still more vital
importance. For it brought about a national unanimity unex-
ampled in our history since the reign of Elizabeth; and Provi-
dence, never wanting to a good work when men have done their
parts, soon provided a common focus in the cause of Spain;

 

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA‘ 287

whichmade us all once more Englishmen by at once-gratifying
and correcting the predilections of both parties. The sincere
reverers of the throne felt the cause of loyalty ennobled by its
alliance with that of freedom; while the honest zealots of the
people could not but admit, that freedom itself assumed a more
winning form, humanized by loyalty and consecrated by religious
principle. The youthful enthusiasts who, ﬂattered by the morn-
mg rainbow of the French revolution, had made a boast of expa-
triating their hopes and fears, now, disciplined by the succeed-
ing storms and sobered by increase of years, had been taught to
prize and honor the spirit of nationality as the best safeguard of
national independence, and this again as the absolute pre-requi-
site and necessary basis of popular rights.

If in Spain too disappointment has nipped our too forward ex—
pectations, yet all is not destroyed that is checked. The crop
was perhaps springing up too rank in the stalk to kern well;
and there were, doubtless, symptoms of the Gallican blight on it.
If superstition and despotism have been suffered to let in their
wolvish sheep to trample and eat it down even to the surface,
yet the roots remain alive, and the second growth may prove the
stronger and the healthier for the temporary interruption. At
all events, to us heaven has been just and gracious. The people
of England did their best, and have received their rewards.
Long may we continue to deserve it 3 Causes, which it had been
too generally the habit of former statesmen to regard as belong-
ing to another world, are now admitted by all ranks to have
been the main agents of our success. “ We fought from heaven ;
the stars in their courses fought against Sisem.” If then una-
nimity grounded on moral feelings has been among the least
equivocal sources of our national glory, that man deserves the
esteem of his countrymen, even as patriots, who dcvoteSLhis life
and the utmost efforts of his intellect to the preservation and
continuance of that unanimity by the disclosure and establishment
of principles. For by these all opinion must be ultimately tried ;
and (as the feelings of men are worthy of regard only as far
as they are the representatives of their ﬁxed opinions) on the
knowledge of these all unanimity, not accidental and ﬂeeting,
must be grounded. Let the scholar, who doubts this assertion,
refer only to the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke at the
commencement of the American war, and compare them with

288 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

his speeches and writings at the commencement of the French
revolution. He will ﬁnd the principles exactly the same and
the deductions the same ; but the practical inferences almost op-
posite in the one case from those drawn in the other; yet in
both equally legitimate, and in both equally conﬁrmed by the re-
sults. Whence gained he this superiority of foresight ‘3 Whence
arose the striking difference, and, in most instances, even the
discrepancy between the grounds assigned by him and by those
who voted with him, on the same questions ? How are we to
explain the notorious fact, that the speeches and writings of Ed-
mund Burke are more interesting at the present day than they
were found at the time of their ﬁrst publication ; while those of
his illustrious confederates are either forgotten, or exist only to
furnish proofs, that the same conclusion, which one man had de-
duced scientiﬁcally, may be brought out by another in conse-
quence of errors that luckily chanced to neutralize each other ?
It would be unhandsome as a conjecture, even were it not, as it
actually is, false in point of fact, to attribute this difference to
deﬁciency of talent on the part of Burke’s friends, or of expe-
rience, or of historical knowledge. The satisfactory solution is,
that Edmund Burke possessed and had sedulously sharpened that
eye, which sees all things, actions, and events, in relation to the
laws that determine their existence and circumscribe their pos
sibility. He referred habitually to principles. He was a scien
tiﬁc statesman ; and therefore a seer. For every principle con-
tains in itself the germs of a prophecy; and, as the prophetic
power is the essential privilege of science, so the fulfilment of its
oracles supplies the outward, and (to men in general) the only
test of its claim to the title. Wearisome as Burke’s reﬁnements
appeared to his parliamentary auditors, yet the cultivated classes
throughout Europe have reason to be thankful, that he

 

 

went on reﬁning, .
And thought of convincing, While they thought of dining."6

Our very sign-boards (said an illustrious friend to me) give evi-
dence, that there has been a Titian in the world. In like man-
ner, not only the debates in parliament, not only our proclama-
tions and state papers, but the essays and leading paragraphs of
our journals, are so many remembrancers of Edmund Burke.

* [Goldsmith’s Retaliation.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 289

Of this the reader may easily convince himself, if either by recol-
lection or reference he will compare the opposition newspapers
at the commencement and during the ﬁve or six following years
of the French revolution with the sentiments, and grounds of ar-
gument assumed in the same class of journals at present, and
for some years past.

Whether the spirit of J acobinism, which the writings of Burke
exorcised from the higher and from the literary classes, may not,
like the ghost in Hamlet, be heard moving and mining in the
underground chambers with an activity the more dangerous be
cause less noisy, may admit of a. question. I have given my
opinions on this point, and the grounds of them, in my letters to
Judge Fletcher, occasioned by his charge to the W exford grand
jury, and published in the Courierﬁ"< Be this as it may, the evil
spirit of jealousy, and with it the Cerberean whelps of feud and
slander, no longer walk their rounds, in cultivated society.

Far different were the days to which these anecdotes have
carried me back. The dark guesses of some zealous Quidmmc
met with so congenial a soil in the grave alarm of a titled Dog-
berry of our neighborhood, that a spy was actually sent down
from the government pour surveillance of myself and friend.
There must have been not only abundance, but variety of these
“ honorable men” at the disposal of Ministers : for this proved a
very honest fellow. After three weeks’ truly Indian perseverance
in tracking us (for we were commonly together), during all which
time seldom were we out of doors, but he contrived to be within
hearing,—(and all the while utterly unsuspected; how indeed
could such a suspicion enter our fancies ?)—he not only rejected
Sir Dogberry’s request that he would try yet a little longer,
but declared to him his belief, that both my friend and my-
self were as good subjects, for aught he could discover to the
contrary, as any in His Majesty’s dominions. He had repeat-
edly hid himself, he said, for hours together behind a bank at
the sea-side (our favorite seat), and overheard our conversa-
tion. At ﬁrst he fancied, that we were aware of our danger;
for he often heard me talk of one Spy Nozy, which he was
inclined to interpret of himself, and of a remarkable feature be-
longing to him ; but he was speedily convinced that it was the
name of a man who had made a book and lived long ago. Our

* [They appeared in November and December of 1814.—-S. 0.]

VOL. 111. N .

290 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

talk ran most upon books, and we were perpetually desiring each
other to look at this, and to listen to that; but he could not
catch a word about politics. Once he had joined me on the
road; (this occurred, as I was returning home alone from my
friend’s house, which was about three miles from my own cot-
tage,) and, passing himself off as a traveller, he had entered into
conversation with me, and talked of purpose in a democrat way
in order to draw me out. The result, it appears, not only con~
vinced him that I was no friend of jacobinism; but (he added),
I had “ plainly made it out to be such a silly as well as wicked
thing, that he felt ashamed though he had only put it 0n.” 1
distinctly remembered the occurrence, and had mentioned it im-
mediately on my return, repeating what the traveller with his
Bardolph nose had said, with my own answer ; and so little did
lsuspect the true object of my “ tempter ere accuser,” that I ex
pressed with no small pleasure my hope and belief, that the con-
versation had been of some service to the poor misled malcontent.
This incident therefore prevented all doubt as to the truth of the
report, which through a friendly medium came to me from the
master of the village inn, who had been ordered to entertain the
Government gentleman in his best manner, but above all to be
silent concerning such a person being in his house. At length
he received Sir Dogberry’s commands to accompany his guest at
the ﬁnal interview; and, after the absolving suffrage of the gen-
tleman honored with the conﬁdence of ZVIinisters, answered, as
follows, to the following queries? D. Well, landlord! and what
do you know ‘of the person in question? L. I see himoften pass
by with maister ———-, my landlord (that is, the owner of the
house), and sometimes with the new-comers at Holford ;* but I
never said a word to him or he to me. D. But do you not
know, that he has distributed papers and hand-bills of a seditious
nature among the common people? L..No, your Honor! I
never heard of such a thing. D. Have you not seen this Mr.
Coleridge, or heard of, his haranguing and talking to knots and
clusters of the inhabitants 'l—What are you grinning at, Sir 7 L.
Beg your Honor’s pardon ! but I was only thinking, how they’d
have stared at him. If what I have heard be true, your Honor!
they would not have understood a word he said. “’lien our

* [Holford is the village near Alfoxton, where Mr. W'ordsworth andMisa
Wordsworth resided—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPH IA LI'I‘ERA'RIA. g9},

Vicar was here, Dr. L.”“ the master of the great school and Canon
of ‘Windsor, there was a great dinner party at maister -——-—’s ;
and one of the farmers, that was there, told us that he and the
Doctor talked real Hebrew Greek at each other for an hour to-
gether after dinner. D. Answer the question, Sir 3 does he ever
harangue the people? L. Ihope, your Honor an’t angry with
me. I can say no more than I know. I never saw him talking
with any one, but my landlord, and our curate, and the strange
gentleman. D. Has he not been seen wandering on the hills
towards the Channel, and along the shore, with books and pa-
pers in his hand, taking charts and maps of the country '? L.
Why, as to that, your Honor. ' I own, I have heard ; I am sure, I
would not wish to say ill of any body, but it is ce1tain, that I
have heard—D. Speak out, man. ' don t be afraid, you me doing
your duty to your King and Government. What have you heard?
L. Why, folks do say, your Honor 3 as how that he is a Poet, and
that he is going to put Quantock and all about here in print;
and as they be so much together, I suppose that the strange gen-
tleman has some 0072365777, in the business.”—So ended this formi-
dable inquisition, the latter part of which alone requires explana-
tion, and at the same time entitles the anecdote to a place in my
literary life. I had considered it as a defect in the admirable
poem of THE TASK, that the subject, which gives the title to the
work, was not, and indeed could not be, carried on beyond the
three or four ﬁrst pages, and that, throughout the poem, the c011-
nections are frequently awkward, and the transitions abrupt and
arbitrary. I sought for a subject, that should give equal room
and freedom for description, incident, and impassioned reﬂections
on men, nature, and society, yet supply in itself a natural connec-
tion to the parts, and unity to the whole. Such a subject I con-
ceived myself to have found in a stream, traced from its source in
the hills among the yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped
tufts" of bent, to the ﬁrst break or fall, where its drops become
audible, and it begins to form a channel ; thence to the peat and
turf barn, itself built of the same dark squares as it sheltered ; to
the sheepfold ; to the ﬁrst cultivated plot of ground ; to the
lonely cottage and its bleak garden won from the heath; to the
hamlet, the villages, the market—town, the rnanufactories, and
the sea-port. My walks therefore were almost daily on the top

* [Dr. Langford.-—S. 0.]

292 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

of Quantock, and among its sloping coombes. With my pencil
and memorandum-book in my hand, I was making studies, as
the artists call them, and often moulding my thoughts into verse,
with the objects and imagery immediately before my senses.
Many circumstances, evil and good, intervened to prevent the
completion of the poem, which was to have been entitled. THE
BROOK. Had I ﬁnished the work, it was my purpose in the heat
of the moment to have dedicated it to our then committee of
public safety as containing the charts and maps, with which I
was to have supplied the French Government in aid of their
plans of invasion. And these too for a tract of coast that, from
Clevedon to Minehead, scarcely permits the approach of a ﬁsh-
ing-boat ! .

All my experience from my ﬁrst entrance into life to the pres-
ent hour is in favor of the warning maxim, that the man, who
opposes “in lolo the political or religious zealots of his age, is safer
from their obloquy than he who differs from them but in one or
two points, or perhaps only in degree. By that transfer of the
feelings of private life into the discussion of public questions,
which is the queen bee in the hive of party fanaticism, the par-
tisan has more sympathy with an intemperate opposite than with
a moderate friend. We now enjoy an intermission, and long may
it continue 3 In addition to far higher and more important mer-
its, our present Bible societies and other numerous associations for
national or charitable objects, may serve perhaps to carry off the
superﬂuous activity and fervor of stirring minds in innocent hy-
perboles and the bustle of management. But the poison-tree is
not dead, though the sap may for a season have subsided to its
roots. At least let us not be lulled into such a notion of our en-
tire security, as not to keep watch and ward, even on our best
feelings. lhave seen gross intolerance shown in support of tol-
eration; sectarian antipathy most obtrusively displayed in the
promotion of an rundistinguishing comprehension of sects; and
acts of cruelty, (I had almost said) of treachery, committed in fur-
therance of an object vitally important to the cause of humanity ;
and all this by men too of naturally kind dispositions and exem-
plary conduct.

The magic rod of fanaticism is preserved in the very adyta of
human nature ; and needs only the re-exciting warmth of a
master hand to bud forth afresh and produce the old fruits. The

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 293

honor of the Peasants’ wa1 in Germany, and the direiul effects

W’ tenets (which diff‘e1ed only f1om those of
jacobinism by the substitution of theological for philosophical
jargon), struck all Europe for a time with affright. Yet little
more than a century was sufﬁcient to obliterate all eliective
memory of these events. The same principles with similar
though less dreadful consequences were again at work from the
1mprisonment of the ﬁrst Charles to the restoration of his son.
The fanatic maxim of extirpating fanaticism by persecution pro-.7
duced a civil war. The war ended in the victory of the insur-
gents; but the temper survived, and Milton had abundant grounds
for asserting, that “ Presbyter was but OLD PRIEST writ large 1”*
One good result, thank heaven! of this zealotry was the re-es~
tablishment of the church. And now it might have been hoped,
that the mischievous spirit would have been bound for a season,
“ and a seal set upon him, that he should deceive the nation no
more.”1L But no! The ball of persecution was taken up with
undiminished vigor by the persecuted. The same fanatic prin‘
ciple that, under the solemn oath and covenant, had turned cathe-
drals into stables, destroyed the rarest trophies of art and ances-
tral piety, and hunted the brightest ornaments of learning and
religion into holes and corners, now marched under episcopal
banners, and, having ﬁrst crowded the prisons of England, emptied
its whole vial of wrath on the miserable Covenanters of Scotlandi
A merciful providence at le1 0tth constrained both parties to joim
against a common enemy. A wise government followed, and
the established chu1ch became, and now is, not only the b1ightest
example, but our best and only sure bulwark, of toleration '——-the
true and indispensable bank against a new inundation of perse-
cuting zeal—Esta perpetua .’

3 "i A long interval of quiet succeeded; or rather, the exhaustion
had produced a cold ﬁt of the ague which was symptomalz'zed
by indifference among the many, and a tendency to inﬁdelity or
skepticism in the educated classes. At length those feelings of
disgust and hatred, which for a brief while the multitude had
attached to the crimes and absurdities of sectarian and democratic

* [Line 20 of the irregular sonnet On the New Foreers of CODSCiBDde-v
under the Long Parliament. Todd’s Milton, vol. vi. pp. 92-7.—S. 0.]

f. Revelation xx. 3.

1 See Laing’s History of Scotland.— Walter Scott’s bards, ballads, dzc. . '1

294 . BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

fanaticisms, were transferred to the oppressive privileges of the
noblesse, and the luxury, intrigues and favoritisms of the conti-
nental courts. The same principles, dressed in the ostentatious
garb of a fashionable philosophy, once more rose triumphant and
effected the French Revolution. And have we not within the
last three or four years had reason to apprehend, that the detes-
table maxims and correspondent measures of the late French des-
potism had already bedimmed the public recollections of demo-
cratic phrenzy ; had drawn off to other objects the electric force
of the feelings which had massed and upheld those recollections;
and that a favorable occurrence of occasions was alone wanting
to waken the thunder and precipitate the lightning from the 0p-
posite quarter of the political heaven ?*

In part from constitutional indolence, which in the very hey-
day of hope had kept my enthusiasm in check, but still more
from the habits and inﬂuences of a classical education and aca-
demic pursuits, scarcely had a year elapsed from the commence-
ment of my literary and political adventures before my mind
sank into a state of thorough disgust and despondency, both with
regard to the disputes and the parties disputant. With more
than poetic feeling I exclaimed :

The sensual and the dark rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
They break their manacles, to wear the name
Of freedom, graven on a heavier chain.
0 Liberty 1 with proﬁtless endeavor
Have I pursued thee many a weary hour ;
But thou nor swell’st the Victor’s pomp, nor ever —~
Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power !
Alike from all, howe’er they praise thee,
(Nor prayer nor boastful name delays thee)
From Superstition’s harpy millions
And factious Blasphemy’s obscener slaves,
Thou speedest on thy cherub pinions,
The guide of homeless winds and playmate of the waves H”

I retired to a cottage in Somersetshire at the foot of Quantock,
and devoted my thoughts and studies to the foundations of re-

* [See The Friend, sect. 1, On the Principles of Political Knowledge.
Essay iii. II. pp. 166—171.—S. 0.]

f [Poet Works, VII. p. 106. Mr. 0. here substitutes “Superstition” for
“ Priestcraft,” and “cherub” for “ subtle” in the last line but one—S. 0.}

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ' 295

ligion and morals. Here I found myself all aﬂoat. Doubts
rushed in; broke upon me “from the fountains of the great
deep,” and fell “from the windows of heaven.” The fontal
truths of natural religion and the books of Revelation alike con-
tributed to the ﬂood ; and it was long ere my ark touched on an
Ararat, and rested. The Men of the Supreme Being appeared to X
me to be as necessarily implied in all particular modes of being
as the idea of inﬁnite space in all the geometrical ﬁgures by
which space is limited. I was pleased with the Cartesian
opinion, that the idea of God is distinguished from all other ideas
by involving its reality ; but I was not wholly satisﬁed. I began
then to ask myself, ‘what proof I had of the outward existence of
any thing? Of this sheet of paper for instance, as a thing in
itself, separate from the phcenomenon or image in my perception.
I saw, that in the nature of things such proof is impossible ; and
that of all modes of being, that are not objects of the senses, the
existence is assumed by a logical necessity arising from the con-
stitution of the mind itself,—by the absence of all motive to doubt
it, not from any absolute contradiction in the supposition of the
contrary. Still the existence of a Being, the ground of all ex-
istence, was not yet the existence of a moral creator, and gov-
ernor. “In the position, that all reality is either contained in
the necessary being as an attribute, exists through him, as its
ground, it remains undecided whether the properties of intelli-
gence and will are to be referred to the Supreme Being in the
former or only in the latter sense ; as inherent attributes, or only
as consequences that have existence in other things through
him.* Were the latter the truth, then notwithstanding all the
pre-eminence which must be assigned to the Eternal First from
the sufﬁciency, unity, and independence of his being, as the dread
ground of the universe, his nature would yet fall far short of that, ,
which we are bound to comprehend in the idea of GOD. For,
without any knowledge or determining resolve of its own, it would
only be a blind necessary ground of other things and other spirits,”
and thus would be distinguished from the FATE of certain ancient
philosophers in no respect, but that of being more deﬁnitely and

intelligibly described. ’ "r

* Thus organization, and motion, are regarded as from God, not in God.
f [From Immanuel Kant’s treatise entitled Der einzig mogliche Bewez'c-
~rund zu einer Demonstration fur das Dasez'n Gottes. 1. Abth. 4, Betr, 3

296 - BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

For a very long time, indeed, I could not reconcile personality
with inﬁnity ; and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole
heart remained with Paul and John. Yet there had dawned
upon me, even before I had met with the CRITIQUE OF THE PURE
REASON, a certain guiding light. If the mere intellect could
make no certain discovery of a holy and intelligent ﬁrst cause, it
might yet supply a demonstration, that no legitimate argument
could be drawn from the intellect against its truth. And what
is this more than St. Paul’s assertion, that by wisdom—{more
properly translated by the powers of reasoning)—no man ever
arrived at the knowledge of God? What more than the sub-
limest, and probably the oldest, book on earth has taught us,

Silver and gold man searcheth out:
Bringeth the ore out of the earth, and darkness into light.

But Where ﬁndeth he Wisdom?
Where is the place of understanding?

l
l
1
l
r

The abyss crieth; it is not in me!
i 1 Ocean echoeth back; not in me!

I

thnce then cometh wisdom?
Where dwelleth understanding?

Hidden from the eyes of the living:
Kept secret from the fowls of heaven!

Hell and death answer ;
We have heard the rumor thereof from afar!

GOD marketh out the road to it;
GOD knoweth its abiding place!

He beholdeth the ends of the earth;
He surveyeth What is beneath the heavens !

And as be weighed out the Winds, and measured the sea
And appointed laws to the rain,

And a path to the thunder, ,

A path to the ﬂashes of the lightning!

Then did he see it,

And he counted it ;

He searched into the depth thereof,

And with a line did he compass it round !

 

Anmerkung, ﬁrst published in 1763. Works, vol. vi. p. 4'2. Mr. 0. gave
the abbreviated name of this treatise, and referred it to the Vermischte
Schriften. Zweiter Band. § 102 and 103.—S. 0]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 297

But to man he said,

The fear of the Lord is Wisdom for thee !
And to avoid evil,

That is thy understanding.*

I became convinced, that religion, as both the corner-stone and
the key-stone of morality, must have a moral origin; so far at
least, that the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths
of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will. It were
therefore to be expected, that its fundamental truth would be
such as might be denied ; though only, by the fool, and even by
the fool from the madness of the heart alone!

i The question then concerning our faith in the existence of a
God, not only as the ground of the universe by his essence, but
as its maker and judge by his wisdom and holy will, appeared to
stand thus. The sciential reason, the objects of which are purely
theoretical, remains neutral, as long as its name and semblance
are not usurped by the opponents of the doctrine. But it then
becomes an effective ally by exposing the false show of demonstra-
tion, or by evincing the equal demonstrability of the contrary
from premises equally logicald‘ The understanding meantime
suggests, the analogy of experience facilitates, the belief. Nature
excites and recalls it, as by a perpetual revelation. Our feelings
almost necessitate it; and the law of conscience peremptorily
commands it. The arguments, that at all apply to it, are in its
favor; and there is nothing against it, but its own sublimity.
It could not be intellectually more evident without becoming
morally less effective; without counteracting its own end by
sacriﬁcing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worthless
because compulsory assent. The belief of a God and a future

* Job, chap. xxviii.

1* Wherever A: B, and A is notzB, are equally demonstrable, the
premise in each undeniable, the induction evident, and the conclusion legiti-
mate—the result must be, either that contraries can both be true (Which is
absurd), or that the faculty and forms of reasoning employed are inapplica-
ble to the subject—i. e. that there is a peniﬁaotg sic (22.10 yévog. Thus, the
attributes of Space and Time applied to Spirit are heterogeneous—and the
proof of this is, that by admitting them explicite or implicitc contraries may
be demonstrated true—2'. e. that the same, taken in the same sense, is true
and not true. —That the W01 ld‘had a beginning in Time and a bound in
Space; and That the world had not- a beginning and has no limit ;-—That a

self- -or iginating act IS, and is not possible, are instances.
N*

298 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIAL

state (if a passive acquiescence may be ﬂattered with the name
of belief), does not indeed always beget a good heart ; but a good
heart so naturally begets the belief, that the very few exceptions
must be regarded as strange anomalies from strange and unfor-
,tunate circumstances.*

From these premises I proceeded to draw the following con-
clusions. First, that having once fully admitted the existence of
an infinite yet self-conscious Creator, we are not allowed to
ground the irrationality of any other article of faith on arguments
which would equally prove that to be irrational, which we had
allowed to be real. Secondly, that whatever is deducible from
the admission of a seH-compreheriding and creative spirit may be
legitimately used in proof of the possibility of any further mystery
concerning the divine nature. Possibilitatem mysteriorum,
(Trinitatis, do) contra insullus Inﬁdelium et Ifcerelicorum a
cont-radiczionibus ’Ui’lldiCO ,' haud quiclem veritalem, quce revela-
tione solar. stabiliri possit ,' says Leibnitz in a letter to his Duke

5“ [“ I believe that the notion of God is essential to the human mind ; that
it is called forth into distinct consciousness principally by the conscience,
and auxiliarly by the manifest adaptation of means to ends in the outward
creation. It is, therefore, evident to my reason, that the existence of God is
absolutely and necessarily insusceptible of a scientiﬁc demonstration, and
that Scripturehas so represented it. For it commands us to believe in one
God. I am the Lord thy God: thou shalt have none other gods but me.
N ow all commandment necessarily relates to the will; whereas all scientiﬁc
demonstration is independent of the will, and is apodictic or demonstrative
only as far as it is compulsory on the mind, volentem, holentem.” Lit. Rem.
V. pp. 15, 16. “ The Trinity of persons in the Unity of the Godhead would
have been a necessary idea of my speculative reason, deduced from the
necessary postulate of an intelligent creator, whose ideas, being anterior to
the things, must be more actual than those things, even as those things are
more actual than our images derived from them; and who, as intelligent,
must have had co-eternally an adequate idea of himself, in and through
which he created all things both in heaven and earth. But this would only
have been a speculative idea, like those of circles and other mathematical
ﬁgures, to which we are not authorized by the practical reason to attribute
reality. Solely in consequence of our Redemption does the Trinity become
a doctrine, the belief of which as real is commanded by our conscience.”
V. p. 17. The same distinction between the belief of mere intellectual posi-
tions or logical notions in religion and the reception of living substantive
ideas correspondent to them, is set forth, and that religious faith consists
in the latter alone is argued in the Aids to Reﬂection. Comment on Aphor-
ism II. On that which is indeed Spiritual Religion, I. pp. 207—223.——S. (3.],

BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. 299

He then adds the following just and important remark. “In
vain will tradition or texts of scripture be adduced in support of
a doctrine, donec clava impossibilitatz's et contradictiom's e mani-
bus 12.0mm Herculum extorta fuem't. For the heretic will still ‘
reply, that texts, the literal sense of which is not so much above
as directly against all reason, must be understood ﬁguratively, as
IIerod 23 a fox, and so forth. ”*

These principles I held, philowphically, while 1n respect of re-

 

vealed religion I remained a zealous Unita1ian.lconsidered the
zdea of the Trinity a fair scholastic inference from the being of‘t.
God, as a creative intelligence; and that it was therefore en-
titled to the rank of an esoteric doctrine of natural religion. But
seeing in the same no practical 01 moral bearing, I conﬁned it to
the schools of philosophy. The admission of the Logos, as by-
postasized (that is, neither a mere attribute, nor a personification)
in no respect removed my doubts concerning the Incarnation and
the Redemption by the cross ; which I could neither reconcile in
reason with the impassiveness of the Divine Being, nor in my
moral feelings with the sacred distinction between things and per-
sons, the vicarious payment of a debt and the vicarious expiation
of guilt. A more thorough revolution in my philosophic princi-
ples, and a deeper insight into my own heart, were yet wanting.
Nevertheless, I can not doubt, that the difference of my meta-
physical notlons from those of Unitarians in general contributed
to my final re-conversion to the whole truth in Christ; even as
according to his own confession the books of certain Platonic
philosophers (libri quorzmdam Platonicorum) commenced the
rescue of St. Augustine’s faith from the same error aggravated by
the far darker accompaniment of the Manichaean heresyqL

* [I have looked through several collections of letters and other writings
of Leibnitz, besides the collection of his works by Dutens, and that of all
his philosophical works by Erdmann, but have not met with this letter.
The edition of the philosophical works by Raspe, with a preface by Mr
Kﬁstner, Amst. et Leips. 1765, I have never seen.—-—S. 0.]

f [Et primo calms, ct‘c. Confess. vii. 13. And thou willing ﬁrst to show
me, how Thou resistest the proud, but git-est grace unto the humble, and by
how great an act of Thy mercy Thou hadst traced out to men the way of
humility, in that Thy Word was made ﬂesh, and dwelt among men :——Thou
procuredst for me by means of one puffed up with most unnatural pride,
certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin. And
therein I read, not indeed in the very words, but to the very same purpose,

300 BIO GRAPHIA. LITERARIA.

While my mind was thus perplexed, by a gracious providence
for which I can never be sufﬁciently grateful, the generous and
muniﬁcent patronage of Mr. Josiah, and Mr. Thomas VVedg
wood enabled me to ﬁnish my education in Germany.* In
stead of troubling others with my own crude notions and juvc
nile compositions, I was thenceforward better employed in attempt-
ing to store my own head with the wisdom of others. I made
the best use of my time and means; and there is therefore no
period of my life on which I can look back with such unmingled
satisfaction. After acquiring a tolerable sufﬁciency in the Ger-
man language’r at Ratzeburg, which with my voyage and jour-

enforced by many and divers reasons, that In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the \Vord was God, &c. (A former trans
lation revised by the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D.)

Perrexi ergo ad D'nuplicianmn, (be. Confess. viii. 3. To Simplicianua
then I went, the father of Ambrose (a Bishop now) in receiving thy grace,
and whom Ambrose truly loved as a father. To him I related the mazes
of my wanderings. But when I mentioned that I had read certain books
of the Platonists, which V ictorinus, sometime Rhetoric Professor of Rome
(who had died a Christian, as I had heard), had translated into Latin, he
testiﬁed his joy that I had not fallen upon the writings of other philoso-
pliers, full of fallacies and deceits, after the rudiments of this world, whereas
the Platonists many ways led to the belief in God and his Word. (Ut
supra.)—Ed.]

9* [ll/11‘. C. left England on the 16th of September, 17 98, when he sailed
from Great Yarmouth to Hamburgh, in company with Mr. Vt’ordsworth and
his sister.—S. 0.]

+ To those who design to acquire the language of a country in the coun-
try itself, it may be useful, if I mention the inealculable advantage which 1
derived from learning all the words, that could possibly be so learned, with
the objects before me, and without the intermediation of the English terms.
It was a regular part of my morning studies for the ﬁrst six weeks of my
residence at Ratzeburg, to accompany the good and kind old pastor, with
whom I lived, from the cellar to the roof, through gardens, farm-yard, dzc.
and to call every, the minutest, thing by its German name. Advertise-
ments, farces, jest—books, and the conversation of children while I was at
play with them, contributed their share to a more home-like acquaintance
with the language, than I could have acquired from works of polite litera-
ture alone, or even from polite society. There is a passage of hearty sound
sense in Luther’s German Letter on interpretation, to the translation of
which I shall preﬁx, for the sake of those who read the German, yet are
not likely to have dipped often in the massive folios of the heroic reformer,
the simple, sinewy, idiomatic words of the original. “ Denn man muss
m'cht die Buchstaben in der Lateim’schen Sprache ﬁ'agen wie man soll
Deutsch reden ; sondern man muss die Matter im Hause die [finder auf den

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA 301

ney thither I have described in The Friend,*‘ I proceeded through
Hanover to Gettingen.

Here I regularly attended the lectures on physiology in the
morning, and on natural history in the evening, under Blumen—
hach, a name as dear to every Englishman who has studied at
that university, as it is venerable to men of science throughout
Europe! Eichhorn’s lectures on the New Testament were re-
peated to me from notes by a student from Ratzeburg, a young
man of sound learning and indefatigable industry, who is now, I
believe, a professor of the oriental languaggsﬂﬂdelbexg. But
my chief efforts were directed towards a grounded knowledge of
the German language and literature. From Professor Tychsenl
received as many lessons in the Gothic of Ulp/‘hilas’r as sufﬁced
to make me acquainted with its grammar, and the radical Words
of most frequent occurrence ; and with the occasional assistance
of the same philosophical linguist, I read throughi Ottfried’s

Gassen, den gemez'nen .Mann auf dem ﬁfarkte, darum fragen: and dense]-
bigen auf das Jlfaul schen wz'e sic reden, und darnac/I dolmetschen. So verste-
hen sie es denn, und merken class man Deutsch mit ilmen rcdet.”

TRANSLATION.

For one must not ask the letters in the Latin tongue, how one ought to
speak German ; but one must ask the mother in the house, the children in
the lanes and alleys, the common man in the market, concerning this; yea,
and look at the moves of their months while they are talking, and thereaf-
ter interpret. They understand you then, and mark that one talks German
with them.l

*6 [See the Second Landing-place. Essay iii. p. 333.—-S. C._]

+ [See note D. in the Appendix.——S. C.]

:1: This paraphrase, written about the time of Charlemagne, is by no
means deﬁcient in occasional passages of considerable poetic merit. There
is a ﬂow, and a tender enthusiasm in the following lines (at the conclusion
of Chapter XI.) which, even in the translation. will not, I ﬂatter myself, fail
to interest the reader. Ottfried is describing the circumstances immediately
following the birth of our Lord.

She gave with joy her virgin-breast;
She hid it not, she bared the breast,

 

‘ [Archdeacon Hare has kindly communicated to me that this passage
occurs in a Sendbrz'qf vom Dolmetschen der heilz’gen Selarz'ft, written to VVen-
cesslaus Link, when Luther was . in the Castle of Coburg, during the Diet
of Augsburg, 1530: that it is to be found in vol. xxi. of Walch’s edit. of
Luther’s works, p. 318. The words wie die Esel than, after Deutsch reden,
were doubtless omitted intentionally.—S. C.]

302 BIO GRAPHIA. LITERARIA.

metrical paraphrase of the gospel, and the most important re-
mains of the Theotiscan, or the transitional state of the Teutonic
language from the Gothic to the old German of the Swabian

Which suckled that divinest babe!
Blessed, blessed were the breasts
\Vhich the Saviour infant kiss’d;
And blessed, blessed was the mother
Who wrapp’d his limbs in swaddling-clothes,
Singing placed him on her lap,

Hung o’er him with her looks of love,
And sooth’d him with a lulling motion.
Blessed! for she shelter’d him

From the damp and chilling air;
Blessed, blessed 1 for she lay

\Vith such a babe in one blest bed,
Close as babes and mothers lie 1
Blessed, blessed evermore,

'With her virgin-lips she kiss’d,

\Vith her arms, and to her breast
She embraced the babe divine,

Her babe divine the virgin-mother !
There lives not on this ring of earth
A mortal, that can sing her praise.
Mighty mother, virgin pure,

In the darkness and the night

For us she bore the heavenly Lord !1

Most interesting is it to consider the effect, when the feelings are wrought
above the natural pitch by the belief of something mysterious, while all
the images are purely natural. Then it is, that religion and poetry strike
deepest.

 

1 [Otfridi Evang. Lib. i. cap. xi. 1. 73—108, contained in Schilter’s T liesau-
rus Antiquitatum Teutom'carum, pp. 50—51. The translation is alittle con~
densed but faithful in sense. I shall give a few couplets of the original to
Show the rhyme and metre.

Tho bot si mit gilusti ‘
thio kindisgun brusti,
as are as 9%
Er n’ist in erdringe
ther ira lob irsinge.
as are as are
Dag man ni rinit,
ouh sunna ni biscinit,
Ther iz io bibringe, .
tho er es biginne.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 303

period”)? Of this period—(the polished dialect of which is analo-
gous to that of our Chaucer, and which leaves the philosophic
student in doubt, whether the language has not since then lost
more in sweetness and ﬂexibility, than it has gained in conden-
sation and copiousncss)-—I .read with sedulous accuracy the
ﬂih'mzcsinger (or singers of love, the Provencal poets of the Swa-
bian court) and the metrical romances ; and then labored through
sufﬁcient specimens of the master singers, their degenerate suc-
cessors ; not however without occasional pleasure from the rude,
yet interesting strains of Hans Sachs, the cobbler of N uremberg.’r
Of this man’s genius ﬁve folio volumes with double columns are
extant in print, and nearly an equal number in manuscript ; yet
the indefatigable bard takes care to inform his readers, that he
never made a shoe the less, but had virtuously reared a large
family by the labor of his hands.

In Pindar, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, and many more, we have
instances of the close connection of poetic genius with the love of
liberty and of genuine reformation. The moral sense at least
will not be outraged, if I add to the list the name of this honest
shoemaker (a trade by-the-bye remarkable for the production of
philosophers and poets). His poem entitled THE MORNING STAR,
was the very ﬁrst publication that appeared in praise and support
of Luther ; and an excellent hymn of Hans Sachs, which has been
deservedly translated into almost all the European languages, was
commonly sung in the Protestant churches, whenever the heroic
reformer visited them.

In Luther’s own German writings, and eminently in his trans-
lation of the Bible, the Gwmcm language commenced. I mean
the language as it is at present written ; that which is called the
High German as contra-distinguished from the Platt-Teutsch, the
dialect of the ﬂat or northern countries, and from the Ober-
Teutsch, .the language of the middle and Southern Germany.
The High-German is indeed a lingua commzmz's, not actually
the native language of any province, but the choice and fragrancy
of all the dialects. From this cause it is at once the most copi-
ous and the most grammatical of all the European tongues.

Within less than a century after Luther’s death the German
was inundated with pedantic barbarisms. A few volumes of

9‘? [See note E in the Appendix—S. 0.]
f [See note F in the Appendix—S. 0.]

304 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

this period I read through from motives of curiosity; for it is not
easy to imagine any thing more fantastic, than the very appear-
ance of their pages. Almost every third word is a Latin word
with a Germanized ending, the Latin portion being always
printed in Roman letters, while in the last syllable the German
character is retained.

At length, about the year 1620z Opitz arose, whose genius more
nearly resembled that of Dryden than any other poet, who at
present occurs to my recollection.* In the opiniw-
the most acute of critics, and of Adéfﬁng, the ﬁrst of Lexicogra-
phers, Opitz, and the Silesian poets, his followers, not only rc-
stored the language, but still remain the models of pure diction.
A stranger has no vote on such a question; but after repeated
perusal of the works of Opitz my feelings justiﬁed the verdict,
and I seemed to have acquired from them a sort of tact for what
is genuine in the style of later writers.

Of the splendid aara, which commenced with Gellert, Klopstock.
Itamler, Lessing, and their compeers, I need not speaks? Witlc
the opportunities which I enjoyed, it would have been disgraceful
not to have been familiar with their writings; and I have al-
ready said as much as the present biographical sketch requires
,concerning the German philosophers, whose works, for the greater
part, I became acquainted with at a far later periodi

"Soon after my return from Germany§ I was solicited to under-
take the literary and political department in the Morning Post ;II
and I acceded to the proposal on the condition that the paper
should thenceforwards be conducted on certain ﬁxed and an-
nounced principles, and that I should neither be obliged nor re?
quested to deviate from them in favor of any party or any event.
In consequence, that Journal became and for many years contin-
ued anti—ministerial indeed, yet with a very qualiﬁed approbation
of the opposition, and with far greater earnestness and zeal both

9* [See note G. in the Appendix.—-S. 0.]

+ [See note H. ib.—S. 0.]

1; [See note I. in the Appendix—S. 0.]

§ [M12 Coleridge arrived in London from Germany on the 27th of No~
vember, 1799.——S. 0.]

I] [The reader is referred to the end of the Biographical Supplement for
remarks of Mr. Stuart, who edited the Morning Post from August 1795 to
August 1803, on this part of the B. L. from the present paragraph to that
ending in page 311, inelusively.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. - 305

anti-lacobin and anti-(ﬂan. To this hour I can not ﬁnd rea‘
son to approve of the ﬁrst war either in its commencement or its
conduct. Nor can I understand, with what reason either Mr.
Percival (Whom I am singular enough to regard as the best and
wisest minister of this reign), nor the present Administration, can
be said to have pursued the plans of Mr. Pitt. The love of their
country, and perseverant hostility to French principles and French
ambition, are indeed honorable qualities common to them and to
their predecessor. But it appears to me as clear as the evidence
of facts can render any question of history, that the successes of
the Percival and of the existing ministry have been owing to their
having pursued measures the direct contrary to Mr. Pitt’s. Such
for instance are the concentration of the national force to one ob-
ject; the abandonment of the subsidizing policy, so far at least
as neither to goad nor bribe the continental courts into war, till
the convictions of their subjects had rendered it a war of their
own seeking; and above all, in their manly and generous gell-

ance on the cod sense 0 En lish eo 1e and on that 10 alty

which is linked tetheyeryd‘ heart i Wot

credit and—The interdependence of property.

 

 

* Lord Grenville has lately reasserted (in the House of Lords) the immi-
nent danger of a revolution in the earlier part of the war against France.
I doubt not, that his Lordship is sincere: and it must be ﬂattering to his
feelings to believe it. But where are the evidences of the danger, to which
a future historian can appeal? Or must he rest on an assertion? Let me
be permitted to extract a passage on the subject from The Friend. “I
have said that to withstand the argumentsof the lawless. the anti-Jacobins
proposed to suspend the law, and by'the interposition. of a particular stat-
ute to eclipse the blessed light of the universal sun, that spies and inform
ers might tyrannize and escape in the ominous darkness. Oh! if these
mistaken men, intoxicated with alarm and bewildered by that panic of
property, which they themselves were the chief agents in exciting, had
ever lived in a country where there really existed a general disposition to
change and rebellion I Had they ever travelled through Sicily; or through
France at the ﬁrst coming on of the revolution; or even alas! through too
many of the provinces of a sister island; they could not but have shrunk
from their own declarations concerning the state of feeling and opinion at
that time predominant throughout Great Britain. There was a time—-
(Heaven grant that that time may have passed by !)—When by crossing a
narrow strait, they might have learned the true symptoms of approaching
danger, and have secured themselves from mistaking the meetings and idle
rant of such sedition, as shrankappalled from the sight of a constable, for ‘
the dire murmuring and strange consternation which precedes the storm or

306 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.‘

' Be this as it may, I am persuaded that the Morning Post
proved a far more useful ally to the Government in its most im-
portant objects, in consequence of its being generally considered
as moderately anti-ministerial, than if it had been the avowed
eulogist of Mr. Pitt. The few, whose curiosity or fancy should
lead them to turn over the journals of that date, may find a
small proof of this in the frequent charges made by the Morning
Chronicle, that such and such essays or leading paragraphs had
been sent from the Treasury. The rapid and unusual increase
in the sale of the Morning Post is a sufﬁcient pledge, that genuine

earthquake of national discord. Not only in coffee-houses and public thea
tres, but even at the tables of the wealthy, they .would have heard the ad-
vocates of existing Government defend their cause in the language and with
the tone of men, who are conscious that they are in a minority. But in
England, when the alarm was at its highest there was not a city, no, not a
town or village, in which a man suspected of holding democratic principles
could move abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred
in which his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the peo-
ple; and the only instances of popular excess and indignation were on the
side of the government and the established church. But why need I appeal
to these invidious facts? Turn over the pages of history and seek for a sin
gle instance of a revolution having been effected without the con ‘ e
“W in any coun-
try, 1n which the inﬂuences of property had ever been pre ominant, and
where the interests of the proprietors were interlinked! Examine the rev-
olution of the Belgic provinces under Philip II.; the civil wars of France
in the preceding generation; the history of the American revolution, or
the yet more recent events in Sweden and in Spain; and it will be scarcely
possible not to perceive that in England from 17 91 to the peace of Amiens
i here were neither tendencies to confederacy nor actual confederacies, against
which the existing laws had not provided both suﬂicient safeguards and an
ample punishment. But alas! the panic of property had been struck in
the ﬁrst instance for party purposes; and when it became general, its
propagators caught it themselves and ended in believing their own lie;
even as our bulls in llorrowdale sometimes run mad with the echo of their
own bellowing. The consequences were most injurious. Our attention
was concentrated on a monster. which could not survive the convulsions, in
which it had been brought forth,—even the enlightened Burke himself too
often talking and reasoning, as if a perpetual and organized anarchy had
been a possible thing! Thus while we were warring against French doc-
trines, we took little heed whether the means by which we attempted to
overthrow them, were not likely to aid and augment the far more formida-
ble evil of French ambition. Like children we ran away from the yelpiug
of a cur, and took shelter at the heels of a vicious war-horse.” Works,
II. pp. 199—200 ~

BIOGRAPHI A LITERARIA. 307

impartiality, with a respectable portion of literary talent. will se-
cure the success of a newspaper without the aid of party or min-
isterial patronage. But by impartiality I mean an honest and
enlightened adherence to a code of intelligible principles previously
announced, and faithfully referred to in support of every judg-
ment on men and events ; not indiscriminate abuse, not the in-
dulgence of an editor’s own malignant passions, and still less, if
that be possible, a determination to make money by ﬂattering the
envy and cupidity, the vindictive restlessness and selfconceit of
the half-witted vulgar ; a determination almost ﬁendish, but
which, I have been informed, has been boastfully avowed by one
man, the most notorious of these mob-sycophants! From the
commencement of the Addington administration to the present.
day, whatever I have written in THE MORNING POST, or (after
that paper, was transferred to other proprietors) in THE COURIER,*
has beenﬁn-defence or furtherance of the measures of Government.

I
Things of this nature scarce survive that night
That gives them birth; they perish in the sight;
Cast by so far from after-life, that there
Can scarcely aught be said, but that they; were H-

Yet in these labors I employed, and, in the belief of partial
friends, wasted, the prime and manhood of my intellect. Most
assuredly, they added nothing to my fortune or my reputation.
The industry of the week supplied the necessities of the week.
From government or the friends of government I not only never
received remuneration, nor ever expected it; but Iwas never
honored with a single acknowledgment, or expression of satisfac-
tion. Yet the retrospect is far from painful or matter of regret
I am not indeed silly enough to take as any thing more than a

9* [Mr. Coleridge began to write for The Courier in 1811. One series of
Essays, mentioned in a subsequent page, he had published in that Paper in
1809. He wrote for the Morning Post in 1800 and 1802, but not regularly
or throughout each of those years. See the Biog. Supplement—S. C.]

+ [From the prologue to “ The Royal Slave,” 3. Tragi-comedy by William
Cartwright. _

The author of this play ﬂourished in the reign of James I. and his suc-
cessor, and died of the camp disease, in 1643, according to Wood’s Athen.
Ox. in the thirty-third year of his age. He wrote, beside The Royal Slave,
The Ordinary, a Comedy; The Lady Errant, a Trngi-comedy; The Siege,
or Love’s Convert, a Tragi-comedy ; and Poems, all which were printed to«
gether in 1651.—S. C.]

308 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA,

violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. Fox’s assertion that the
late war (I trust that the epithet is not prematurely applied) was
a war produced byw the Morning Pest; or I Should be proud tc__
have the words inscr1bed on my tomb.*..- As little dol regard the
Circumstance—that I was a speciﬁed object of Bonaparte’s 1e-
sentment during my residence in Italy in consequence of those
essays in the Morning Post during the peace of Amiens.
Of this I was warned, directly, by Baron Von Humboldt, the

9* [In the autumn of 1802 Mr. Coleridge published in the Morning Post
two long letters to Mr. Fox, the ﬁrst of which appeared on the fourth, and
the second on the ninth, of November.

These Letters are not only Anti—Gallican and Anti-Jacobin, but strongly
Anti-Na oleon. They breathe the same uncompromising, hostility to the
then master of France, the same disdain of the “upstart Corsican,” not
simply or chieﬂy as an invader of hereditary rights, but as an unprineipled
despot and oppressor of liberty, whom force of circumstance more than in-
herent power had raised on high,—disdain unmitigated by a shade either
of admiration or fear,——which continued to be his line of sentiment on that
subject for the rest of his life. But the friends and admirers of Fox were
displeased with the letters on his account, because they reﬂected on him
for a departure from sound Anglicanism in his later policy, and expressed
the deeper regret on this head, because his character, as previously mani-
fested, had seemed to be that of a “ genuine Englishman.” The writer was
reproaehed with inconsistency, because he had once been the satirist of
Pitt and the eulogist of Fox. \Vhether or no these censures were deserved,
whether the language of the Letters was indeed, as even his friend Lamb
pronounced it, “agentlemanly ushering in of most arrogant charges,” or_
only such plain, bold speaking as becomes an English subject,—an erection
of strong blame upon a groundwork of real earnest praise ;—whether or
no its tone and import argue any essential inconsistency in a former eulo~
gist of Fox, whom it declares to have “ a just claim on the gratitude and
admiration of his country for his counsels and exertions 7 during the whole
continuance of the ominous” revolutionary war; or a satirist of Pitt, when
it afﬁrms that the J aeobinical party in England had never been truly for-
midable “unless it were during the Jaeobinical career of Mr. Pitt’s parti-
sans” at the close of the contest with America ;—these are questions, which
will be answered more justly and dispassionately hereafter, by many even
now, than they were in the year 1802. “ Upon the whole,” says Mr. De-
quincey, in reference to my father’s change of sides in politics, “I am of
opinion, that few events of Mr. Coleridge's life were better calculated to
place his disinterested pursuit of truth in a luminous point of view.” An
extract from Mr. Dequincey’s defence of Mr. Coleridge’s political consis-
tency, and an opinion expressed by him of his political writings, in allusion
to what is said of “ Bonaparte’s resentment” in this paragraph of the B. L.
will appear in the Appendix, note J.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 309

Prussian Plenipotentiary, who at that time was the minis-
ter of the Prussian court at Rome; and indirectly, through
his secretary, by Cardinal F esch himself. Nor do I lay
any greater weight on the conﬁrming fact, that an order for
my arrest was sent from Paris, from which danger l was
rescued by the kindness of a noble Benedictine, and the gra-
cious connivance of that good old man, the present Pope.*
For the late tyrant’s vindictive appetite was omnivorous, and
preyed equally on a Duc d’E11ghien,’r and the writer of a news-
paper paragraph. Like a true vulture,i Napoleon, with an eye
not less telescopic, and with a taste equally coarse in his ravin,
could descend from the most dazzling heights to pounce 011 the
leveret in the brake, or even 011 the ﬁeld mouse amid the grass.
But I do derive a gratiﬁcation from the knowledge, that my
essays contributed to introduce the practice of placing the ques-
tions and events of the day in a moral point of view ; in giving
a dignity to particular measures by tracing their policy or impol
icy to permanent principles, and an interest to principles by the
application of them to individual measures. In Mr. Burke’s
writings indeed the germs of almost all political truths may be
found. But I dare assume to myself the meiit of having ﬁrst
explicitly deﬁned and analyzed the natuie of J acob1nlsm , and
that in distinguishing the Jacobin from the republican, the demo-
crat, and the mere demagogue, I both rescued the word from re-
maining a mere term of abuse, and put on their guard many
honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against J acobinism,

* [“ Rather unexpectedly he had a visit early one morning from a noble
Benedictine with a passport signed by the Pope in order to facilitate his de-
parture. He left him a carriage, and an admonition for instant ﬂight,
which was promptly obeyed by Coleridge. Hastening to Leghorn, he dis-
covered an American vessel ready to sail for England, on board of which
he embarked.” Life of Coleridge, by James Gillman, pp. 180—1.—~S. C]

+ I seldom think of the murder of this illustrious Prince without recol-
lecting the lines of Valerius Flaccus :

 

super ipsius ingens
Instat fama viri, virtusque baud laeta tyranno;
Ergo anteire metus, juvenemque exstinguere pergit.
Argonaut, i. 29.
97mg? dé Kai 7'52) xﬁva [cat 77%) doplcdda,
Kai 7'51) laywov, Mai 75 71312 Tau/Jam yévug.
Manuel Phile, De Animal. ,Proprietat. sect i. l. 12.

310 _ BI 0G RAPHIA LITERARIA.

admitted or supported principles from which the worst parts of
that system may be legitimately deduced. That these are not
necessary practical results of such principles, we owe to that
fortunate inconsequence of our nature, which permits the heart
to rectify the errors of the understanding. The detailed exami~
nation of the consular Government and its pretended constitu-
tion, and the proof given by me that it was a consummate des
potism in masquerade, extorted a recantation even from the
Morning Chronicle, which had previously extolled this constitu-
tion as the perfection of a wise and regulated liberty. On every
great occurrence I endeavored to discover in past history the
event that most nearly resembled it. I procured, wherever it
was possible, the contemporary historians, memorialists, and
pamphleteers. Then fairly subtracting the points of difference
from those of likeness, as the balance favored the former or the
latter, I conjectured that the result would be the same or differ
ent. In the series of essays entitled “A comparison of France
under Napoleon with Rome under the ﬁrst Caesars,” and in
those which followed “ On the probable ﬁnal restoration of the
Bourbons,”1‘ I feel myself authorized to afﬁrm, by the effect pro-
duced on many intelligent men, that, were the dates wanting, it
might have been suspected that the essays had been written
within the last twelve months. The same plan I pursued at the
commencement of the Spanish revolution, and with the same
success, taking the war of the United Provinces with Philip II.
as the ground-work of the comparison; I have mentioned this
from no motives of vanity, nor even from motives of self-defence,
which would justify a certain degree of egotism, especially if it
be considered, how often and grossly I have been attacked for

9* [Comparison of the present state of France, with that of Rome under
Julius and Augustus Caesar. Morning Post, Sep. 21, continued on Sep. 25,
and on Oct. 2, 1802.——S. 0.]

1- [Morning Post, 1802.—Ed. This article On the circumstances that ap
pear especially to favor the return of the Bourbons at this present time,
was published on the 12th of October. It came after two by Mr. Cole-
ridge on the affairs of France, the ﬁrst of which appeared Oct. 5, and was
followed on the 21st by an essay of his, entitled, Once a Jacobin always a
Jacobin: an extract from which was inserted in The Friend—S. C.]

1; [Eight letters on the Spaniards. which appeared in The Courier on the
7th, 8th, 9th, 15th, 20th, 2lst, and 22d days of December, 1809, and on
the 20th of January, 1810.——S. C]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARI A. 311

sentiments which I had exerted my best powers to confute and
expose, and how grievously these charges acted to my disadvan-
tage while I was in Malta. Or rather they would have done
so, if my own feelings had not precluded the wish of a settled
establishment in that island. But I have mentioned it from the
full persuasion that, armed with the two-fold knowledge of his
tory and the human mind, a man will scarcely err in his judg
ment concerning the sum total of any future national event, ifhe
have been able to procure the original documents of the past,
together with the authentic accounts of the present, and if he
have a philosophic tact for what is truly important in facts, and
in most instances therefore for such facts as the dignity of history
has excluded from the volumes of our modern compilers, by the
courtesy of the age entitled historians.

To have lived in vain must be a painful thought to any man,
and eSpecially so to him who has made literature his profession.
I should therefore rather condole than be angry with the mind,
which could attribute to no worthier feelings than those of van-
ity or self-love, the satisfaction which I acknowledge myself to
have enjoyed from the lepublication of my political essays (either
whole or as extracts) not only in many of our own provincial
papers, but in the federal iournals throughout America. TE-
garded it as some proof of my not having labored altogether in
vain, that from the articles written by me shortly before and at
the commencement of the late unhappy war with America, not
only the sentiments were adopted, but in some instances the very
language, in several of the Massachusetts state papers.

But no one of these motives nor all conjointly would have im-
pelled me to a statement so uncomfortable to my own feelings,
had not my character been repeatedly attacked, by an unjustiﬁa-
ble intrusion on private life, as of a man incorrigibly idle, and
who intrusted not only with ample talents, but favored with 1111-
usual opportunities of improving them, had nevertheless suffered
them to rust away without any efficient exertion, either for his
own good or that of his fellow-creatures. Even if the composi-
tions, which I have made public, and that too in a form the most
certain of an extensive circulation, though the least flattering to
an author’s self-love, had been published in books, they would
have ﬁlled a respectable number of volumes, though every pas«
sage of merely temporary interest were omitted. My prose wri'

 

 

 

 

‘7‘. ..._..... ......477 V ”A , -msﬁ.._._~ V» .. —_ ‘nv‘

D.q

312 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

tings have been marged with a disproportionate demand on the
attention ; with an excess of reﬁnement in the mode of arriving
at truths; with beating the ground for that which might have
been run down by the eye ; with the length and laborious con-
struction of my periods ; in short, with obscurity and the love of
paradox. But my severest critics have not pretended to have
found in my compositions triviality, or traces of a mind that
shrunk from the toil of thinking. N 0 one has charged me with
tricking out in other words the thoughts of others, or with hash-
ing up anew the cmmben jam decies cocz‘am of English litera-
ture or philosophy. Seldom have I written that in a day, the
acquisition or investigation of which had not cost me the previous
labor of a month.

But are books the only channel through which the stream of
intellectual usefulness can ﬂow ? Is the diffusion of truth to be
estimated by publications; or publications by the truth, which
they diffuse or at least contain? I speak it in the excusable
warmth of a mind stung by an accusation, which has not only
been advanced in reviews of the widest circulation, not only reg-
istered in the bulkiest works of periodical literature, but by fre-
quency of repetition has become an admitted fact in private liter-
ary circles, and thoughtlessly repeated by too many who call
themselves my friends, and whose own recollections ought to have
suggested a contrary testimony. Would that the criterion of a
scholar" s utility were the lumbenmmalmm
W has been the means t 0 into the nrcneral ci cu-
versation o1 etters, he has exciWﬁppm

.__. _ _.____—._.—-o-"

Ws of WA distinguished rank

m1g t not indeed, even then, be awarded to my exertions , but I
should dare look forward with conﬁdence to an honorable acquit-
tal. I should dare appeal to the numerous and respectable au-
diences, which at different times and in different places honored
my lecture-rooms with their attendance, whether the points of
view from which the subjects treated of were surveyed, whether
the grounds. of my reasoning were such, as they had heard or
read elsewhere, or have since found in previous publications. I
can conscientiously declare, that the complete success of the
REMORSE 011 the ﬁrst night of its representation did not give me
as great or as heart-felt a pleasure, as the observation that the

  

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 313

pit and boxes were crowded with faces familiar to me, though of
individuals whose names I did not know, and of whom I knew
nothing, but that they had attended one or other of my courses
of lectures. It is an excellent though perhaps somewhat vulgar
provero that there are cases where a man may be as well “ in
for a pound as fm a penny.” To those, who from Ignorance of
the serious injury I have received from this rumor of having
dreamed away my life to no purpose, injuries which I unwillingly
remember at all, much less am disposed to record in a sketch of
my literary life; or to those, who from their own feelings, or
the gratification they 'derive from thinking contemptuously of
others, would like Job’s comforters attribute these complaints,
.extorted from me by the sense of wrong, to self- conceit or pre-
sumptuous vanity, Ihave already furnished such ample mate-
rials, that I shall gain nothing by withholding the remainder. I
will not therefore hesitate to ‘ask the consciences of those, who
from their long acquaintance with me and with the circum-
stances are best qualiﬁed to decide or be my judges, whether the
restitution of the sit-24m cuique would increase or detract from my
literary reputation. In. this 'exculpation I hope to be understood
as speaking of myself comparatively, and in proportion to the
claims, which others. are entitled to make on my time or my tal-
ents. By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellow-
men; what I could have 'done, is a question for my own eon-
scienee. On my own account I may perhaps have had sufﬁcient
reason to lament my deﬁciency in self-control, and the neglect—of
coWe Permanent

work. But to verse rather than to prose, if to either, belongs the
voice of mourning for 1 M

\

Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe \
Turbulent, with an outcry 1n the heart;
And rears 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 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—hut ﬂowers.
Strewed on my corpse, and borne uponmy bier,
In the same coﬂin, for the self-same grave l*

 

* [Poet Warts, VII. p. l60.—-Ed.]
VOL. m. 0

 

314 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

These will exist, for the future, I trust, only in ‘the poetic
strains, which the feelings at the time called forth. In those
only, gentle reader,

Aﬁ'ectus animi varios, bellumque sequacis
Perlegis invidiae, curasque revolvis inanes,

Quas humilis tenero stylus olim eﬁ’udit in aevo.
Perlegis et lacrymas, et quod pharetratus acuta
Ille puer puero fecit mihi cuspide vulnus.

Omnia paulatim consumit longior zetas,
Vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo.
Ipse mihi collatus enim non ille videbor;

Frons alia. est, moresque alii, nova mentis imago,
Vox aliudquc sonat-—J amque,r1 1 srvatio vitae
Multa dedit——1ugere nihil, fei‘iﬁ g .nnia; jamque
Paulatim lacrymas rerum exper'ientia tersit.*

 

CHAPTER XI.

AN AFFECTIONATE EXHORTATION TO THOSE WHO IN EARLY LIFE
FEEL THEMSELVES DISPOSED TO BECOME AUTHORS.

IT was a favorite remark of the late Mr. Whitbread’s, that no
man does any thing from a single motive. The separate mo-
tives, or rather moods of mind, which produced the preceding
reﬂections and anecdotes have been laid open to the reader in
each separate instance. But an interest in the welfare of those,
who at the present time may be in circumstances not dissimilar
to my own at my ﬁrst entrance into life, has been the constant
accompaniment, and (as it were) the under-song of all my feel-
ings. Whiteheadl~ exerting the prerogative of his laureatcship
addressed to youthful poets a poetic Charge, which is perhaps
the best, and certainly the most interesting, of his worksi With
no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes,
I would adress an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati,
grounded on my own experience. It will be but short ;. for the

* [Epist. Fr. Petrarchze Lib. i. Barbato Salmonensz', Opp. Basil, 1554,
vol. ii. p. 76.—S. 0.] .
f [See Appendix, note J.——S. 0.] 1 [See Appendix, note K—S. C.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 315

beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge : never )ur«
sue literature W With the exception of one extraordi-
nary man, I have never known an individual, least of all an in-
dividual of genius, healthy or happy without a prqﬂzssion, that is,
some regular employment, which does not depend on the will
of the moment, and which can be carried on so far mechanically
that an average quantum only of health, spi1its, and intellectual
exertion are requisite to its faithful discharge. Three hours of
leisure, unannoycd byﬂly alien anxiety, and lookm
with delight as a change and recreation, will sufﬁce to realize in
literature; a larger nial than weeks of
cow oney, and -'1 nediate reputation form only an ar-
bitrary and accidental end in literary labor. The hope of increas-
ing them by any given exertion will often prove a stimulant to
industry; but the necessity of acquiring them will in all works
of genius convert the stimulant into a narcotic. Motives by ex-
cess reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting, stun and
stupefy the mind. For it is one contradistinction of enius from
talent, that. its predominant end is always comprime
means; and this is one of the many points, which establish an
analogy between genius and virtue. Now though talents may
exist withOut genius, yet as genius can not exist, certainly not
manifest itself, without talents, I would advise every scholar, who
feels the genial power working within him, so far to make a di-
vision between the two, as that he should devote his talents to
the acquirement of competence in some known trade or profes~
sion, and his genius to objects of his tranquil and unbiassed '
choice; while the consciousness of being actuated in both alike
by the sincere desire to perform his duty, will alike ennoble both.
“My dear young friend” (I would say), “suppose yourself estab-
lished in any honorable occupation. From the manufactory or
counting-house, from the law-court, or from having visited your
last patient, you return at evening,

 
 
 

Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home
Is sweetest ———-——*

to your family, prepared for its social enjoyments, with the very
countenances of your wife and children brightened, and their

*9 [From the poem to William Wordsworth. Poet. Works, VII. p. 161
S. 0.]

31 6 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

voice of welcome made doubly welcome, by the knovs [edge that,
as far as they are concerned, you have satisﬁed the demands of
the day by the labor of the day. Then, when you retire into
your study, in the books on your shelves you revisit so many ven-
erable friends with whom you can converse. Your own spirit
scarcely less free from personal anxieties than the great minds,
that in those books are still living for you I Even your writing-
desk with its blank paper and all its other implements will ap-
pear as a chain of ﬂowers, capable of linking your feelings as
\well as thoughts to events and characters past or to come ; not a
chain of iron, which binds you down to think of the future and
the remote oy recalling the claims and feelings of the peremptory
present. But why should I say 9'eti7'e? The habits of active
life and daily intercourse with the study of the world will tend
to give you such self-command, that the presence of your family
will be no interruption. Nay, the social silence, or undisturbing
voices of a wife or sister will be like a restorative atmosphere, or
soft music which moulds a dream without becoming its object.
If facts are required to prove the possibility of combining weighty
performances in literature with full and independent employ-
ment, the works of Cicero and Xenophon among the ancients;
of Sir Thomas Moore, Bacon, Baxter, or to refer at once to later
and contemporary instances, Darwin and Roscoe, are at once de-
cisive of the question.

But all men may not dare promise themselves a sufﬁciency of
self-control for the imitation of those examples; though strict
scrutiny should always be made, whether indolence, restlessness,
or a vanity impatient for immediate gratiﬁcation, have not tam-
pered with the judgment and assumed the vizard of humility for
the purposes of self-delusion. Still the Church resents to every
man of learning and genius a profession, in which he may cherish
a rational hope of being able to unite the widest schemes of lit-
erary utility with the strictest performance of professional duties.‘
Among the numerous blessings of Christianity, the introduction
of an established Church makes an especial claim on the grati-
tude of scholars and philosophers; in England, at least, where
the principles of Protestantism have conspired with the freedom

5* [All that follows, as far as “expected to withhold ﬁve” in the follow-
ing paragraph, with but very little difference, is to be found in the Chm
an ate, VI. 70—7 2.—-S. 0.] " i“

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 317

of the government to double all its salutary powers by the re.
moval of its abuses.

That not only the maxims, but the grounds of a pure morality.
the mere fragments of which

 

the lofty grave tragedians taught
In chorus or iambic, teachers best

Of moral prudence, with delight received
In brief sententious precepts ;“6

and that the sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, ,
which a Plato found most hard to learn and deemed it still more
difﬁcult to reveal; that these should have become the almost
hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and
the workshop ; that even to the unlettered they sound as common
place, is a phcenomenon which must withhold all but minds of
the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the
pulpit and the reading desk. Yet those, who conﬁne the efﬁ-
ciency of an established Church to its public ofﬁces, can hardly
be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. That to every
parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of i
civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus,
round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and
brighten ; a model sufﬁciently superior to excite, yet sufﬁciently
near to encourage and facilitate imitation ; this, the unobtrusive,
continuous agency of a protestant church establishment, this it
is, which the patriot, and the philanthropist, who would fain
unite the love of peace with the faith in the progressive meliora-
tion of mankind, can not estimate at too high a price. It can not
be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, 07' the
sapphire. No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls : for
the price of wisdom is above Vubiesi The clergyman is with
his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the clois-
tered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbor and a family-
man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the
rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of
the farm-house and the cottage. He is, or he may become, con-
nected with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage.
And among the instances of the blindness, or at best of the short

sightedness, which it is the nature of cupidit to inﬂict, I

“ Paradise Regained. Book iv. 1. 261. 1‘ [Job xxviii. 16, 18.—S. 0.]

318 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA;

few '7 " 0 than e clamors of the farmers a ainst Churc

ro ert . Whatever was not paid to the clergyman would inev-
itably at the next lease be paid to the landholder, while, as the
case at present stands, the revenues of the Church are in some
sort the reversionary property of every family, that may have a
member educated for the Church, or a daughter that may marry
a clergyman. Instead of being foreclosed and immovable, it is in
fact the only species of landed property, that is essentially moving
and circulative. That there exist no inconveniences, who will
pretend to assert? But I have yet to expect the proof, that the
inconveniences are greater in this than in any other species ; or
that either the farmers or the clergy would be beneﬁted by forcing
the latter to become either Trullibers or salaried placemen.
Nay, I do not hesitate to declare my ﬁrm persuasion, that what-
ever reason of discontent the farmers may assign, the true cause
is this : that they may cheat the parson, but can not cheat the
steward; and that they are disappointed, if they should have
been able to withhold only two pounds less than the legal claim,
having expected to withhold ﬁve. At all events, considered rela-
tively to the encouragement of learning and genius, the establish-
ment presents a patronage at once so effective and unburden-
some, that it would be impossible to afford the like or equal in
any but a Christian and Protestant country. There is scarce a
department of human knowledge without some bearing on the
various critical, historical, philosophical and moral truths, in which
the scholar must be interested as a clergyman; no one pursuit
worthy of a man of genius, which may not be followed without
incongruity. To give the history of the Bible as a book, would
be little less than to relate the origin or ﬁrst excitement of all the
literature and science, that we now possess. The very decorum
which the profession imposes, is favorable to the best purposes of
genius, and tends to counteract its most frequent defects. Finally,
that man must be deﬁcient in sensibility, who would not ﬁnd an
incentive to emulation in the great and burning lights, which in
a long series have illustrated the church of England; who would
not hear from within an echo to the voice from their sacred
shrines,

  

Et Pater Eneas et avuuculus excitat Hector.git

 

* [zEneid iii. 343.——s. 0.] '

BIOGRAPHIA‘ LITERARIA. 819

But, whatever be the profession or trade chosen, the advan
wages are many and important, compared with the state of a mere
literary man, who in any degree depends on the sale of his works
for the necessaries and comforts of life. In the former, a man
lives in sympathy with the world, in which he lives. At least
he acquires a better and quicker tact for the knowledge of that,
with which men in general can sympathize. He learns to man-
age his genius more prudently and eﬂicaciously. His powers
and acquirements gain him likewise more real admiration; for
they surpass the legitimate expectations of others. He is some-
thing besides an author, and is not therefore considered merely

as an author.

The hearts of men are open to him, as to one of

their own class; and whether he exerts himself or not in the
conversational circles of his acquaintance, his silence is not at-
tributed to pride, nor his communicativeness to vanity.* To these
advantages I will venture to add a superior chance of happiness.
in domestic life, were it only that it is as natural for the man to
be out of the circle of his household during the day, as it is meri-
torious for the woman to remain for the most part within it. But
this subject involves points of consideration so numerous and so
delicate, and would not only permit, but require such ample doc-
uments from the biography of literary men, that I now merely
allude to it in trarzsim. When the same circumstance has oc-
curred at very different times to very different persons, all of
whom have some one thing in common ; there is reason to sup-

* [These lines in The Danger of writing Verse, by Whitehead, describe
the trials of the professed and noted author from the intensity with which
the gazle others is ﬁxed upon him :

“ His acts, his words, his thoughts no more his own,
Each folly blazoned and each frailty known.
Is he reserv’d?-—-his sense is so reﬁn’d
It ne’er descends to triﬂe with mankind.
Open and free ?—they ﬁnd the secret cause
Is vanity; he courts the world’s applause.
Nay, though he speak not, something still is seen,
Each change of face betrays a fault within.
If grace, ’tis spleen; he smiles but to deride;
And downright awkwardness in him is pride.
Thus must he steer through fame’s uncertain seas,
Now sunk by censure, and now puff’d by praise;
Contempt with envy strangely mix’d endure,
Fear’d where caress’d, and jealous though secure.”—S. 0.]

320 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

pose that such circumstance is not merely attributable to the
1957290723 concerned, but is in some measure occasioned by the one
point in common to them all. Instead of the vehement and
almost slanderous dehortation from marriage, which the Misogyne,
Boccaccio* addresses to literary men, I would substitute the simple
i advice: be not merely a man of letters! Let literature b_e__a.n
} honorable augmentation to your arms; but not constitute the
To objections from conscience I can of course answer in no
other way, than by requesting the youthful objector (as I have
already done on a former occasion) to ascertain with strict self-
examination, whether other inﬂuences may not be at work ;
whether spirits, “ 720t of health,” and with whispers “ not from
heaven,” may not be walking in the twilight of his conscious-
ness. Let him catalogue his scruples, and reduce them to a dis-
tinct, intelligible form ; let him be certain, that he has read with
a docile mind and favorable dispositions the best and most funda-
mental works on the subject; that he has had both mind and
heart opened to the great and illustrious qualities of the many
renowned characters, who had doubted like himself, and whose
researches had ended in the clear conviction, that their doubts
had been groundless, or at least in no proportion to the counter-
weight. Happy will it be for such a man, if among his contem-
poraries echould meet with one, who, with
similar powers, and feelings as acute as his own, had entertained
the same scruples; had acted upon them; and who by after-
research (when the step was, alas I irretrievable, but for that very
reason his research undeniably disinterested) had discovered him-
self to have quar elled with received 0 inions 0111 r to.embrace
errors, to have 1e th direction tracked out ior him on the high
road of honorable exertion, only to deviate into a labyrinth, where
when he had wandered till his head was giddy, his best good
fortune was ﬁnally to have found his way out again, too late for
prudence, though not too late for conscience or for truth ! Time
spent in such delay is time won : for manhood in the mean time
is advancing, and with it increase of knowledge, strength of
judgment, and above all, temperance of feelings. And even if
these should effect no change, yet the delay will at least prevent
the ﬁnal approval of the decision from being alloyed by the in
"" Vita e C’ostumi dz' Dante. [See Appendiic, note M.--S 0.]

 

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. _ 321

ward censure of the rashness and vanity, by which it had been
precipitated. It would be a sort of irreligion, and scarcely less
than a libel on human nature to believe, that there is any estab-
lished and reputable profession or employment, in which a man
may not continue to act with honesty and honor ; and doubtless
there is likewise none, which may not at times present tempta-
tions to the contrary. But wofully will that man ﬁnd himself
mistaken, who imagines that the profession of literature, or (to
speak more plainly) the tmde of authorship, besets its members
with fewer or with less insidious temptations, than the Church,
the law, or the different branches of commerce. But I have
treated sufﬁciently on this unpleasant subject in an early chapter
of this volume. I will conclude the present, therefore, with a
short extract from Herder, whose name I might have added to
the illustrious list of those, who have combined the successful
pursuit of the Muses, not only with the faithful discharge, but
with the highest honors and honorable emoluments of an estab-
lished profession. The translation the reader will ﬁnd in a note
below.* “ Am sorgfdltz'gsten, meiden sie die Autorschaft. Zn
frtlh Oder unmdssz'g gebmucht, macht sie den Kopf waste und
das Herz leer; wenn sie auch sonst lceine able Folgen gdbe.
Ez'n Mensch, der nu?" lieset um zn (Zane/sen, lieset wakrschein-
lick noel; nnd wer jeden Gedan/cen, der z'hm anfszosst, (lurch
Fedev' und Presse versendet, hat sie in km‘zer Zeit alle versandt,
und wird bald ez'n blosser Diener der Dmckerey, ein Backsta-
bensetzer wem’enqL

TRANSLATION.*

“ With the greatest possible solicitude avoid authorship. Too early or
immoderately employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty;
even were there no other worse consequences. A person, who reads only
to print, in all probability reads amiss ; and he, who sends away through
the pen and the press every thought, the moment it occurs to him, will
in a short time have sent all away, and will become a mere journeyman of
the printing-ofﬁce, a compositor.”

To which I may add from myself, that what medical physiologists afﬁrm
of certain secretions applies equally to our thoughts; they too must be
taken up again into the circulation, and be again and again re-secreted in
order to insure a healthful vigor,-both to the mind and to its intellectual
offspring.1

f See Appendix. (Note N.)

 

‘ See Appendix. (Note 0.)
0%

CHAPTER XII.

A CHAPTER OF REQUESTS AND PREMONITIONS CONCERNING THE
PERUSAL OR OMISSION OF THE CHAPTER THAT FOLLOWS.

IN the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly
beneﬁted by a resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with
the allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim, I have been accus-
tomed to word thus : until youunderslandxa‘ioriterfs ignorance,
presume’g/Oursey ignorant of his understanding. This golden
rule of mine does, I own, resemble those of Pythagoras in its ob-
scurity rather than in its depth. If, however, the reader will
permit me to be my own Hieroclesﬁ“ I trust that he will ﬁnd its
meaning fully explained by the following instances. Iggmow
before me a treatise of a religious fanatic, full of dreams and
supernatural experiences. I see clearly the writer’s grounds, and
their hollowness. I have a complete insight into the causes,
which through the medium of his body had acted on his mind ,
and by application of received and ascertained laws I can satis-
ftctorily explain to my own reason all the strange incidents, which
the writer records of himself. And this I can do without sus-
pecting him of any intentional falsehood. As when in broad
daylight a man tracks the steps of a traveller, who had lost his
way in a fog or by treacherous moonshine, even so, and with the
same tranquil sense of certainty, can I follow the traces of this
bewildered visionary. I understand his ignorance.

On the other hand, I have been re-perusing with the best en-
ergies of my mind the TIMJEUS of Plato. Whatever I comprehend,
impresses me with a reverential sense of the author’s genius ; but
there is a considerable portion of the work, to which I can at-
tach no consistent meaning. In other treatises of the same phi-

9“ [A Neo-Platonist of the ﬁfth century, Who left a. Commentary on (In
Golden Verses of Pythagoras, as well as other werks.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. ' 323

losopher, intended for the average comprehensions of men, I have
been delighted with the masterly good sense, with the perspicuity
of the language, and the aptness of the inductions. I recollect,
likewise, that numerous passages in this author, which I thor-
oughly comprehend, were formerly no less unintelligible to me,
than the passages now in question. It would, I am aware, be
quite fashionable to dismiss them at once as Platonic jargon. But
this I can not do with satisfaction to my own mind, because I
have sought in vain for causes adequate to the solution of the
assumed inconsistency. I have no insight into the possibility of
a man so eminently wise, using words with such half-meanings
to himself, as must perforce pass into no-meanings to his readers.
When in addition to the motives thus suggested by my own rea-
son, I bring into distinct remembrance the number and the series
of great men, who after long and zealous study of these works
had joined in honoring the name of Plato with epithets, that al-
most transcend humanity, I feel, that a contemptuous verdict on
my part might argue want of modesty, but would hardly be re-
ceived by the judicious, as evidence of superior penetration.
Therefore, utterly baffled in all my attempts to understand the
ignorance of Plato, I conclude myself ignorant of his un(le7:\
standing. -—1
In lieu of the various requests which the anxiety of authorship
addresses to the unknown reader, I advance but this one ; that
he will either pass over the following chapter altogether, or read
the whole connectedly. The fairesL part of the most beauti‘f_ul

body will appear deformed and monstrous, if dissexemd £19me
place in the organic whole. Nay, on delicate subjects, where a

seemingly triﬂing difference of more or less may constitute a dif-
ference in kind, even a faithful display of the main and support-
ing ideas, if yet they are separated from the forms by which they
are at once clothed and modiﬁed, may perchance present a skel-
eton indeed ; but. a skeleton to alarm and deter. Though I
might ﬁnd numerous precedents, I shall not desire the reader to
strip his mind of all prejudices, nor to keep all prior systems
out of view during his examination of the present. For in truth,
such requests appear to me not much unlike the advice given
to hypochondriacal patients in Dr. Buchan’s domestic medicine :
videlicet, to preserve themselves uniformly tranquil and in good
spirits. Till I had discovered the art of destroying the memory

 

324 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

a panic cmte, without injury to 11's future operations, and without
detriment to the judgment, I should suppress the request as pre-
mature; and therefore, however much I may wish to be read
with an unprejudiced mind, I do not presume to state it as a.
necessary condition.

The extent of my daring is to suggest one criterion, by which
it may be rationally conjectured before-hand, whether or no a
reader would lose his time, and perhaps his temper, in the peru-
sal of this, or any other treatise constructed on similar principles.
But it would be cruelly misinterpreted, as implying the least dis-
respect either for the moral or intellectual qualities of the indi-
viduals thereby precluded. The criterion is this: if a man re-
ceives as fundamental facts, and therefore of course indemonstra-
ble and incapable of fu1ther analysis, the general notions of

 

matter spirit, soul b d action, passiveness, time, space, caus__e
andﬁWWn, memm and _hath; if he
feels his mind completely at rest concerning all these, and 15 satis-
ﬁed, if only he can analyze all other notions into some one or
more of these supposed elements with plausible subordination and

apt arrangement : to such a mind I would as courteously as pos-
sible convey the hint, that for him the chapter was not written.

Vir bonus es, doctus, prudens; ast hand tibi Spiro.

For these“ terms do in truth include all the (1mm
theWose for SOLE-”EQ— Taking them there-
fore 1n mass, and unexamiriemquires only a decent appren-
ticeship in logic, to draw forth their contents in all forms and,
colors, as the professors of legerdemain at our village fairs pull
out ribbon after ribbon from their mouths. And not more difﬁ-
cult is it to reduce them back again to their different genera.
But though this analysis is highly useful in rendering our knowl-
edge more distinct, it does not really add to it. It does not in-
crease, though it gives us a greater mastery over, the wealth
which we before possessed. For forensic purposes, for all the es-
tablished professions of society, this is sufﬁcient. But for philoso-
phy in its highest sense, as the science of ultimate truths, and
therefore scientia scientiarum, this mere analysis of terms is
preparative only, though as a preparative discipline indispensable.

Still less dare a favorable perusal be anticipated from the
proselytes of that compendious philosophy, which talking of mind

 

BIOGRAPBIA LITERARIA. , 325

but thinking of brick and mortar, or other images equally abstract-
ed from body, contrives a theory of spirit by nicknaming matter,
and in a few hours can qualify its dullest disciples to explain the
omne scibile by reducing all things to impressions, ideas, and
sensations.

But it is time to tell the truth ; though it requires some
courage to avow it in an age and country, in which disquisitions
on all subjects, not privileged to adopt technical terms or scien-
tiﬁc symbols, must be addressed to the Public. I say then, that
it is neither possible nor necessary for all men, nor for many, to
be philosophers. There is a philosophic (and inasmuch as it is
actualized by an effort of freedom, an artiﬁcial) consciousness,
ﬂighlie‘sﬂbeneath'or (as it were) behind the spontaneous oon~
sciousness natural to allireﬂecting, beings. I As the elder Romans
distinguished their northern provinces into Cis-Alpine and Trans-
Alpine, so may we divide all the objects of human knowledge
into those on this side, and those on the other side of the spon-
taneous consciousness; citra et trans conscientiam communem.
The latter is exclusively the domain of pure philosophy, which is
therefore properly entitled transcendental, in order to discriminate
it at once, both from mere reﬂection and re-presentation on the
one hand, and on the other from those ﬂights of lawless specula-
tion which, abandoned by all distinct consciousness, because
transgressing the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties,
are justly condemned, as transcendent.* The ﬁrst range of hills,

*9 This distinction between transcendental and transcendent is observed by
our elder divines and philosophers, whenever they express themselves
scholastically. Dr. Johnson indeed has confounded the two words ; but his
own authorities do not hear him out. Of this celebrated dictionary I will
venture to remark once for all, that I should suspect the man of a morose
disposition who should speak of it without respect and-gratitude as a most
instructive and entertaining book, and hitherto, unfortunately, an indispen-
sable book; but I confess, that I should be surprised at hearing from a
philosophic and thorough scholar any but very qualiﬁed praises of it, as a
dictionary. I am not now alluding to the number of genuine words omitted;
for this is (and perhaps to a greater extent) true, as Mr. Wakeﬁeld has
noticed, of our best Greek Lexicons, and this too after the successive labors
of so many giants in learning. I refer at present both to omissions and

commissions of amore important nature. What these are, me saltem judice,
will be stated at full in The Friend, republished and completed.1

 

—‘ [This is one of the many literary projects and promises of Mr. Coleridge
that were never fulﬁlled—S. 0.]

326 ' BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

that encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for the
majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sunis born
and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they
vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and bu]
wark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents
are too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated
swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To
the multitude below these vapors appear, now as the dark haunts
of terriﬁc agents, on which none may intrude with impunity;
and now all a-glow, with colors not their own, they are gazed at
as the Splendid palaces of happiness and power. But in all ages
there have been a few, who measuring and sounding the rivers
of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls have
learned, that the sources must be far higher and far inward ; a
few, who even in the level streams have detected elements, which

I had never heard of the correspondence between Wakeﬁeld and Fox till
I saw the account of it this morning (16th September, 1815) in the Monthly
Review. Iwas not a little gratiﬁed at ﬁnding, that Mr. Wakeﬁeld had pro
posed to himself nearly the same plan for a Greek and English Dictionary,
which I had formed, and began to execute, now ten years ago. But far, far
more grieved am I, that he did not live to complete it. I can not but think
it a subject of most serious regret, that the same heavy expenditure, which
is now employing in the republication of STEPHANUS augmented, had not been
applied to a new Lexicon on a more philosophical plan, with the English,
German, and French synonymes as well as the Latin. In almost every in-
stance the precise individual meaning might be givcn in an English or Ger-
man word; whereas in Latin we must too often be contented with a mere
general and inclusive term. How indeed can it be otherwise, when we at-
lempt to render the most copious language of the world, the most admirable
for the ﬁneness of its distinctions, into one of the poorest and most vague
languages? Especially, when we reﬂect on the comparative number of the
works, still extant, written while the Greek and Latin were living languages.
Were I asked what I deemed the greatest and most unmixed beneﬁt, which
a wealthy individual, or an association of wealthy individuals could bestow
on their country and on mankind, I should not hesitate to answer, “ a
philosophical English dictionary; with the Greek, Latin, German, French,
Spanish and Italian synonymes, and with correspondent indexes.” That the
learned languages might thereby be acquired, better, in half the time, is but
a part, and not the most important part, of the advantages. which would
accrue from such a work. 0 i if it should be permitted by Providence, that
without detriment to freedom and independence our government might be
enabled to become more than a committee for war and revenue! There was
a. time. when every thing was to be done by Government. Have we not
ﬂown off to the contrary extreme?

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 327

neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or
could supply.* How and whence to these thoughts, these strong
probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge may
ﬁnally supervene, can be learnt only by the fact. I might op-
pose to the question the words with which]L Plotinus supposes
Nature to answer a similar difﬁculty. “ Should any one interro-
gate her, how she works, if graciously she vouchsafe to listen and
speak, she will reply, it behooves thee not to disquiet me with in-
terrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as I am silent,
and work without words”:

Likewise in the ﬁfth book of the ﬁfth Ennead, speaking of the
highest and intuitive knowledge as distinguished from the discur-
sive, or in the language of Wordsworth,

“The vision and the faculty divine ;”§
he says : “ It is not lawful to inquire from whence it sprang, as

* April, 1825. If I did not see it with my own eyes, I should not be-
lieve that I had been guilty of so many hydrostatic Bulls as bellow in this un-
happy allegory or string of metaphors ! How a river was to travel up hill
from a vale far inward, over the intervening mountains, Morpheus, the Dream-
weaver, can alone unriddle. I am ashamed and humbled—S. T. Coleridge.

1- Ennead, iii. 8. 3. The force of the Greek avvtévat is imperfectly ex-
pressed by “ understand ;” our own idiomatic phrase “ to go along mith me”
comes nearest to it. The passage, that follows, full of profound sense, ap-
pears to me evidently corrupt; and in fact no writer more wants, better
deserves, or is less likely to obtain, a new and more correct edition—Ti 015v
avmévat; 6n 7'?) yevéluevov éart Béapa élubv, otcﬁmyo’cg (mallem, Oéalua, époﬁ
awn-00779) IcaZ (priest yevéluevov Geépn/za, Kai/10L yew/151:7; éK Bewpiag 7-77; (.362,
777v (Mow éxsw gbtitoﬁedluova éndplca. (mallem, IcaZ luoa 7'7 yevops’vn élc Bewpt’ag
(tori/g 6625'.) “ What then are we to understand ? That whatever is pro«
duced is an intuition, I silent; and that, which is thus generated, is by its
nature a theorem, or form of contemplation; and the birth, which results
to me from this contemplation, attains to have a contemplative nature.” So
Synesius :

’82ng lepd,

”Appm'a yovd 1
The after-comparison of the process of the natura naturans with that of
the geometrician is drawn from the very heart of philosophy.
- i [KaZ £Z my 6:? (1137512 ’e'pou'o Tivog ﬁve/ca «owl, éc 701'} éprOv-rog £68710;
évrat‘ew Kai Myew, sZ7roc dv' éxpiyv pév p7) épwrév, ditld avvtévat IcaZ az’n'bv
atmrg‘i, (Sump 53ch 01mm”), [cal m’m eiﬁwpac 7téyew. » Ennead. iii. 8. 3, in initio,
p. 634 of Creuzer’s edition—S. 0.]

§ [Poet Works, vi. p. 6. ' The Excursion, book i.—S. 0.]

 

1 [Hymn Tert. v. 226.18. 0.]

328 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

if it were a thing subject to place and nzotion, for it neither ap:
proached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other
place ; but it either appears to us or it does not appear. So that
we ought not to pursue it with a view of detecting its secret
source, but to watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us ; pre-
paring ourselves for the blessed spectacle as the eye waits pal
tiently for the rising sun. ”* They, and they only, can acquire
the philpsgpliic imagination, the sac1cd power of self- -1ntuition,
who within themselves can inte1pret fand understand the symbol,
that the wings of the air-sy lph a1e forming within the skin of
the caterpillar ; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same
instinct, which impels the Chrysalis of the horned ﬂy to leave room
in its involummn for antenna: yet to come. They know and
feel, that the potentialworks in them, even as the actual works
on themm'” ., ln short, all the organs of sense are “framed for a co1~
responding world of sense , and we have it. All the organs of
spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit : though the
latter organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in
all, and their ﬁrst appearance discloses itself in the moral being.
How else could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased,
will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested goodness
with contradictory feelings of pity and respect? “Poor man!
he is not made for this world.” Oh! herein they utter a pro-
phecy of universal fulfilment ; for man must either rise or sink.
It is the essential mark of the true philosopher to rest satisfied
with no imperfect light, as long as the impossibility of attaining
a fuller knowledge has not been demonstrated. That the com-
mon consciousness itself will furnish proofs by its own direction,
that it is connected with master-currents below the surface, I shall
merely assume as a postulate pro tempore. This having been
granted, though but in expectation of the argument, I can safely
deduce from it the equal truth of my former assertion, that phi«
losophy can not be intelligible to all, even of the most learned
9* [”‘Slo're u’wopeZv 668v égbé/my, éfwﬁsv 7') Evdov, Kai dwelﬂévrog slvreZv, évdor
dpa 7712, Kai oz’m évdov (113' 7’) (01’) dd {777821}, 776681), 01’) yap éon Ta 776061)‘ 0157':
yap prerat, 01578 (27112va oz’idaluoﬁ, (ma oaiverai T8 not 02’) oaivarat' 6L6 or"
35,077 dufmew, dll’ firm/177 luévew, £019 (212 gbavﬁ, wapaaxevéoavra éavrc‘w Bear-771'
elvat, (Scrap (swarm; dvaroldg {71501) wepalue’vem (5 63 éwepqﬁavelg‘ 7'02? opiﬁ'ov-
10;, £25 dmsavoﬁ ¢aoZv (it natural, Eda/cw éav'Tbv ﬁedoaaﬂat ToZg 5/l/tadtv. Em]

v. 5. 8.—-Ed.] P. 97 5 of Creuzer’s edit.
The parentheses note the part of the passage quoted in the text.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. 329

and cultivated classes. A system, the ﬁ1st principle of which it
is to render the mind intuitive of the spiritual in man (i. e. of
that which lies on the other side of our natural consciousness)
must needs have a great obscurity for those, who have never dis-
ciplined and strengthened this ulterior consciousness. It must in
truth be a land of darkness, a perfect Anti-Goslzen, for men to
whom the noblest treasures of their own being are reported only,
through the imperfect translation of lifeless and sightless mafia;
Perhaps, in great part, through words which are but the shadows
of notions; even as the notional understanding itself is but the
shadowy abstraction of living'and actual truth On the IMMEDI-
ATE, which dwells 1n every man, and on the original intuition, or
absolute afﬁrmation of it, (which is likewise in every man, but
does not 1n every man rise into consciousness), all the certainty
of our knowledge depends; and this becomes intelligible to no
man by the ministry of mere words from without. The medium,
by which spirits understand each other, is not the surrounding
1r ; but the freedom which they possess in common, as the com-
mon ethereal element of their being, the trernulous reciprocations
of which propagate themselves even to the inmost of the soul.
Where the spirit of man is not filled with the consciousness of
freedom (were it only from its restlessness, as one struggling in
bondage) all spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with
others, but even with himself. N o wonder then, that he remains
incomprehensible to himself as well as to others. No wonder,
that, in the fearful desert of his consciousness, he wearies him
self out with empty words, to which no friendly echo answers,
either from his own heart, or the heart of a fellow-being ; or be-
wilders himself in the pursuit of notional phantoms, the mere
refractions from unseen and distant truths through the distorting
medium of his own unenlivened and stagnant understanding!
To remain unintelligible to such a mind, exclaims Schelling
on a like occasion, is honor and a good name before God and
man. ~
The history of philosophy (the same writer observes) contains
instances of systems, which for successive generations have re-
mained enigmatic. Such he deems the system of Leibnitz, Whom
another writer (rashly I think, and invidiously) extols as the only
philosopher, who was himself deeply convinced of his own doc-

 

830 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

trinesfl‘< As hitherto interpreted, however, they have not pro

duced the effect, which Le'ibnitz himself, in a-most instructive -_

passage, describes as the criterion of a true philosophy ; namely,
that it would at once explain and collect the fragments of truth
scattered through systems apparently the most inCongruous. The
truth, says he, is diffused more widely than is commonly believed ;
but it is often painted, yet oftener masked, and is sometimes mu-
tilated and sometimes, alas! in close alliance with mischievous
errors. The deeper, however, we penetrate into the ground of
things, the more truth we discover in the doctrines of the greater
number of the philosophical sects. The want of substantial
reality in the objects of the senses, according to the skeptics;
the harmonies or numbers, the prototypes and ideas, to which

9“ [The observations of Schelling referred to here and in the previous
paragraph are as follows:

“ A philosophy the ﬁrst principle of which is to call forth to consciousness
the spiritual in man, namely that which lies on the other side the conscious-
ness, must needs have a great unintelligibility for those who have not exerr
cised and strengthened this spiritual consciousness, or to whom even that
in themselves, which is most excellent, is wont to appear only through dead
intuitionless conceptions. The Immediate, which is in every one, and on
the original intuition whereof (whieh” [original intuition] “likewise is in
every one, but comes not in every one to consciousness), all certainty of our
knowledge depends, is intelligible to no one through words, that pass into
him from without. The medium, through which spirits understand one an-
other, is not the surrounding air, but the common freedom, the vibrations
whereof (deren Erschittterungen) propagate themselves even to the inner-
most part of the soul. When the spirit of a man is not ﬁlled with the con-
sciousness of freedom, all spiritual connection is broken off, not only with
others, but even with himself; no wonder that he remains unintelligible to
himself as well as to others, and in his fearful solitude only wearies himself
with empty words, to which no friendly echo—out of his own or another’s
breast—replies.

“To remain unintelligible to such a one is glory and honor before God
and man.

“The history of philosophy contains examples of systems, which, for sev-
eral centuries, have remained enigmatical. A philosopher whose principles
are to solve all these riddles, declares lately of Leibnitz, that he is probably
the only man, in the history of philosophy, who has attained conviction, the
only man therefore who is right at bottom. This declaration is remarkable,
because it shows that the time is come for understanding Leibnitz. For, as
he has been hitherto understood, he is unintelligible, however right he may
be at bottom.” Transl. (Abhandlungen zur Erlailter. des Id. der le'sa—
Phil. Sehrift. pp. 327~8.)—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 331

the Pythagoreans and Platonists reduced all things ; the ONE and
ALL of Parmenides and Plotinus, without* Spinozism ; the neces-
sary connection of things according to the Stoics, reconcilable
with the spontaneity of the other schools; the vital-philosophy
of the Cabalists and Hermetists, who assumed the universality
of sensation; the substantial forms and entelechies of Aristotle
and the schoolmen, together with the mechanical solution of all
particular phenomena, according to Democritus and the recent
philosophers—all these we shall ﬁnd united in one perspective
central point, which shows regularity and a coincidence of all

5* This is happily effected in three lines by Synesius, in his THIRD HYMN.

'Ev IcaZ Hav’Ta—(taken by itself) is Spinozz'sm.
'Ev d’ 'Aa'av’rwv—a mere Am'ma ZlIzmdz'.
'Ev 7'8 717)?) mirror—is mechanical Theism.1

But unite all three, and the result is the Theism of St. Paul and Chris-
tianity.

Synesius was censured for his doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul;
but never, that I can ﬁnd, arraigned or deemed heretical for his Pantheism,
though neither Giordano Bruno, nor Jacob Behmen ever avowed it more
broadly. \

Mzig'ag dé Néog,
Ta’r, 7's KaZ n2 Zéyet,
Bvﬁov dﬁfinrov
Alugbtxopeéwv.

21) n3 TZIcTov égbvg',
21) Ta rL/crépevov'
21) 7'?) (target),

21) Ta lalumiluevov'
21) Ta pawéluevov,
213 To Icpvnropevov
Idiatg dvyaig‘.

”Ev IcaZ miv‘ra,
"Ev xaﬁ’ éavre,
Kai (ltd 7112221101)?

Pantheism is therefore not necessarily irreligious or heretical; though it
may be taught atheistically. Thus Spinoza would agree with Synesius in
calling God (Piotr év NoepoZg', the Nature in Intelligences; but he could not
subscribe to the preceding Noﬂg Kai vospeg, 2'. e. Himself Intelligence and in-
telligent. -

In this biographical sketch of my literary life I may be excused, if I men~
tion here, that I had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius from the
Greek into English Anacreontics before my ﬁfteenth year.

—— j

‘ [Hymn. Tert. v. 180.—S. 0.] 9 [Ibid. v. 187.—S. 0.]

 

 

832 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARI A.

the parts in the very object, which from every other point of
View must appear confused and distorted. The Spirit of secta
rianism has been hitherto our fault, and the cause of our failures.
We have imprisoned our own conceptions by the lines, which we
have drawn, in order to exclude the conceptions of others. J’ai
trozwc’ que la, plupart des Sectes 0m mison dams une 609mg
pantie de ce gu’elles avancent, mais non pas Zamt en ce qu’elles
aziem.*

A system, which aims to deduce the memory with all the other
functions of intelligence, must of course place its ﬁrst position from
beyond the memory, and anterior to it, otherwise the principle of
solution would be itself a part of the problem to be solved. Such
a position therefore must, in the ﬁrst instance, be demanded, and
the ﬁrst question will be, by what right is it demanded? On
this account I think it expedient to make some preliminary re-
marks on the introduction of Postulates in philosophy]L The
word postulate is borrowed from the science of mathematicsi
In geometry the primary construction is not demonstrated, but
postulated. The ﬁrst and most simple construction in space is
the point in motion, or the line. Whether the point is moved in
one and the same direction, or whether its direction is continually
changed, remains as yet undetermined. But if the direction of
the point have been determined, it is either by a point without
it, and then there arises the straight line which incloses no space;
or the direction of the point is not determined by a point without
it, and then it must ﬂow back again on itself, that is, there arises
a cyclical line, which does inclosc a space. If the straight line
be assumed as the positive, the cyclical is then the negation of
the straight. It is a line, which at no point strikes out into the

* [See Appendix P.—S. 0.]

-|' [The following remarks, contained in this and the next two paragraphs,
as far as the reference to Plotinus, are borrowed from Schelling, only a
few words here and there being added or altered by Mr. Coleridge. See
Abhandlungen zur Erlailter. dzc. Phil. Schriﬂ. pp. 329—30—31-32. Mr. C.
has expanded the conclusion of the passage which in the German author
stands thus: “ Philosophy is to him a fabric of air, even as to one born deaf
the most excellent theory of music if he knew not, or did not believe, that
other men have a sense more than he, must seem a vain play with concep-
tions, which may have connection in itself indeed, but at bottom has abso
lutely no reality.” Trans1.—S. 0.]

1 See Schcll. Abhandl. zur Erlailter. dos Id. (161' lVissenschaftsIehre.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 333

straight, but changes its direction continuously. But if the pri-
mary line be conceived as undetermined, and the straight line as
determined throughout, then the cyclical is the third compound
of both. It is at once undetermined and determined; undeter-
mined through any point without, and determined through itself.
Geometry therefore supplies philosophy with the example of a
primary intuition, from which every science that lays claim to
evidence must take its commencement. The mathematician
does not begin with a demonstrable proposition, but with an‘ins
tuition, a practical idea. A

But here an important distinction presents itself. Philosophy
is employed on objects of the inner SENSE, and can not, like
geometry, appropriate to every construction a correspondent out.-
wcw‘cl' intuition. Nevertheless philosophy, if it is to arrive at
"evidence, must proceed from the most original construction, and
the question then is, what is the most original construction or ﬁrst
productive act for the inner sense. The answer to this question
depends on the direction which is given to the inner sense. But
in philosophy the inner sense can not have its direction deter-
mined by any outward object. To the original construction of
the line I can be compelled by a line drawn before me on the slate
or on sand. The stroke thus drawn is indeed not the line itself,
but only the image or picture of the line. It is not from it, that
we ﬁrst learn to know the line; but, on the contrary, we bring
this stroke to the original line generated by the act of the imagi-
nation ; otherwise we could not deﬁne it as without breadth or
thickness. Still, however, this stroke is the sensuous image of
the original or ideal line, and an efﬁcient mean to excite every
imagination to the intuition of it.

It is demanded then, whether there be found any means in
philosophy to determine the direction of the inner sense, as in
mathematics it is determinable by its speciﬁc image or outward
picture. Now the inner sense has its direction determined for
the greater part only by an act of freedom. One man’s con-
sciousness extends only to the pleasant or unpleasant sensations
caused in him by external impressions; another enlarges his
inner sense to a consciousness of forms and quantity ; a third in
addition to the image is conscious of the conception or notion of
the thing ; a fourth attains to a notion of his notions—he reﬂects
on his own reﬂections; and thus we may say without impropri

47; ﬂ (1/ /

334 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

ety, that the one possesses more or less inner sense, than the
other. This more or less betrays already, that philosophy in its
ﬁrst principles must have a practical or moral, as well as a theo-
retical or speculative side. This difference in degree does not
exist in the mathematics. Socrates in Plato shows, that an ig-
norant slave may be brought to understand and of himself to
solve the most difﬁcult geometrical problem. Socrates drew the
ﬁgures for the slave in the sand. The disciples of the critical
philosophy could likewise (as was indeed actually done by La
Forge and some other followers of Des Cartes) represent the ori-
gin of our representations in copper-plates; but no one has yet

. attempted it, and it would be utterly useless. To an Esquimaux
, or New Zealander our most popular philosophy would be wholly

unintelligible. The sense, the inward organ, for it is not yet
born in him. So is there many a one among us, yes, and some
who think themselves philosophers too, to whom the philosophic
organ is entirely wanting. To such a man philosophy is a mere
play of words and notions, like a theory of music to the deaf, or
like the geometry of light to the blind. The connection of the
parts and their logical dependencies may be seen and remem-
bered: but the whole is groundless and hollow, unsustained by
living contact, unaccompanied with any realizing intuition which
exists by and in the act that afﬁrms its existence, which is
known, because it is, and is, because it is known. The words of
Plotinus, in the assumed person of Nature, hold true of the phil-
osophic energy. To 66mg?» ,ue, ﬂatbgryya nocéc, (307159 oi yew/létgm
ﬁswgéneg 7902(1me (211’ 5,112} ,ui‘} ygaqaéoqg Oewpéaqg dé, ucptgavmt at
16w aaiydtwv yga‘u‘ual. With me the act of contemplation makes the
thing contemplated, as the geometricians contemplating describe
lines correspondent; but I not describing lines, but simply con-
templating, the representative forms of things rise up into exist-
ence.*

9* [KaZ 82 my 63 abn‘yv épono Tivog‘ évexa natal, £Z 7013 épwrév‘rog‘ £04,510:
éwai‘ew va léyew, eZ7r0L (212° éxpiyv ,uév p7) épwrgiv, (Z7042 ovmévat IcaZ ai’i‘rov
O'twﬂ'ﬁ, (50778;) éycb awn-(f), Kai 013K sidwluat léyew. Ti 0151) avmévat; (in To
yevéyevév éan déalua an», océwnmg, Kai Most yevé/revov Osépnya, Ital/10L
yevoluévy élc Bewpiag 7779‘ (362 T7712 simian) Exew (ﬁddled/1022a éwépxa, Kai 7'5
dewpoﬁv ,uov, Beépnpa warez, c507rep oi yewluérpat Bewpoﬁv‘reg ypégbovaw‘ (221’
é/Joﬁ p7) ypaeoﬁmyg, Oewpoﬁmyg déj'beiaravrac al 7151) owpdrwv ypappal, (307nm
émrim'ovaat' Kai ,uoc 7'5 777; ,un'rpbg [cal 70v yewapévwv iimipxst 7112609 Erin
iii. 8. 3.—Ed. P. 634, of Crcuzeiz’s edit—S. 0.]

<\

.r’“

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 1 385

‘The 0 hiloso and at the same time the test of

philosophic capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended
KNOW: THrsELF. ' (E cazlo descendit, F2166» aeavtév.) ' And
“iii“s’ﬁt 6nce practically and speculatively. For as philosophy is
neither a science of the reason or understanding only, nor merely
a science of morals, but theWr, its pli-
mary ground can be neither merely speculative nor merely prac-
tical, but both in one. All knowledge rests on the coincidence
of an object with a subject.* (My readers have been warned in
a former chapter that, for their convenience as well as the wri-
ter’s, the term, subject, is used by me in its scholastic sense as
equivalent to mind or sentient being, and as the necessary correl-
ative of object or quz'cquid Objicitur mantel.) For we can know
that only which 1s true: and the truth is universally placed in
the coincidence of the thought with the thing, of the representa-
tion with the object represented.

Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE, we will hence?
forth call NATURE, conﬁning the term to its passive and material
sense, as comprising all the phccnomena by which its existence is
made known to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is
SUBJECTIVE, we may comprehend in the name of the SELF or IN->
TELLIGENCE. Both conceptions are in necessary antithesis. In-
telligence is conceived of as exclusively representative, nature as
exclusively represented ; the one as conscious, the other as With-
out consciousness. Now in all acts of positive knowledge there
is required a reciprocal concurrence of both, namely, of the con-
scious being, and of that which is in itself unconscious. Our
problem is to explain this concurrence, its possibility and its ne—
cessity.

During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and the sub
jective are so instantly united, that we can not determine to which
of the two the priority belongs. .There is here no ﬁrst, and no
second ; both are coinstantaneous and one. While I am attempt-
ing to explain this intimate coalition, I must suppose it dissolved.
I must necessarily set out from the one, to which therefore I give

 

9* [This sentence and, with the exception of the parenthesis immediately
succeeding it, all that follows, as far as the words “mechanism of the heav-
enly motions,” is to be found in Schelling’s Transsc. Id. pp. 1—4: but a few
explanatory expressions are added, and some sentences are a little altered
and diﬁ‘erently arranged—S. 0.]

386 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

hypothetical antecedence, in order to arrive at the other. But
as there are but two factors or elements in the problem, subject
and object, and as it is left indeterminate from which of them I
should commence, there are two cases equally possible.

1. EITHER THE OBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THEN
WE HAVE TO ACCOUNT FOR THE SUPERVENTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE,
WHICH COALESCES WITH IT.

The notion of the subjective is not contained in the notion of
the objective. On the contrary they mutually exclude each other.
The subjective therefore must‘supervene to the objective. The
conception of nature does not apparently involve the co-presence
of an intelligence making an ideal duplicate of it, that is, repre-
senting it. This desk for instance would (according to our natu-
ral notions) be, though there should exist no sentient being to
look at it. This then is the problem of natural philosophy. It
assumes the objective or unconscious nature as the ﬁrst, and has
therefore to explain how intelligence can supervene to it, or how
itself can grow into intelligence. If it should appear, that all
enlightened naturalists, without having distinctly proposed the
problem to themselves, have yet constantly moved in the line of
its solution, it must afford a strong presumption that the problem
itself is founded in nature?“t For if all knowledge has, as it
were, two poles reciprocally required and presupposed, all sciences
must proceed from the one or the other, and must tend towara
the opposite as far as the equatorial point in which both are rec
onciled and become identical. The necessary tendence therefore
of all natural philosophy is from nature to intelligence ; and this,
and no other is the true ground and occasion of the instinctive
striving to introduce theory into our views of natural phamomena.
The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist in the
perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of in-
tuition and intellect. The plzwnomena (the material) must
wholly disappear, and the laws alone (theformal) must remain.
Thence it comes, that in nature itself the more the principle'of
law breaks forth, the more does the husk drop off, the phamome—
7m themselves become more spiritual and at length cease alto-

* [Schelling’s words correspondent to this last sentence are these : “ That
the science of Nature at least approximates to the solution of the problem
really—and Without knowing it—can be only brieﬂy shown here.” Tram!
Ib. p 3.~-S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 337

gether in our consciousness. The optical phenomena are but a
geometry, the lines of which are drawn by light, and the mate-
riality of this light itself has already become matter of doubt.

In the appearances of magnetismallth, a d ....

of the phrenomena of gravitation, which not a few among the
most illustrious N ewtonians’i‘< have declared no otherwise com-
prehensible than as an immediate spiritual inﬂuence, there re-
mains nothing but its law, the execution of which on a vast
scale is the mechanism of the heavenly motions]L The theory

* [“ Which searchers of Nature themselves thought it only possible to
conceive,” dzc. Schelling, Ib. p. 4.-—-S. 0.]

1‘ [After “ the mechanism of the heavenly motions,” Schelling proceeds
thus—“ The perfected theory of nature would be that, in virtue of which
all nature should resolve itself into an intelligence. The dead and uncon-
scious products of Nature are only abortive attempts of Nature to reﬂect her.
self; but the so named DEAD nature in general is an unripe intelligence;
thence through her PH/ENOMENA, even while yet unconscious, the intelligent
character discovers itself.” The sentence in italics is omitted by Mr. 0., who
says of it, in a note: “True or false this position is too early. Nothing
precedent has explained, much less proved, it true.” “ The highest aim, to
become completely an object to self, Nature ﬁrst attains through the high-
est and last reﬂection, which is no other than man, or that which we com-
monly call reason, through which Nature ﬁrst returns completely into her-
self, and whereby it becomes evident, that Nature originally is identical
with that which is known in us as intelligence and consciousness.”

“This ’may sufﬁce to show that the knowledge of Nature necessarily
tends to represent Nature as intelligent; it is precisely through this ten-
dency that it becomes N ature-Philosophy, which is the one necessary ground-
knowledge of philosophy.”

The substance of the foregoing paragraphs is contained in pp. 337-9 of
the Biographia, with some additions. Then after the second statement of
the problem, which is given verbatim from Schelling by Mr. 0., and, after
six paragraphs which he omits, the Transsc. Id. proceeds as follows: “ As
the natural philosopher, whose attention is directed solely to the objective,
seeks to prevent nothing so much as the blending of the subjective in his
knowledge, so, conversely, the Transcendental philosopher (objects to nothing
so much) as any admixture of the objective in the pure subjective princi
ple of knowledge. The means of separation is absolute skepticism—not
the half sort, directed only against the common prejudices of men, which
yet never sees into the ground; but the comprehensive skepticism, which
is aimed not against single prejudices, but against the fundamental preju-
dice, with which all others must fall of themselves. For beside the artiﬁ
cial prejudices, introduced into man, there are others, far more original,
planted in. him not by instruction or art, but by Nature herself; which,
with all but the philosopher, stand for the principles of all knowledge, and

P

VOL. III.

"‘1

338 BIOGRAPHIA ' LITERARIA.

l of natural philosophy would then be completed, when all nature
ll was demonstrated to be identical in essence with that, which in
l its highest known power exists in man as intelligence and self-
I consciousness; when the heavens and the earth shall declare not
only the power of their Maker, but the glory and the presence of
their God, even as he appeared to the great Prophet during the
vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity.

This may sufﬁce to show, that even natural science, which
commences with the material phmzomenon as the reality and
substance of things existing, does yet by the necessity of theoriz-
ing unconsciously, and as it were instinctively, end in nature as
an intelligence ; and by this tendency the science of nature be-
comes ﬁnally natural philosophy, the one of the two poles offun-
damental science.

2. OR THE SUBJECTIVE Is TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THE PROB~
LEM THEN Is, How THERE SUPERVENES TO IT A COINCIDENT OBJEC-
TIVE.

In the pursuit of these sciences, our success in each, depends
011 an austere and faithful adherence to its own principles with a
careful separation and exclusion of those, which appertain to the
opposite science. As the natural philosopher, who directs his
views to the objective, W‘a‘sﬁﬁu things the intermixture
of the subjective 111 his knowledge, as fo1 instance, arbitrary sup-
positions 01 1ather sufﬁctions, occult qualities, spiritual agents,
and the substitution of ﬁnal for efﬁcient causes , so 011 the other
hand, the transcendental or intelligential philosopher is equally .
anxious to preclude all interpolation of the objective into the sub-
jective principles of his science, as for instance the assumption
of impresses or conﬁgurations in the brain, correspondent to min-
iature pictures on the Tetina painted by rays of light from sup-
posed originals, which me not the immediate and 1eal objects of
vision, but deductions f1om it for the purposes of explanation.
This puriﬁcation of the mind is effected by an absolute and scien-
tiﬁc skepticism, to which the mind voluntarily determines itself
for the speciﬁc puipose of future certainty. Des Cartes who (in
his meditations) himself ﬁrst, at least of the modems, gave a

i
l
l
l

by the mere self-thinker are even considered the touchstone of all truth."
l'ranssc. Id. 1). 8. T1 ansl The substance of this passage the leader will
ﬁnd in the paragraph” of the B. L. beginning with the words: “ In the pur
suit of these sciences, ’.pp 338- 9—8. 0.]

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 339

beautiful example of this voluntary doubt, this self-determined
indetermination, happily expresses its utter difference from the
skepticism of vanity or irreligion: Nec tamen in en Scepm'cos,
i77zita‘ba7', qui dubitcmt tamum ut dubilent, ct prwter incertz'tu-
clinem ipsam nihil quazmmt. Nam contra lotus in 60 mum at
aliguid certi Te])e7°i7'em.* Nor is it less distinct in its motives
and ﬁnal aim, than in its proper objects, which are not as in ordi-
nary skepticism the prejudices of education and circumstance, but
those original and innate prejudices which nature herself has
planted in all men, and which to all but the philosopher are the
ﬁrst principles of knowledge, and the ﬁnal test of truth.

1' Now these essential prejudices are all reducible to the one
fundamental presumption, THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT-US.
As this on the one hand originates, neither in grounds nor argu-
ments, and yet on the other hand remains proof against all at-
tempts to remove it by grounds or arguments (nan/mam furcas ex-
pellas tamen usquc 7'cclibit,°) on the one hand lays claim to IM-
MEDIATE certainty as a position at once indemonstrable and irre»
sistible, and yet on the other hand, inasmuch as it refers to some-
thing essentially diH'erent from ourselves, nay even in opposition
to ourselves, leaves it inconceivable how it could possibly become
a part of our immediate consciousness (in other words how that,
which ea; hypothcsi is and continues to be extrinsic and alien to
our being, should become a modiﬁcation of our being) ; the philoso-
pher therefore sompels himself to treat this faith as nothing more
than a prejudice, innate indeed and connatural, but still a preju-
dice.

i The other position, which not only claims but necessitates

‘5 Des Cartes, Dias. de JVIetllodo. [Sect iii. Amstel. 1664, p. 16.—S. 0.]

f [The contents of this paragraph are to be found in the Transsc. Id. pp.
8, 9, only the second sentence in brackets “in other words, dzc.” being inter-
polated.-—S. 0.]

q”. [The passages from which this paragraph is taken stand thus in Schel-
ling: ib. pp. 9, 10. “ The contradiction, that a position, which, by its own
nature, can not be immediately certain, is nevertheless so blindly, and ground«
lessly received as such, the Transcendental philosopher can only solve by
presuming that the aforesaid position, hiddenly and hitherto unperceivedly,
does not (merely) cohere, but is identical—one and the same—With an im-
mediate consciousness; and to demonstrate this identity Will be the peculiar
business of Transcendental philosophy.”

“ Now for the common use of reason there is nothing immediately certain

340 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

the admission of its immediate certainty, equally for the scientiﬁc
reason of the philosopher as for the common sense of mankind at
large, namely, I AM, can not so properly be entitled a prejudice.
It is groundless indeed ; but then in the very idea it precludes all
ground, and separated from the immediate consciousness loses its
whole sense and import. It is groundless ; but only because it is
itself the ground of all other certainty. N ow the. apparent con
tradiction, that the former position, namely, the existence 01
things without us, which from its nature can not be immediately
certain, should be received as blindly and as independently of all
grounds as the existence of our own being, the Transcendental
philosopher can solve only by the supposition, that the former is
unconsciously involved in the latter ; that it is not only coherent
but identical, and one and the same thing with our own imme-
diate self-consciousness. To demonstrate this identity is the ofﬁce
and object of his philosophy.

3* If it be said, that this is idealism, let it be remembered that
it is only so far idealism, as it is at the same time, and on that
very account, the truest and most binding realism. For wherein
does the realism of mankind properly consist? In the assertion

but the position I am, which, because out of immediate consciousness it even
loses its meaning, is the most individual of all truths, and the absolute
prejudice, which must be assumed in the ﬁrst place if any thing else is to
have certainty. Consequently the position, There are things without us, for
the Transcendental philosopher will only be certain through its identity
with the position I am, and its certainty will only be equal to the certainty
of the position from which it borrows its own.” Transl.—S. 0.]

9* [For the contents of this paragraph as far as the words ‘ mechanical
philosophy,” see Abhandlungen, Phil. Sehrift. pp. 273, 274. Compare also
the ﬁrst sentence with the T ramsc. Id. pp. 148, 149. “Thence the improper
Idealism, that is, a system which converts all knowledge into mere appear-
ance, must be that which takes away all immediateness in our perceptions
by placing originals out of us independent of our representations; whereas
a system, which seeks the origin of things in the activity of the spirit, even
because it is the most perfect Idealism. must at the same time be the most
perfect Realism. That is to say, if tlm most perfect Realism is that which
lnows the things in themselves and immediately, this is possible only in a
Nature, which beholds in the things only her own, through her own activity
limited, Reality. For such a Nature, as the indwelling soul of the things,
would penetrate them as her own immediate organism: and, even as the
artiﬁcer most perfectly knows his own work, would look through their inner
mechanism.” Transl.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 841

that there exists a something without them, what, or how, or
where they know not, which occasions the objects of their per-
ception? Oh no! This is neither connatural nor universal. It
is what a few have taught and learned in the schools, and which
the many repeat without asking themselves concerning their own
meaning. The realism common to all mankind is far elder and
lies inﬁnitely deeper than this hypothetical explanation of the
origin of our perceptions, an explanation skimmed from the mere
surface of mechanical philosophy. It is the table itself, which
the man of common sense believes himself to see, not the phan-
tom of a table, from which he may argumentatively deduce the
reality of a table, which he does not see. If to destroy the re‘
ality of all, that we actually behold, be idealism, what can be
more egregiously so, than the system of modern metaphysics,
which banishes us to a land of shadows, surrounds us with appa-
ritions, and distinguishes truth from illusion only by the majority of
those who dream the same dream? “ I asserted that the world
was mad, ” exclaimed poor Lee, “and the world said, that I was
mad, and confound them, they outvoted me.

* It 1s to the true and original realism, that I would direct the
attention. This believes and requires neither more nor less, than
that the object which it beholds and presents to itself, is the real
and very object. In this sense, however much we may strive
against it, we are all collectively born idealists, and therefore and
only therefore are we at the same time realists. But of this the
philosophers of the schools know nothing, or despise the faith as
the prejudice of the ignorant vulgar, because they live and move
in a crowd of phrases and notions from which human nature has
long ago vanished. Oh, ye that reverence yourselves, and walk
humbly with the divinity in your own hearts, ye are worthy of a
better philosophy I Let the dead bury the dead, but do you pre-
serve your human nature, the depth of which was never yet
fathomed by a philosophy made up of notions and mere logical
entities
‘3‘ In the third treatise of my LogOSOphia, announced at the end

9“ [This paragraph is contained in Abhandlzmgen, Phil. Schrift. pp. 274—-
5. Compare also with Idem, pp. 83—4. In the latter (p. 64), Schelling afv
ﬁrn1s--“ Nature must be visible spirit, spirit invisible nature. Here then
in the absolute identity of the spirit in us, and of nature out of us, must the
problem, how a nature without us is possible, be solved.”—S. 0.]

342 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

of this volume, I shall give (D60 volente) the demonstrations and
constructions of the Dynamic Philosophy scientiﬁcally arranged.
It is, according to my conviction, no other than the system of
Pythagoras and of Plato revived and puriﬁed from impure mix-
tures. Doctrinal p67' tot manus tradita tandem fin vappam
desiit.’”* The science of arithmetic furnishes instances, that a
rule may be useful in practical application, and for the particular
purpose may be sufﬁciently authenticated by the result, before it
has itself been fully demonstrated. It is enough, if only it be ren-
dered intelligible. This will. I trust, have been effected in the
following Theses for those of my readers, who are willing to ac-
company me through the following chapter, in which the results
will be applied to the deduction of the Imagination, and with it
the principles of production and of genial criticism in the ﬁne
arts. ' - --~ .
THESIS I.+

Truth is correlative to being. Knowledge without a corres-
pondent reality is no knowledge; if we know, there must be
somewhat known by us. Taknow is in‘itvs very essence a verb
active. H ’-

THESIS II.

All truth is either mediate, that is, derived from some other
truth or truths ; or immediate and original. The latter is abso-
lute, and its formula A. A. ; the former is of dependent or condi-
tional certainty, and represented in the formula B. A. The cer-
tainty, which inheres in A, is attributable to B.

SCHOLIUM. A chain without a staple, from which all the
links derived their stability, or a series without a ﬁrst, has been

9“ [This quotation is applied by Schelling to Leibnitz in the same treatise.
Phil. Schriﬂ. p. 212.—-S. 0.]

f [It has been said that these ﬁrst six T leases are “mainly taken from
Sehelling.” I can give no references to the works of that philosopher for
any of the sentences as they stand.1 The reader, however, may compare the
beginning of Thesis IV. with the Transsc. Id. p. 48; and the beginning of
Thesis V. with the same, p. 49.—S. 0.]

 

‘ [They are a condensation and re-composition of the ﬁrst part of the
Vom 10h als Princip. dbc. 600. Phil. Sclzrvft.

For a full and rigorous development of this theory of consciousness see
Gablcr’s If'y'z'tik des Bewusztseyns and Hegel’s PIac'tnomenologie.—Am. 1M] ,

V,_—vr«_7.n ...s -

BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. 343

not inaptly allegorized, as a string of blind men, each holding the
skirt of the man before him, reaching far out of sight, but all
moving without the least deviation in one straight line. It-
would be naturally taken for granted, that there was a guide at
the head of the ﬁle: what if it were answered, No! Sir, the
men are without number, and inﬁnite blindness supplies the
place of sight?

Equally inconceivable is a cycle of equal truths without a
common and central principle, which prescribes to each its proper
sphere in the system of science. That the absurdity does not
so immediately strike us, that it does not seem, equally unimagi-
72able, is owing to a surreptitious act of the imagination, which
instinctively and without our noticing the same, not only ﬁlls up
the intervening spaces, and contemplates the cycle (ofB. C. D.
E. F. 850.) as a continuous circle (A.) giving to all collectively
the unity of their common orbit ; but likewise supplies, by a sort
of subintellz'gz'tur, the one central power, which renders the
movement harmonious and cyclical.

THESIS III.

We are to seek therefore for some absolute truth capable oI
communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not
itself borrowed; a truth self-grounded, unconditional and known
by its own light. In short, we have to ﬁnd a somewhat which
is, simply because it is. In order to be such, it must be one
7 which its own predicate, so far at least that all other nominal
predicates must be modes and repetitions of itself. Its existence
too must be such, as to preclude the possibility of requiring a.
cause or antecedent without an absurdity.

THESIS IV.

That there can be but one such principle,"“ may be proved \dl
primi; for were there two or more, each must refer to some
other, by which its equality is afﬁrmed; consequently neither
would be self-established, as the hypothesis demands. And (i
posteriori, it will be proved by the principle itself when it is dis.
covered, as involving universal antecedence in its very conception.

SCHOLIUM. If we afﬁrm of a board that it is blue, the predi

’* [See Note, p. 347.——S. 0.]
Pit

344 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

cate (blue) is accidental, and not implied in the subject, board
If we afﬁrm of a circle that it is equi-radial, the predicate indeed
is implied in the deﬁnition of the subject ; but the' existence of
the subject itself is contingent, and supposes both a cause and a
percipient. The same reasoning will apply to the indeﬁnite
number of supposed indemonstrable truths exempted from the
profane approach of philosophic investigation by the amiable
Beattie, and other less eloquent and not more profound inaugu-
rators of common sense on the throne of philosophy ; a fruitless
attempt, were it only that it is the two-fold function of philosophy
to reconcile reason with common sense, and to elevate common
sense into reason.

THESIS V.

Such a principle can not be any THING or OBJECT. Each thing
is what it is in consequence of some other thing. An inﬁnite,
independent* thing, is no less a contradiction, than an inﬁnite
circle or a sideless triangle. Besides a thing is that, which is
capable of being an object of which itself is not the sole percip-
ient. But an object is inconceivable without a subject as its
antithesis. Omne perceptum percz’pientem suppom't.

But neither can the principle be found in a subject as a sub
ject, contra-distinguished from an object: for uniczcique pelvi-
m'enti aliquid obj/icitur perceptum. It is to be found, therefore,
neither in object nor subject taken separately, and consequently,
as no other third is conceivable, it must be found in that which
is neither subject nor object exclusively, but which is the iden-

tity of both.
THESIS VI.

This principle, and so characterized, manifests itself in the
SUM or I AM; which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express
by the words spirit, self, and self-consciousness. In this, and. in
this alone, object and subject, being and knowing, are identical,

* The impossibility of an absolute thing (substantia unica) as neither
genus, species, nor z'ndim'duum : as well as its utter unﬁtness for the funda-
mental position of a philosophic system, will be demonstrated in the cri-
tique on Spinozism in the ﬁfth treatise of my Logosophia. [This is the
great phi osophical work, to preparations for which Mr. C. devoted so much
time and thought during his latter years—S. 0.]

.1........ ,-,..v..-d—i;ru...... .__. _....-. - “.—

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 345

each involving and supposing the other.* In other words, it is a
subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself
objectively to itself ; but which never is an object except for itself,
and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject. It
may be described, therefore, as a perpetual self-duplication of one
and the same power into object and subject, which pre-suppose
each other, and can exist only as autitheses.

SCHOLIUM. If a man be asked how he knows that he is ? he
can only answer, sum quid sum. But if (the absoluteness of
this certainty having been admitted) he be again asked, how he,
the individual person, came to be, then in relation to the ground
of his existence, not to the ground of his knowledge of that exist—
ence, he might reply, sum quia; Deus est, or still more philo-
sophically, sum guia m Deo sum

But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great
eternal I AM, then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of
idea, and of reality ; the ground of existence, and the ground of
the knowledge of existence, are absolutely identical, Sum quz'a
sum ,"r I am, because I afﬁrm myself to be ; I afﬁrm myself to
be, because I am.

* [“ The I is nothing sepai ate f1 om its thinking ;—the thinking of the
I and the I itself are absolutely one; the I, therefore, in general, is anothing
out of thinking, consequently no thing, no matter, but to all inﬁnity the
non-objective. The I is certainly an object, but only for itself; it is not
therefore originally in the world of objects. It ﬁrst becomes an object by
making itself an object, and it becomes an object not for something without,
but ever for itself alone.” Tmnssc. 1d. Transl. pp. 47—8.—S. 0.]

f It is most worthy of notice, that in the ﬁrst revelation of himself, not
conﬁned to individuals; indeed in the very ﬁrst-revelation of his absolute
being, Jehovah at the same time revealed the fundamental truth of all phi-
losophy, which must either commence with the absolute, or have no ﬁxed
commencement; that is, cease to be philosophy. I can not but express my
regret, that in the equivocal use of the word that, for in that, or because,
our admirable version has rendered the passage susceptible of a degraded
interpretation in the mind of common readers or hearers, as if it were a
mere reproof to an impertinent question, I am what I am, which might be
equally afﬁrmed of himself by any existent being.

The Cartesian Cogito ergo sum1 is objectionable,because either the Oogz'to
is used extra gradum, and then it is involved in the sum and is tautological;
or it is taken as a particular mode or dignity, and then it is subordinated

 

‘ [Principz'a Philosophies. Pars Prima, ppgh. vi. and x. See also
De Methodo, iv. pp. 18—19, edit. 1664.—S. 0.]
p-‘K‘

THESIS VII.*

If then I know myself only through myself, it is contradlctory
to require any other predicate of self, but that of self-conscious-
ness. Only in the self- consciousness of a spirit is there the re-
quiied identity of object and of 1epresentation; f01 herein con-
sists the essence of a spiiit, that it is self- -1epresentative. ”If,
the1efore, this be the one only immediate truth, in the certainty
of which the reality of . ourgcollective knowledge is grounded, it
must follow that the spirit in all the objects which it views, views
only‘itself. If this could be proved, the immediate reality of all
intuitive knowledge would be assured. It has been shown, that
a spirit is that, which is its own object, yet not originally an ob-
ject, but an absolute subject for which all, itself included, may

to the sum as the species to the genus, or rather as a particular modiﬁcation
to the subject modiﬁed; and not pre-ordinated as the arguments seem to
require. For Cogito is Sum Cogitmzs. This is clear by the inevidence of
the converse. Cogz'tat, ergo est is true, because it is a mere application of
the logical rule: Quiequid in genere est, est et in Specie. Est (cogz'tans),
ergo est. It is a cherry-tree; therefore it is a tree. But, est ergo eogitat, is
illogical: for guod est in specie, non NECESSARIO in genere est. It maybe
true. I hold it to be true, that quicguid vere est, est per veram sui aﬁrma-
tionem ; but it is a derivative, not an immediate truth. Here then we have,
by anticipation, the distinction between the conditional ﬁnite I (which, as
known in distinct consciousness by occasion of experience, is called by
Kant’s followers the empirical I) and the absolute I AM, and likewise the
dependence or rather the inherence of the former in the latter; in whom
“we live, and move, and have our being,” as St. Paul divinely asserts, dif-
fering widely from the Theists of the mechanic school (as Sir I. Newton,
Locke, and others) who must say from whom we had our being, and with
'1: life and the powers of life.

*5 [The contents of Theses VII. VIII. may be found scattered about in
Schelling’s Abhandlungen, Phil. Schrift. 223-4—5. Only the sentences at the
end of Thesis VII. from “Again, the spirit,” to the end, I do not ﬁnd for-
mally expressed in Schelling’s treatise, with the exception of the words,
“identity of object and subject.” At pp. 223—1 Schelling says, “ In regard
t: every other object I am obliged to ask how the being of the same is
brought into connection (vermittelt) with my representation. But origi-
nally I am not any thing that exists for a knowing subject, out of myself, as
matter does, but I exist for myself; in me is the original identity of sub-
ject and object of knowing and of being.” See also how this doctrine is
applied in the TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM, p. 63.

» The last sentence of Thesis VIII. I have not met with 1n Schelling.—
S (3.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARIA. 847

become an object. It must, therefore, be an ACT ; for every ob-
ject is, as an object, dead, ﬁxed, Incapable in itself of any action,
and necessarily ﬁnite. Again the Spirit (originally the identity
of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this identity,
in order to be conscious of it ; ﬁt alter et idem. But this implies
an act, and it follows, therefore, that intelligence or self-conscious-
ness is‘ impossible, except by and in a will. The self-conscious -»
spirit, therefore, is a will; and freedom must be assumed as a
ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it. '

THESIS VIII.

Whatever in its origin is objective, is likewise as such neces-
sarily ﬁnite. Therefore, since the Spirit is not originally an ob-
ject, and as the subject exists in antithesis to an object, the
spirit can not originally be ﬁnite. But neither can it be a sub-
ject without becoming an object, and, as it is originally the iden-
tity of both, it can be conceived neither as infinite nor ﬁnite ex-
clusively, but as the most original union of both. In the exist-
ence, in the reconciling, and the recurrence of this contradiction
consists the process and mystery of production and life.

THESIS IX.

This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting
in a WILL, or primary ACT of self-duplication, is the mediate or
indirect principle of every science ; but it is the immediate and
direct principle of the ultimate science alone, i. e. of transcenden-
tal philosophy alone. For it must be remembered, that all these
Theses refer solely. to one of the two Polar Sciences, namely, to
www.mnggsijtlhandwrigidly.con-ﬁnes—vitself.-.within,
the subjective, leaving...the...0bjeetive (as far as it is exclusively
objective) to natural philosophy, which is its opposite pole. In
its very idea therefore as a systematic knoWledge of our collective
KNOWING (seientia scientice) it involves the necessity of some one
highest principle of knowing, as at once the source and the ac-
companying form in all particular acts of intellect and percep-
tion.* This, it has been shown, can be found only in the act

* [Schelling says in the T ranssc. Id. pp. 25—6 that, “if there is a. system

of knowledge the principle of the same must lie Within the knowing itself ;"
that “this principle can be the only one” and that it is the “mediate or in

and evolution of self-consciousness. We are not investigating an
absolute principz'um essend‘i ; for then, I admit, many valid ob-
jections might be started against our theory; but an absolute
principium cognoscendi.* The result of both the sciences, or
their equatorial point, would be the principle of a total and undi-
vided philosophy, as, for prudential reasons, I have chosen to an-
ticipate in the Sch-oli'um to Thesis VI. and the note subjoined.
In other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and religion
become inclusive of philosophy. We begin with the I KNOW MY-
SELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from
the SELF, in order to lose and ﬁnd all self in GOD.

THESIS X.+

The transcendental philosopher does not inquire, what ultimate
ground of our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but
what is the last in our knowing itself, beyond which we can not
pass. The principle of our knowing is sought within the sphere
of our knowing. ' Itmmiist be .‘sOmething,'therefOre,‘ Which can
itself be known. It is asserted only, that the act Of self-censcmus-
ness is for us'the source and principle of all our possible knowl:
edge. Whether abstracted from us there exists any thing higher

direct principle of the science of knowing or transcendental philosophy.”—
S. 0.]

9* [This sentence “ We are not investigating,” &c., is in the Transsc. Id
p. 27.——S. C.]

+ [Thesis X. as far as the words “farthest that exist for us” is taken from
pp. 27—28 of the Transcendental Idealism ;——the remainder of the second
paragraph, as far as the words “ will or intelligence” from p. 29, with the
exception of some explanatory sentences. Schelling’s words in the last pas-
sage from which Mr. Coleridge has borrowed, are as follows: “ To go yet
further, it may be shown, and has already been shown in part (Introd. § 1)
that even when the objective is arbitrarily placed as the ﬁrst, still we never
go beyond self-consciousness. We are then in our explanations either driven
back into the infinite, from the grounded to the ground; or we must arbio
trarily break off the series by setting up an Absolute, which of itself is cause
and effect—subject and object; and since this originally is possible only
through self-conseiousness—by again putting a self-consciousness as a First;
this takes place in natural philosophy, for which Being is not more original
than it is for transcendental philosophy, and which places the Reality in an
Absolute, which is of itself cause and effect—in the absolute identity of the
subjective and objective which we name Nature, and which again in it:
highest power is no other than self-consciousness.” Transl.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. 8 19

and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us the form
of all our knowing, must be decided by the result.

That the self-consciousness is the ﬁxed point, to which for us
all is mortised and annexed, needs no further proof. But that
the self-consciousness may be the modiﬁcation of a higher form
of being, perhaps of a higher consciousness, and this again of a
yet higher, and so on in an inﬁnite 7'eg/essus ; in short, that self-
eonsciousness may be itself something explicable into something,
which must lie beyond the possibility of our knowledge, because
the whole synthesis of our intelligence is ﬁrst formed in and
through the self-consciousness, does not at all concern us as trans-
cendental philosophers. For to us thiselfw consciousness is wngta
kinLof oezng, but a kind of knowing, and that too the highest
and farthest that exists for us. It may howevei be shown, and
has in part already been shown in page 335, that even when
the Objective is assumed as the ﬁrst, we yet can never pass
beyond the principle of self-consciousness. Should we attempt it,
we must be driven back from ground to ground, each of which
would cease to be a ground the moment we p1 essed on it. We
must be whirled down the gulf of an inﬁnite series. But this“
would make our reason bafﬂe the end and purpose of all reason,
namely, unity and system. Or we must break off the series ar-
bitrarily, and afﬁrm anabsolute something thatis-in and of itself
at once cause and eﬂect(causa, sni) subject and object, or rather
the absolute identity of both. But as this is inconceivable, ex-
cept in a self-consciousness, it follows, that even as natural phi-
losophers we must arriveatthe .samedprineiple from Which~as
transcendentalphilosophers we set out; that is in a self-con-
sciousness in which ihe9~2225ﬂ0i17mm essendz does not stand to the
197 inCzpinm connoscendz in the 1elation of cause to effect, but
both the one and the other {twee-inherent and identical. Thus
the true system of natural philosophy places the sole reality of
things in an ABSOLUTE, which is at once cansa sui et efectns,
71011ij abrondmg, we); éavIE—in the absolute identity of subject
and object, which it calls nature, and which in its highest power
is nothing else but self-conscious will or intelligence. In this
sense the position of Malebrancheﬁ‘ that we see all things 1n G od,

 

 

is a strict philosophical truth ; and equally true is theL assertion

* [See his treatise De la Recherche de la Vérité. Book iii. especially
chap. 6. See Appendix Q..]

350 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

of Hobbes, of Hartley, and of their masters in ancient Greece,-
that all real knowledge supposes a prior sensation. For sensation
itself is but vision nascent, not the cause of intelligence, but in-
telligence itself revealed as an earlier power in the process of
self-construction.

Mdlcap, Z7ta6£ ,uOL'

IIdTep, ilaﬁi [mm

El aapd Koo/10v,

EZ rapt) potpav

T012 0012 5190/01)?*

Bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-develop
ment, not a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract
from all degree, and for the purpose of philosophic construction
reduce it to kind, under the idea of an indestructible power with
two opposite and counteracting forces, which, by a metaphor bor-
rowed from astronomy, we may call the centrifugal and centrip-
etal forces. The intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself,
and in the other to know itself in the object. It willbehere-
after mypbusiness to constructby abseries of intuitions the pro-
gressive schemes, that mustrfollow from 'such a power with such
forces, till I arrive at the fulness of the human intelligence. For -
my present purpose, I assume [such a powder- as my principle, in
order to deduce from it a faculty, the generation, agency, and
application of which form the contents of the ensuing chapter.

In a preceding page I have justified the use of technical terms
in philosophy, whenever they tend to preclude confusion of
thought, and when they assist the memory by the exclusive
singleness of their meaning more than they may, for a short time,
bewilder the attention by their strangeness. I trust, that I have
not extended this privilege beyond the grounds on which I have
claimedit; namely, the conveniency of the scholastic phrase to
distinguish the kind from all degrees, or rather to express the
kind with the abstraction of degree, as for instance multeity in-
stead of multitude; or secondly, for the sake of correspondence
in sound in interdependent or antithetical terms, as subject and
object ; or lastly, to avoid the wearying recurrence of circumlocu-
tions and deﬁnitions. Thus I shall venture to use 10*an ,_in
order to express a speciﬁc degree of a power, in imitation of the.
Algebraists. I have even hazarded the new verb polenziate,

* [Synesii Episcopi. Hymn iii. 113.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 351

With its derivatives, in order to express the combination or trans—
[er of powers. It is with new or unusual terms, as with privi-.
leges in courts of J ustice or legislature ; there can be no legitimate
privilege, where there already exists a positive law adequate to:
the purpose ; and when there is no law in existence, the privilege
is to be justiﬁed by its accordance with the end, or ﬁnal cause,

of all law. Unusual and new-coined words are doubtless an evil; .
but vagueness, confusion, and imperfect conveyance of our thoughts
are a far greater. Every system, which is under the necessity
of using terms not familiarized by the metaphysics in fashion,
will be described as written in an unintelligible style, and the
author must expect the charge of having substituted learned jar-
gon for clear conception; while, according to the creed of our
modern philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear conception, but
what is representable by a distinct image. Thus the conceivable
is reduced within the bounds of the picturable. Hinc patet, qui
ﬂat, at, cum irreprzesentabile et impossibile malgo ejusdem signi-
ﬁcatus habeantmy conceptus tam continui, quam inﬁniti, a
plumimis 7'ejicia7it2tr, quippe quorum, secundum leges cognitionis
intuitivae meprresentatio est impossibilis. Quanguam autem lia-
mm e 7207?. paucis scholis explosamtm notiomtm, prcese'rtim prioris,‘
causam hie non gem, maximi tamen momenti erit momtisse .'
g/ra’vissimo iltos emore labi, qiti tam perversa argumentandi
'ratione utimtiw'. Quicguid enim repugnat legibits intellectits
et 7‘ati07iis, utique est impossibile; quad autem, cum rationis
1mm: sit objectum, legions cognitionis intuitive tantummodo
non subest, 72072 item. Nam hie dissensus interﬁzcultatem sen-
sitivam et intellectualem (quamtm indolem mox exponam), nilzil
indigitat, 7iisi, quas mens ab intellectu acceptas fert ideas ab-
stractas, illas in concrete exsequi et in intuitus commutare saepe

numero non posse. Hcec autem a'eluctantia. subjectiva mentitm‘,
ut plm'imitm, Tepugnantiam aliquam objectivam, et incautos
facile fallit, limitibus, quibits mens humana circumscribitm',
pro iis liabitis, quibus ipsa rerum essentia continetm’ﬂt

9* TRANSLATION.

‘Hence it is clear, from what cause many reject the notion of the con-
tinuous and the inﬁnite. They take, namely, the words irrepresentable and
impossible in one and the same meaning; and, according to the forms of sen.
suous evidence, the notion of the continuous and the inﬁnite is doubtless im-
possible. I am not now pleading the cause of these laws, which not a few.

852 BIOGRAPHIA ‘LITERARIA.

‘ Critics,* who are most ready to bring this charge of 'pedantry
nd unintelligibility, are the most apt to overlook the important
act, that, besides the language of words, there is a language of
pirits—(sermo interior)—and that the former is only the vehicle
f the latter. Consequently their assurance, that they do not un-
erstand the philosophic writer, instead of proving any thing against
he philosophy, may furnish an equal, and (cceteris paribus) even

stronger presumption against their own philosophic talent.

Great indeed are the obstacles which an English metaphysician
has to encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent
judges, there will be many who have devoted their attention ex-
clusively to the concerns and interests of human life, and who
bring with them to the perusal of a philosophic system an habit-
ual aversion to all speculations, the utility and application of
which are not evident and immediate. To these I would in the
ﬁrst instance merely oppose an authority, which they themselves

schools have thought proper to explode, especially the former (the law of
continuity). But it is of the highest importance to admonish the reader,
that those, who adopt so perverted a mode of reasoning, are under a griev-
ous error. W'hatever opposes the formal principles of the understanding
and the reason is confessedly impossible; but not therefore that, which is
therefore not amenable to the forms of sensuous evidence, because it is ex-
clusively an object of pure intellect. For this non-coincidence of the sensu-
cus and the intellectual (the nature of which I shall presently lay open)
proves nothing more, but that the mind can not always adequately repre-
sent in the concrete, and transform into distinct images, abstract notions de
rived from the pure intellect. But this contradiction, which is in itself
merely subjective (2'. e. an incapacity in the nature of man), too often passes
for an incongruity or impossibility in the object (2. e. the notions them-
selves), and seduces the ineautious to mistake the limitations of the human
faculties for the limits of things, as they really exist.”

I take this occasion to observe, that here and elsewhere Kant uses the
terms intuition, and the verb active (intueri Germanice anéchauen) for
which we have unfortunately no correspondent word, exclusively for that
which can be represented in space and time. He therefore consistently and
rightly denies the possibility of intellectual intuitions. But as I see no ade-
quate reason for this exclusive sense of the term, I have reverted to its wider
signiﬁcation, authorized by our elder theologians and metaphysicians, accord-
ing to whom the term comprehends all truths known to us without a medium.

From Kant’s Treatise .De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilz's forma et princi-
pz'z's, 1770. [(Sect. i. § 1. Works, vol. iii. pp. 126—7.)—S. 0.]

9* [This paragraph and the second sentence of the following are nearly
the same as some sentences that occur in Abhandlungen, Phil. Schrift. pp

203—4.]

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 853

hold venerable, that of Lord Bacon : non inutiles Scientice exis-
timanda: smzt, garment in se mollus est usus, si ingenia acmml
at m-dz'nent.*

There are others, whose prejudices are still more formidable
inasmuch as they are grounded in their moral feelings and reli-
gious principles, which had been alarmed and shocked by the im-
pious and pernicious tenets defended by Hume, Priestley, and the
French fatalists and necessitarians ; some of whom had perverted
metaphysical reasonings to the denial of the mysteries and indeed
of all the peculiar doctrines of Christianity ; and others even to
the subversion of all distinction between right and wrong. I
would request such men to consider what an eminent and success-
ful defender of the Christian faith has observed, that true meta~
physics are nothing else but true divinity, and that in fact the
writers, who have given them such just offence, were sophists,
who had taken advantage of the general neglect into which the
science of logic has unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians,
a name indeed which those writers were the ﬁrst to explode as
unmeaning. Secondly, I would remind them, that as long as
there are men in the world to whom the I‘mbﬁo oeavtdv- is an in-
stinct and a command from their own nature, so long will there
be metaphysicians and metaphysical Speculations ; that false
metaphysics can be effectually counteracted by true metaphysics
alone ; and that if the reasoning be clear, solid and pertinent, the
truth deduced can never be the less valuable on account of the
depth from which it may have been drawn.

A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and
believe that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no
objection to system or terminology, provided it be the method and
the nomenclature to which they have been familiarized in the
writings of Locke, Hume, Hartley, CondillacnL or perhaps Dr.
Reid,i and Professor Stewart.§ To objections from this cause, it

*9 [De Augment. Scient. vi. 0. 3.-—-S. 0.]

1* [Appendix Q.] 1 [Appendix R.]

§ [Schelling also says (in Abhandlungen, Phil. Schrift. p. 204), “ Others
were not prejudiced against nomenclature, terminology,—the spirit of sys«
tem in general,-—but only against this nomenclature,” namely that of Kant;
which he attributes to their having been long accustomed to the statements
of Leibnitz, who had communicated his philosophical principles fragmenta—
rily, in letters to friends, or to distinguished and great Lords, ever with
much forbearance towards prevailing opinions, and on that account with

354 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

is a sufficient answer, that one main object of my attempt was to
demonstrate the vagueness or insufﬁciency of the terms used in
the metaphysical schools of France and Great Britain since the
revolution, and that the errors which I propose to attack can not
subsist, except as they are concealed behing the mask of a plau-
sible and indefinite nomenclature.

But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the
predominance of a popularphilosophy, at once the counterfeit
and the mortal enemy of all true and n_anly metaphysical research.
It is that corruption, introduced by certain immethodioal apho-
risming eclectics,* who, dismissing not only all system, but all
logical connection, pick and choose whatever is most plausible
and showy; who select, whatever words can have some sem-
blance of sense attached to them without the least expenditure
of thought ; in short whatever may enable men to talk of what
they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every thing
that might awaken them to a moment’s suspicion of their igno-
rance. This, alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with
it, not so much an indisposition to any particular system, but an
utter loss of taste and faculty for all system and all philosophy.
Like echoes that beget each other amongst. the mountains, the
praise or blame of such men roll in volleys long after the report
from the original blunderbuss. Seguacitas est potius et coitz'o
guam consensus: et lumen (quad pessimum est) pusz'llanimz’tas
ism non sine arroganlz'a elf fastidio se aﬂerm‘

I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagina-
tion; but I must ﬁrst take leave to notice, that after a more ac-
curate perusal of Mr. Wordsworth’s remarks on the Imagination,
in his preface to the new edition of his poems, I ﬁnd that my con-
clusions are not so consistent with his as, I confess, I had taken
for granted. In an article contributed by me to Mr. 'Southey’s
Omniana, On the soul and its organs of sense, are the following

less of sharpness and precision than is suitable to scientiﬁc explanation; .or
to their having grown stiﬂ' in the school-language and method of \Volﬁ—S. 0.]

* [“ Finally, the last of all, through the impotent sham philosophy of
some water-i511 authors, or the pandect wisdom of aphoristic eclectics. had
lost all sense and taste, not perhaps for a determined system, but for phi.
bsopby in general, before Kant had published a syllable of his philosol hy.”
Transl. (Ab/candlungen, Phil. Schrift. p. 204.) S. 0.]

1 Franc. Baconis de Verulmn, NOVUM ORGANUM. [Aphorisms LXX VII and
LXXXVIIL —S. C.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 355

sentences ‘ These (the human faculties) I would arrange under
the different senses and powers : as the eye, the ear, the touch, ‘
85c. ; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic; the ima-
ginati_on, or shaping; and modifying Dower; ‘the.fa'ncy,'"01:thié
aggregative and associative power ; the understanding, or the reg-
ulative, substantiating and realizing power; the speculative rea-
son, m’s theoretica ct scientiﬁca, or the power by which we pro
duce, or aim to produce unity, necessity, and universality in all
our knowledge by .means of principles d priori;* the will, or
practical reason ; the faculty of choice (Gama-nice, Willkiihr)
and (distinct both from the moral will and the choice) the sensa-
tion of volition, which I have found reason to include under the
head of single and double touch.” To this, as far as it relates
to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative
and associative power) Mr. Wordsworth’s “ objection is only that
the deﬁnition is too general. To aggregate and to assbc'iate, to
evoke and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to
the Fancy.”T I reply, that if, by the power of evoking and
combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the same as, and no more
than, I meant by the aggregative and associative, I continue to
deny, that it belongs at all to the Imagination; and I am disposed
(to conjecture, that he has mistaken the co-presence of Fancy with
Imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may
work with two very different tools at the same moment; each
has its share in the work, but the work effected by each is dis-
tinct and different. But it will probably appear in the next
chapter, that deeming it necessary to go back much further than
Mr. Wordsworth’s subject required or permitted, I have attached
a meaning‘to both Fancy and Imagination, which he had not in
view, at least while he was writing that preface. ‘ He will judge.

9* This phrase, dpriorz’, is in common, most grossly misunderstood, and
an absurdity burdened on it, which 1t does not deserve ! By knowledge at
priorz', we do not mean, that we can know any thing previously to experi-
ence, which would be a contradiction in terms; but that having once known
it by occasion of experience (that is, something acting upon us from with-
Out) we then know, that it must have pre-existed, or the experience itself
would have been impossible. By experience only I know, that I have
eyes; but then my reason convinces me, that I must have had eyes in order
to the experience.

1 [Preface to the Poetical Works, Vol. i. p. xxxiv.)

Would to Heaven, I might meet with many such readers!

will conclude with the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor : “ He t
'whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, am
' seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace and rest of spirit.”

 

CHAPTER XIII.

ON THE IMAGINATION, OR ESEMPLASTIC POWER.

0 Adam, One Almighty is, from whom

All things proceed, and ,up -tQ_hin_1,r;eturn,

If not deprav’d from good, created all

Such to perfection, one ﬁrst matter all

Endued with various forms, various degrees

Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
But more reﬁn’d, more spiritous and pure,

As nearer to him plac’d, or nearer tending,

Each in their several active spheres assign’d,

Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportion’d to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aery: last the bright consummate ﬂower
Spirits odorous breathes : ﬂowers and their fruit,
Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublim’d,

To vital spirits aspire: to animal :

To intellectual l—give both life and sense,

Fancy and understan'ding’fﬁvhéh'cewthc soul
REASON receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive or intuitiveqL

“Sane si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent, verissime dic
rentur in ﬂuxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam, quemadm
dum et Platonici olim recte agnovere.

“Hinc igitur, praetcr pure mathematica et phantasiae subjecta, colle
quasdam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda: et m
sae materiali principium quoddam superius ct, ut sic dicam, formale adde
dum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis axiom
tibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto et part
ﬁgura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et effectu, actioneque

 

* J er. Taylor’s Via pacis. [Sunday. The First Decad. 8.-—S. 0.]
+ Par. Lost. Book v. L 469.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 357

passions, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis rerum rationes salventur. Id
p1incipium rerum, an évrelexeiav an vim appellemus, non refe1t,m0do
mem1ne1 1mus per solam Virium notionem, intelligibiliter explicari.”*

2:530de vospcfm
Kovgbiau Tdfw.
X-ppec TI MEEON
Ov Karaxvﬂév.+

DES CARTESJI speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of
Archimedes, said, give me matter and motion and I will construc‘
you the universe. We must of course understand him to have
meant : Iwill render the construction of the universe intelligible.
In the same sense the transcendental philosopher says : grant me,
a nature having two contrary forces, the 9ne of which tends to
expand inﬁnitely, While the other *strives to apprehend or ﬁnd
itself in this inﬁnity, and I will cause the world of intelligences
with the whole system of their representations to rise up before
you. Every other science pre-supposes intelligence as already
existing and complete; the philosopher contemplates it in its
growth, and as it were representsits histO’ry'to'the’mind from its“
birth to its maturity. I

The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of

* Leibnitz. Op. T. ii. P. ii. p. 53.—T. iii. p. 321.

[The ﬁrst sentence of this quotation is from the treatise of Leibnitz Dc
[psa Natura, sive dc Vi insita Actionibusque creatumrum, § 8. ed. Erdmann.
P. i. p. 157 :—the second is from his Specimen Dynamic-um, pro admirandis
Natures legibus circa corporum Vires, ct mutuas Actiones detegendis et ad
was causas revocandis. Ex Actis Erudit. Lips. ann. 1695. In the second
extract Mr. C. has substituted the word phantasiw for imaginationi, and, in
the beginning of the last sentence rerum for formam. He quuted from the
edition of Lud. Dutens, a Frenchman resident in Britain, as I learn from
Erdmann’s Preface, in which it is mentioned that neither his collection nor
that of Raspe, who added posthumous works of Leibnitz, contains all his
philosophical writings, and that both the one and the other frustro a biblio-
polis gum-es, imo in publicis bibliothecis desiderabis. The former, however,
is at the British Museum, presented by himself in 1800. The new edition
comprehends only the philosophical works,—the Specimen Dynamicum is
classed among the mathematica1,-—but, as Erdmann himself observes, it is
often very difﬁcult to judge utrum scriptio ali qua philosophicw indolis sit an
non sit. See Appendix S.——S. 0.]

‘r Synesii Episcop. Hymn. iii. i. 231.

i [This ﬁl st par aglaph of Chap. xiii. with the exception of the second
sentence, is f1 eel) tlanslated f1 0111 Transsc. Id. ﬁrst § of Sectim C. p. 147.
~S. 0.]

~.

358 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

this master-thought as an eﬂective pioneer in his essay on the in-
troduction of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763.”I
In this he has shown, that instead of assailing the science of
mathematics by metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYSTJ
or of sophisticating it, as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of de-
ducing the ﬁrst principles of geometry from supposed deeper
grounds of ontologyg‘. it behooved the metaphysician rather to ex-
amine whether the only province of knowledge, which man has
succeeded in erecting into a pure science, might not furnish ma-
terials, or at least hints, for establishing and pacifying the unset
tled, warring, and embroiled domain of philosophy. n imita-
tion 6f“the“mathemeticalimethod.hadindeed been at ted
with no better success than attended the essay of David to wear
the armor _of Saul. Another use however, is possible and of far
greater promise, namely, the actual application .of— the ‘poSitions
which had so wonderfully enlarged the discoveries-of geometry,
mutatis maitandis, to philosophical subjectsé Kant, having

*5 [Versuch, den Beyriﬂ' der negativen Grossen in die lVeltweisheit einzufiih-
ren. An attempt towards introducing the idea of negative magnitudes
into philosophy, 17 63. Works, vol. i. p. 19.—S. 0.]

f [The Analyst; was published soon after Berkeley’s promotion to the sec
of Cloyne, March 17, 1(8)34. It is said that the Bishop addressed it to Dr.
Halley on learning from Mr. Addison that he, “who dealt so much in dem-
onstration,” had brought Dr. Garth into a state of general skepticism or
even unbelief on religious subjects, as appeared in the latter’s last illness.
Its whole title is The Analyst; or, a Discourse addressed to an inﬁdel hfathe-
matician : wherein it is examined whether the object, principles, and infer-
ences, of the modern Analysis are more distinctly conceived, or more evidently
deduced, than religious mysteries and points of faith. He endeavored to
show that the doctrine of ﬂuxions furnished a strong example of mathemati-
cal, uncertainty and fallacy]

1 [Cousin represents Wolf as having improved the Leibnitzian philoso-
phy by qualifying it in some directions and ﬁlling it up in others. He
seems to consider his mathematical method as at once his strength and his
weakness—for he says—“ Son mérite principal consiste clans l’unité, la solidité
et l’enchainement systématigue gu’il sut donner d tout l’ensemble d l’aide de la
méthode appelée mathématigue, méthode gui, selon lui, n’étoit autre chose qne
l’application la plus parfaite des lois du raisonnement.” Then after enumerating
the defects of his philosophy he sums them up thus—“Enﬁn” il “ négligea
la distinction des caractéres propres gni séparent la philosophic et les mathéo
matiques dans leurforme et leur matiére.” (Manuel. vol. ii. 175—6.) I sup-
pose that no man before Kant’s day had seen this distinction so clearly, and
laid it down so determinately, as did the sage of K.oenigsberg.—S. 0.]

§ [Kant says in his Preface to the Versuch already referred to: “The use

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 359

brieﬂy illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the questions
of space, motion,- and inﬁnitely small quantities, as employed by
the mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and
the transfer of them to metaphysical investigation.* Opposites
he well observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is,.such as
are absolutely incompatible ; or real without being contradictory.
The former he denominates Nihil negativum z'wepmzsemabile,
the connection of which produces nonsense. A body in motion
is something—Aliguid cogitabz'le; but a body, at one and the
same time in motion and not in motion, is nothing, or, at most,
air articulated into nonsense. But a motory force of a body in
one direction, and an equal force of the same body in an opposite
direction is not incompatible, and the result, namely rest, is real
and representable. For the purposes of mathematical calculus
it is indifferent which force we term negative, and which positive,
and consequently we appropriate the latter to that, which hap-
pens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus if a man’s
capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be the
same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt
negative capital. But in as much as the latter stands practi-
cally in reference to the former, we of course represent the sum
as 10—8. It is equally clear that two equal forces acting in op-
posite directions, both being finite and each distinguished from
the other by its direction only, must neutralize or reduce each
other to inaction. JrNow the transcendental philosophy demands ;
ﬁrst, that two forces should be conceived which counteract 7:73:05:
other by their esserﬂialggtpﬁjdmlt only not in consequence of
the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all direction, nay.

which may be made of mathematics in philosophy consists either in an imi-
tation of the method or in the real application of their positions to the ob-
jects of philosophy.” He shows the ill success of the former attempt, and
that the troublesome non Iiguet would not yield to all this pomp of demon-
stration—S. 0.]

'* [Ibid. 1. Absch. Works, i. 25—33. Mr. C. repeats the teaching of the Ver-
mch, in language of his own, till he comes to the application, “ It is equally
clear,” &c.——S. 0.]

1- [The reader may compare the rest of the paragraph and the following
one with the doctrine of the Transsc. Id. especially the section entitled De-
duction der productiven Anschaung, pp. 156—185. But the sentences of the
B. L. are not the same with those of Schelling, nor is the application of the
analogy suggested by Kant made in the T ranssc. Id.-—S. 0.]

. 860 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

as the prima1y forces from which the conditions of all possible
diiections a1e derivative and deducible . secondly, that these
forces should be assumed to be both alike inﬁnite, both alike in-
destructible. The problemﬂiﬂ then—hertoﬂ'iscoverwthe result or
product of two sums, as distinguished from the result of
those linces which are ﬁnite, andﬂerive their difference solely
f1om the circumstance of their direction. 7 When we havciormed
a scheme or outline of these tWo different kinds of force, and of
their different results by the process of discursive reasoning, 1t 4
will then remain for us to elevate the thesis from notional to ac-
tual, by contemplating intuitively this One power With its two i11-
he1eiit indestructible yet counteracting forces, and W or '
generations to which thei1 intcr- -penet1ation gives existence, in,
the~l1yi11g punciple and in the process of our self consc1ous11ess
By what instrument this is possible the solution itself w illdiscovel,
at the same time that it will reveal to and for whom it is possi
ble. Non 077mm possumus 07727263. There is a philosophic, no
less than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest
perfection of talent, not by degree but by kind.

The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not de-
pend on their meeting from opposite directions ; the power which
acts in them‘is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-
ebullient ; an__d___as,.s g t be ‘ these two
forces, both alike inﬁnite, and both 'alike indestructible; andas
rest or neutralization can not be this result ; no other conception
is possible, but that the product must be a Zertium aliguid, or
ﬁnite generation. Consequently this conception is necessary.
Now this terlium aliquid can be no other than an inter-pene-
tration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both

4* a: as =X< at *8 as =12 *

Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when ]
received the following letter from a friend, whose practical judg-
' ment I have had ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose
taste and sensibility preclude all the excuses which my self-love
might possibly have prompted me to set up in plea against the
decision of advisers of equal good sense, but with less tact and
feeling.

“ Dear C.
“ You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on the 1772- -
agina tioz , both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 361

those which I think it will make on the Public, i. e. that part of
the public, who, from the title of the work and from its forming a
sort of introduction to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute
the great majority of your readers.

“As to myself, and stating in the ﬁrst place the efect on my
undelstanding, your Opinions and method of a2 Jument were not
onl J so new to me, but so directly the reverse of all I had eve2 been
accustomed to consider as truth, that even if I had comprehended
your premises suﬂiciently to have admitted them, and had seen the
necessity of your conclusions, I should still have been in that state
of mind, which in your'note in C’hap. I V. you have so ingeniously
evolved, as the antithesis to that in which a man is, when he makes
a bull. In your own words, Ishould havefelt as if I had been
standing on my head.

“ The efect on my feelings, on the other hand, I can not better
represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light
airy modern chapels of ease, and then for the ﬁrst time to have
been placed, and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals
in a gusty moonlight night of autumn. ‘Now in glimmer, and
now in gloom," often in palpable darkness not without a. chilly
sensation of terror ; then suddenly emerging into broad yet vision-
ary lights with colored shadows (f fantastic shapes, yet all decked
with holy insignia and mystic symbols ; and ever and anon coming
out full upon pictures and stone-work images of great men, with
whose names I was familiar, but which looked upon me with coun-
tenances and an expression, the most dissimilar to all I had been
in the habit of connecting with those names; lesewhom._l,had
been taught to venerate as almost superhuman in magnitude of in-
tellect, I found perched in little fret-work iniches,ilas_ grotesque
dwa2fs; while the grotesques, in my hitherto belief, stood. guarding
the h2gh altar with all the characte2s of apotheoszs In short, what
I had supposed substances were thinned away into sh,adows while
everywhere shadows were deepened into substances:

If substance might be call’d that shadow se‘em’d,
For each seem’d either !*

. “ Yet after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had
.quoted from a M S poem of your own in the FRIEND, and applied

* [Milton’s Par. Lost, Book 1i. ]. 669.—-—S. 0.]
VOL. m. 0.

362 BIO GRAPHIA LITERARIA.

to a work of Mr. Wordsworth’s though with a few of the words

altered :
—— An Orphic tale indeed,
A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts
To a strange music chanted !*

“Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your
great book on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have
promised and announced: and that I will do my best to under—
stand it. Only I will not promise to descend into the dark cave
of Trophonius with you, there to rub my own eyes, in order to
make the sparks and ﬁgured ﬂashes, which I am required to see.

“ So much for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate
a moment in advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter
from the present work, and to reserve it for your announced trea-
tises on the Logos or communicative intellect in Man and Deity.
First, because imperfectly as I understand the present Chapter, I
see clearly that you have done too much, and yet not enough. You
have been obliged to omit so many links, from the necessity of com-
pression, that what remains, looks (if I may recur to my former
illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps of an old
ruined tower. Secondly, a still stronger argument (at least one
that I am sure will be more forcible with you) is, that your read
ers will have both right and reason to complain of you. Thi:
Chapter. which can not, when it is printed, amount to so little as
an hundred pages, will of necessity greatly increase the expense of
”the work ; and every reader who, like myself, is neither prepared
nor perhaps calculated for the study of so abstruse a subject so ab-
strusely treated, will, as I have before hinted, be almost entitled to
accuse you of a sort of imposition on him. For who, he might
truly observe, could from your title-page, to wit, ‘ MyLiterary Life
and Opinions,” published too as introductory to a volume of mis-
cellaneous poems, have anticipated, or even conjectured, a long trea-
tise on Ideal Realism, which holds the same relation in abstruseness
toPlotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato. It will be well, if already
you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition in your work,
though as the larger part of the disguisition is historical, it will
doubtless be both interesting and instructive to many to whose un-
prepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic power would

* [Coleridge’s Poetic. \Vorks, p. 159.]

BIOGRAPHIA 'LITERARIA. 363

be utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish this Chap-
ter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop Berkeley’s
Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, :vhich beginning with
Tar ends with the Trinity, the omnes scibile forming the interspace.
I say in the piesent work. In that greater work to which? you have
devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be
in its proper place. Your prospectus will have described and an-
nounced both its contents and their nature; and if any persons
purchase it, who feel no interest in the subjects of which it treats,
they will have themselves only to blame.

“I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary
motives, and particularly from the probable eﬁ‘ects on the sale of
your present publication; but they would weigh little with you
compared with the preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that
arguments drawn from your own personal interests more often act
on you as narcotics than as stimulants, and that in money concerns
you have some small portion of pig-nature in your moral idiosyn-
crasy, and, like these amiable creatures, must occasionally be pulled
backward from the boat in order to make you enter it. All success
attend you, for if hard thinking and hard reading are merits, you
have deserved it.

’ “ Your afectionate, ckc.”

In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced
complete conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the
present with stating the main result of the chapter, which I have
reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of
which the reader will ﬁnd at the close of the volume.

The Imagination then- Innnsidex either as primar 1.01 secgnd-

ary; The eprimarylmagination I hold to be the living power

and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in
the ﬁnite mind of. the etemaLact of 01 eatlon in the. inﬁnite I: AM. 3"

“Mr-rw‘ "

The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former.
co- existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the
primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only 1n degree.

.9“ [This last clause “ and as a repetition,” &c. I ﬁnd stroked out 1n a copy
of the'B. L. containing a few MS. marginal notes of the author, which are
printed in this edition. I think it best to prese1 ve the sentence, While I
mention the author’s judgment upon it, especially as it has been quoted.—

'il. 0.

‘lz

v.--...s_«,,,_
‘*—.g-- ,, '_ --~v: .. .. r

364 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

and in the mode of its operation. 3“ It dissolves, diffuses, dissi-
pates, in order to re- -create: or where this process is rendered 1m-
possible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.
It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essen
tially ﬁxed and dead. +

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with
but ﬁxities and deﬁnites. The fancy is indeed no other than a
mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space ;
while it is blended with, and modiﬁed by that empirical phenom
enon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But
equally with the ordinary memory the Ewust receive ,allits

materials ready made, from the law of association.
“’MJ.-W"”WT "‘ """-" ~ ~- ._.~ .

 

CHAPTER XIV.

OCCASION OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS, AND THE OBJECTS ORIGINALLY
PROPOSED—PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION—THE ENSUING
CONTROVERSY, ITS CAUSES AND ACRIMONY—PHILOSOPHIC DEFINI-i
TIONS OF A POEM AND POETRY WITH SCHOLIA.

\ DURING the ﬁrst year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neigh-
bors,:t our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal
points of poetry, the( power of exciting the sympathy) of the
reader by a faithful adherence to the truthaof nature, and the
(power of giving the interest of novelty\by the modifying colors of
imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and
shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and
familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of
combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought

* [Compare this distinction with that of the Productive and Reproduc-
tive Imagination given in the section on the Transcendental Synthesis of
the Imagination (synthesis Speciosa) in the Ifn'tz'k der reinen Vernunft.
Works, vol. ii. p. 14. I. 2.]

+ [F01 what is said of objects in the last sentence see .Transsc. Id. p. 68
Abhandlungen, Phil. Schrift. p. 224.]

1 [In 1797— 8, whilst Mr. Coleridge resided at Nether Stowey, and M!
Wordsworth at Alfoxton .-——.Ed ]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 365

EL ggested itself—(to which of us I do not recollect)—thata
se1ies of poems might be composed of two sorts. 1n the one, the
1ncidents and agents were to be, 1n part at least, supernatural;
and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of
the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would

'11aturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And

real in this sense they have been to every human being who,
from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed him-
self under supernatuial agency. For the second class, subjects
we1e to be chosen f1om ordinarywlife ; the characters and inci-
dents were to be such as will be found in every village and its
vicinity, where there is' a meditative and feeling mind to seek
after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.

.7 In this idea originated the plan of the LwL BA,LLADS ' in
lwhich it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to
persons and characte1s supernatural, or at least romantic , yet so
as to transfer flom ou1 inwa’1d nature a human interest and a
semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of im-
agination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,

i which constitutes poetic faith. 'M1. WordsWorth; on the other

hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm
of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analo-
gous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention to
the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the
wonders of the world before us , an inexhaustible treasure, but
for which, in consequence of the ﬁlm of familiarity and selﬁsh
solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and
hearts that neither feel nor understand.

With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was pre
paring among other poems, THE DARK LADIE, and the CHR1STA-
BEL,* in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than
I had done in my: ﬁrst attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth’s indusi _‘
try had proved so much 'more successful, and the number of- his
poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming

‘ a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous

mattel. Mr. Wordsworth added two 01 three poems written In
his own character, in the impassw sioned, lofty, and susZaineg dic-

tion, which is characte1istic of his genius. In this fmm the

A *‘ [The Ancient Mariner, Poet. W. p. 219. —0111 1stabel ibid. p. 239. —-The
DaikL‘a‘die, P. W. p.11q9—Ed.1

7/

366 BIO GRAPHIA LITERARIA.

LYRILAL BALLADS were published f"< and were presented by him
as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature re-
jected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems
in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary
life as to produce the leasurable interest, which it is the pecu-
liar business of poetry to impart To the second edition he added'
a preface of considerable length ;’r in which, notwithstanding
some passages of apparently a cont1ary import, he was under-

stoodWﬂmxtensionf of this style to poetry of all
kinds, and to reject as violous and indeﬁé‘nsible all phrases and

fo1ms of speech that were not included 1n what he (unfortunate-
ly, I think, adopting an equivocal express1on) called the language
of real life: From this preface, preﬁxed to poems in which it
was impossible to deny the presenceiof "original genius, however
mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-
continued controversy? For from the conjunction of perceived
power with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy and in some
instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which
the controversy has been conducted by the assailants.§

9“ [The ﬁrst volume of the Lyrical Ballads was published in-1798.—Ed.]

+ [The second edition, with an additional volume and the preface, was
published in 1800.——E¢l.]

1 [“ The ﬁrst volume of these Poems has already been submitted to gen.
eral perusal. It was published as an experiment, which I hoped might be
of some use to ascertain how far, by ﬁtting to metrical arrangement a se‘
lection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort
of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet
may rationally endeavor to impart.” Preface P. W. ii. p. 303.—Ed.]

§ [In illustration of these remarks or the allusions that follow, the Edi-
tor gave rather copious extracts from the E. Review of Oct. 1807, Nov.
1814, and Oct. 1815, which I believe that, after all, he would have felt it
not worth while to reprint; and I therefore refer the curious reader to
those specimens of the criticisms of thirty years since in their own place.
I think it right however to preserve the Editor’s comment upon them, which
is as follows :—

It is of great importance to the history of literature in this country that
the critiques contained in the Edinboro Review on Wordsworth, Southey,
and Coleridge, should be known and reperused 1n the p1 esent day ;—not as
1eﬂccting any special disgrace 011 the writers—(for as to them, the matter
and tone of these essays only showed that the 01 ltlcs had not risen above
the level of the mass of their age)—but for the purpose of demonstrating

that immediate popularity, though it may atten, ,cau never be a test of,

excellence in works of the hiagination and of tie hing, possible, the

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.‘ 367

(“It Had Mr. Wordsworth’s poems been the silly,” the childish
things, which the y were for a long time described as being ; had
they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets
merely by meanness of language and illﬂliily of thought; had
they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the

duty and advantages of respect for admitted genius, even when it pursues ’
a path of its own making. Just consider what was the effect of all the
scorn and ridicule of Wordsworth by which the Edinboro’ Review, the
leading critical Journal of the nation for a long time, distinguished itself
for twenty years together. A great laugh was created in the fashionable
world of letters, and the poet’s expectation of pecuniary proﬁt was de-
stroyed. Public oplnion was, for about a quarter of a century, set against
the reception of works, which were always allowed to be innocent, and are
now everywhere proclaimed as excellent ; and for the same space of time a
great man was defrauded of that worldly remuneration of his virtuous la-
bors, which the authors of frivolous novels and licentious poems were per-
mitted—and in some instances helped—during the same period to obtain
for their compositions. To make the lesson perfect, it has pleased Heaven
to let Wordsworth himself live to see that revolution legitimated which he
and his compeers, Coleridge and Southey, in different ways and degrees,
together wrought; and to read his own defence and praise in the pages of
the same work by which some of his most exquisite productions were once
pronounced below criticism—Ed. '
Agreeing as I do with these remarks in the main, I venture to observe
that in my mind they ascribe too much inﬂuence upon the early fate of
Mr. W.’s poems to the E. Review. That those poems were not generally
admired from the ﬁrst, was, in my opinion, their own fault, that is to say,
arose principally from their being works of great genius, and consequently,
though old as the world itself, in one way, yet in another. a new thing un-
der the sun. Novelty is delightful when it is understood at once, when it
is but the old familiar matters newly set forth; but here was a new world
presented to the reader which was also a strange world, and most of those
who had grown to middle age acquainted with the old world only, and
chieﬂy with that part of it which was least like Wordsworth’s,—the hither
part, out of sight of Chaucer and Spenser and the old English Poets in gen-
oral, could never learn their way, or ﬁnd themselves at home there.
Periodical literature can hardly be said to create public taste and opin-
ion: I believe it does no more than strongly reﬂect and thereby concentre
and strengthen it. The fashionable journal is expected to be a mirror of
public opinion in its own party, a brilliant magnifying mirror, in which the
mind of the public may see itself look large and handsome. Woe be to the
mirror if it presumes to give pictures and images of its own l—it will fall
to the ground, even if not shivered at once by popular indignation. Such
publications depend for their maintenance on the public which they are to
teach, and must therefore, like the pastor of a voluntary ﬂock, pipe only
such tunes as suit their auditor’s sense of harmony. Thev can not afford to

‘ q,

368 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

parodies and pretended imitations of them ; they must have sunk
at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have
dragged the preface along ‘withthem. But year after year in-
creased the number of Mr. Wordsworth’s admirers. They were
found too not in the lower classes of the reading public, but

make ventures, like warm-hearted disinterested individuals. It is far from
my intention to deny, that the boldest things are often said, the most ex-
travagant novelties broached in publications of this kind: that the strongest
and most sweeping assertions, ﬁt, as might be supposed, to startle and
shock even the cold and careless,——ascriptions of saintly excellence to men
whose unchristian acts of duplicity or cruelty are undenied and undeniable
—of worse than human folly and wickedness to men, whom millions have
regarded with reverential gratitude, and this in the way of mere assertion,
with no attempt at proof, or only the merest shadow of a shade of one,—
references to the authority of accusers, who are themselves resting their
vague and violent charges on the authority of previous accusers and bitter
enemies—will never be ventured upon in the public journal. We have had
evidence enough in our day to the contrary.l Still I aver that such things
are not done till nothing but truth and charity is risked in the doing of.
them; till the mass of readers are known to be in such a state of mind, that
these bold utterances will move them not at all, or only with a pleasurable
excitement. Again, the chief contributors to the leading periodicals are for)
the most part a class of persons opposed to essential novelty; able men
more or less advanced beyond the period of impressible youth, whose intel-
lectual frame is set,—who are potent in exposing new follies and false pre-
tensions; but slow to understand the fresh products of genius, unwilling
even to believe in them. It is by the young, or at least by the youthful,“
that accessions to the old stores of thought and imagination are welcomed
and placed in the treasury. Still it is a remarkable fact, that the journal,
which especially professed faith in the intellectual progress of the human
race, and to be open-eyed to modern excellence, should have shown itself
blind to the merits of a body of poetry, in which the spirit of the age, in
its noblest and most reﬁned characteristics, is more amply and energetically
manifested than in any other. When the luminary ﬁrst appeared above
the horizon, those admirers of new light declared it to be nothing better
than green cheese, yet assailed it with as violent outcries as if they thought
it was able to set the world on ﬁre. If these criticisms excited “a great
laugh,” this shows with how little expenditure of wit a great laugh may be

 

1 For some considerable evidence on these points I refer the reader to
Note 10 in Vol. ii. (pp. 656—87 8), of Archdeacon Hare’s new work, The
Mission of the Comforter, &c., which contains a thorough investigation of
the charges brought against Martin Luther of late years, including those of
Bossuet, and a most animated and luminous exposure of the perversiens and
transmutations, rather than misrepresentations, of his teaching, imputable
to certain reviewers.

BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARlA. 369

chieﬂy among yOung men of strong sensibility and meditative
minds; and their admiration (inﬂamed perhaps in some degree
by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost
say, by its religious fervor. These facts, and the intellectual
energy of the author, which was more or less consciously felt,
where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting
with sentiments of aversion to his Opinions, and of alarm at their
consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself
have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled
them round and round.) With many parts of this preface in the
sense attributed to them and which the words undoubtedly seem
to authorize, I never concurred} but on the contrary objected to‘
them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in appear5
'ance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the
author’s own practice in the greater part of the poems them-
selves. Mr. Wordsworth in his recent collection has, I ﬁnd, de-

exeited; for Whatever talents in that way the writers may have possessed
and on other occasions shown, I think they displayed none of them at the
expense of Mr. Wordsworth. The same kind of attack has been repeated
of late years with a far more cunning malice and amusing injustice, without
exciting any general laughter at all, simply because the time for laughing
at a great poet is over and gone. If any laughter is heard now it is but an
echo of the past :—if there be any minds that have been dwelling in caves
under the earth during the last quarter of a century, they may suppose that
Wordsworth’s fame has never risen above the horizon. Not that every
man of sense must needs bow down before it; there are clever persons who
deny the greatness of Milton; some ingenious critics have pronounced
Homer a barbarian, others have decried Shakspeare, many have looked
upon Pindar as a “crazy fellow,” and Spenser is thought even by some of

the poetical a very great bore. In like manner there may be a man of
sense who has no sense of the merits of Mr. Wordsworth’s writings; but
to be ignorant of their power and inﬂuence is to he ignorant of the mind of
- the age in relation to poetry. The laughter of thirty years age must have
been chieﬂy produced by a sense of the contrast between the great concep

tion of the Poet entertained by a few, and the small conception which the
many were then alone able to form of it. “ He strides on so far before us,”
said Mr. Coleridge of his friend, “that he dwarfs himself in the distance."
People saw him as a dwarf yet had a suspicion that he might in reality be
a giant. One advantage of the present time to Mr. Wordsworth is this
‘ that poetry is not now the fashion. We bestow our “ignorance, ineapa

- bility and presumption,” or at least our superﬁciality, incompetence and
hastiness on the religious tract or controversial pamphlet, and poetry-
is resigned to those who have a true taste for it and study it in earnest.
—S. 0.]

Qa:

370 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

‘

graded this prefatory disquis1tion to the end of his second volume,
to be read or not at the reader’s choice.* But he has not, as
far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed.
At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy, in
which I have been honored more than I deserve by the frequent
conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare
once for all, in what points I coincide with the opinions supported
in that preface, and in what points I altogether differ. But in
order to render myself intelligible I must previously, in as few
words as possible, explain my views ,‘i‘ir'st of a Poem; and .sec-
ondly, of Poet1y itself, 1n kind, and 1n essence

S‘ The ”oﬂicemosophieal disquWonswts in just distintr
kimr , while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve him-

elf constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order
to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually
separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process
of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them
in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co exist:
and this is the 1esult of philosophy. A poem contains the same
elements as a prose composition} the difference therefore must
consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a
different object being proposed. According to the difference of
the object will be the difference of the combination. ﬁlt is poss1-
ble, that the object may be merely to facilitate the recollection
of any given facts or observations by artiﬁcial arrangement; and
the composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished
from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this,
the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to
the wel-l known enumeration of the days 1n the several months;

9“ [“ The observations preﬁxed to that portion of these Volumes which
was published many years ago, under the title of Lyrical Ballads, have so
little of a special application to the great part of the present enlarged and
diversiﬁed collection, that they could not with propriety stand as an Intro-
duction to it. Not deeming it, however, expedient to suppress that expom
tion, slight and imperfect as it is, of the feelings which had determined the
choice of the subjects, and the principles which had regulated the composi-
tion of these Pieces, I have transferred it to the end of the second volume,
to be attended to, or not, at the pleasure of the Reader. ” Pref. to edition
of 1815.

This preface is now to be found in Vol. 1i. p. 303, of the edition of 1840

«Fill

’f?“““ . 4'

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 871
up

“ Thirty days hath September, '
April, June, and November,” (810.

and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particulal
pleasure is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and
quantities, all compositions that have this charm superadded,
whatever be their contents, may be entitled poems. .

So much for the superﬁcial form. (A difference of object and
contents supplies an additional ground of distinction) The im-
mediate purpose may be the communiCation of truths ; either of i;
‘truth absolute and demonstrable, as in works of science; or of
facts experienced and recorded, as in histo1y Pl easure, and that
of the highest and most permanent kind,r_r1ay result from the at- _
twat 00f w ,_ but it is not itself the immediate end. In
other works the communication of pleasure may be the immediate
purpose ; and though truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to
be the ultimate end,‘yet this will distinguish the character of the
author, not the class to which the work belongs. 'Blest indeed is
that state of society, in which the immediate purpose would be
bafﬂed by the perversion of the proper ultimate end, in’Which
no charm of diction or ima ery could exempt the BAmi-I‘IYLLUS even ‘7
of an Anacreon, or the ALEXIS 40f Virgil, from disgust and aver-
sion!

But the c unication of pleasure may be the immediate ob-
ject of a WWW composed; and that object may
have been 1n a high degree attained, as in novels and romances.
Would then the mere superaddition of metre, with or without
rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The answer is, '
that [nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in
itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwiseJ .If metre be”
superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it.
They must be__such, as to justify the perpetual and distinct atten- -
tion tole'ach part; which an exact correspondent recurrence of
accent and sound'are calculated to excite The ﬁnal definition
then, so deduced, may be thus worded. [A poem is that species!
of composition, which 1s opposed to worksomnce, by]: p1:~ oposing
for its zmmcdzatemob‘lect pleasure, not truth} and from .all other
spec1es—(hav1ng tins object 111 common with it)—it is discrimi-
riﬂed by proposing to ”itself such delight from the whole, as is
mp 513 With“ a distinct gratiﬁcatlon from each component

1&1

 

372 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Controversy is not seldom excned in consequence of the dispu-
tants attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and
in few instances has this been more striking, than in disputes con
.erning the present subject. If a man chooses to call every com-
position a poem, which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must
leave his opinion uncontroverted The distinction is at least
competent to characterize the writer’s intention. If it were sub-
joincd, that the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, asa
tale, or as a series of interesting reﬂections, I of course admit this
as another fit ingledient of' a poem, and an additional‘merit.
But if the deﬁnition sought for be that of a legztimate poem, I

answer, iwﬂhamapm which mutually Apport a11d__

3 explain each othel; all in their proportion harmonlzlna with,

v..- w». '4 Wk-v’

" and supportlng the purpose and known 1n'tluences of metricaljr-

.. w"..-

langement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the

Tic-?'

ultimate judg ment of all“ countries, in equally denying the praises

Of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or dis-
tichcs, each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader
to itself, becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate
whole, instead of a harmonizing part ; and on the other hand, to
an unsustained composition, from'which the reader collects rapidly
the general 1esult u11att1 acted by the component parts. The
1eader should be car1ied forwa1,d not merely or chieﬂy by the
mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to a1rive
at the ﬁnal solution ; but by the pleasurable activity of mind ex-
? cited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion
of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellect-
ual power ; or like the path of sound through the air :—at every
step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive move-
ment collects the force which again carries him onward. Prae-

cip itazgdus elst liégz‘ spiritus, says Petronius most happilyf)‘< The

* [These words occur in the passage in which Petronius -is supposed to
attack Lucan. Cater): cm'm, aut non viderunt m'am qua irietur ad carmen,
ant visam timuerunt calcare. Ecce, belli civilis ingens opus quisquis attz'gerit,

1 nisi plenus literis, sub onere labetur. Non enim res gestce versibus compre-
lwndendm sunt, quod longe melius Historicifac-iunt; sedper ambages, .Deo.
rumque ministeria, et fabulosum sententiarum tormentum prcccipz'tandus est
ﬁber Spiritus; ut potius furentis animi vatz’cinatio apparcat, quam religiom
orationis sub testibusﬁdes: tanquam si placet hie impetus, etiamsi nondum
recepit ultimam manum. Satyrz'c. p. 63, edit. Lug. Bat. 1623., And then fol.
lows a. specimen of a new Pharsalz'a. which a great many learr cd critics, to

 

-\ .

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 373

epithet, libe7, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not
easy to conceive moremcaning condensed-in fewer words.

' But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a
poem, we have still to seek for a deﬁnition of poetry. The writ-
ings of Plato and Jeremy Taylor, and Burnet’s Theory of the
Earth, * furnish undeniable proofs that(poetry of the highest kind
may exist without metre, and even Without the contradistinguish-
ing objects of a Joem) The ﬁrst chapter of Isaiah—(indeed a
very large :proportion of the whole book)—is poetry in the most
emphatic sense; yet it would be not less irrational than strange
to assert, that pleasure, and not truth was the immediate object'
of the prophet. In shert,1whatever speciﬁc import we attach to
the word,1f’oetry, there will“ be found involved in it, as a neces-
sary consequence, that a poerrfOf any length neithe1 can be, nor
Ought to be, all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to be
produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with
the poetry; and this can be'no otherwise effected than by such a
studied selection and artiﬁcial arrangement, as will partake of one,
though not a peculiar property of poetry. And this again can be
no other than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal
attentiOn than the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial
or written.

My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest
use of the word, have been 111 part anticipated 1n some _Qf the re-
ma\ks”Un fli'é Fancy and Imagénaticn in the ﬁrst part of..this
work. What IS poetry. —is so nearly the same question. with,
what is a poet ?—that the answer to the one is involved in the
solution Of the othe1. [-For it is a distinction resultirg from the

the confusion of ordinary readers, prefer to Lucan’ s. Douza says, se hum
impetum plm'isfacere, quam trecenta 00rdubulensz's illius 11011 m.z'na.—-Ed.]

Petronius I—all the muses weep for thee,
But every tear shall scald thy memory.—

So speaks Cowper in a: strong passage upon this‘ polish’ d and high ﬁnish’d
foe to t1 uth ” in his poem called the Progress of EIIOI‘ Sm they’ 8 edit. vol.
viii. pp. 155, 156 .—-.S C.]

9* [Telluris Cl’heorz'a Sacra. London, 1681. by Thomas Burnet, D..D The
work was translated into English by order of King Charles, and was in a
sixth edit. in 1726. The author, a nativgsf Scotland, and Master of Slit
't'on’s Hospital, London, wrote also 35¢: Siam Mortuorum et Resurgentium,
and several other books, died Sep ,27, 57123—1. 90 ]

I
r
“‘1‘

i 374 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

poetic genius itself, which sustains and modiﬁes the images,
thoughts,O and emotions of the poet’s own mind.

The esmibed in ideal ~perfectimW
of man into act1v1ty, with the submdination of its faculties to
each other according to their >1elative worth and dignity. He'
diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were)
fuses each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to
which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. ‘
This power, ﬁrst put in action by the will and understanding,
and letained under their irremissiv’e, though gentle-‘and unno
ticed, control, lattis efertur hdhén'is, reveals itself .. in the

balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities; of
slain-chss, with diﬂerence; of the general with the concrete; the
idea with the image , the individual with- the representative ,
the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects, '
aWILQSJAal state ofentiotion. with more than—usualmdeL;
judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm
and feeling profound or vehement ; and while it blends and half-‘1
monizes the natural and the artiﬁcial, still subordinates art to
nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the
poet-to our sympathy with the poetry. Doubtless, as Sir John
Davies Observes of the soul—(and his words may with slight
alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic

imagination)—

 

Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns

Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, -
As ﬁre converts to ﬁre the things it burns, . ‘
As we our food into our nature change.

From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessenée from things;
Which to her proper nature she transforms

To bear them light on her celestial Wings.

Thus does she, when from individual states

She doth abstract the universal kinds; .
Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through the senses to our minds. *

Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its.

* [Of the Soul of Man, 8.41 Mr. Unleridge’ s alterations are printed in

Italics .—Ed.'l 5

‘\

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. - 375

Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that IS every-:5.
where, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelli1
gent whole.*

 

CHAPTER XV.

THE SPECIFIC SYMPTOMS or POETIC POWER ELUCIDATED IN A GRIT-
ICAL ANALYSIS OF SHAKSPEARE’S VENUS AND ADONIS, AND RAPE or
LUCRECE.‘l’

IN the application of these principles to purposes of practical
criticism, as employed in the appraisement of works more or less
imperfect, I have endeavored to discover what the qualities in a
poem are, which may be deemed promises and speciﬁc symp-
toms of poetic pow er, as distinguished from general talent deter-
mined to poetic composition by accidental motives, by an act of
the'will, rather than by the inspiration of a genial and produc-
tive nature. In this investigation, I could not, I thought, do
better, than keep before me the earliest work of the greatest
genius, that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our zngriad-
Wit Shakspeare. I mean the VENUS AND ADONIS, and the
LUCRECE, works which give at once strong promises of the
strength, and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity of his genius.
From'these I abstracted the following marks, as characteristics
of original poetic genius in general.

1‘. 'In'the VENUS AND ADONIS, the ﬁrst and most obvious ex
'eellence is the pegfegt sweetness of the versiﬁcation ; its adapta-
tion to the subject; and the power displayed in varying the
'march of the 'Words without passing into a loftier and more ma-
jestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted
by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant.

* [The reader is referred generally to Mr. Coleridge's Lectures on Shak~
speare, IV. pp. 19—2 2..—Ed ]

f [See Works, IV. pp. 48—50. —Ed.]

1: Avﬁp pvptévovg, a phrase Which I have borrowed f1 om a G? ek monk,
who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I might have sand, that I
an reclaimed, rather than borrowed it: for it seems to belong to Shaka
we, dejure singulari, et 6 ' privilegz'o naturce.

376 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

”he delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty

excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an easily
imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favorable promise in
the compositions of a young man. The man that hath not music .
in his soul* can indeed never be a genuine poet. Imagery,—
(even taken from nature, much more when transplanted from
books, as travels, voyages, and works of natural history),—affect-
ing incidents, just thoughts, interesting personal or domestic
feelings, and with these the art of their combination or intertex-
ture in the form of a poem,—may all by incessant effort be
acquired as a trade, by a man of talent and much reading, who,
as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic
reputation for a natural poetic genius ; the love of the arbitrary
end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the sense of mu-
sical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of 1magina-
tier‘ , and this together with the power of reducing multitudec into
unity of eHect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one pre-
(ldﬁiir—ziiit“thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but
can never be learned. It is in these that “ poem mscitur nonﬁt. ”
2. A second pronrise of genius is the choice of sub ects very re-
mote from the private interests and emf the writer
himself At least I have found, that where the subject is take1
immediately from the author 5 personal sensations and expe
riences, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal
mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power
We may perhaps remember the tale of the statuary, who hao
acquired considerable reputation for the legs of his goddesses,
though the rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with ideal
beauty; till his Wife, elated by her husband’s praises, modestly
acknowledged that she had been his constant model. In the
VENUS AND ADONIs this proof of poetic power exists even to ex-
cess. It 1s throughout as if a superior spirit more intuitive, more
intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves, not
only of every outward look and act, but of the ﬂux and reﬂux of
the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing
the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating
in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excite-
ment, which had resulted from the energetic fervor of his own

* [“ The man that hath not music in 111mself ”—Merchant of Venice, 1?
so. 1 ..-—Ed]

BlOGRAPHIA LITERARI A. 377

spirit in so vividly exhibiting what 'it had so accurately and pro-
foundly contemplated. I think, I should have conjectured from
these poems, that even then the great instinct, which impelled
- the post to the drama, was secretly working him in; prompting
him—by a series and never broken chain of imagery, always
vivid and, because unbroken, often minute ; by the highest effort
of the picturesque in words, of which words are capable, higher
perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante
not excepted ;*—to provide a substitute for that visual language,
that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look
and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to ex
pect from the players. ' His Venus and Adonis seem at once the
characters themselves, and the whole representation of those
characters by the most consummate actors. 193%..5391'“ to be told
nothing, but to see and hear every thing. Hence itETmhc
perpetual activity of attentionrequired on'the part of the reader;
from the rapid ﬂow, the quick change, and the playful nature of
the thoughts and images; and above all from the alienation,
and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter (deafness of

* [“ Consider how he paints,” says Mr. Carlyle, “he has a great power
of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and nothing more.
You remember the ﬁrst view he gets of the Hall of Dite; red pinnacle, red
hot cone of iron glowing through the immensity of gloom ;—so vivid, so
distinct, visible at' once and forever! It is as an emblem of the whble
genius of Dante.” “ Milton,” says Lessing in his Laokoon, “ can indeed ﬁll
.no galleries. Yet is the Par. Lost the ﬁrst Epic after Homer no whit the
less because it affords few pictures, than the History of Christ is a Poem,
‘because we can not put so much as a nail’s head upon it without hitting on
a place which has employed a crowd of the greatest artists.” “A poetic
picture is not necessarily that which can be converted into a material pic-
ture; but every stroke or combination of strokes, by which the Poet makes
. his object so sensuous to us, that we are more conscious of this object than
of his words, may be called picturesque.” Thus Dante’s squilla da lonteno
(Purg. 0. viii. l. 5) may well be called a picture. His picture words have
not done much for the material painter’s art, if we may judge by Flaxman’s
illustrations. The famous image in the Purgatorio

solo guardando
A guisa di leon quando si posae,

is, as has been shown, not a more presentation of “ picturable matter,” but
a picture ready drawn and “ so clearly visible that the pencil can not make
'its outline clearer.” (See Art. on Pindar. Q Review, March 1834.) Yet it
would be nothing in a material painting, because the illustration and "the
thing illustrated could not be given together.—S. 0.]

378 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

the poet’s own feelings, from those of which he is at once the
painter. and the analyst ;——that though the very subject can not
but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was
poem less dangerous on amoral account. Instead of doing as
Ariosto, and as, still more offensively, Wieland has done, instead
of degrading andldeforming passion into appetite, the trials of
love into the struggles of concupiscence ;-—Shakspeare has here
represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all sym‘
pathy with it, by dissipating the reader’s notice among the thou-
sand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circum-
stances, which form its dresses and its scenery ; or by diverting
our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or
profound reflections, which the poet’s ever active mind has de-
duced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents.
The reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the
merely passive of our nature. As little can a mind thus roused
and awakened be brooded on by mean and indistinct emotion, as
the low, lazy mist can creep upon the surface of a lake, while a
strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows.

3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful,
though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately repre-

r’ sented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet,
[Eney become proofs of original genius only as far as they are
0

diﬁed by a predominant passion ; or by associated thoughts or
images awakenem that passion ; or when they have the effect
of reducing multitude to unity,* or succession to an instant; or
lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them
from the poet’s own spirit,

Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and ainf

' In, the two following lines for instance, there is nothing objec-
tionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in
their proper place, part of a descriptive poem :

Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow’d
Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve.

 

* [“ The truth is, he does not possess imagination in its highect form,—
that of stamping il piz‘b nell’ uno.” Table Talk, VI.‘ p. 497.

“ The Imagination modiﬁes im. (res, and gives unity to variety; it seen all
things at once, él p237. nell’ uno.” Ib. p. 518.—Ed.] '

1- [France An Ode. Mr. C.’s P. \V. p. 104.—Ed.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 379

But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would
be equally in their place in a book of topography, or in a descrip
tive tour. The same image will rise into a semblance of poetry
if thus conveyed :

Yon row of bleak and visionary pines,

By twilight glimpse discerned, mark! how they ﬂee
From the ﬁerce sea-blast, all their tresses wild
Streaming before them.

I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance,
of that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which
Shakspeare even in his earliest, as in his latest, works surpasses
all other poets. It is by this, that he still gives a dignity and a
passion to the objects which he presents. Unaided by any pre-
vious excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in
power,—

“ Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.”*

“Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come-—
as are ec— as are a:
as is * 9* *6 *
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage
Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d,
And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him, I’ll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes.
And thou in this shalt ﬁnd thy monument,
“Then tyrant’s crest-s, and tombs of brass are spent.”+

As of higher worth, so doubtless .still more characteristic of
poetic genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and
colors itself to the circumstances, passion, or character, present
and foremost in the mind. For unrivalled instances of this ex-
cellence, the reader’s own memory will refer him to the LEAR,
OTHELLO, in short to which not of the “ g7‘eat, ever-living, dead
man’s” dramatic works ? Inopem me copia fecz't. How true it
is to nature, he has himself ﬁnely expressed in the instance of
love in his 98th Sonnet.

* [Shakspeare’s 33d Sonnet—Ed] 1L [Sonnet cvii.—Ed.]

380 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

“ From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April drest in all its trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing ;
That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
0f different ﬂowers in odor and in hue,

Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from thei1 proud lap pluck them, where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose ;
They were, tho’ sweet, but ﬁgures of delight.
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow, I with these did play!”

Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable
mark

 

Pow/Lou ,uév TTOLﬂTO'D
(Song p'nlua yevvaZov )L:(2K0£,+

 

will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the
painter, the poet gives us~ the liveliest image of succession with
the feeling of simultaneousness :—

VVith this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace

Of those fair arms, which bound him to her breast,

And homeward through the dark laund runs a pace ;—
15 9E 5% 9E 9* 2"!

Look 1 how a bright star shooteth from the sky,

80 glides he in the nightfrom Venus’ agent

4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove 1n~

deed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former ;--
yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree,
and (even if this were possible) would give promises only of tran-

* [See Table Talk, VI. p. 452. for Mr. Coleridge’s general view of
Shakspeare’s Sonnets, and also Mr. Knight’svaluable essay on the same
subject in that beautiful edition of our great poet by which he has rendered
so signal and enduring a service to the cause of English literature—Ed]

-|- [Aristoph Rana, v. 96—7. Mr. Frere, in the' tone of the Bacchus of
the play, tlanslates thus.

The1e s not one hea1ty Poet amongst them all
That’s ﬁt to 1isque an adventu1ous valiant ph1ase.
But it is obvious that Mr. Coleridge meant by yémyog woumig, the genuine
poet—Ed] .
i [Venus and Adonis—Ed]

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 38]

mtory ﬂashes and a meteoric power, —is depth, and e mof
thourrI ht. No man was ever yet a greaLpoet, without being at
Wtime a pro ound philosopher. Forﬁmetry ism-
som and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts,
human passions, emotion, language .j In Shakspeare’ s poems the
crea’gye power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war
embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the
extinction of the other. At length in the drama they were rec-
onciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the
other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their ﬁrst meeting
within narrow and ‘rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each
other and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon ﬁnding
a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and
ﬂow on in one current and with one voice. The VENUS AND
ADONIS did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions.
But the story of Lucretia seems to favor and even demand their
intensest workings. And yet we ﬁnd in Shakspeare’s manage,“
ment of the tale neither pathos, nor any other dramatic quality.
There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former
.poem, in the same vivid colors, inspirited by the same impetuous
vigor of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same
activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and
with yet a larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and
reﬂection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often
domination, over the whole world of language. What then shall
we say? even this ; that Shakspeare, no mere child of nature ;
no auzomamn of genius; no passive vehicle of insPiration pos-
sessed by the spirit, not possessing it; ﬁrst studied patiently, '

 

 

vmeditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become

habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and
at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he
stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class ﬂto that
power, which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten surn-
mits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer not
rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all
the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of
the ﬁre and the ﬂood; the other attracts all forms and things
to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and
medes'of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton 3
while Shakspeare becomes all things, yet forever remaining him-

382 BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA.

Self. * 0 What great men hast thou not produced, England, my
country' -- Truly indeed—

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue,
Which Shakspeare spake ; the faith and morals hold,
Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung
Of earth’s ﬁrst blood, have titles manifoldf

 

CHA PTER XVI.

STRIKING POINTS OF DIFFERENCE BET‘VEEN THE POETS 01" THE
PRESENT AGE AND THOSE OF THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH
CENTURIES—VVISH EXPRESSED FOR THE UNION OF THE CHARAC-
TERISTIC MERITS OF BOTH.

CHRISTENDOM, from its ﬁrst settlement on feudal rights, has
been so far one great body, however imperfectly organized, that
a similar spirit will be found in each period to have been acting

individual Shakspeareg but John Milton is in every line. of the Paradise
Lost.” Table Talk, VI.‘ p. 312.—Ed.]

1- [Mr. Wordsworth’s P. W. iii. p. 190, edit. 1840.—Ed.]

[Mr. VVordsworth’s noble Preface, often referred to in these pages, con-
tains as high a tribute to

\\ * [“ Shakspeare’s poetry is characterless, that is, it does not reﬂect the

that mighty orb of song
The divine Milton

(«I quote the author’s words in another place) as one great poet could pay
to another. (See also his three ﬁne sonnets relating to Milton, Poet.
Works, iii. pp. 188— 90.) It would have been out of his way to speak of
Milton’s prose—though such p1ose as none but the author of Paradise Lost
could have written. If matter is spiritus m coagulo‘ as some philosophers
aver, this grand Miltonic p10se may fancifully be called poész’s in coagulo
Yet I think it is more truly and properly prose than the high-strained pas-
sages of Jeremy Taylor.

Dante is by some accounted a greater poet than Milton, as beinga greater

 

 

 

’ “ When Leibnitz calls matter the sleep-state of the monads, or when
Hemsterhuis names it—den geronnenen Geist—curdled spirit,—there lies a
meaning in these expressions, &c.” Transsc. Id. 11. 190. See also Lit. Re-
mains, V. p. 221.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 383

in all its members. The study of Shakspeare s poems—(I do
not include his dramatic works, eminently as they too deserve
that title)—led me to a more careful examination of the contem-
porary poets both in England and in other countries. But my
attention was especially ﬁxed on those of Italy, from the birth to

philosopher; I think that he showed the philosopher in his poetry too
much to be the best of poets, especially in the Paradiso. A poet should
avoid science, which is ever in a process of change and development, and
abide by the ﬁxed and eternal; great part of that thirteenth century lore
contained in Dante’s poem is dead, and but for the poetic spices with which
it is embalmed, and the swathe-bands of the poetic form in which it is pre«
served, would long since have been scattered abroad, like any unsepulchred
dust and ashes. I am here speaking of physics and metaphysics: if wise
reﬂections, just sentiments and deep moral .and spiritual maxims are referred
to in this comparison, then surely the English poet has greatly the advan-
tage in thought and still more in expression. Philosophy in the song of
Milton is better harmonized with poetry than in that of Dante; it is fused
into the poetic mass by something accompanying it which appeals to the
heart and moral being; or it. is introduced obliquely, with a touch of ten-
derness, which brings it into unison with the human actions and passions of
the poem, as in that beautiful passage,

Others apart sate on a hill retired——l

which seems so like a new voice of The Preacher, pathetically satirizing
the efforts of man after speculative knowledge and insight. There is to be
sure some ﬁctitious or defunct astronomy and spherology in the great poem
of Milton ;2 but it is lightly touched on and imaginatively presented; com- '
pare the passages that treat of these subjects in the Paradise Lost, espe-
cially that'noble speech of the Angel3 in the eighth book, with the ﬁrst
and second cantos of the Paradiso ; surely the later poetry is to the earlier
as “ Hyperion to a Satyr,” so far does it exceed in richness and poetic grace.
Bizzarra Teologz'a! says a Commentator on a passage in the Purgatorio
(0. iii. 1. 18). Bizzarra If’z'losoﬁa may we say of that in the Paradiso (C. i.
at the end), which begins ﬁnely, but ends with making speciﬁc gravity de~
pend upon original sin; unless nothing but a fanciful ﬂight is intended.
What a pomp of philosophy, exclaims M. Merian, speaking of this passage,—
and all to usher in a foolery! “ Every great poet is a profound philoso
pher :” that is, he sees deep into the life and soul of the things which are
already known—and has a special mastery over them; but is not necessarily
beyond his age in speculative science. Certainly this can not be predicated
either of Dante or of Milton.

I own myself of the vulgar herd in greatly preferring the ﬁrst to the
other sections of Dante’s Poem—nay even venture to think, that if it had

 

1 Par. Lost, 1). ii. 1. 555-61. 2 Ib.b. ii1.l. 481, et seq.
’ Lines 39—178. ‘

384 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

the death of Shakspeare; that being the country 5:11 which the
ﬁne arts had been most sedulously, and hitherto most successfully
cultivated. Abstracted from the degrees and peculiarities of in-
dividual genius, the properties common to the good writers of each
period seem to establish one striking point of difference between
the poetry of the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that of the

not been both more striking than those two other parts in its general struc-
ture and more abundant in passages of power and of beauty, the Divine
Uommedia would never have been a famous poem at all. The mere plan of
describing the unseen world in three divisions would not have made it so;
there were Paradise Losts before Milton’s which it would be time lost to
read. Milton is ﬁner 1915811 than in ,Heaxen, ﬁnest of-alLiniis—earthly

Meetnd Dante’s Inferno is better than his Purgatorio or Paraaz‘so, be.
cause he could put more of this earth into it,—conform it more to the only
world the form of which he was acquainted with. Men can not make bricks
Without straw nor ﬁne houses without bricks or stones, nor ﬁne poems
without sensuous material.

The Divine Commodz'a is more considerable in religion and ecclesiastical
politics, I think—on which last head there was some accordance betwixt
its author and Milton,—than for its philosophy; the highest conception of
it is that of Mr. Carlyle, that it is “the soul of the Middle Ages ren
dered rhythmically visible”—the voice of “ten Christian centuries ;”—-“ the
Thought they lived by bodied forth in. everlasting music.” Its author is
great, as Mr. C. observes, from “ﬁery emphasis,” and intensity rather than
from comprehensiveness or catholicity of spirit. His was “not a great
Catholic—was even a narrow sectarian mind.” If Mediaevalism in Dante’s
day was a sectarian thing, cut off from thought expanding beyond it—then,
when the torch had not been kindled in the hand of Des Cartes, and the re-
volt against the dominant Aristotelianism was yet to begin, what must it be
now, when thought has been expanding during six more centuries, whilst It
remains ﬁxed, rigid—not lifeless as a mummy—but imprisoning the life it
has with bands and cerements in a body of death!

But Dante’s imagination was as mediaeval as his theology and philosophy ;
hovering continually between the horrible sublime and the hideous gro-
tesque, and sometimes saved only from the ridiculous by the chaste severity
of a style which is the very Diana of poetical compositions. Witness,
amongst a cloud of witnesses, his Mines, whom he has equipped with a tail
long and lithe enough to go nine times round his body l—thc wise conqueror
and righteous judge is degraded into a worse monster than the Minotaur, in
order that he may indicate every circle in a fantastic hell down to the ninth
and last. How would Pindar have been horror- stricken to see the Hero thus
turned into a hideous automaton sign-post! In Dante’s hands the demigod
sinks into the beastman, while in those of Milton devils appear as deities, ﬁt
indeed to obtain adoration from the dazzled mind,——_not frightful ﬁends but
wicked angels—specious and seductive as they actually are to the human
heart and imagination. Milton has borrowed from Dante, but how has he

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 385

present age. The remark may perhaps be extended to the sister art
of painting. At least the latter Will serve to illustrate the former.
In the present age the poet—(I would wish to be understood as
speaking generally, and Without allusion to individual names)-—-
seems to propose to himself as his mainﬁqugqtiﬁndnalsihﬂt,which is

“W“k- _ “*rm‘ﬁ- .rv-

the most characteristiccofmhisartrnemandrstrikingLimages; with

multiplied his splendors, how nobly exchanged his “ detestable horrors”l for
a pageantry of Hell that far exceeds the luminous pomp of his Paradise in.
sublimity and beauty !

\Ve, who feel thus can enter into Mr. Carlyle’s high notion of Dante’s
genius, yet own the justice of Mr. Landor’s searching and severe criticism
upon the products of it, though the two views appear dissimilar as day and
night. The one displays the D. C. under a rich moonlight, which clothes
its dreary ﬂats and rugged hollows with sublime shadow; the other under
a cold keen dawning daylight, which shows the whole landscape, but not its
noblest countenance. Mr. C. so far idealizes his HerovPoet, that without
keeping out of view his characteristic faults he, with a far ﬁner economy,
converts them into cognate virtues ; the poet’s stern, angry temper, for in-
stance, appears through Mr. C.’s glorifying medium like earnest sincerity,
religious severity, a spiritual sadness; and he contrasts his “implacable,
grim-trenchant face” with his “ soft ethereal soul” more beautifully perhaps
than quite truthfully; ,for Dante’s soul was not all softness. Indeed it
escapes this powerful advocate that the heroic poet was bitter. Are the
noblest minds embittered then by evil and calamity? Do they clothe them-
selves with cursing as with a garment, and forget that judgment as well as
vengeance belongs to God? Dante’s soul was full of pity, say other apolo-
gists, but he deemed it sinful to commiserate those whom God’s justice had
condemned. Justice forsooth I—and how knew he whom God had condemned—
that He had sunk Brutus and Cassius into the nethermost pit, and doomed
poor Pope Celestine to be wasp-stung to all eternity on the banks of
Acheron ?' I deny not his pity or his piety; yet I say that thus to fabri-
cate visions of divine wrath upon individuals was a bad sign both of his age
and of himself—the sign of a violent and presumptuous spirit. Again, are
the noblest minds moody and mournful as Dante is described to have been 5

Rather they b t . t
a e no jo

Of heart or hope, but still hear up and steer
Right onward.

Thus did John Milton, whom with Mr. Landor I can not help honoring and
admiring above any other poet of past times except Shakspeare. His in-
deed was what Mr. Carlyle ascribes to Johnson, “a gigantic calmness”—nay
more, an almost angelic serenity and cheerfulness; to judge from the tone
of his writings with which the tenor of his life seems to agree—S. C.]

 

1 For a striking account of these “ detestable horrors” see Mr. Leigh
Hunt’s Fancy and Imagination. '
VOL. ML 13.

886 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

incidents that interest the affectio ' the curiosit . Both
his characters and his descriptions he renders, as much as possible,
speciﬁc and individual, even to a degree of portraiture. In his
Ldiction and metre, on the other hand, he is comparatively (gage:
less. The measure is either constructed on no previous system, and
acknowledges no justifying principle but that of the writer’s con~
venience ; or else some mechanical movement is adopted,‘of which
one couplet or stanza is so far an adequate specimen, as that the
occasional differences appear evidently to arise from accident, or
the qualities of the language itself, not from meditation and an
intelligent purpose. And the language from Pope’s translation
of Homer, to Darwin’s Temple of Natureﬁ‘“ may, notwithstanding
some illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized, as
claiming to be poetical for no better reason, than that it would
be intolerable in conversation or in prose. Though alas! even
our prose writings, nay even the style of our more set discourses,
strive to be in the fashion, and trick themselves out in the soiled
and over-worn finery of the meretricious muse. It is true that
of late a great improvement in this respect is observable in our
most popular writers. But it is equally true, that this recurrence
to plain sense and genuine mother English is far from being gen-
eral; and that the composition of our novels, magazines, public
harangues and the like is commonly as trivial in thought, and
yet enigmatic in expression, as if Echo and Sphinx had laid their
heads together to construct it. Nay, even of those who have
most rescued themselves from this contagion, I should plead in-
wardly guilty to the charge of duplicity or cowardice, if I With-
held my conviction, that few have guarded the purity of their
native tongue with that jealous care, which the sublime Dante
in his tract De la, volgare Eloquenza, declares to be the ﬁrst duty
of a poet.1' For language is the armory of the human mind;

* First published in 1803.

+ [See I. c. xix. s. ii. 0. i. The spirit breathing in this Fragment may jus-
tify What Mr. C. says; but Dante does not appear to have used the expres-
sion attributed to him in the text.—Ed.]

It seems probable that Mr. Coleridge alludedto the following passage.
winch I found written by his hand in a copy of the ﬁrst edition of Joan of
A re.

.Degne di sommo st'ilo sono le somme Case, cz'é é, l’Amore, la Libertd, la -
Virtz‘z, l’Immortalz'tci, e quelle altre Case che per cagz'on di esse sono nella
Meme nostra conceputz'; per che per m'un Accidente non siano fatte viii.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 387

and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of
its future conquests. Animadverte, says Hobbes, quam sz't a6
z'mproprz'etate verborum pmnum hominibus prolabi in errores
circa; ipsas 7*es 1* Sat [vem], says Se7mertus,’r in Jade m'taa
brevitate et natm'ce obscuritate, Irerum est, quibus cognoscendis
tempus impendatur, ut [confttsis et multivocz’s] sermom'bus mu
telligendz's illud consumere opus non sit. [Eheu .’ guantas strages
pav‘avve're verba nubile, guee tot (Ziczmt ut m'hz'l cliczmt ;—mtbes
potizts, e guibus et in rebus politicis et in ecclesict turbines e!
tonitrua erumpzmt .’] Et Pmind e 9'eete dictum putamus a Pla-
tone in Gorgz'a : 89 82V Id: oré‘uam 81652, ei’osmt am) 16‘: nodyyam:
et ab Epicteto, (2911‘; 710216515080); 77 1(7):! opopérwv e’nloxeiptg: et
prudentissz'me Galenus scribit, 1i 16w ovopdrwr zgﬁms weazﬂeiaa
and 17‘)» 1G)» ngayydrwv émmgdneo ymbo‘w.

Egv'egz'e zero J. C. Scaliger, in Lib. I. (Ze thtz's: Est

Guardisi adunque cz'aseuno, e discerna quello che d'icemo: e quando vuole
gueste somme Cose puramente cantare, primal bevendo nel Fonte di Elicona,
ponga sicuramente a l’accordata Lyra z'l sommo Plettro, e costumatamente
comincz'. Ilia a fare questa Canzone, e queste Divisione, come 82' dee—gui 6
la Diﬁz’coltd, gut é la thicd .' pert-2'5 che mai senza Aeume d’Ingegno, ne senza
Assicluz'td d’Arte, ne senza Abito di Scienze, non si potrd fare. E quesli sono
quelli, ehe’l Poeta nel L. VI. de la Eneide chiami Diletti da Dio, e da la ardente
Virtit alzati al Oielo, e Fzﬁqlinoli di Dio, avegna cheﬁgurdtamente parli.

E pero si confessa la Sciocchezza di coloro,z' quali senza Arte, e senza
Scienza, conﬁdando sz' solamente del Zoro Ingegno, si pongono a cantar som-
mamente le Case somme. Adunque cessino questi talz' da tanta loro Presun-
zione, e se per la loro naturale Desidz'a sono Oche, non vogliano l’Aquila, che
altamente cola, imitare.

Dante. de la volgare Eloquenza, 1. ii. 0. 4.2—8. 0.]

* [Examinatz'o et Emendatz‘o JIIat/zematz'cce Izodiernoe. (Dial. II. vol. iv.
1). 83 of Molesworth’s edit.)—S. C.

f [See the chapter p. 193, De nominibus novis Paracelsz'cz's in his folio
works, Leyden 1676. The words in brackets, are not in the original, and
there are several omissions—Ed. The sentence cited as from the Gorgias,
is not contained, I believe, in that dialogue—S. 0.]

 

‘ That is, waiting for, and seizing the moment of deep Feeling, and stir-
ring Imagination, after having by steadfast accurate Observation, and by
calm and profound Meditation, ﬁlled himself, as it were, with his subject.
—S. T. C.

2 [This Italian version of the treatise De vulg. Eloq. was by Trissino, ac-
cording to A. Zeno who says that the translator has, in many places, con-
founded and altered the sense. The Latin tractate, which the Editor refers
to. is by Dante himselﬁ—S. 0.]

388 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

primum, inquit, sapientis ofﬁcium, bene sentire, ut sibi vivat:
proximum, bene loqui, ut patriaa vivat.”

Something analogous to the materials and structure of modern
poetry I seem to have noticed—(but here I beg to be understood
as speaking with the utmost difﬁdence)—-in our common land-
scape painters. Their foregrounds and intermediate distances
are comparatively unattractive: while the main interest of the
( landscape is thrown into the back-ground, where mountains and
torrents and castles forbid the eye to proceed, and nothing
tempts it to trace its way back again. But in the works of
the great Italian and Flemish masters, the front and middle
objects of the landscape are the most obvious and determinate,
the interest gradually dies away in the back-ground, and the
charm and peculiar worth of the ﬁgure consists, not so much in
the speciﬁc objects which it conveys to the understanding in a
visual language formed by the substitution of ﬁgures for words,
as in the beauty and harmony of the colors, lines, and expression,
with which the objects are represented. Hence novelty of sub-
ject was rather avoided than sought for. Superior excellence in
the manner of treating the same subjects was the trial and test
of the artist’s merit.

Not otherwise is it with the more polished poets of the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries, especially those of Italy. The
imagery is almost always general: sun, moon, ﬂowers, breezes,
murmuring streams,'warbling songsters, delicious shades, lovely
damsels cruel as fair, nymphs, naiads, and goddesses, are the
materials which are common to all, and which each shaped and
arranged according to his judgment or fancy, little solicitous to
add or to particularize. If we make an honorable exception in
favor of some English poets, the thoughts too are as little novel
as the images; and the fable of their narrative poems, for the
most part drawn from mythology, or sources of equal notoriety,
derive their chief attractions from the manner of treating them ;
from impassioned ﬂow, or picturesque arrangement. In opposi-
tion to the present age, and perhaps in as faulty an extreme,
they placed the essence of poetry in the art. The excellence, at
which they aimed, consisted in the exquisite polish of the diction,
combined with perfect simplicity. This their prime object they
attained by the avoidance of every word, which a gentleman
would not use in dignified conversation, and of every word and

BIOGRAPHIA ' LITERARIA. 389

phrase-which none but a learned man would use ; by the stuc
died position of words and phrases, so that not only each part
should be melodious in itself, but contribute to the harmony of
the whole, each note referring and conducting to the melody of
all the foregoing and following words of the same period 01
stanza ; and lastly with equal labor, the greater because unbe-
trayed, by the variation and various harmonies of their metrical
movement. Their measures, however, were not indebted for
their variety to the introduction of new metres, such as have
been attempted of late in the Alonzo and Imogenﬁ“ and others
borrowed from the German, having in their very mechanism a
_ speciﬁc overpowering tune, to which the generous reader humors
his voice and emphasis, with more indulgence to the author than
attention to the meaning or quantity of the words ; but which,
to an ear familiar with the numerous sounds of the Greek and
Roman poets, has an effect not unlike that of galloping over a
paved road in a German stage-wagon without springs. On the
contrary, the elder bards both of Italy and England produced a
far greater as well as more charming variety by countless modi—
ﬁcations, and subtle-balances of sound in the common metres of
their country. A lasting and enviable reputation awaits that
man of genius, who should attempt and realize a union ;—who
should recall the high ﬁnish, the appropriateness, the facility, the
delicate proportion, and above all, the perfusive and omnipresent
grace, which have preserved, as in a shrine of precious amber, ,
the Sparrow of Catullus, the Swallow, the Grasshopper, and all
the other little loves of Anacreon ; and which, with bright,
though diminished glories, revisited the youth and early manhood
of Christian Europe, in the vales of ‘i‘ Arno, and the groves of Isis

* [Here is a stanza of this overpowering metre :—

A warrior so bold and a virgin so bright
Conversed as they sat on the green;
They gazed on each other with tender delight:
Alonzo the brave, was the name of the knight,

The maid’s was the fair Imogene.

Mr. Southey adopted this metre for his popular ballad—Mary the Maid
of the Inn. Poet. Works, 1838, vol. vi. 1). 3.—-S. 0.]

1» These thoughts were suggested to me during the perusal of the Mad‘
rigals of Giovambatista Strozzi published in Florence in May, 1593, by his
sons Lorenzo and lippo Strozzi, with a dedication to their paternal uncle,

 

390 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

and of Cam ;—and who with these should combine the keene1 inv

Signor Leone Strozzz', Generale delle battaglz‘e di Santa Chiesa. As I do not
remember to have seen either the poems or their author mentioned in any
English work, or to have found them in any of the common collections of
Italian poetry ;1 and as the little work is of rare occurrence; I will trans-
cribe a few specimens. I have seldom met with compositions that pos-
sessed, to my feelings, more of that satisfying entireness, that complete ade-
quateness of the manner to the matter which so charms us in Anacreon,
joined with the tenderness, and more than the delicacy of Catullus. Triﬂes
as they are, they were probably elaborated with great care; yet in the
perusal we refer them to a spontaneous energy rather than to voluntary
effort. To a cultivated taste there is a delight in perfection for its own
sake, independently of the material in which it is manifested, that none but
a cultivated taste can understand or appreciate.

After what I have advanced, it would appear presumption to offer a
translation; even if the attempt were not discouraged by the different ge-
nius of the English mind and language, which demands a denser body of
thought as the condition of a high polish, than the Italian. I can not but
deem it likewise an advantage in the Italian tongue, in many other respects
inferior to our own, that the language of poetry is more distinct from that
of prose than with us. From the earlier appearance and established pri-
macy of the Tuscan poets, concurring with the number of independent
states, and the diversity of written dialects, the Italians have gained a po-
etic idiom, as the Greeks before them had obtained from the same causes,
with greater and more various discriminations, for example, the Ionic for
their heroic verses; the Attic for their iambic; and the two modes of the
Doric for the lyric or sacerdotal, and the pastoral, the distinctions of which
were doubtless more obvious to the Greeks themselves than they are to us.

I will venture to add one other observation before I proceed to the trans-
cription. I am aware that the sentiments which I have avowed concerning
the'points of difference between the poetry of the present . 0e, and that of
the period between 1500 and 1650, are the reverse of the opinion commonly
entertained. I was conversing on this subject with a friend, when the ser-
vant, a worthy and sensible woman, coming in, I placed before her two en»
gravings, the one a pinky-colored plate of the day, the other a masterly
etching by Salvator Rosa from one of his own pictures. On pressing her to
tell us, which she preferred, after a little blushing and ﬂutter of feeling, she
replied—“ Why, that, Sir, to be sure! (pointing to the ware from the Fleet-
street print-shops);—it’s so neat and elegant. T’other is such a scratchy
slovenly thing.” An artist, whose writings are scarcely less valuable than
his pictures, and to whose authority more deference will be willingly paid.
than I could even wish should be shown to mine, has told us, and from his
own experience too, that good taste must be acquired, and like all other
good things, is the result of thought and the submissive study of the lags}

 

1 [Gamba, p. 593, calls this edition ram edizione.—— E'd.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ' 391

terest, deeper pathos, manlier reﬂection, and the fresher and more /’

models.x If it be asked, “But what shall I deem such ?"——the answer is;

presume those IQ he the best, the reputationoilwhichhas been matured into

fiTﬁ‘DLthﬁ consent of ﬂages. F01 wisdom always has a ﬁnal majority, if
not by conviction, yet by acquiescence. In addition to Si1 J. Reynolds I
may mention Harris of Salisbury ; who in one of his philosophical disquisi-
tions has written on the means of acquiring a just taste with the precision

of Aristotle, and the elegance of Quinctilian.‘2

MADRIGALI.

Gclido suo mscel chiaro, e tranquillo
[W’i'nsegné Amor di state a, mezzo’l giomo ,-
Ardean le selve, ardean Ze piagge, e i colli.
0nd ’io, clt’ al piu gran giclo ardo e sfam'llo,
Subito corsi ; ma si 7mm adorno
Girsene it vidi, cite tm'bm vto’l vollz’ :

Sol

 

r1

l [“ On whom then can he rely, or who shall show him the path that
leads to excellence? The answer is obvious. Those great masters who
have travelled the same road with success are the most likely to conduct
others. The works of those who have stood the test of ages have a claim
to that respect and veneration to which no modern can pretend. The du-
ration and stability of their fame is sufﬁcient to evince that it has not been
suspended upon the slender thread of fashion and caprice, but bound to the
human heart by every tie of sympathetic admiration.” Reynolds. Discourse
ii.—Ed.]

2 [See Philological Inquiries: Part ii. chap. xii. especially the concluding
paragraphs. This Treatise is contained in vol. ii. of the collective edition
of the works of Harris,—by his son, the Earl of Malmesbury, in two vols
4to. London, 1801.

James Harris, the author of those volumes, was born in the Close of Sal-
isbury, July 29, 1709—died Dec. 22, 17 80. He is best known as the author
of Hermes, a work on Universal Grammar; which, according to Bishop
Lowth, presents “ the most beautiful example of analysis that has been ex-
hibited since the days of Aristotle :” and three Treatises concerning Art,—
Music, Painting and Poetry, and Happiness,—which imitate the method of
Plato, and are written with admirable distinctness. Harris was not given
up wholly to literary pursuits, and domestic and social amusements, though
possessed of high qualiﬁcations for both the one and the other: he also
took a part in public life, held the ofﬁce ﬁrst of a Lord of the Admiralty, _
then for about two years of a Lord of the Treasury. In 1774 he became
Secretary and Comptrolle1 to the Queen. He represented the Borough of
Christ Chmch till the day of his death, was assiduous 1n the discharge of
his pa1liamentary duty and occasionally took a shale 1n debates. See Me
moi rs of the Author by his Son, p1 efixed to his wo1 ks —S. 0.]

392 ' BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

various imagery, which give a value and a name that will not

Sol mi specclu'ava, e’n dolce ombrosa sponda
1m stava intenio al mormomr dell’ onda.
Awe dell’ angoscioso viver mio
Refrigerio soave,

E dolce 3i, clLe pit), non mi par grave
Ne’l mder, 'ne’l morir, anz’ il desio ,-

De/L 'voi’i ghiaccio, e le nubi, e’i tempo rio
Discacciaiene omai, ehe l’onda chiam,

E i’ ombm mm men cam

A scherzmc, e cantar per suoi bosclzetti,
E praiifesia et allcgrezza alletii.

 

Pacific/Le, ma spesso in amorosa

Guerra co’ﬁori, e l’ erba

Alla stagione acerba

Verdi insegne del giglio e della 703a,

Movete, Ame, .picm pian ; cite tregua 5 posa,
So non pace, i0 7'iirove ;

E 50 ben dove :— 0/1, vago, e mansueio
Sguarda, o/L labbra d’ambrosia, oh Tidef lieto!

HOT came an scoglio siassi,

H07“ came an 7‘io se’n fugge,

Ed lwr cmid’ masa rugge,

HM cunta ngelo pio : ma Che non fassi?
E Che non fammi, 0 sassi,

O m'vi, o belue, o Dii, questa mia vaga.
Non 50, se ninja, 6 maga,

N071. 30, se (10mm, 6 Dad,

Nun 30, 3e dolce 5 ma ?

Piaozgenda mi baciasie,
E ridendo ii negasie :

I n, dogiia [Lebbivi pia,

In festa [Lebbivi rid, :
Nacque gioia di pianti,
Doior di riso : O amrmti
Miscri, habbiate insieme
Ognor paum e speme.

Bel Fior, tu mi 7imembri
La mgiadosa guancia del bel visa:
E si 'vem l’assembri,
Clie’n Ze sovenie, come in lei m’aﬁsa
El

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 393

pass away to the poets who have done honor to our own times,
and to those of our immediate predecessors.* "

El [tor del vago riso,

Ho7' del serene sgnaado

10 pm“ cieco Tignardo. Ma qualfugge,
O Rosa, il mallin lz'eve ?

E chi le, come neve,

E’l mio cor teco, e la mia vita strugge ?

 

Anna1 mia, Anna dolce, 0k sempre nnovo
E pin c/Liaro concento,

Quanta dolcezza sento

In sol Anna dicendo ? Io mi par pmmw,
Ne qni tra noi 'rilrnovo,

Ne tad cz'eli armonia,

C/LG del bcl name suo pin dolce sia .-

Allro il Ciclo, altro Amm‘e,

Allro non snona l’Ecco (Zel mio core.

 

Hor clte’l pralo, e la selva 3i scolora,

Al lno sereno ombroso

Muom'ne, allo Riposo,

Delt c/L ’z'o riposi nna sol nolle, nn hora :
Hanylefcre, e gli angelli, ognnn talm'a

Ha qualclze pace ; 2'0 qnando,

Lasso .' non vonne errando,

E non piango, e non grido ? e qual pur forte ?
Ma poiclzé, non senl’ egli, Odine, Morle.

 

R‘isi e piansi (l’Amor ; né p676 mai

Sc non in ﬁamma, 5 ’n onda, 6 ’n vento scrissi :
Spesso mercé tronai

C'rndel ,- sempre in me morlo, in allri vissi :
Hor da’ 121'?) scm‘i Abissi al ciel m’alzai,

H07 ne pm caddi ginso ;

Slanco al ﬁn qn’l son chinso.

* [The union of “high ﬁnish and perfusivc grace with pathos and manly
reﬂection”—-pathos recalling the peculiar tone of Southey with a Words
worthian strength of thought and stateliness of sentiment—is exempliﬁed,
as it seems to me, in the poetry of Mr. H. Taylor (not to speak of its other
merits of a different kind), especially his later poetry, and very exquisitely
in his printed but unpublished lines written in remembrance of E. E. Vil-
liers. A friend pointed out to me, what I had before been feeling, the ﬁne
interwoven harmony of the stanza in this poem, which, though long and

 

’ [Filli in Strozzi’s Madrigal—S. 0.]
11*

CHAPTER XVII.

EXAMINATION OF THE TENETS PECULIAR T0 MR. wORDSWORTH—
RUSTIC LIFE (ABOVE ALL, Low AND RUSTIC LIFE) ESPECIALLY
UNFAVORABLE To THE FORMATION OF A HUMAN DICTION—THE
BEST PARTS OF LANGUAGE THE PRODUCT 0F PHILOSOPHERS,
NOT OF CLOWNs OR SHEPHERDS—POETRY ESSENTIALLY IDEAL
AND GENERIC—THE LANGUAGE OF MILTON As MUCH THE LAN-
GUAGE OF REAL LIFE, YEA, INCOMPARABLY MORE so THAN THAT
OF THE COTTAGER. -

As far then as Mr. Wordsworth in his preface contended, and
most ably cWr a reformation in our _p___oe_tic...diction,‘as
far as he has evinced the tinflTof'paSSionjand the dramatic
propriety of those ﬁgures and metaphors in the original poets,
which, stripped of their justifying reasons, and converted into
mere artifices of connection or ornament, constitute the charac:
teristic falsity in the poetic style of the moderns ; and as far as
he has, with equal acuteness and clearness, pointed out the pro-
cess by which this change was effected, and the resemblances be-
tween that state into which the reader’s mind is thrown by the
pleasurable confusion of thought from an unaccustomed train of
words and images ; and that state which is induced by the natu-

varied, forms a whole to the ear as truly as the more formal Spenserian
stanza, but has a soft, ﬂowing movement remarkably well ﬁtted for the ex-
pression of thoughtful tenderness, and well illustrates Mr. Wordsworth’s
remark, recorded in this work, on the musical “sweep of whole para-
graphs.” It is easy enough to invent new metres, but some new metres
which the world has lately been presented with will never live, I fear, to
be old. They are as unmusical and not so spirited as a Chicasaw war-song.
-—'1‘here is a witch in Mr. Tennyson’s poetry, but I do not imagine that any
great part of her witching power resides in newness of metre—though
perhaps it is rash even to hazard a conjecture on the properties of such a
subtle enehantress, or to say how such a mysterious siren does or does not
bewitch.——S. 0.]

- BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 395

ml language 0* impassioned feeling , he undertook _a useful task ,
and dWe, both for the attempt and for the execu
tign. The plovocations to this remonstrance in behalf of truth
and nature were still of perpetual recurrence before and after the
publication of this preface. I can not likewise but add, that the
comparison of such poems of merit, as have been given to the
public within the last ten or twelve years, with the majority of
those produced previously to the appearance of that preface, leave
no doubt on my mind, that Mr. Wordsworth is fully justiﬁed in
believing his efforts to have been by no means ineffectual. Not
only in the verses of those who have professed their admiration
of his genius, but even of those who have distinguished them-
selves by hostility to his theory, and depreciation of his writings,
are the immessﬂbnsof his principles plainly visible. It is possi-
ble, that with these principles others may have been blended,
which are not equally evident; and some which are unsteady
and subvertible from the narrowness or imperfection of their
basis. But it is more than possible, that these errors of defect 011
exaggeration, by kindling and feeding the controversy, may have
conduced not only to the Wider propagation of the accompanying
truths, but that, by their frequent presentation to the mind in an
excited state, they may have won for them a more permanent
and practical result. A man will borrow a part from his oppo-
nent the more easily, if he feels himself justified in continuing to
reject a part. While there remain important points in which he
can still feel himself in the right, in which he still finds firm
footing for continued resistance, he will gradually adopt those
opinions, which were the least remote from his own convictions,
as not less congruous with his own theory than with that which
he repr.obates In like manner with a kind of instinctive pru-
dence, he will abandon by little and little his weakest posts, till
at length he seems to forget that they had ever belonged to him,
or affects to consider them at most as accidental and “petty an-
nexments,” the removal of which leaves the citadel unhurt and
unendangered.

My own differences from certain supposed parts of Mr. Words-
worth’s theory ground themselves on the assumption, that his
words had been rightly inte1 preted as purporting that the ro er
illition for poetry in general consists #We
taken, with due exceptions, from the mouths of Wife '

 

 

 

896 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

a language which actually constitutes the natu1a1 conversation

of men under the inﬂuence of natural feeli11rrs.lVI bjectlon ‘1s,’

ﬁrst, that in any sense this rule is applicable only to certain
.lasses of poetry; secondly, that even to these classes it is not
. pplicable, except in such a sense, as hath never by any one (as

'ar as I know or have read) been denied or doubted ; and lastly,
that as far as, and in that degree in which it is practicable, it is
yet as a rule useless, if not injurlous, and therefore either need
not, or ought to be practised. The poet informs his reader, that
he had generally chosen low and rustic life ;* but not as low and
rustic, or in order to repeat that pleasure of doubtful moral effect,
which persons of elevated rank and of superior reﬁnement often
times derive from a happy imitation of the rude unpolished man-
ners and discourse of their inferiors. For the pleasure so de
rived may be traced tWexciting causes. The ﬁrst is the
natural11ess,in fact, of the things represented. The second is
the apparent naturalness of the representation, as raised, and
qualiﬁed by an imperceptible infusion of the author’s own knowl
edge and talent, which infusion does, indeed, constitute it an imi
tation as distinguished from a me1e copy. The thiLd cause may
be found 1n the 1eade1 s conscious feeling of his supe1 iority awaken-
ed by the contrast presented to him ; even as for the same pur
pose the kings and great barons of yore retained, sometimes ac—
tual clowns and fools, but more frequently shrewd and witty fel-
lows in that character. These, however, were not Mr. Words-
worth’s objects. IIc chose low and rustic life, “because in that
condition the essential passions of the heart ﬁnd a better soil, in
which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and
speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that
condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of
greater simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately con-
templated, and more forcibly communicated; because the man-
ners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings ; and
from the necessary character of rural occupations are more easily
comprehended, and are more durable ; and lastly, because in that
condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful
and pe1ma11ent forms 0 nature.’

Now it is clear to -ne, that in the most interesting of the

 

   
  

* [In the last edition of this preface the word “humble”is substituted for
“low.” See P. W. ii. p. 306.—Ed.]

BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. 397

poems, in which the author is more or less dramatic, as THE
BROTHERS, MICHAEL, RUTH THE MAD MOTHER, and others, * the
persons introduced are by no means taken from low or rustic life
in the common acceptation of those Wo1ds; and it is not less
clear, that the sentiments and language, as far as they can be
conceived to have been really transferred from the minds and con-
versation of such persons, are attributablc to causes and circum-
stances not necessarily connected with " their. occupations and
abode.” The thoughts, feelings, language, and manners of the
shepherd-farmers in the vales of Cumberland and Westmoreland,
as far as they are actually adopted in those poems, may be ac-
counted for from causes, which will and do produce the same re-
sults in every state of life, whether in town or country. As the
two principal Irank that independence, which raises a man above
servitude, or daily toil for the proﬁt of othersﬁet not abov the.
necessity of industry and a ~_,___f1;1,1ga—l simplicity of domestic life; and

the accompanying unambitious, but solid and religious (e,ducation,
which has rendered few books familiar, but the bBible,m
Liturgy or Hymn-book. To this latter cause, indeed, which is so
far accidental, that it ‘is the blessing of particular countries and
a particular age, not the product of particular places or employ-
ments, the poet owes the show of probability, that his personagea
might really feel, think, and talk with any tolerable resemblance
to his representation. It is an excellent remark of Dr. Henry
More’s that “ a man of conﬁned education, but of good parts, by
constant reading of the Bible will naturally form a more winning
and commanding rhetoric than those that are learned ; the inter.
mixture of tongues and of artiﬁcial phrases debasing their style.”t

9* [The Brothers: P. W. i. p. 109. Michael: 2'6. p. 222. The Mad Mother,
now simply entitled “Her eyes are wild :” éb. p. 256, and Ruth ii. p. 106.—
Ed. The Edition of Mr. Wordsworth’s Poems, referred to by Mr. Coleridge
in this critique, is that of 1815, in two vols. large 8vo.—‘—S. 0.]

1' [Entimsiamnus Triumphatus, Sect. xxxv. “ For a man illiterate, as he
was,1 but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will naturally con-
tract a more winning and commanding Rhetoric than those that are learned,
the intermixture of tongues and of artiﬁcial phrases deforming their style,
and making it sound more after the manner of men, though ordinarily there
may be more of God in it than in that of the enthusiast.” P. 34, Ed. Lon-

 

1 [This 1s spoken of the enthusiast, David Ge01ge, who was born at Delph;
died 1556-—S. 0.]

/"

3 )8 BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA.

It is, moreover, to be considered, that to the formation of healthy
feelings, and a. reﬂecting mind, negations involve impediments
not less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture
I am convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic
life a certain vantage-ground is pre-requisite. (L; is not every
man that is likely to be improved by a country life or by country
labors) Education, or original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist
if the changes, forms, and incidents of nature are to prove a
sufﬁcient stimulant. And where these are not sufficient, the
mind contracts and hardens by want of stimulants ; and the man
becomes selﬁsh, sensual, gross, and hard-hearted. Let the man-
agement of the Poor Laws in Liverpool, Manchester, or Bristol be
compared with the ordinary dispensation of the poor-rates in ag-
ricultural villages, where the farmers are the overseers and
guardians of the poor. If my own experience have not been
particularly unfortunate, as well as that of the many respectable
country clergymen with whom I have conversed on the subject,
the result would engender more than skepticism concerning the
desirable inﬂuences of low and rustic life in and for itself.
Whatever may be concluded on the other side, from the stronger
local attachments and enterprising spirit of the Swiss, and other
mountaineers, applies to a particular mode of pastoral life, under
forms of property that permit and beget manners truly republican,
not to rustic life in general, or to the absence of artificial cultiva-
tion. On the contrary, the mountaineers, whose manners have
been so often eulogized, are in general better educated and greater
readers than men of equal rank elsewhere. But where this is

don, 1656. Dr. Henry More, the friend and colleague of Cudworth, was
born in 1614, died 1687. He was educated in Christ College, Cambridge,
in which university he spent his life. His theological works,—the chief of
which are The Mystery of Godliness and a Modest Inquiry into the Mystery
of Iniquity, a detailed argument against the Church of Rome,——ﬁll one
large folio volume, and his philosophical writings are numerous. He
studied Plotinus and, rejecting the doctrines of Aristotle and the scholastics,
sought the principles of divine philosophy in the writings of the Platonists.
Their teaching and that of the ancient Cabbalists he traced to the same
source, the Hebrew Prophets, whose doctrines he believed to have been
transmitted to Pythagoras, and from him to Plato. Though an opponent
of mystics and enthusiasts, his own mind had a strong tendency to mysti
aism; he was profoundly learned and of a most contemplative spirit.
Cousin says that in combating the errors of Des Cartes and Spinoza he
showed great respect for the genius of these two philosophers—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 399

not the ease, as among the peasantry of North Wales, the ancient
mountains, with all their terrors and all their glories, are pic-
tures to the blind, and music to the deaf.

I should not have entered so much into detai- upon this pas-
sage, but here seems to be the point, to which all the lines of dif—
ference converge as to their source and centre ;-—-I mean, as far
as, and in whatever respect, my poetic creed does differ from the
doctrines promulgated in this preface. I adept with full faith, ‘
the principle of Aristotle, that poetry, as poetry, is essentially*
ideal,“ that it avoids and excludes all accident ; that its apparent
individualities of rank, character, or occupation must be represen-
tative of a class ; and that the persons of poetry must be clothed
with generic attributes, with the common attributes of the class;
not with such as one gifted individual might possibly possess, but
such as from his situation it is most probable beforehand that he
would possessi If my premises are right and my deductions

9* [Mr. Coleridge here quoted, in a foot-note, from the ﬁrst edition of The
Friend the passage, “Say not that I am recommending abstractions,” to
the end of the paragraph, which occurs in the Second of the Letters from
Germany, placed near the end of this volume]

+ [See Poetic. s. 18. (Pavepbv (55 it: 71522 cipn/tévwv, Kai 5m 02’) To Tc‘t ycvé-
ucva hiyaw, 701370 70077017 Epyov éarlv, dhh’ Old (212 yévowo, IcaZ rd dvva'rd
Kara To elxbg, 7’} Ta a’vaylcaiov. 9* 9“ 9* Au} Kai gbthoaogbérepov Kai arrov-
daiérepov noinotg‘ ioropiag éoriv. 'H ,uév yap woinoig pdhhov rd Icadohov, 7'7 6’
iaropia 7'0, Icad’ EKaarov Myst. ”Earl. dz? Kadéhov ,uév, 7'93 noiga rd TroZ’ drra
ovyﬁaivct héycw, 7’7‘ npdrrew, Kara Tb (ii/cog, ii To dvayxaiov, ob aroxdé'crai
7'] noinoig‘, ova/Lara émnOc/iévn' rd (55 Ica6’ é’xaarov, Ti ’Ahmﬁuidng én'pmfev,
7) Ti Enadev.—Ed.

It appears from what has been said, that the object of the poet is not to re
late what has actually happened, but what may possibly happen, either with
probability or from (necessity. The difference between the poet and the
historian does not arise from one writing in verse and the other in prose ;
for if the work of Herodotus were put into verse, it would be no less a his—
tory than it is in prose. But they differ in this, that one relates what has
actually been done, the other what may be done. Poetry, therefore, is more

philosophical and instructive than history. Poetry speaks more of general
By general things I mean w at any per-

thin s and histor of articula
son of suc a c (aracter would probably and naturally say or do in such a

situation ; and this is what poetry aims at even in giving names to the char-
acters. By particular things I mean what any individual, as Alcibiades, for
instance, either acted or suy‘ered in reality. Pye’s Translation.~—S. 0.]

1: [“ It is Shakspeare’s peculiar excellence, that throughout the whole of
his splendid picture-gallery—(the reader will excuse the acknowledged in-
adequacy of this metaphor)-—we ﬁnd individuality everywhere. more per-

400 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARI A.

legitimate, it follows that there can be no poetic medium be
tween the swains of Theocritus and those of an imaginary golden
age.

The characters of the vicar and the shepherd-mariner in the
poem of THE BROTHERsf and that of the shepherd of Green-head
Ghyll in the MICHAELJ‘ have all the verisimilitude and represen-
tative quality, that the purposes of poetry can require. They
are persons of a known and abiding class, and their manners and
sentiments the natural product of 'circumstances common to the
class. Take Michael for instance :

An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.

His bodily frame had been from youth to age I

Of an unusual strength : his mind was keen,
Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,

And in his shepherd’s calling he was prompt

And watchful more than ordinary men.

Hence he had learned the meaning of all winds

Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes

When others heeded not, he heard the South
Make subterraneous music, like the noise

Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.

The Shepherd, at such warning, of his ﬂock
Bethought him, and he to himself would say,

‘The winds are now devising work for me !’

And, truly, at all times, the storm, that drives
The traveller to a shelter, summoned him

Up to the mountains: he had been alone

Amid the heart of many thousand mists,

That came to him and left him on the heights.

So lived he, till his eightieth year was past.

And grossly that man errs, who ‘should suppose
That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,
Were things indifferent to the Shepherd’s thoughts.
Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed
The common air; the hills, which he so oft

 

trait nowhere. In all his various characters we still feel ourselves com-
muning with the same nature, which is everywhere present as the vegetable
sap in the branches, sprays, leaves, buds, blossoms, and fruits, their shapes,
tastes, and odors. Speaking of their effect, that is, his works themselves,
we may deﬁne the excellence of their method as consisting in that just pro-

ortion, that union and interpenetration of the universal and the particular,
which must ever pervade all works of decided and true science.” The
Friend, II. p. 416.—Ed.] '

* [R W. i. p.109.——Ed.] + [1b. p’. 222.—Ed.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 40]

Had climbed with vigorous steps ;* which had impressed
So many incidents upon his mind

Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;

\Vhieh, like a book, preserved the memory

Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved,

Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts,

So grateful in themselves, the certainty

Of honorable gain; these ﬁelds, these hills

Which were his living Being, even more

Than his own blood—what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections,+ were to him

A pleasurable feeling of blind love,

The pleasure which there is in life itself.

On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched in a lower\'
key, as the HARRY GILL,i and THE IDIOT BOY,§ the feelings are .
those of human nature in general; though the poet has judi-i
ciously laid the scene in the country, in order to place himself in
the vicinity of interesting images, without the necessity of ascrib-
ing a sentimental perception of their beauty to the persons of his
drama. In THE IDIOT BOY, indeed, the mother’s character is not
so much the real and native product of a “situation where the
essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they
can attain their maturity and Speak a plainer and more emphatic
language,” as it is an impersonation of an instinct abandoned by
judgment. Hence the two following charges seem to me not
wholly groundless: at least, they are the only plausible objec-
tions, which I have heard to that ﬁne poem. The one is, that
the author has not, in the poem itself, taken sufﬁcient care to
preclude from the reader’s fancy the disgusting images of ordi-
nary morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention
to represent. He has even by the “burr, burr, burr,” uncoun-
teracted by any preceding description of the boy’s beauty, assisted
in recalling them. The other is, that the idiocy of the boy is so
evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the

 

 

[‘t hills, which with vigorous step
He had so often climbed.”—Last edition—Ed]
' [“ linking to such acts

The certainty of honorable gain ;
Those ﬁelds, those hills—what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affactions.”—Last edition—Eat]

; LP. w. ii. p. 135.—-.Ed.] §[Ib. i. p. 203—1301]

402 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of
anilc dotage, than an analytic display of maternal affection in its
ordinary workings. ‘ .

In THE THORN,* the poet himself acknowledges in a note the
necessity of an introductory poem, in which he should have por-
trayed the character of the person from whom the words of the
poem are supposed to proceed: a superstitious man moderately
imaginative, of slow faculties and deep feelings, “a captain of a
small trading vessel, for example, who, being past the middle
age of life, had retired upon an annuity, or small independent in-
come, to some village or country town of which he was not a
native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such
men having nothing to do become credulous and talkative from
indolencc.” But in a poem, still more in a lyric poem—and the
Nurse in ROMEO AND JULIET alone prevents me from extending
the remark even to dramatic poetry, if indeed even the Nurse
can be deemed altogether a case in point—it is not possible to
imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourser, without repeating
the effects of dulness and garrulity. However this may be,I
dare assert, that the parts—(and these form the far larger por-
tion of the whole)—which might as well or still better have pro-
ceeded from the poet’s own imagination, and have been spoken
in his own character, are those which have given, and which
Will continue to give, universal delight; and that the passages
exclusively appropriate to the supposed narrator, such as the last
couplet of the third stanza ;1‘ the seven last lines of the tenth fl;
and the ﬁve following stanzas, with the exception of the four

9* [P. W. i’. p. 1‘24. The note to which Mr. Coleridge refers is omitted
in the last editions—Ed]

* 1 “I’ve measured it from side to side;
’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.”

f 9 “Nay, rack your brain—’tis all in vain,
I’ll tell you every thing I know;
But to the. Thorn, and to the Pond
Which is a little step beyond,

 

1 [These two lines are left out in the latter editions. So are the two
stanzas (originally the 11th and 12th) cited in the next note, and some
parts of the present 12th, 13th, and 14th, are altered from what they were
as quoted by Mr. C.—S. 0.] I

‘2 {Prefice, P. W. i. p. BOT—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 403

admirable lines at the commencement of the fourteenth, are felt
by many unprejudiced and unsophisticated hearts, as sudden and
unpleasant sinkings from the height to which the poet had pre-
viously lifted them, and to which he again re-elevates both him.
self and his reader. -

If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice

I wish that you would go:
Perhaps, when you are at the place,
You something of her tale may trace.

I’ll give you the best help I can:
Before you up the mountain go,

Up to the dreary mountain-top,

I’ll tell you all I know.

’Tis now some two-and-twenty years
Since she (her name is Martha Ray)
Gave, with a maiden’s true good will,
Her company to Stephen Bill;

And she was blithe and gay,

And she was happy, happy still
Whene’er she thought of Stephen Hill.

And they had ﬁxed the wedding-day,
The morning that must wed them both;
But Stephen to another maid

Had sworn another oath ;

And, with this other maid, to church
Unthinking Stephen went—

Poor Martha! on that woful day

A pang ofpitiless dismay

Into her soul was sent;

A ﬁre was kindled in her breast.
Which might not burn itself to rest.

They say, full six months after this,
While yet the summer leaves were green,
She to the mountain-top would go,
And there was often seen.

'Tis said, a child was in her womb,

As now to any eye was plain;

She was with child, and she was mad;
Yet often she was sober sad

From her exceeding pain.

011 me! ten thousand times I’d rather
That he had died, that cruel father!

a: an as an ac- as

r at as an ate a»

u an an at an a

404 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

of characters was to be directed, not only (i priori, from ground:
of reason, but both from the few instances in which the poet
himself need be supposed to have been governed by it, and from
the comparative inferiority of those instances ; still more must I
hesitate in my assent to the sentence which immediately follows
the former citation ; and which I can neither admit as particular
fact, nor as general rule. “ The language, too, of these men has
been adopted (puriﬁed indeed from what appear to be its real
defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust)
because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from
which the best part of language is originally derived; and be-
cause, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow
circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of social
vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and 11n-
elaborated expressions.”* To this I reply; that a rustic’s lan-
guage, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far
re-constructed as to be made consistent with the rules of gram-
mar—(which are in essence no other than the laws of universal
logic, applied to psychological materials)—will not difler from
the language of any other man of common sense, however learned
or refined he may be, except as far as the notions, which the
rustic has to convey, are fewer and more indiscriminate. This

Last Christmas when they talked of this,
Old farmer Simpson did maintain,

That in her womb the infant wrought
About its mother’s heart, and brought
Her senses back again:

And, when at last her time drew near,
Her looks were calm, her senses clear.

No more I know, I wish I did,

And I would tell it all to you ;

For what became of this poor child
There’s none that ever knew:

And if a child was born or no,
There’s no one that could ever tell;
And if ’twas born alive or dead,
There’s no one knows, as I have said:
But some remember well,

That Martha Ray about this time
Would up the mountain often climb."

* [Preface P. W. ii. p. 307.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHI‘A LITERARIA. 405

will become still clearer, if we add the consideration—(equally
important though less obvious)——that the rustic, from the more
imperfect development of his faculties, and from the lower state
of their cultivation, aims almost solely to convey insulated facts,
either those of his scanty experience or his traditional belief;
while the educated man chieﬂy seeks to discover and express
those connections of things, or those relative bearings of . fact to
fact, from which some more or less general law is deducible. For
facts are valuable to a wise man, chieﬂy as they lead to the dis-
covery of the indwelling law, which is the true being of things,
the sole solution of their modes of existence, and in the knowl-
edge of which consists our dignity and our power.

As little can I agree with the assertion, that from the objects '
with which the rustic hourly communicates the best part of lan-
guage is formed. For ﬁrst, if to communicate with an object,
implies such an acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of
being discriminately reﬂected on, the distinct knowledge of an
uneducated rustic would furnish a very Scanty vocabulary. The
few things and modes of action requisite for his bodily conveniences
would alone be individualized ; while all the rest of nature
would be expressed by a small number of confused general terms.
Secondly, I deny that the words and combinations of words de-
rived from the objects, with which the rustic is familiar, whether
with distinct or confused knowledge, can be justly said to form
the best part of language. It is more than probable, that many
classes of the brute creation possess discriminating sounds, by
which they can convey to each other notices of such objects as
concern their food, shelter, or safety. Yet we hesitate to call the
aggregate of such sounds a language, otherwise than metaphori-
cally. The best part of human language, properly so called, is
derived from reﬂection on the acts of the mind itself. It is formed
by a voluntary appropriation of ﬁxed symbols to internal acts, to
processes and results of imagination, the greater part of which
have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man ; though in
civilized society, by imitation and passive remembrance of what
they hear from their religious instructors and other superiors, the
most uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed,
nor reaped. If the history of the phrases in hourly currency
among our peasants were traced, a person not previously aware
of the fact would be surprised at ﬁnding so large a number,

406 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

which three or four centuries ago were the exclusive property of
the universities and the schools ; and, at the commencement of
the Reformation, had been transferred from the school to the
pulpit, and thus gradually passed into common life. The ex-
treme difﬁculty, and often the impossibility, of ﬁnding words for
the simplest moral and intellectual processes in the languages of
uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the weightiest obstacle to
the progress of our most zealous and-adroit missionaries. Yet
these tribes are surrounded by the same nature as our peasants
are ; but in still more impressive forms : and they are, moreover,
obliged to particularize many more of them. When, therefore,
Mr. Wordsworth adds, “ accordingly, such a language”—(mean-
ing, as before, the language of rustic life purified from provincial-
ism)—“ arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings,
is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language,
than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who
think that they are conferring honor upon themselves and their
art in proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and capricious
habits of expression ;”* it may be answered, that the language,
which he has in View, can be attributed to rustics with no greater
right than the style of Hooker or Bacon to Tom Brown]L or Sir

*5 [Ib.—“ In. proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies
of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in
order to furnish food for ﬁckle tastes, and ﬁckle appetites, of their own
creation.”—S. 0.]

f [Thomas Brown, the son of a farmer in Shropshire, lived towards the
close of the seventeenth century, died in 1704. His works in prose and
verse, with his remains, were printed in 4 vols. 121110., in 1707. There was
a 9th edition in 1730. “His poems,” says Dr. Drake, in his ‘ Character of
the author,’ “are most of them imitations of antiquity, and so called by
him, but generally so improved under his hands, they may justly be es-
teemed originals. They were generally Odes, Satires, or Epigrams, Para
phrases, Imitations of Horace and Martial.”

His prose works consist of Letters from the Dead to the Living, &c.,
after the manner of Lucian, Dialogues, Essays, Declamations,.Satires, Let-
ters, and other miscellaneous productions, being Amusements Serious and
Comical, calculated for the Meridian of London. I would fain believe, to
speak from a mere glance into these volumes, that the Meridian of London
is improved since Mr. Brown’s days : and am sorry to learn that this “vul~
gar writer’s” works are not likely just yet to visit

“The waters of Obliviou’s lake.”

The author appears to have possessed, besides an acquaintance with French,

BIOGRAPE [A LITERARIA. 497

Roger L’Estrange.* Doubtless, if what is peculiar to each were
omitted in each, the result must needs be the same. Further,
that the poet, who uses an illogical diction, or a style ﬁtted to
excite only the low and changeable pleasure of wonder by means
of groundless novelty, substitutes a language of folly and vanity,

Italian, and Spanish, some classic lore, and to have employed it in working
up the alloy and baser portions of ancient wit into modern shapes. “And
if he was not so nice in the ‘choice of his authors,” says Dr. Drake, “as
might be expected from a man of his taste, he must be excused; because,
doing those things for his subsistence, he did not consult his own liking so
much as his booksellers’, taking such as they offered the best price for.”
Poor man! he had better have tried to dig, and ought to have been less
ashamed to beg. than to follow in the track of those who, though they do not
call evil good, yet stimulate under pretence of satirizing it. His eulogist
and defender adds, “Nor can he be blam’d for this, since fortune having
provided no other way for him to live by, prudence directed him to prefer
the drudgery of most gain, before a more specious one of applause, and
taught him not to barter his ease and proﬁt for the reputation of being
nice.” What lax notions must have been generally tolerated in times when
a grave man could write such a sentence as this in sober earnest, weighing
money gains against reputation for delicacy, and leaving morals out of the
question! It would seem as if Charles Lamb’s remark On the Artiﬁcial
Comedy of the last Century must be applied to a great deal of our literature
beside comedy, both in that century and the preceding one: that it is out
of the moral world altogether, to be judged by no laws but those of a land
where laws of conscience are unrecognized—a Utopian place, where
“ pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom.”—S. C.]

9* [Sir Roger L’Estrange, of an ancient family in Norfolk, is another
“eminent writer in the 17th century,” who eminently displays the worse
characteristics of that period of our literature. He lived from about 1617
to December 12, 1705 ; was a royalist; contrived to keep in with Cromwell,
but was in trouble, as a disaffected person, under King William. He wrote
a great many tracts for those times, but as an author is at present best
known by the Alliance of Divine Ofﬁces, exhibiting all the Liturgies of the
Church of England since the Reformation, 1699, folio—The Reign of Charles
I, 1654—Histor y of the Times 1687, and a tract against Milton, entitled No
Blind Guides.

His writings have been characterized with great severity by Mr. Thomas
Gordon, who declares them “not ﬁt to be read by any who have taste
and breeding”——“ full of technical terms, of phrases picked up in the streets
from apprentices and porters.” “ His sentences,” says the critic, “beside
their grossness, are lively nothings, which can never be translated.” After
giving a specimen, “ Yet this man,” he adds, “was reckoned a master, nay,
a reformer of the English language; a man who writ no language, nor does
it appear that he understood any; witness his miserable translations of
Cicero’s ()jices and Josephus.—Sir Roger had a genius for buﬂ‘oonery and n

408 BIOGILAPHIA LITERARIA.

not for that of the rustic, but for that of good sense and natural
feeling.

Here let me be permitted to remind the reader, that the posi-
tions, which I controvert, are contained in the sentences—“ a se-
lection of the real language of men ;”*—~—-“ the language of these
men” (that is, men in low and rustic life) “ has been adopted ; I

ave proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to
dopt the very language of men.”

“ Between the language of prose and that of metrical composi-
tion, there neither is, nor can be, any essentialdﬁerence ."’ it is
against these exclusively that my opposition is directed.

I object, in the very ﬁrst instance, to an cquivocation in the
use of the word “ real.” Every man’s language varies, according
to the extent of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and
the depth or quickness of his feelings. Every man’s language
has, ﬁrst, its individualities ; secondly, the common properties of
the class to which he belongs ; and thirdly, words and phrases of
universal use. The language of Hooker, Bacon, Bishop Taylor,
and Burke differs from the common language of the learned class
only by the superior number and novelty of the thoughts and re»
lations which they had to convey. The language of Algernon
Sidney differs not at all from that, which every well-educated
gentleman would wish to write, and (with due allowances for the.
undeliberateness, and less connected train, of thinking natural and
proper to conversation) such as he would wish to talk. Neither
one nor the other differ half as much from the general language
of cultivated society, asﬂhe language of Mr. VVordsworth’s home»
liest composition differs from that of a common peasant} For
“real” therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua com-
mzmis. And this, we have proved, is no more to be found in the

rabble, and higher he never went—To put his books into the hands of
youth, or boys, for whom zEsop, by him burlesqued, was designed, is to
vitiate their taste, and to give them a poor, low turn of thinking: not to
mention the vile and slavish principles of the man. He has not only
turned jEsop’s plain beasts from the simplicity of nature into jesters and
buﬁ'oons, but out of the mouths of animals inured to the boundless freedom
of air and deserts, has drawn doctrines of servitude and a defence of
tyranny.” (Quoted from the General Dictionary, Historical and Critical,
vol. vii.)—-—S. 0.] '

9* [“ A selection of language really : sed by men,” in the later edit-ions.“-

s. o]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 409

phraseology of low and rustic life than in that of any other class.
Omit the peculiarities of each and the result of course must be com-
mon to all. And assuredly the omissions and changes to be made
in the language of rustics, before it could be transferred to any spe«
cies of poem, except the drama or other professed imitation, are
at least as numerous and weighty, as would be required in adapt-
ing to the same purpose the ordinary language of tradesmen and
manufacturers. Not to mention, that the language so highly ex-
tolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in every county, nay in every
village, according to the accidental character of the clergyman,
the existence or non-existence of schools; or even, perhaps, as
the exciseman, publican, and barber happen to be, or not to be,
zealous politicians, and readers of the weekly new spaper 3970 60720
publico. Anterior to cultivation the lmgua commzmz's of every
country, as Dante has well observed, exists eveiy where 1n pa1ts,
and nowhere as a whole.

Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addi-
tion of the words, “in a state of excitement.” For the nature of
a man’s words, when he is strongly affected by joy, grief, or anger,
must necessarily depend on the number and quality of the general
truths, conceptions and images, and of the words expressing them,
with which his mind had been previously stored. For the
property of passion'is not to create; but to set in increased activ-
ity. At least, whatever new connections of thoughts or images,
or—(whieh is equally, if not more than equally, the appropriate
effect of strong excitement)—whatever generalizations of truth or
experience the heat of passion may produce; yet the terms of
their conveyance must have pre-existed in his former conversa-
tions, and are only collected and crowded together by the unusual
stimulation. It is indeed very possible to adopt in a poem the
unmeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and other blank counters,
which an unfurnished or confused understanding intei poses at
short intervals, 1n order to keep hold of his subject, which 15 still
slipping from him, and to give him time for recollection, or, in
mere aid of vacancy, as in the scanty companies of a country
stage the same player pops backwards and forwards, in order to
prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the procession of Mac-
beth, or Henry VIII. But what assistance to the poet, or orna-
ment to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture.
Nothing assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more

voL. .111. S‘ '

410 BIO GRAPHIA LITERARIA.

widely from the apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent
feeling, in which the passion is greater and of longer endurance
than to be exhausted or satisﬁed by a single representation of the
image or incident exciting it. Such repetitions I admit to be a
beauty of the highest kind; as illustrated by Mr. Wordsworth
himself from the song of Deborah. At her feet he bowed, he fell,
he lay down ; at her feet he bowed, he fell .' where he bowed,
(here he fell down dead. Judges v. 27.

 

CHAPTER XVIII.

LANGUAGE OF METRICAL COMPOSITION, \VHY AND VVHEREIN ESSEN-
TIALLY DIFFERENT FROM THAT OF PROSE—ORIGIN AND ELE-
MENTS OF METRE—ITS NECESSARY CONSEQUENCES, AND THE CON-
DITIONS THEREBY IMPOSED ON THE METRICAL \VRITER IN THE
CHOICE OF HIS DICTION.

I CONCLUDE, therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; and
that, were it not impracticable, it would still be useless. For
the very power of making the selection implies the previous pos-
session of the language selected. Or where can the poet have
lived? And by what rules could he direct his choice, which
would not have enabled him to select and arrang his words b1
the light of his own judgment? We do not adopf the language
of a class by the mere adoption of such words exclusively, as that
class would use, or at least understand; but likewise by following
the order, in which the words of such men are wont to succeed
each other. Now this order, in the intercourse of uneducated
men, is distinguished from the diction of their superiors in knowl~
edge and power, by the greater disjunction and separation in the
component parts of that, Whatever it be, which they wish to
communicate. There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind,
that surview, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what
he is to convey, appertaining to any one point; and by this means
so to subordinate and arrange the different palts according to
their 1elative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an
organized whole

BIOGRAPHJA LITERA RIA. 411'

Now I will take the ﬁrst stanza, on which I have chanced to
open, in the Lyrical Ballads. It is one of the most simple and
least peculiar in its language.

“In distant countries have I been,
And yet I have not often seen
A healthy man, a man full grown,
Weep in the public roads, alone.
But such a one, on English ground,
And in the broad highway, I met;
Along the broad highway he came,
His cheeks with tears were wet:

Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad;
And in his arms a lamb he had?"6

The words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks
of life ; and of course not less so in the hamlet and cottage than
in the shop, manufactory, college, or palace. But is this the
order in which the rustic would have placed the words? I am
grievously deceived, if the following less compact mode of com-
mencing the same tale be not a far more faithful copy. “ I have
been in a many parts, far and near, and I don’t know that I ever
saw before a man crying by himself in the public road ; a grown
man I mean, that was neither sick nor hurt, &c. 850.” But
when I turn to the following stanza in The Thorn :

“ At all times of the day and night

This wretched woman thither goes;

And she is known to every star,

And every wind that blows:

And there beside the Thorn, she sits,

When the blue daylight’s in the skies,

And when the whirlwind’s on the hill,

Or frosty air is keen and still,

And to herself she cries,

Oh misery 1 Oh misery!

Oh woe is me! Oh misery l”+
and compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with
that which I can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life,
from such a narrator, as is supposed in the note to the poem;
compare it either in the succession of the images or of the sen~
tences ; I am reminded of the sublime prayer and hymn of
praise, which Milton, in opposition to an established liturgy, pre-

*' [The last of the Flock, lst stanza. P. W. i. p. 169.—S. 0.]
-| [P. W. ii. p. 127.—S. 0.]

'412 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

sents as a fair specimen of common extemporary devotion, and
such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired minister
of a conventiclel And I reﬂect with delight, how little a mere
theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the
processes of genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius,
who possesses, as Mr. Wordsworth, if ever- man did, most assur-
edly does possess, '

“The Vision and the Faculty divine.”

One point then alone remains, but that the most important,
its examination having been, indeed, my chief inducement for the

1‘ l preceding inquisition. “ There neither is nor can be any essen-

ll

tial difference between the language of prose and metrical com«
position.”’r 2 Such is Mr. VVordsworth’s assertion. Now prose it
self, at least in all argumentative and consecutive works, differs,
and ought to differ, from the language of conversation ; even asi

* [The Excursion, B. i. P. W. vi. 1). 6.——S. 0.]

Jr [P. W'. ii. p. 315. Preface. The word essential is marked with italics in
the edition of 1840.—S. 0.]

1 It is no less an error in teachers, than a torment to the poor children, to
enforce the necessity of reading as they would talk. In order to cure them
of singing as it is called, that is, of too great a difference, the child is made
to repeat the words with his eyes from off the book; and then, indeed, his
tones resemble talking, as far as his fears, tears and trembling will permit.
But as soon as the eye is again. directed to the printed page, the spell begins
anew; for an instinctive sense tells the child’s feelings, that to utter its own
momentary thoughts, and to recite the written thoughts of another, as of
another, and a far wiser than himself, are two widely different things ; and
as the two acts are accompanied with widely different feelings, so must they
justify different modes of enunciation. Joseph Lancaster, among his other
sophistications of the excellent Dr. Bell’s invaluable system, cures this fault
of singing by hanging fetters and chains on the child, to the miigic of which
one of his school-fellows, who walks before, dolefully chants out the child’s
last speech and confession, birth, parentage, and education. And this soul-
benumbing ignominy, this unholy and heart-hardening burlesque on the
last fearful inﬂiction of outraged law, in pronouncing the sentence to which
the stern and familiarized judge not seldom bursts into tears, has been ex-
tolled as a happy and ingenious method of remedying—What? and how ?——-
why, one extreme in order to introduce another, scarce less distant from good
sense, and certainly likely to have worse moral effects, by enforcing a sem-
blance of petulant ease and self-sufﬁciency, in repression, and possibly after-
perversion of the natural feelings. I have to beg Dr. Bell’s pardon for' this
connection of the two names, but he knows that contrast is no less power-
ful a cause of association than likeness.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. . 418

reading ought to differ from talking; A‘Unless therefore the differ-
ence denied be that of mere words, as materials common to all
styles of writing, and not of the style itself in the universally ad-
mitted sense of the term, it might be naturally presumed that
there must exist a still greater between the'ordonnance of poetic
' composition and that of prose, than is expected to distinguish
prose from ordinary conversation.

There are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of lit.
erature, of apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public.
wonder as new and startling truths, but which, on examination,
have shrunk into tame and harmless truisms; as the eyes of a
cat, seen in the dark, have been mistaken for ﬂames of ﬁre. But
Mr. Wordsworth is among the last men, to whom a delusion of '
this kind would be attributed by any one, who had enjoyed the
slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and character.
Where an objection has been anticipated by such an author as
natural, his answer to it must needs be interpreted in some sense
which either is, or has been, or is capable of being controverted.
My object then must be to discover some other meaning for the
term “ essential difference” in this place, exclusive of the indis-
tinction and community of the words themselves. For whether
there ought to exist a class of words in the English, in any
degree resembling the poetic dialect of the Greek and Italian,
is a question of very subordinate importance. The number of
such words would be small indeed, in our language ; and even in
the Italian and Greek, they consist not so much of different words,
as of slight differences in the forms of declining and conjugating
the same‘words; forms, doubtless, which havingbeen, at some
period more or less remote, the common grammatic ﬂexions of
some tribe or province, had been accidentally appropriated to
poetry by the general admiration of certain master intellects, the
ﬁrst established lights of inspiration, to whom that dialect hap-
pened to be native.

Essence, in its primary signiﬁcation, means the principle of in-
dividuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing,
as that particular thing. It is equivalent to the idea of a thing,
whenever we use the word, idea, with philosophic precision.
Existence, on the other hand, is distinguished from essence, by
the superinduction of reality. Thus we speak of the essence,
and essential properties of a circle ; but we do not therefore as

O

4:14 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

sert, that any thing, which really exists, is mathematically cir-
)cular. Thus too, without any tautology, we contend for the ex-
[ istence of the Supreme Being; that is, for a reality correspondent
:to the idea. There is, next, a secondary use of the word es-
sence, in which it signiﬁes the point or ground of contra-distinc-
tion between two modiﬁcations of the same substance or subject.
Thus we should be allowed to say, that the style of architecture
of Westminster Abbey is essentially different from that of Saint
Paul, even though both had been built with blocks cut into the
same form, and from the same quarry. Only in this latter sense
of the term must it have been denied by Mr. Wordsworth (for in
this sense alone is it afﬁrmed by the general opinion) that the
language of poetry (that is the formal construction, or architec-
ture, of the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of
prose. Now the burden of the proof lies with the oppugner, not
with the supporters of the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth, in
consequence, assigns as the proof of his position, “that not only
the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the
most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference
to the metro, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but
likewise that some of the most interesting parts of the best poems
will be found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is
Well written. The truth of this assertion might be demonstrated
by innumerable passages from almost all the poetical writings,
even of Milton himself.” He then quotes Gray’s sonnet—

“ In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddening Phcebus lifts his golden ﬁre;
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful ﬁelds resume their green attire.
These ears, alas! for other notes repine;

A dtﬂ‘erent object do these eyes require;

Jig lonely anguish melts no heart but mine ;
And in my breast the imperfect jog/s expire.

Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men ;
The ﬁelds to all their wonted tribute bear ;

To warm their little loves the birds complain:
I fruitless mourn to him that can not hear,
And weep the more, because I weep in vain.”

and adds the following remark :—“ It will easily be perceived,
that the only part of this Sonnet which “is of any value, is the

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 4.15

lines printed in Italics; it is equally obvious, that, except in the
rhyme, and in the use of the single word “fruitless” for fruitlessly,
which is so far a defect, the language of these lines does in no
resPect differ from that of prose.”*

An idealist defending his system by the fact, that when asleep
We often believe ourselves awake, was well answered by his plain
neighbor, “ Ah, but when awake do we ever believe ourselves
asleep ?” ”Things identicalmust be convertible- The preceding
passage seems to réét'ahﬁ similar Sophism. For the question is
not, whether there may not occur in prose an order of words,
which would be equally proper in a poem; nor whether there
are not beautiful lines and sentences of frequent occurrence in
good poems, which would be equally becoming as well as beau
tiful in good prose; for neither the one nor the other has ever
been either denied or doubted by any one. The true question
must be, whether there are not modes of expression, a construc-
tion, and an order of sentences, which are in their ﬁt and natural
place in a serious prose composition, but would be disproportionate
and heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and vice versa, whether
in the language of a serious poem there may not be an arrange«
ment both of words and sentences, and a use and selection of
(what are called) ﬁgures of speech, both as to their kind, their
frequency, and their occasions, which on a subject of equal weight
would be vicious and alien in correct and manly prose. I con-
tend, that in both cases this unﬁtness of each for the place of
the other frequently will and ought to exist.

0 And ﬁrst from the origin of metre. This I would trace to the
balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which
strives to hold in check the workings of passion. It might be
easily explained likewise in what manner this salutary antagon-
ism is assisted by the very state, which it counteracts ; and how
this balance of antagonists became organized into metre (in the
usual acceptation of that term), by a supervening act of the will
and judgment, consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleas
ure. Assuming these principles, as the data of our argument, we
deduce from them two legitimate conditions, which the critic is
entitled to expect in every metrical work. First, that, as the
elements of metre owe theim to a state of increased ex-
citement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the nat

* [P. W. ii. pp. 313—14.—S. 0.]

I

416 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

ural.]anguage of excitement. Secondly, that as these elements
are formed into metre artiﬁcially, by_a_._ voluntary . act, with the
design and for the purpose of blending delight with emotion, so
the traces of present volition should throughout the metrical lan- -
guage be proportionably discernible. Now these two conditions
must be reconciled and co-present. There must be not only a
partnership, but a union ; an interpenetration of passion and of
will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose. Again,
this union can be manifested only in a frequency of forms and
ﬁgures of speech (originally the offspring of passion, but now the
adopted children of power), greater than would be desired or en-
dured, where the emotion is not voluntarily encouraged and kept
., up for the sake of that pleasure, which such emotion, so tempered
and mastered by the will, is found capable of communicating.
It not only dictates, but of itself tends to produce a more frequent
employment of picturesque and vivifying language, than would
be natural m any other case, in which there did not exist, as
there does in the present, a previous and well understood, though
tacit, compact between the poet and his reader, that the latter
is entitled to expect, and the former bound to supply this species
and degree of pleasurable excitement. We may in some measure
apply to this union the. answer of Polixenes, in the Winter’s Tale,
to Perdita’s neglect of the streaked gilliﬂowers, because she had
Md heard it said,

“ There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares
\Vith great creating nature.
Pol. Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; so, o’er that art,
Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art,
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock ;.
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art,
Which does mend nature,—change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.”".t

Secondly, I argue from the effects of metre. As far as metre
acts in and for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and suscep-
tibility both of the general feelings and of the attention. This.
effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprise, and

* [Act iv. 50. iii.—--S. 0.]

.BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. 417

by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratiﬁed and still res

excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment ob-
jects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their
aggregate inﬂuence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine
during animated conversation, they act powerfully, though them-
selves unnoticed. Where, therefore, correspondent food and ap-
propriate matter are not provided for the attention and feelings
thus roused there must needs be a disappointment felt ; like that
of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we
had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.

The discussion on the powers of metre in the preface is highly
ingenious and touches at all points on truth. But I can not ﬁnd
any statement of its powers considered abstractly and separately.
On the contrary Mr. Wordsworth seems always to estimate metre
by the powers, which it exerts during (and, as I think, in conse-
quence of ) its combination with other elements of poetry. Thus
the previous difﬁculty is left unanswered, what the elements are,
with which it must be combined, in order to produce its own ef-’
fects to any pleasurable purpose. Double and tri-syllable rhymes,
indeed, form a lower species of wit, and, attended to exclusively
for their own sake, may become a source of momentary amuse-
ment; as in poor Srnart’s distich to the Welsh Squire who had
promised him a‘hare :

“ Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader l
Hast sent the bare? or hast thou swallow’d her l”

' But for any poetic purposes, metre resembles (if the aptness
'of the simile may excuse its meanness) yeast, worthless or disa
greeable by itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with
which it is proportionally combined.

The reference to THE CHILDREN IN THE WO0D* by no means
satisﬁes my judgment. We all willingly throw ourselves back
for awhile into the feelings of our childhood. This ballad, there—
fore, we read under such recollections of our own childish feel-

ings, as would equally endear to us poems, which Mr. Words-

worth himself would regard as faulty in the opposite extreme of
gaudy and technical ornament. Before the invention of printing,
and in a still greater degree, before the introduction of writing,
metre, especially alliterative metre (whether alliterative at the

* [P. 333.——s. 0.]
5*

.M b

418 BIO GRAPH IA LITERARIA.

beginning of the words, as in PIERCE PLOUMAN, or at the end, as
in rhymes), possessed an independent value as assisting the recol-
lection, and consequently the preservation, of any series of truths or
incidents. But I am not convinced by the collation of facts, that ‘
THE CHILDREN IN THE W 00D owes either its preservation, or its
popularity, to its metrical form. Mr. Marshal’s repository affords
a number Of tales in prose inferior in pathos and general merit,
some of as old a date, and many as widely popular. TOM HICK-
ATHRIFT, J ACK THE GIANT-KILLER, GOODY TWO-SHOES, and LIT-
TLE RED RIDING-HOOD are formidable rivals. And that they
have continued in prose, can not be fairly explained by the as-
sumption, that the comparative meanness of their thoughts and
images precluded even the humblest forms of metre. The scene
of GOODY Two-SHOES in the church is perfectly susceptible of
metrical narration; and, among the Qavyata ﬂavyaaréwm even
of the present age, I do not recollect a more astonishing image
than that of the “whole rookery, that ﬂew out of the giant’s
beard,” scared by the tremendous voice, with which this monster
answered the challenge of the heroic TOM HICKATHRIFT !

If from these we turn to compositions universally, and inde~
pendently of all early associations, beloved and admired ; would
the MARIA, THE MONK, or THE POOR MAN’S Ass of Sternefle be
read with more delight, or have a better chance of immortality,
had they without any change in the diction been composed in
rhyme, than in their present state? If I am not grossly mis-
taken, the general reply would be in the negative. Nay, I will
confess, that, in Mr. Wordsworth’s own volumes, the ANECDOTE
FOR FATHERS, SIMON LEE, ALICE FELL, BEGGARS, and THE SAILOR’s
MOTHERJ notwithstanding the beauties which are to be found in
each of them where the poet interposes the music of his own
thoughts, would have been more delightful to me in prose, told
and managed, as by Mr. Wordsworth they would have been, in a
moral essay or pedestrian tour.

Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and
therefore excites the question: Why is the attention to be thus
stimulated ? Now the question can not be answered by the pleas-
ure of the metre itself: for this we have shown to be conditional,

* [Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy. Works II. pp. 247, 394,

271, 312.—S. 0.]
1' [P. W. I. p. ‘32. V. p. 17. I. p. 13. II. p. 101. I. p. 182.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 419

and dependent on the appropriateness of the thoughts and ex-
pressions, to which the metrical form is superadded. Neither
can I conceive any other answer that can be rationally given,
Short of this. W1 am about to use a lan-
guaggliﬂérent from that of prose, Besides, where the language
is not such, how interesting soever the reﬂections are, that a1e
capable of being drawn by a philosophic mind from the thoughts
or incidents of the poem, the metre itself must often become
feeble. Take the three last stanzas of THE SAILOR’S MOTHER,
for instance. If I could for a moment abstract from the effecti
produced on the author’s feelings, as a man, by the incident at
the time of its real occurrence, I would dare appeal to his own
judgment, whether in the metre itself be found a sufﬁcient reason
for their being written metrically ?

And, thus continuing, she said

“ I had a Son, who many a day

Sailed on the seas ; but he is dead;

In Denmark he was cast away ;

And I have travelled far as Hull, to see
What clothes he might have left, or other property.“I

The Bird and Cage they both were his :

’Twas my Son’s Bird: and neat and trim

He kept it ; many voyages

This Singing-bird hath gone with him ;

When last he sailed he left the Bird behind ;

As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind.

He to a Fellow-lodger’s care

Had left it, to be watched and fed,

Till he came back again ; and there

I found it when my Son was dead;

And now, God help me for my little wit !

I trail it with me, Sir ! he took so much delight in it.”

 

v-f

* [In the edit. of 1840,

“ And I have travelled weary miles to see
If aught which he had owned might still remain for me.”

The last line of stanza5 in that edit. stands thus :
“From bodings, as might be, that hung upon his mind.”
The end of stanza 6 has been altered thus :

“And pipe its song in safety ;—-there
I found it when my Son was dead;
And now, God help me for my little wit!
I bear it with me, Sir ;-—he took so much delight in it.”—-S. 0.]

4:20 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

If disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as ta
make the rhymes perceptible, even tri syllable rhymes could
scarcely produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we
feel heie 1n ﬁnding 7hymes at all 1n sentences so exclusively col-
loquial. I would further ask whether, but for that visionary
state, into which the ﬁgure of the woman and the susceptibility
of his own genius had placed the poet’s imagination,——(a state,
which spreads its inﬂuence and coloring over all, that co-exists
with the exciting cause, and in which

“The simplest and the most familiar things
Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them”),*

I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt
downfall 1n these verses from the preceding stanza?

“The ancient spirit is not dead ;
Old times, thought I, are breathing there;
Proud was I that my country bred
Such strength, a dignity so fair ;
She begged an alms, like one in poor estate;
I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate.”

It must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that
those stanzas furnish the only fair instance that I have been able
to discover in all Mr. Wordsworth’s writings, of an actual adop-
tion, or true imitation of the real and very language of low and
rustic life, freed from provincialisms.

Thirdly, I deduce the position from all the causes elsewhere

* Altered from the description of Night-Mair in the REMORSE.

“ Oh Heaven I ’twas frightful l N ow run down and stared at
By hideous shapes that can not be remembered ;
Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing;
But only being afraid—stiﬂed with fear !
While every goodly or familiar form
Has a strange power of spreading terror round me 1’"

N..B Though Shakspeme has, for his own alljustgfyz'ng purposes, intro-
duced the Night-Mare with her own foals, yet Mair means a Sister, or per-
haps a Hag.

 

‘ [Coleridge’s Poet. Works, VII. p. 367. Act iv. sc. 1. Altered thus:

0 sleep of horrors! Now run down and stared at
By forms so hideous that they mock remembrance —
Now seeing nothing, die—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 42]

assigned, which render metre the proper form of poetry, and
poetry imperfect and defective without metre. Metre, therefore,
having been connected with poetry most often and by a peculiar
ﬁtness, whatever else is combined with metre, must, though it
be no's itself essentially poetic, have nevertheless some property
in common with poetry, as an intermedium of affinity, a sort (if
I may dare borrow a well-known phrase from technical chemis-
try) of morclazmt between it and the super-added metre. Now,
poetry, Mr. Wordsworth truly afﬁrms, does always imply passion;
which word must be here understood in its most general sense“
as an excited state of the feelings and faculties. And as every
passion has its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its charac-
teristic modes of expression. But where there exists that degree
of genius and talent which entitles a writer to aim at the hon-
ors of a poet, the very act of poetic composition itself is, and is
allowed to imply and to produce, an unusual state of excitement, .
which of course justiﬁes and'demands a correspondent difference
of language, as truly, though not perhaps in as marked a degree, ,
as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The vividness
of the descriptions or deelamations in Donne, or Dryden, is as
much and as often derived from the force and fervor of the de-
scriber, as from the reﬂections, forms or incidents, which consti-
tute their subject and materials. ”The wheels take ﬁre from the
mere rapidity of their motion. To what extent, and under
what modiﬁcations, this may be admitted to act, I shall attempt
to deﬁne in an after-remark on Mr. Wordsworth’s reply to this
objection, or rather on his objection to this reply, as already anti-
eipated in his preface.

Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the
same argument in a more general form, I adduce the high spirit-
ual instinct of the human being impelling us to seek unity by
harmonious adjustment, and thus establishing the principle, that
all the parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to the
more important and essential parts. This and the preceding ar-
guments may be strengthened by the reﬂection, that the compo-
sition of a poem is among the imitative arts ; and that imitation,
as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the
same throughout the radically different, or .of the different
throughout a base radically the same.

Lastly. I appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all eounv

122 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

tries and in all ages, as authorizing the opinion (deduced from all
the foregoing), that in every import of the word essential, which
would not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and
ought to be, an essential difference between the language of
prose and of metrical composition.

' In Mr. VVordsworth’s criticism of Gray’s Sonnet, the reader’s
sympathy with his praise or blame of the different parts is taken
for granted rather perhaps too easily. He has not, at least, at-
tempted to win or compel it by argumentative analysis. In my
conception at least, the lines rejected as of no value do, with the
exception of the vs rs differ as much and as little from the
language of common 11 , s those which he has printed in italics
as possessing genuine excellence. Of the ﬁve lines thus honora-
bly distinguished, two of them differ from prose even more wide-
ly than the lines which either precede or follow, in the position

-of the words.

“ A diﬁ‘erent object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine ',
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.”

nut were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of
which no man ever doubted ?—videlicet, that there are sentences,
which would be equally in their place both in verse and prose.
Assuredly it does not prove the point, which alone requires proof;
namely, that there are not passages, which would suit the one
and not suit the other. The first line of this sonnet is distin-
guished from the ordinary language of men by the epithet to
morning. For we will set aside, at present, the consideration,
that the particular word “smiling” is hackneyed, and, as it in-
volves a sort of personiﬁcation, not quite congruous with the com-
mon and material attribute of “ shining.” And, doubtless, this
adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional description,
where no particular attention is demanded for the quality of the
thing, would be noticed as giving a poetic cast to a man’s con-
versation. Should the sportsman exclaim, “Come boys! the
rosy morning calls you up :”—he will be supposed to have some
song in his head. But no one suspects this, when he says, “A
wet morning shall not conﬁne us to our beds.” This then is
either a defect in poetry, or it is not. Whoever should decide in
the afﬁrmative. I would request him to re-peruse any one poem.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 423

of any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from
ZEschylus to Shakspeare ; and to strike out (in thought I mean)
every instance of this kind. If the number of these fancied era-
sures did not startle him; or if he continued to deem the work
improved by their total omission ; he must advance reasons of no
ordinary strength and evidence, reasons grounded in the essence of
human nature. Otherwise I should not hesitate to consider him
as a man not so much proof against all authority, as dead to it.
The second line,
“ And reddening Phcebus lifts his golden ﬁre ;——”

has indeed almost as many faults as.words. But then it is a bad
line, not because the language is distinct from that of prose ; but
because it conveys incongruous images ; because it confounds the
cause and the effect, the real thing with the personiﬁed represen-
tative of the thing; in short, because it differs from the language
of good sense I That the “ Phcnbus” is hackneyed, and a school-
boy image, is an accidental fault, dependent on the age in which
the author wrote, and not deduced from the nature of the thing.
That it is part of an exploded mythology, is an objection more
deeply grounded. Yet when the torch of ancient learning was
rekindled, so cheering were its beams, that our eldest poets, cut
off by Christianity from all accredited machinery, and deprived
of all acknowledged guardians and symbols of the great objects
of nature, were naturally induced to adopt, as a poetic language,
those fabulous personages, those forms of the* supernatural in
nature, which had given them such dear delight in the poems of
their great masters. Nay, even at this day what scholar of ge-
nial taste will not so far sympathize with them, as to read with
pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser, what he would per-
haps condemn as puerile in a modern poet?

I remember no poet, whose writings would safelier stand the
test of Mr. Wordsworth’s theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr.
Wordsworth say, that the style of the following stanza is either
undistinguished from prose, and the language of ordinary life?
Or that it is vicious, and that the stanzas are blots in THE FAERY
QUEEN ?

“‘ But still more by the mechanical system of philosophy which has need-
lesslyinfected our theological opinions, and teaching us to consider the

world in its relation to God, as of a building to its mason, leaves the idea
of omnipresence a mere abstract notion in the state-room of our reason.

424 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

“ By this the northern wagoner had set
His sevenfold teine behind the steclfast starre,
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But ﬁrmc is ﬁxt and sendeth light from farre
To all that in the wild deep wandering arre :
And chearfull chaunticlere with his note shrill
Had warned once that Phcebus’ ﬁery carre
In hast was climbing up the easterne hill,
Full envious that night so long his roome did ﬁll.”

“ At last the golden orientall gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
And Phcebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate,
Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
And hurl’d his glist’ring beams through gloomy ayre :
Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway
He started up, and did him selfe prepayre
In sun-bright armes and battailous array;
For with that pagan proud he combat will that day.”+

On the contrary to how many passages, both in hymn books
and in blank verse poems, could I (were it not invidious) direct
the reader’s attention, the style of which is most unpoetic, be—
cause, and only because, it is the style of prose? He will not
suppose me capable of having in my mind such verses, as

“ I put my hat upon my head
And walk’d into the Strand ;
And there I met another man,
Whose hat was in his hand.”

To such Specimens it would indeed be a fair and full reply,
that these lines are not bad, because they are unpoetic ; but be-
cause they are empty of all sense and feeling ; and that it were
an idle attempt to prove that “Wt
' is self-evident that he is not a ma1 ” But the sense shall be
Wand digniﬁed, the subject
interesting and treated with feeling; and yet the style shall, not—
withstanding all these merits, be justly blamable as prosaic, and
solely because the words and the order of the words would ﬁnd
their appropriate place in prose, but are not suitable to metrical
composition. The CIVIL WARS of Daniel is an instructive, and
even interesting work ; but take the following stanzas (and from

* [Book ii. can. i. st. 1.] 1- [Book i. can. v. st. 2.]
1’ [Preface, pp. 333—4.] .

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 425

the hundred instances which abound I. might probably have se
lected others far more striking) :

“ And to the end we may with better ease
Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to show
What were the times foregoing near to these,
That these we may with better proﬁt know.
Tell how the world fell into this disease;

And how so great distemperature did grow
So shall we see with what degrees it came;
How things at full do soon wax out of frame.”

“ Ten kings had from the Norman Conqu’ror reign’d
With intermix’d and variable fate,

When England to her greatest height attain’d

Of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state;
After it had with much ado sustain’d

The violence of princes, with debate

For titles, and the often mutinies

Of nobles for their ancient liberties.

For ﬁrst, the Norman, conqu’ring all by might,
By might was forc’d to keep what he had got ;
Mixing our customs and the form of right

With foreign constitutions, he had brought;
Mast’ring the mighty, humbling the poorer wight,
By all severest means that could be wrought ;
And, making the succession doubtful, rent

His new-got state, and left it turbulent?”l6

Will it be contended on the one side, that these lines are mean
and senseless? Or on~the other, that they are not prosaic, and
for that reason unpoetic? This poet’s well—merited epithet is
that of the “ well-languaged Daniel ;” but likewise, and by the
consent of his contemporaries no less than of all succeeding crit
ics, the “ prosaic Daniel.” Yet those, who thus designate this
wise and amiable writer from the frequent incorrespondency of
his diction to his metre in the majority of his compositions, not
only deem them valuable and interesting on other accounts ; but
willingly admit, that there are to be found throughout his poems.
and especially in his EPISTLES and in his HYMEN’s TRIUMPH,
many and exquisite specimens of that style which, as the neutral
ground of prose and verse, is common to both. A ﬁne and al-
most faultless extract, eminent as for other beauties, so for its
perfection in this species of diction, may be seen in La mb’s DRA'

* [Book I. Stanz-as vii. viii. and ix.]

£26 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

MATIC SPECIMENS,* a work of various interest from the nature of
the selections themselves,——(all from the plays of Shakspeare’s
contemporaries),—and deriving a high additional value from the
notes, which are full of just and original criticism, expressed with
all the freshness of originality.

Among the possible effects of practical adherence to a theory,
that aims to identify the style of prose and verse—(if it does not
indeed claim for the latter a yet nearer resemblance to the aver-
age style of men in the vivd voce intercourse of real life)—-we
might anticipate the following as not. the least likely to occur.
It will happen, as I have indeed before observed, that the metre
itself, the sole acknowledged difference, will occasionally become
metre to the eye only. The existence of prosaisms, and that
they detract from the merit of a poem, must at length be con-
ceded, when a number of successive lines can be rendered, even
to the most delicate ear, unrecognizable as verse, or as having
even been intended for verse, by simply transcribing them as
prose : when if the poem be in blank verse, this can be effected
without any alteration, or at most by merely restoring one or two

9* [Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of
Shakspeare, with notes by Charles Lamb. Vol. i. p. 284.
The ﬁrst extract, Love in Infancy, is as follows:

Ah, I remember well (and how can I

But evermore remember well) when ﬁrst

Our ﬂame began, when scarce we knew what was
The ﬂame we felt: when as we sat and sigh’d

And look’d upon each other, and conceiv’d

Not what we ail’d, yet something we did ail;

And yet were well, and yet we were not welL

And what was our disease we could not tell,

Then would we kiss, then sigh, then look: And thus
In that ﬁrst garden of our simpleness

\Ve spent our childhood: but when years began

To reap the fruit of knowledge; ah, how then
Would she with graver looks, with sweet stern brow,
Check my presumption and my forwardness ;

Yet still would give me ﬂowers, still would me show
What she would have me, yet not have me, know.

Two other extracts are also given; Love after death-—

Fie, Thyrsis, with what fond remembrances
Dost thou, &c.

and the story of Isulia.——S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 427

words to their proper places, from .which they had been trans-
planted“ for no assignable cause or reason but that of the author’s
convenience ; but if it be in rhyme, by the mere exchange of the
ﬁnal word of each line for some other of the same meaning,
equally appropriate, digniﬁed and euphonic. ‘

The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated fe-
mark “ that metre paves the way to other distinctions/’1' is con-
tained in the following words. “The distinction of rhyme and
metre is regular and uniform, and not, like that produced by
(W arbitrary, and subject to
inﬁnite caprices, upon which no calculation whatever can be
made. In the one case the reader is utterly at the mercy of the

’* As the ingenious gentleman under the inﬂuence of the Tragic Muse
contrived to dislocate, “I wish you a good morning, Sir! Thank you, Sir,
and I wish you the same,” into two blank-verse heroics :—

To you a morning good, good Sir l I wish.
You, Sir 1 I thank: to you the same wish I.

In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth’s works which I have thoroughly stu
died, I ﬁnd fewer instances in Which this would be practicable than I have
met in many poems, where an approximation of prose has been sedulously
and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas already
quoted from THE SAILon’s MOTHER, I can recollect but one instance: that is
to say, a short passage of four or ﬁve lines in THE BROTHERS,l that model
of English pastoral, which I never yet read with unclouded eye.—“ James,
pointing to its summit, over which they had all purposed to return togeth-
er, informed them that ‘he would wait for them there. They parted, and
his comrades passed that way some two hours after, but they did not ﬁnd
him at the appointed place, a circumstance of which they took no heed: but
one of them, going by chance into the house, which at this time was J ames’s
house, learnt there, that nobody had seen him all that day.” The only
change which has been made is in the position of the little word therein
two instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not.
adopted in ordinary conversation. The other words printed in italics were
so marked because, though good and genuine English, they are not the
phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in apposition,
or in the connection by the genitive pronoun. Men in general would have
said, “but that was a circumstance they paid no attention to, or took no
notice of ;” and the language is, on the theory of the preface, justiﬁed only
by the narrator’s being the Vicar. Yet if any ear could suspect, that these
sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words alone could the
suspicion have been grounded.

f [Preface, p. 316.—-—S. 0.]

 

I [P. w. i. p. 109.—s. 0.]

428 .BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

poet respecting what imagery or diction he may choose to connect
with the passion.””“ But is this a poet, of whom a poet is Speak-
ing? No surely! rather of a fool or madman: or at best of a
’ vain or ignorant phantast ! And might not brains so wild or so
deﬁcient make just the same havoc with rhymes and metres, as
they are supposed to effect with modes and ﬁgures of speech?
How is the reader at the mercy of such men ? If he continue to
read their nonsense, is it not his own fault? The Wand-
of criticism is much more to establish the principles of writing,
han to furnish rules how to pass judgment on what has been
ritten by others; if indeed it were possible that the two could
e separated. But if it be asked, by what principles the poet is
to regulate his own style, if he do not adhere closely to the sort
nd order of words which he hears in the market, wake, high-
road, or plough-ﬁeld? I e ly;.by principles, the ignorance or
neglect of which would com poet, but a silly
or presumptuous usurper of the w By the WM
~grarnmar, logic, psychology. In one word by such a knowledge
f the facts, material andspiritual, that most appertain to his art,
gs, if it have been governed and applied by good sense, and ren
dered instinctive by habit, becomes the representative and reward
of our past consolous reasonings, insights, and conclusions, and
acquires the name of Taste. By what rule that does not leave
the reader at the poet’s mercy, and the poet at his own, is the
latter to distinguish between the language suitable to suppressed,
and the language, which is characteristic of indulged, anger?
Or between that of rage and that of jealousy ? Is it obtained by
wandering about in search of angry or jealous people in unculti-
vated society, in order to copy their words ? Or not far rather by
j' the power of imagination proceeding upon the all in each of hu-
i man nature ? By meditation, rather than by observation? And
i by tha latter in consequence only of the former? As eyes, for
which the former has pre-determined their ﬁeld of vision, and to
which, as to its organ, it communicates a microscopic power?
There is not, I ﬁrmly believe, a man now living, who has, from
his own inward experience, a clearer intuitinn, than'Mr. Words-
worth himself, that the last-mentioned are the true sources of
genial discrimination. Through the same process and by the
same creative agency will the poet distinguish the degree and

* [Prefaca pp. 325—6.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 429

kind of the excitement produced by the very act of poetic com-
position. As intuitively will he know, what differences of style
it at once, inspires and justiﬁes; what intermixture of conscious
volition is natural to that state ; and in what instances such fig-
ures and colors of speech degenerate into mere creatures of an
arbitrary purpose, cold technical artiﬁces of ornament or connec-
tion. For, even as truth is its own light and evidence, discover-
ing at once itself and falsehood, so is it the prerogative of poetic
genius to distinguish by parental instinct its proper offspring from
the changelings, which the gnomes of vanity or the fairies of
fashion may have laid in its cradle or called by its names. Could
a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry,
and sink 'into a mechanical art. It would be ,uo’gqawmg, not
noirjms‘. The r l .he Ima inatio ' themselves the ver
powers of growth and production. The words to which they are i
reducible, present only the outlines and external appearance of ,i
the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and
colors may be elaborated ; but the marble peach feels cold and
heavy, and children only put it to their mouths. We ﬁnd no
difficulty in admitting as excellent, and the legitimate language l
of poetic fervor self-impassioned, Donne’s apostrophe to the Sun
in the second stanza of his PROGRESS OF THE SOUL.

“ Thee, eye of heaven 1 this great Soul envies not ;
By thy male force is all, we have, begot.
In the ﬁrst East thou now beginn’st to shine,
Suck’st early balm and island spices there,
And wilt anon in thy loose-rein’d career
At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,
And see at night this western world of mine :
Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,
Who before thee one day began to be,
And, thy frail light being quench’d, shall long, long outlive thee”

Or the next stanza but one :

“ Great Destiny, the commissary of God,
That hast mark’d out a path and period
For every thing! Who, where we offspring took,
Our ways and ends see’st at one instant: thou
Knot of all causes ! Thou, whose changeless brow
N e’er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,
And show my story in thy eternal book, 610.”

”As-little difficulty do we ﬁnd in excluding from the honors

430 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

of unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense oi
pseudopoesy, or the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting
itself, which bursts on the unprepared reader in sundry odes and
apostrophes to abstract terms. Such are the Odes to Jealousy,
to Hope, to Oblivion, and the like, in Dodsley’s collection and the
magazines of that day, which seldom fail to remind me of an
Oxford copy of verses on the two SUTTONS, commencing with

“ Inoculation, heavenly maid l descend l”

It is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even
poets of true, though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mis-
taken theory deluded both themselves and others in the opposite
extreme. I once read to a company of sensible and well-edu-
cated women the introductory period of Cowley’s preface to his
“ Pindaric Odes, written in imitation of the style and manner
of the Odes of Pindar.” “ If” (says Cowley), “ a man should un-
dertake to translate Pindar, word for word, it would be thought
that one madman had translated another ; as may appear, when
he, that understands not the original, reads the verbal traduction
of him into Latin prose, than which nothing seems more raving.”
I then proceeded with his own free version of the second Olym-
pic, composed for the charitable purpose of 7'ati072alizing the
Theban Eagle.

“ Queen of all harmonious things,
Dancing words and speaking strings,
What god, what hero, wilt thou sing ?
What happy man to equal glories bring?
Begin, begin thy noble choice,
And let the hills around reﬂect the image of thy voice.
Pisa does to Jove belong,
Jove and Pisa claim thy song.
The fair ﬁrst-fruits of war, th’ Olympic games,
Alcides offer’d up to Jove;
Alcides, too, thy strings may move,
But, oh 1 what man to join with these can worthy prove?
Join Theron boldly to their sacred names;
Theron the next honor claims ;
Theron to no man gives place,
Is ﬁrst in Pisa’s and in Virtue’s race ;
Theron there, and he alone, ,
Ev’n his own swift forefathers has outgone.”

One of the company exclaimed, with the‘full assent of the rest,

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 431

that if the original were madder than this, it must be incurably
mad}? I then translated the ode from the Greek, and as nearly
as possible, word for word ; and the impression was, that in the
general movement of the periods, in the form of the connections
and transitions, and in the sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared

9* [But is not this equally delirious, close as it keeps to the Pindaric
Images? It is the exordium of the ﬁrst Pythian, characterized by “light-
ning energy” in an article on Pindar by Mr. Coleridge’s late editor. Q.
Review, March, 1834.

O thou whom Phoebus and the quire
Of violet tressed Muses own,

Their joint treasure, golden Lyre,
Ruling step with warbled tone, (to. &c.
In thy mazes, steep’d, expire

Bolts of every‘lowing ﬁre.

Jove’s eagle on the sceptre slumbers
Possest by thy enchanting numbers :
On either side, his rapid wing,
Drops, entranc’d, the feather’d king;
Black vapor o’er his curved head,
Sealing his eyelids, sweetly shed;
Upheaving his moist back he lies,
Held down with thrilling harmonies.

Surely this is but a brilliant chaos. “ Hyacinthine locks” have been
kindly received at the bounteous hand of Milton, though no one in this age
If the world, quite understands the epithet, or has seen that black or ferru-
gineous, or “ e-nsanguined ﬂower inscribed with woe ;” the ancient hyacinth.
The sound is beautiful, and we imagine the sense to be right; but violet
tresses look as strangely in our modern eyes as the green locks of the
Nereids; for to us the violet is the type of blueness, and we talk of violet
eyes, but never of violet hair. Then Pindar as little dreamed of presenting
to his auditors a moist-backed eagle, by the phrase vypov vo‘rrov, as we now-
a-days dream of bringing into view a man with drenched raiment of a pecu-
liar cut when we mention a wet Quaker. And who can suppose that the
eagle was lying held down by harmony ? That would be an inconvenient
posture for a sleeping biped, however convenient for the translator’s verse.

According to Moore
Slumbering he sits aloft

With ruﬁling plumes and heaving spine,
Quelled by thy potent strain.

It is interesting to compare Cowley’s second Olympic, of which stanzas iii.
v. and vii. are very readable in their way, with Moore’s and Gary’s trans‘
latious—to see how the ﬁrst displays the genius of Cowley, while the others
are attempts at adapting Pindar to our language, and are the works of
poetical minds rather than of poets. There are very good passages in Mr

432 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

to them to approach more nearly, than any other poetry they had
heard, to the style of our Bible in the prophetic books. The ﬁrst
strophe will sufﬁce as a specimen :

“ Ye harp-controlling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps!
What God? what Hero?
What Man shall we celebrate?
Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,
But the Olympiad (or the Olympian games) did Hercules establish,
The ﬁrst-fruits of the spoils of war.

 

Gary’s translation, but it strikes me as a fault in his version, that it brings
the lyric ﬂow of the Allegro, Penseroso, and Lycidas so strongly to mind,
that we seem to be reading Milton instead of Pindar, yet feel that we have
the mere manner of the one and the bare matter of the other. Those who
bring a knowledge of the original to Moore’s and Cary’s translations, and
thus illuminate them with Pindar himself, may enjoy the perusal; to others
they must seem, I should think, like water of Helicon bewitched. Gary’s
Dante, on the other hand, is a noble poem that may be read and admired
apart from the Italian.

A prose translation, like that of the Psalms and Prophets, would ex
hibit more of Pindar to the English reader, or would at least disguise him
less than any metrical version of a poet, whose metre is so irrepresentable
in a modern tongue, and whose metaphors are so bold, and thickly inter-
laced, that in order to be well understood they should be rendered into the
plainest and most straightforward language that can be employed. I tried
the simple plan thus, but can not judge whether it will seem tolerable to
others.

Golden Lyre, joint possession of Apollo and the Muses with braided hair
dusky as violets,
Thee the movements of the choir obey, thou Ruler of Festivity,
And the singers attend to thy signals,
When thrillingly thou settest up the preamble which leads the feet of the
dancers.
Also thou quenchest the pointed thunder-bolt
Of everlasting ﬁre; for Jove’s Eagle sleeps on the sceptre, his swift wing
drooping on each side,
King of Birds,
When o’er his curv’d head thou hast pour’d a dark mist, sweet seal of his
eyelids, he slumbering
Lifts up the plumes of his back, overcome by thy vibrations.
Yea and ev’n impetuous Mars, far away from the bristling spear-ranks,
Softens his heart with sleep,—-and thy shafts soothe the souls of the di-
vinities, ~
Through the skill of Latona’s son, Apollo, and the. deep-bosom’d Muses.
Gray and Akenside have each given a modiﬁcation of this passage, the one
in the Progress of Poetry, the other in his Hymn to the Naiads.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 433

But Theron for the four-horsed car,

That bore victory to him,

It behooves us now to voice aloud:

The Just, the Hospitable,

The Bulwark of Agrigentmn,

Of renowned fathers

The Flower, even him

Who preserves his native city erect and safe.”

But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their de-
viation from the language of real life? and are they by no other
means to be precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions be-
tween prose and verse, save that of metre? Surely good sense,
and a moderate insight into the constitution of the human mind,
would be amply sufﬁcient to prove, that such language and such
combinations are the native produce neither of the fancy nor of
the imagination ; that their operation consists in the excitement
of surprise by the juxtaposition and apparent reconciliation of
widely different or incompatible things. As when, for instance,
the hills are made to reﬂect the image of a voice. Surely, no
unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that this compulsory
juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation of impressive
or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any sympathy with
the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet had
united and inspired all the objects of his thought; that it is
therefore a species of wit, a pure work of the will, and implies a
leisure and self-possession both of thought and of feeling, incom-
patible with the steady fervor of mind possessed and ﬁlled with
the grandeur of its subject. To sum up the whole in one sen-
tence. When a poem, or a part of a poem, shall be adduced,
which is evidently vicious in the ﬁgures and contexture of its
style, yet for the condemnation of which no reason can be as:
signed, except that it differs from the style in which men actually

converse, then, and not till then, can I hold this theory to be'

either plausible, or practicable, or capable of furnishing either
rule, guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and
more safely, as well as more naturally, have been deduced in the
author’s own mind from considerations of grammar, logic, and
the truth and nature of things, conﬁrmed by the authority of

Works, whose fame is not of one country, nor of one age.
v0L. III.

M

CHAPTER XIX.

CONTINUATION-~CONCERNING THE REAL OBJECT WHICH, IT IS PROB‘
ABLE, MR. VVORDS‘VORTH HAD BEFORE HIM IN HIS CRITICAL
PREFACE—ELUCIDATION AND APPLICATION OF THIS.

IT might appear from some passages in the former part of Mr
Wordsworth’s preface, that he meant to conﬁne his theory of
style, and the necessity of a close accordance with the actual lan-
guage of men, to those particular subjects from low and rustic
life, which by way of experiment he had purposed to naturalize
as a new species in our English poetry. But from the train of
argument that follows ; from the reference to Milton ; and from
the Spirit of his critique on Gray’s sonnet ; those sentences appear
to have been rather courtesies of modesty, than actual limitations
of his system. Yet so groundless does this system appear on a
close examination; and so strange and overwhelming”F in its con-
sequences, that I can not, and I do not, believe that the poet did
ever himself adopt it in the unqualified sense, in which his ex-
pressions have been understood by others, and which, indeed, ac-
cording to all the common laws of interpretation they seem to
bear. What then did he mean '3 I apprehend, that in the clear
perception, not unaccompanied with disgust or contempt, of the
gaudy affectations of a style which passed current with too many
_for poetic diction (though in truth it had as little pretensions to

“5 I had in my mind the striking but untranslatable epithet, which the
celebrated Mendelssohn applied to the great founder of the Critical Philoso-
phy, “ Der alleszermalmende KANT,” that is, the all-beerushing, or rather the
all-to-nothz‘ng-cruslzz'ng Kant. In the facilit and force of compound epi-
thets, the German from the number of its cases and inﬂections approaches
to the Greek, that language so -

“ Bless’d in the happy marriage of sweet "Words.”

It is in the wofnl harshness of its sounds alone that the German need
shrink from the comparison.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 4 35

poetry, as to logic or common sense), he narrowed his view for
the time ; and feeling a justiﬁable preference for the language of
nature and of good sense, even in its humblest and least orna-
mented forms, he suffered himself to express, in terms at once too
large and too exclusive, his predilection for a style the most re-
mote possible from the false and showy splendor which he wished
to explode. It is possible, that this predilection, at ﬁrst merely
comparative, deviated for a time into direct partiality. But the
real objectwhich he had in view, was, I doubt not, a species of
excellence which had been long before most happily characterized
by the judicious and amiable Garve, whose works are so justly
beloved and esteemed by the Germans, in his remarks on Gellert,
from which the following is literally translated. ‘The talent,
that is required in order to make excellent verses, is perhaps
greater than the philosopher is ready to admit, or would ﬁnd it in
his power to acquire : the talent to seek only the apt expression
of the thought, and yet to ﬁnd at the same timeiwith it the
rhyme and the metre. Gellert possessed this happy gift, if ever i
any one of our poets possessed it ; and nothing perhaps contribu-
ted more tp’ the great and universal impression which his fables
made on/their ﬁrst publication, or conduces more to their con-
tinue popularity. It was a strange and curious phzenornenon,
an such as in Germany had been previously unheard of, to read
verses in which every thing was expressed just as one would wish
to talk, and yet all digniﬁed, attractive, and interesting; and all
at the same time perfectly correct as to the measure of the sylla-
bles and the rhyme. .It is certain, that poetry when it has at-
tained this excellence makes a far greater impression than prose.
So much so indeed, that even the gratiﬁcation which the very
rhymes afford, becomes then no longer a contemptible or triﬂing
gratiﬁcation.”*

However novel this phaenomenon may have been in Germany, at
’ the time of Gellert, it is by no means new, nor yet of recent exist-
ence in our language. Spite of the licentiousness with which Spen~
ser occasionally compels the orthography of his words into—a sub-
servience to his rhymes, the whole FAERY QUEEN is an almost
continued instance of this beauty. 'Waller’s song, G o, LOVELY ROSE,
is doubtless familiar to most of my readers; but if I had hap-

*5 Sammlung etniger Abhandlungen von Christian Game. [Leipzig
177 9, pp. 233-4, with slight alterations—S. 0.]

436 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

pened to have had by me the Poems of Cotton, more but far less
deservedly celebrated as the author of the VIRGIL TRAVESTIED, I
should have indulged myself, and I think have gratiﬁed many,
who are not acquainted with his serious works, by selecting some
admirable specimens of this style. There are not a few poems
in that volume, replete with every excellence of thought, image,
and passion, which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder
muse; and yet so worded, that the reader sees no one reason
either in the selection or the order of the words, why he might
not have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and
can not conceive how indeed he could have expressed such
thoughts otherwise, without loss or injury to his meaning.*

9“ [Charles Cotton, the poet, was born of a good family in Staf’fordshire
in 1630, died at Westminster in 1687. His Scarronides or Virgil Travestie,
a burlesque on the ﬁrst and fourth books of the fEneid. was printed for the
ﬁfteenth time in 1771. The ﬁrst book was ﬁrst published in 1664. It
seems to have'owed its popularity less to its merits than to its piquant de-
merits, which were infused into it, because, as the author says in the Epi-
logue to another work in the same style, Burlesque upon Burlesque (quoted
in Sir H. N icolas’s Memoirs), in the “precious age" in which he lived.

“ Coarse hempen trash was sooner read,
Than poems of a ﬁner thread,”

and therefore he must

—.

 

“wisely choose

To dizen up his dirty muse,

In such an odd fantastic weed,

As every one, he knew, would read :”

thus coolly resolving to minister to the worse than levity of his age instead
of aiming to correct it. The Biographie U niversclle afﬁrms that to compare
the Virgil Travestie to Hudibras is to compare a caricature to a painting
which, though a little overcharged, has a great foundation of truth. He
published several prose works beside the Second Part of the Complete
Angler. Sir Harris Nicolas observes, that as these “ consist almost entirely
of translations, and with the exception of Montaigne’s Essays, of Memoirs
of warriors whose deeds have been eclipsed by modern prowess, it is not
surprising that his labors should be forgotten.” His volume of Poems on
several Occasions was in a sixth edition in 17 7 0.

As a poet Cotton appears to most advantage, when teaching in easy verse
and transparent language, a sort of Horatian morality, serious but not
ardent or profound, as in his poem called Contentation: or in lively pictures
of nature and rustic life, as in his Quatrains on Morning and Noon, on
Evening and Night, particularly the two last, which are like Milton’s Alle«
gro and Penseroso pitched at a lower key: or in poems of sentiment. as

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 437

But in truth our language is, and from the ﬁrst dawn of poetry
ever has been, particularly rich in compositions distinguished by
this excellence. The ﬁnal 6, which is now mute, in Chaucer’s
age was either sounded or dropt indifferently. We ourselves still
use either “beloved” or “belov’d” according as the rhyme, or

the Ode to Chlorinda: or the sportive Epistle, as that to Bradshaw quar.
relling with him for epistolary neglect; or in the picturesque Anacreontic,
a ﬁne specimen of which is his Ode entitled Winter. This poem Mr.
\Vordsworth describes, in his Preface, as “an admirable composition ;” and
he quotes the latter part of it as “an instance still more happy of Fancy
employed in the treatment of feeling than in the preceding passages, the
Poem supplies of her management of forms.”

The poems of Cotton have the same moral stain as Herrick’s, with not
less fancy but a less Arcadian air,——-more of the world that is about them.
The spirit of poetry was indeed on the way downward from “great Eliza’s
golden time” till its reascent into the region of the pure and elevated to-
wards the end of the last century, and a declension may even be observed,
I think, from Herrick to Cotton, who came into the world about thirty-nine
_ years later. His poetry, indeed, has more of Charles II.’s time and less of
the Elizabethan period in its manner and spirit than that of Waller, who
was but twenty-ﬁve years his senior. Cotton writes like a man of this worldJ
who has glimpses 110w and then of the other; not as if he lived utterly out
of sight of it, like the dramatists characterized by C. Lamb. There are
more detailed corporeal descriptions in his poetry than in any that I know,
of not more than equal extent; descriptions of the youthful body more
vividly real than is to be desi1’ed, and of the body in age, when it “de-
mands the transluceney of mind not to be worse than indifferent” so full of
mortality, or, what it grieves us more to contemplate than ashes and the
grave, the partial perishing of the natural man while he is yet alive, that
they excite an indignant disgust on behalf of our common humanity. That
Cotton was “ an ardent royalist,” appears in many of his poems, and with
special vehemence in his denunciation of \Valler for his Panegyric upon
Cromwell, which exhibits, in its features, all the ugliness, with some of the
energy, of anger. If, as is said, the admirer of Saccharissa leant to mon-
archy in his heart, his poetic genius had a heart of its own, and a far
stronger one,_whieh leant another way; for both his poems on Cromwell
have vastly more heart in them than his poetical address to Charles at the
Restoration. And this the King himself, among whose faults want of dis-
cernment was not to be reckoned, took care to point out, enjoying, no doubt,
the versatile poet’s double mortiﬁcation as much as he would have done the
best ver.ses Cotton should have given Waller a receipt for w1iting as
ﬁnely about an hereditary monarch, as about a king of “noble nature’s
crowning’ ’—a Hero.

Some men are worse upon the whole than they appear in thei1 writings .
there is reason to hope that Cotton, though an imprudent, was a better
man than might be inferred from the tone of much of his poetry, which

1h

438 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

measure, or the purpose of more or less solemnity may require.
Let the reader then only adopt the pronunciation of the poet and
of the court, at which he lived, both with respect to the ﬁnal 6
and to the accentuation of the last syllable : I would then venture
to ask, what even in the colloquial language of elegant and unaf-
fected women, (who are the peculiar mistresses of “ pure English
and undeﬁled,”) what could we hear more natural, or seemingly
more unstudied, than the following stanzas from Chaucer’s TROILUn
AND CRESEIDE.

“And after this forth to the gate he wente,
Ther as Creseide out rode a ful gode paas,
And up and doun there made he many a wente,
And to himselfe ful oft he said, Alas I
Fro hennis rode my blisse and my solas:

As woulde blisful God now for his joie,
I might her sene agen come in to Troie!
And to the yondir hi1 I gan her gide,
Alas! and there I toke of her my leve:
And yond I saw her to her fathir ride;
For sorow of whiche mine hert shall to-cleve;
And hithir home I came when it was eve,
And here I dwel, out-cast from alle joie,
And shal, til I maie sene her efte in Troie.
“ And of himselfe imaginid he ofte
To ben defaitid, pale and woxin lesse
Than he was wonte, and that men saidin softe,
What may it be? who can the sothe gesse,
Why Troilns hath al this hevinesse ?
And al this n’ as but his melancolie,
That he had of himselfe suche fantasie.
Anothir time im. winin he would
That every wight, that past him by the wey,

 

probably exaggerates the features of his earthly mind as much as that of
many others exalts the heavenly part of them. The persistent friendship
of Isaac \Valton is a great testimony in his favor, and it might be conjec-
tured, from the internal evidence of his productions in verse, that of all the
poets of his day he was the most agreeable companion, the least apt to ﬂy
above his company though never lagging behind in any conversation.

A memoir of Cotton by Sir Harris Nicolas is preﬁxed to the beautifully
illustrated edition of the Complete Angler of 1836. This edition was pub-
lished by Mr. Pickering, and, as his friend the Editor declares, is very
largely indebted to his taste and exertions and biographical knowledge for
the value which the volumes possess.

I believe that Mr. Pickering intends to bring out a select edition of the
occasional poems of Cotton—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ' 4:39

Had of him routhe, and that thei saien should,
I am right sory, Troilus W01 dey!
And thus he drove a daie yet forth or twey,
As ye have herde: suche life gan he to lede
As he that stode betwixin hope and drede:
For which him likid in his songis shewe
Th’ encheson of his wo as he best might,
And made a songe of wordis but a fewe,
Somwhat his woful herté for to light,
And when he was from every mann’is sight
With softé voice he of his lady dere,

That absent was, gan sing as ye may here :
If '39 9K 5‘16 *6 Ali-

This song, when he thus songin had, ful sone
He ﬁl agen into his sighis olde :
And every night, as was his wonte to done;
He stode the bright moone to beholde
And all his sorowe to the moone he tolde,
And said : I wis, whan thou art hornid newe,
I shall be glad, if al the world be trewe 1”*

Another exquisite master of this species of style, where the
scholar and the poet supplies the material, but the perfect well-
bred gentleman the expressions and the arrangement, is George
Herbert. As from the nature of the subject, and the too frequent
quaintness of the thoughts, his TEMPLE; or SACRED POEMS AND
PRIVATE EJACULATIONS are comparatively but little known, I
shall extract two poems. The first is a sonnet, equally admira-
ble for the weight, number, and expression of the thoughts, and
for the simple dignity of the language. Unless, indeed, a fastid-
ious taste should object to the latter half of the sixth line. The
second is a poem of greater length, which I have chosen not
only for the present purpose, but likewise as a striking example
and illustration of an assertion hazarded in a former page of
these sketches: namely, that the characteristic fault of our elder
poets is the reverse of that, which distinguishes too many of our
more recent versiﬁers ; the one conveying the most fantastic
thoughts in the most correct and natural language ; the other in
the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts.

* [Boke V. The ﬁrst lines of the ﬁrst stanza stand thus in the original
And aftir this he to the yatis wente
and the ﬁrst of the last stanza thus:
This song? when he thus songin had sone.—'S. 0.]

440 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

The latter is a riddle of words; the former an enigma of thoughts
The one reminds me of an old passage in Drayton’s IDEAS :

As other men, so I myself do muse,
Why in this sort I wrest invention so ;
And why these giddy metaphors I use,
Leaving the path the greater part do go
I will resolve you: I am lunatic.I316

The other recalls a still odder passage in THE SYNAGOGUE : 01
THE SHADOW OF THE TEMPLE, a connected series of poems in im
itation of Herbert’s TEMPLE, and, in some editions, annexed to it

0 how my mind
Is gravell’d I
Not a thought,
That I can ﬁnd,
But’s ravell’d
All to naught !
Short ends of threads,
And narrow shreds
Of lists,
Knots, snarled ruffs,
Loose broken tufts
Of twists,
Are my torn meditations’ ragged clothing.
Which, wound and woven, shape a suit for nothing:
One while I think, and then I am in pain
To think how to unthink that thought againf

Immediately after these burlesque passages I can not proceed L0
the extracts promised, without changing the ludicrous tone of
feeling by the interposition of the three following stanzas of Her
bert’s.

VIRTUE.
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night ',
For thou must die,

 

* Sonnet IX.

1r [The Synagogue, a collection of poems generally appended to the Tem-
ple, has been retained in Mr. Pickering’s edition of 1835. “They were
first printed,” as the Preface mentions, A.D. 1640, and have been, with
much probability, attributed to the Rev. Christopher Harvie, M.A. The
poem quoted is at p. 2-74 of the edit—S. C.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 44]

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:
Thy root is ever in its grave,

And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

A box, where sweets compacted lie:

My music shows, ye have your closes,
And all must die.

THE BOSOM SIN:
A SONNET BY‘GEORGE HERBERT.

Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round 1
Parents ﬁrst season us ; then sehoolmasters
Deliver us to laws ; they send us bound

To rules of reason, holy messengers,
l’ulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,

Aﬂlietions sorted, anguish of all sizes,

Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises;
Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,

The sound of Glory ringing in our ears:

Without, our shame; within, our consciences
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.

Yet all these fences and their whole array

One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.

LOVE UNKNOWN.

Dear friend, sit down, the tale' is long and sad:
And in my faintings, I presume, your love
Will more comply than help. A Lord I had,
And have, of whom some grounds, which may improve,
I hold for two lives, and both lives in me.
To him I brought a dish of fruit one day,
And in the middle placed my heart. But he

(I sigh to say)
Look’d. on a servant, who did know his eye,
Better than you know me, or (which is one)
Than I myself. The servant instantly,
Quitting the fruit, seiz’d on my heart alone,
And threw it in a font, wherein did fall
A stream of blood, which issued from the side
Of a great rock: I well remember all,
And have good cause: there it was dipt and (1de,
And wash’d, and wrung: the very wringing yet
Enforeeth tears. “Your heart was foul, I fear.”

T?

442

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Indeed ’tis true. I did and do commit
Many a fault, more than my lease will bear
Yet still ask’d pardon, and was not denied.
But you shall bear. After my heart was well,
And clean and fair, as I one eventide
(I sigh to tell)

Walk’d by myself abroad, I saw a large
And spacious furnace ﬂaming, and thereon
A boiling caldron, round about whose verge
Was in great letters set AFFLICTION.
The greatness show’d the owner. So I went
To fetch a sacriﬁce out of my fold,
Thinking with that, which I did thus present,
To warm his love, which, I did fear, grew cold,
But as my heart did tender it, the man
\Vho was to take it from me, sli pt his hand,
'And threw my heart into the scalding pan;
My heart that brought it (do you understand 3)
The offerer’s heart. “ Your heart was hard, I fear.”
Indeed ’tis true. I found a callous matter
Began to spread and to cxpatiate there :
But with a richer drug than scalding water
I bath’d it often, ev’n with holy blood,
Which at a board, while many drank bare wine,
A friend did steal into my cup for good,
Ev’n taken inwardly, and most divine
To supple hardnesses. But at the length
Out of the caldron getting, soon I ﬂed
Unto my house, where to repair the strength
Which I had lost, I hasth to my bed:
But when I thought to sleep out all these faults,

(I sigh to speak)
I found that some had stuff’d the bed with thoughts,
I would say thorns. Dear, could my heart not break,
When with my pleasures cv’n my rest was gone?
Full well I understood who had been there:
For I had given the key to none but one:
It must be he. “ Your heart was dull, I fear.”
Indeed a slack and sleepy state of mind
Did oft possess me; so that when I pray’d,
Though my lips went, my heart did stay behind.
But all my scores were by another paid,
Who took my guilt upon him. “ Truly, Friend,
For aught I hear, your Master shows to you
More favor than you wot of. Mark the end.
The font did only what was old renew :
The caldron suppled what was grown too hard:

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 443

The thorns did quicken what was grown too dull:
All did but strive to mend what you had marr’d.
Wherefore be cheer’d, and praise him to the full
Each day, each hour, each moment of the week,
Who fain would have you be new, tender, quick.”

 

CHAPTER XX.

THE FORMER SUBJECT CONTINUED—THE NEUTRAL STYLE, OR_ THAT
COMMON TU PROSE AND POETRY, EXEMPLIFIED BY SPECIMENS FROM
CHAUCER, HERBERT, AND OTHERS.

I HAVE no fear in declaring my conviction, that the excellence
defined and exempliﬁed in the preceding chapter is not the char-
acteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth’s style; because I can
add with. equal sincerity, that it is precluded by higher powers.

VThe praise of uniform adherence to genuine, logical English is
undoubtedly his; nay, laying the main emphasis on the word
umform, I will dare add that, of all contemporary poets, it is his
alone. For, in a less absolute sense of the word, I should cer-
tainly include Mr. Bowles, Lord Byron, and, as to all his later
writings, Mr. Southey, the exceptions in their works being so
few and unimportant. But of the speciﬁc excellence described
in the quotation from Garve, I appear to ﬁnd more, and more
undoubted specimens in the works of others ; for instance, among
the minor poems of Mr. Thomas Moore, and of our illustrious
Laureate. To me it will always remain a singular and noticeable
fact ; that a theory, which would establish this lingua communist,
not only as the best, but as the only commendable style, should
have proceeded from a poet, whose diction, next to that of Shak-
speare and Milton, appears to me of all others the most indi-
vidualized and characteristic. And let it be remembered, too,
that I a‘niii‘now interpreting the controverted passages of Mr.
Wordsworth’s critical preface by the purpose and object, which
he may be supposed to have intended, rather than by the sense

* [The three poems are at pp. 87, 40, and 133 respectively—S. 0.]

444 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

which the words themselves must convey, if they are taken ‘
without this allowance.

A person of any taste, who had but studied three or four of
Shakspeare’s principal plays, would without the name afﬁxed
scarcely fail to recognize as Shakspeare’s a quotation from any
other play, though but of a few lines. A similar peculiarity,
though in a less degree, attends Mr. Wordsworth’s style, whenever
he speaks in his own person; or whenever, though under a
feigned name, it is clear that he himself is still speaking, as in
the different dramatis persona of THE RECLUSE. Even in the
other poems, in which he purposes to be most dramatic, there
are few in which it does not occasionally burst forth. The reader
might often address the poet in his own words with reference to
the persons introduced :

“ It seems, as I retrace the ballad line by line
That but half of it is theirs, and the better half is thine.”

Who, having been previously acquainted with any considerable
portion of Mr. Wordsworth’s publications, and having studied
them with a full feeling of the author’s genius, would not at
once claim as VVordsworthian the little poem on the rainbow '3'

“ The Child is father of the Man, &c.”f
Or in the LUCY GRAY ?

“ N o mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor ;
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human damn”:

 

* [Altered from The Pet Lamb, P. W. p. 30.-—S. 0.]
f P. W. p. 2, line 7.

“My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky;
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die !

The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.”- S. 0.]

1 [1b. i. p. 16,—S. 0.] '

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 445

Or in the IDLE SHEPHERD-BOYS ?*

“ Along the river’s stony marge
The sand-lark chants a joyous song;
The thrush is busy in the wood,
And carols loud and strong.
A thousand lambs are on the rocks,
All newly born! both earth and sky
Keep jubilee, and more than all,
Thos boys with their green coronal,
They never hear the cry,
That plaintive cry I which up the hill
Comes from the depth of Dungeon-Ghyll.”

Need I mention the exquisite description of the Sea Loch 1n
THE BLIND HIGHLAND BOY. Who but a poet tells a tale in such
language to the little ones by the ﬁre-side as—

“ Yet had he many a restless dream;
Both when he heard the eagle’s scream,
And when he heard the torrents roar,
And heard the water beat the shore

Near where their cottage stood.

Beside a lake their cottage stood,

I Not small like our’s, a peaceful ﬂood;
But one of mighty size, and strange;
That, rough or smooth, is full of change,

And stirring in its bed.

For to this lake, by night and day,
The great Sea-water ﬁnds its way
Through long, long windings of the hills,
And drinks up all the pretty rills

And rivers large and strong:

Then hurries back the road it came—
Returns on errand still the same;
This did it when the earth was new;
And this for evermore will do,

As long as earth shall last.

And with the coming of the tide,

Come boats and ships that sweetly ride,

Between the woods and lofty rocks;

And to the shepherds with their ﬂocks
Bring tales of distant lands.”+

 

' [1b. i. p. 31.—S. 0.]
1' [1b. iii. pp. 145-6. Mr. Wordsworth has altered “sweetly” in the last

1,46 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

I might quote almost the whole of his RUTH,* but take the
following stanzas :

“ But as you have before been told,
This Stripling, sportive, gay, and bold,
And, with his dancing crest,
So beautiful, through savage lands
Had roamed about with vagrant bands
Of Indians in the West.

The wind, the tempest roaring high,

The tumult of a tropic sky,

Might well be dangerous food

For him, a Youth to whom was given

So much of earth—so much of heaven,
And such impetuous blood.

’Whatever in those climes he found

Irregular in sight or sound

Did to his mind impart

A kindred impulse, seemed allied

To his own powers, and justiﬁed
The workings of his heart.

Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought,

The beauteous forms of nature wrought,

Fair trees and lovely ﬂowers;

The breezes their own languor lent;

The stars had feelings, which they sent
Into those magic bowers.

Yet in his worst pursuits, I ween,

That sometimes there did intervene

Pure hopes of high intent:

For passions linked to forms so fair

And st. tely, needs must have their share
Of noble sentiment.”

But from Mr. Wordsworth’s more elevated compositions, which
already form three fourths of his works; and will, I trust, con-
stitute hereafter a still larger proportion ;—from these, whether

stanza to “safely.” In the ﬁrst I venture to prefer “the eagle’s scream,”
which my father wrote, to “the eagles,” as it is written by Mr. Words-
worth—because eagles are neither gregarious nor numerous, as the ﬁrst
expression seems to mark the nature of the bird, and to bring it more inter
estingly before the mind, than the last—S. 0.]

* l P. W. ii. p. JOEL—S. 0.] .

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 447

in rhyme or blank verse, it would be difﬁcult and almost super-
ﬂuous to select instances of a diction peculiarly his own, of a
style which can not be imitated without its being at once recog-
nized, as originating in Mr. Wordsworth. It would not be easy
to open on any one of his loftier strains, that does not contain ex—
amples of this ; and more in proportion as the lines are more ex-
cellent, and most like the author. For those, who may happen
to have been less familiar with his writings, I will give three
specimens taken with little choice. The ﬁrst from the lines on
the BOY or WINANDER-MERE,*——who

“Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him—And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
With long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
' Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of mirth and jocund din ! And when it chanced,
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
0f mountain-torrents ; or the visible scenef .

 

* [There was a Boy. P. W. ii. p. 79.—S. (3.]

1- Mr. Wordsworth’s having judiciously adopted “ conEourse wild” in this
passage for “ a wild scene” as it stood in the former edition, encourages me
to hazard a remark which I certainly should not have made in the works
of a poet less austerely accurate in the use of words, than he is, to his own
great honor. It respects the propriety of the word, “scene,” even in the
sentence in which it is retained. Dryden, and he only in his more careless
verses, was the ﬁrst, as far as my researches have discovered, who for the
convenience of rhyme used this word in the vague sense, which has been
since too current even in our best writers, and which (unfortunately, I
think) is given as its ﬁrst explanation in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, and
therefore would be taken by an incautious reader as its proper sense. In
Shakspeare and Milton the word is never used without some clear refer
ence, proper or metaphorical, to the theatre. Thus Milton:

“Cedar, and pine, and ﬁr, and branching palm
A sylvan scene ;. and, as the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a. woody theatre
Of stateliest view.”1

I object to any extension of its meaning, because the word is already

 

——_—.._.__

‘ [Pan Lost, iv. 1. 139.—-S 0.]

448 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

lVould enter unawares into his mind

lVith all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.”6

 

more equivocal than might be wished; inasmuch as in the limited use, which
I recommend, it may still signify two different things; namely, the scenery,
and the characters and actions presented on the stage during the presence
of particular scenes. It can therefore be preserved from obscurity only by
keeping the original signiﬁcation full in the mind. Thus Milton again.

 

“Prepare thee for another scene.”1
* [Part of this peetieal description has been altered or expanded, thus.

And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his eall,—with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild

Of joeund din ! And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as bafﬂed his best skill:

Then, sometimes, in that silence

 

 

I fear it is presumptuous even to express a feeling, which hardly dares
to be an opinion, about these ﬁne verses (one of the most exquisite specimens
of blank verse that I know, and ﬁt to be placed beside the most exquisite
specimens from Milton, though different from them in the kind of excellence)
and yet I can not forbear to express the feeling, that the latter part of this
quotation stood better at ﬁrst; or that any improvement,—if any there be
—in the ﬁrst of the two altered lines, is dearly purchased by the compara
tive languor which has thus been occasioned in the second :—

Of silence such as baﬁted his best skill
seems to me almost prose in comparison with
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,—

which presents the image (if so it may be called), at once without dividmg
it, while the spondaic movement of the verse corresponds to the sense.
Neither can I think that “ mirth” is here a superﬂuity even in addition to
“ jocund din ;” the logic of poetic passion may admit or even require what
the mere logic of thought does not, exact: and what is the objection to
“ chane’d,” which Milton uses just in the same way in Paradise Lost 32 The
utter silence of the owls, after such free and‘full communications, is as good
an instance of chance, or an event of which we can not see the cause, as the
affairs of this world commonly present; and the word seems to me parties
darly expressive—S. C.]

 

[Pain Lost, xi. 1. 637.—S. C: i 2 Book lx. l. 575.

*V'mwam .

BIOGRAPHIA ' LITERARIA, 449

The second shall be that noble imitation of Drayton“ (if it was
not rather a coincidence) in the lines To JOANNA.’r

—“ When I had gazed perhaps two minutes’ space.
Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld

That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
Took up the Lady’s voice, and laughed again!
That ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag

Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar,
And the tall Steep of Silver-How sent forth

A noise of laughter; southern Longhrigg heard,
And Fairﬁeld answered with a mountain tone.
Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky

Carried the Lady’s voice !-——old Skiddaw blew
His speaking trumpet l—baek out of the clouds
From Glaramara southward came the voice:
And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head 1”

The third, which is in rhyme, I take from the SONG AT THE
FEAST OF BROUGHAM CASTLE, upon the restoration of Lord Clif-
ford, the Shepherd, to the Estates and Honors of his Ancestors;

—-“ N 0w another day is come,

Fitter hope, and nobler doom;

He hath thrown aside his crook,
And hath buried deep his book
Armor rusting in his halls

0n the blood of Cl/ford calls ;

‘ Qucll the Scot,’ exclaims the Lance!
Bear me to the heart of France,

18 the longing of the Shield-—

Tell thy name, thou trembling Field [—
Fielcl of death, where’er thou be,
Groan thou with our victory!

 

* Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every hill,
Upon her verge that stands, the neighboring valleys ﬁll;
'Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
From whose stone-trophied head, it on the Wendross went,
Which, tow’rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent.
That Brodwater, therewith within her banks astound,
In sailing to the sea, told it to Egremound,
Whose buildings, walks, and streets, with echoes loud and long,
Did mightily commend old Copland for her song.
Drayton’s POLYOLBION: Song XXX.
1 [P. 'W. ii. p. 289.—S. C.] i [P. W. ii. p. 154.—S. 0.]

s

450 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Happy day, and mighty hour,

When our Shepherd, in his power,

Mailed and horsed, with lance and sword,
' To his ancestors restored,

Like a re-appearing Stal,

Like a glory from afa1,

F50 st shall head the ﬂock of war I”

“Alas ! the fervent harper did not know,
”i That for a tranquil Soul the Lay was framed,
Who, long compelled in humble walks to go,
Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed.

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,

‘ The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”

The words themselves in the foregoing extracts, are, no doubt,
sufﬁciently common for the greater part—But in what poem are
they not so, if we except a few misadventurous attempts to trans-

“late the alts and sciences into verse? In THE EXCURSION the
‘1 1umbe1 of poly sy llabic (or what the common people call, diction-
Mary) wo1ds is mo1e than usually great. And so must it needs
be, in prop01tion to the number and variety of an author’s con-
ceptions, and his solicitudc to express them with precision—But
are those words in those places commonly employed in real life to
express the same thought or outward thing ? Are they the style
used in the ordinary intercourse of spoken words ? N 0! nor are
the modes of connections; and still less the breaks and transi-
tions. Would any but a poet—at least could any one without
being conscious that he had expressed himself with noticeable
vivacity—have described a bird singing loud by, “The thrush is
busy in the wood ?”—or have spoken of boys with a string'of
club-moss round their rusty hats, as the boys “with their green
coronal ?”—or have translated a beautiful May-day into “Both
earth and shy keep jubilee ?”—or have brought all the different
marks and circumstances of a sea-loch before the mind, as the
actions of a living and acting power 3’ Or have representedthe
reﬂection of the sky in the water as “ That uncertain heaven re-
ceived into the bosom of the steady lake ?” Even the grammat-
ical construction is not unfrequently peculiar; as, “The wind,
the tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic sky, might well
be dangerous food to him, a youth to whom was given,” 85c

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. , 451

I‘here is a peculiarity in the frequent use of the dourdgmrov
(that is, the omission of the con11ect1ve particle before the last of
several words, or several sentences used grammatically as single
words, all being in the same case and governing or governed by
the same verb), and not less in the construction of words by ap-
position (“to him, a youth”). In short, were .there excluded
from Mr. VVordsworth’s poetic compositions all that a literary ad- ‘
herence to the theory of his preface would exclude, two thirds‘at
least of the marked beauties of his poetry must be erased. For
a far greater number of lines would be sacriﬁced than in any
other recent poet; because the pleasure received from Words-
worth’s poems being less derived either from excitement of curi-
osity or the rapid ﬂow of narration, the striking passages form a
larger proportion of their value. I do not adduce it as a fair
criterion of comparative excellence, nor do I even think it such :
but merely as matter of fact. LaﬁrmLthat from no contempo-

ary writerfco‘uld so many lines be quoted, without reference to
the poem in which they are found, for_ their own 111dependexgt
weight 01 beauty F1om the sphere of my own experience I can
bring to my recollection thiee persons of 110 every day powers
and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more
and more unallg’ied pleasure, and had thought more highly of
their authors, as poets ; who yet have confessed to me, that from
no modern work had .so many passages started up anew in their
minds at different times, and as different occasions had awakened
a meditative mood. /_~\ ‘ _»-~

 

"K"

CHAPTER XXI.

REMARKS ON THE PRESENT MODE OF CONDUCTING CRITICAL
JOURNALS.

LONG have I wished to see a fair and philosophical inquisition
into the character of Wordsworth, as a poet, on the evidence of
his published works ; and a positive, not a comparative, apprecia-
tion of their characteristic .excellencies, deﬁciencies, and defects.
Iknow no claim, that the mere opinion of any individual can

452 . BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

have to weigh down the opinion of the author l‘.imself ; against
the probability of whose parental partiality we ought to set that
of his having thought longer and more deeply on the subject.
But I should call that investigation fair and philosophical in
which the critic announces and endeavors to establish the princi-
ples, which he holds for the foundation of poetry in general, with
the speciﬁcation of these in their application to the different
classes of poetry. Having thus prepared his canons of criticism
for praise and condemnation, he would proceed to particularize
the most striking passages to which he deems them applicable,
faithfully noticing the frequent or infrequent recurrence of similar
merits or defects, and as faithfully distinguishing what is charac-
teristic from what is accidental, or a mere ﬂagging of the wing.
Then if his premises be rational, his deductions legitimate, and
his conclusions justly applied, the reader, and possibly the poet
himself, may adopt his judgment in the light of judgment and in
the independence of free-agency. If he has erred, he presents his
errors in a deﬁnite place and tangible form, and holds the torch
and guides the way to their detection.

I most willingly admit, and estimate at a high value, the ser-
vices which the EW, and others formed after-
wards on the same plan, have rendered to society in the diffusion
of knowledge. I think the commencement of the EDINBURGH
REVIEW an important epoch in periodical criticism ; and that it
has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary republic, and indeed
of the reading public at large, for having originated the scheme
of reviewing those books only, which are susceptible and deserv-
ing of argumentative criticism. Not less meritorious, and far
more faithfully and in general far more ably executed, is'their
plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or mediocrity,
wisely left to sink into oblivion by its own weight, with original
essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious, or
political ; in which: the titles of the books or pamphlets preﬁxed
furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition. » I do not
arraign the keenness, or asperity of its damnatory style, in and
for itself, as long as the author is addressed or treated as the
mere impersonation 3f the work then under trial. I have no
quarrel with them on this account, as long as no personal allu-
sions are admitted, and no re-commitment (for new trial) of juve-
nile performances, that were published, perhaps forgotten. many

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 453

years belbre the commencement of the review: since for the for-
cing back of such works to public notice no motives are easily as-
signable, but such as are furnished to the critic by his own
personal malignity ;‘ or what is still worse, by a habit of malig-
nity in the form of mere wantonness.

“ N 0 private grudge they need, no personal spite:
The viva sectio is its own delight!
All enmity, all envy, they disclaim,
Disinterested thieves of our good name:
Cool, sober murderers of their neighbor’s fame l”—S. T. C.

Every censure, every sarcasm respecting a publication which
the critic, with the criticized work before him, can make good, is
the critic’s right. The writer is authorized to reply, but not to
complain. Neither can any one prescribe to the 'critic, how soft
or how hard ; how friendly, or how bitter, shall be the phrases
which he is to select for the expression of such reprehension or
ridicule. The critic must know, what effect it is his object to
produce ; and with a view to this effect must he weigh his
words. But as soon as thcmmwmlwmlﬂ-Df
his‘ author, than the authpﬁs publications could have told him; \
as soon as f ' ' orgintimate knowledge, elsewhere obtained,
he avails himselm : ' 't against the author' his
censure ° tl becomes persona "i'ur , his sarcasms Bengal,
InSul _ He ceases to be a critic, and takes on him the most con-
temptible character to which a rational creature can be degraded,
that of a gossip, backbiter, and pasquillant .' but with this heavy
aggravation, that he steals the unquliet, the deforming passions oi
the world into the museum ; into the very place which, next to
the chapel and oratory, should be our sanctuary, and secure place
of refuge ; offers abominations on the altar of the Muses; and
makes its sacred paling the very circle in which he conjures up
the lying and profane spirit.

This determination of unlicensed personality, and of permitted
and legitimate censure (which I owe in part to the illustrious

Lessingﬁ“ himself a model of acut ir" d, sometimes ' ting,

* [SeE‘a feW remarks on this subject in Lessing’s Preface to his Essay on
the manner in which the Ancients represented Death (11% die Alten den
Tod gebildet). Works, Leipzig, 1841, vol. v. pp. 273—4. Lessing also re-
monstrates against a certain sort of personality in criticism in the Advertise-
ment preﬁxed to his Hamburgz'sche Dramaturgie. 1b. vol. vii. pp. 3—6.—S. 0.]

 

”—-

4.54 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

but alwa ar umentative and orable. criticism), is beyond

controversy the true one : and though I would not myself exer-
cise all the rights of the latter, yet, let but the former be exclu-
ded, I submit myself to its exercise in the hands of others, with-
out complaint and without resentment.

Let a communication be formed between any number of
learned men in the various branches of science and literature:
and whether the president and central committee be in London,
or Edinburgh, if only they previously lay aside their individuality,
and pledge themselves inwardly, as well as ostensibly, to adminis-
ter judgment according to a constitution and code of laws ; and
if by grounding this code on the two-fold basis of universal
morals and philosophic reason, independent of all foreseen appli-
cation to particular works and authors, they obtain the right to
speak each as the representative of their body corporate; they
shall have honor and good wishes from me, and I shall accord to
them their fair dignities, though self-assumed, not less cheerfully
than if I could inquire concerning them in the herald’s ofﬁce, or
turn to them in the book of peerage. However loud may be the
outcries for prevented or subverted reputation, however numerous
and impatient the complaints of merciless severity and insuppor-
table despotism, I shall neither feel, nor utter aught but to the
defence and justiﬁcation of the critical machine. Should any
literary Quixote ﬁnd himself provoked by its sounds and regular
movements, I should admonish him with Sancho Panza, that it is
no giant but a windmill ; there it stands on its own place, and its
own hi110ck, never goes out of its way to attack any one, and to
none and from none either gives or asks assistance. When the
public press has poured in any part of its produce between its
mill-stones, it grinds it off, one man’s sack the same as another,
and with whatever wind may happen to be then blowing. Al’
the two-.and-thirty winds are alike its friends. 0f the whole
wide atmosphere it does not desire a. single ﬁnger-breadth more
than what is necessary for its sails to turn round in. But this
space must be left free and unimpeded. Gnats, beetles, wasps,
butterﬂies, and the whole tribe of ephemerals and insigniﬁcants,
may ﬂit in and out and between ; may hum, and buzz, and jarr ;
may shrill their tiny pipes, and wind their puny horns, unchas-
tised and unnoticed. But idlers and bravadoes of larger size and
prouder show must beware, how they place themselves within its

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 455

sweep. Much less may they presume to lay hands on the sails,
the strength of which is neither greater nor less than as the
Wind is, which drives them round. Whomsoever the remorseless
arm slings aloft, or whirls along With it in the air, he has him-
self alone to blame; though, when the same arm throws him
from it, it will more often double than break the force of his fall

Putting aside the too manifest and too frequent interference of
national party, and even personal predilection or aversion; and
reserving for deeper feelings those worse and more criminal in-
trusions into the sacredness of private life, which not seldom
merit legal rather than literary chastisement, the two principal
objects and occasions which I ﬁnd for blame and regret in the
conduct of the review in question are : ﬁrst, its unfaithfulness to
its own announced and excellent plan, by subjecting to criticism
works neither indecent nor immoral, yet of such triﬂing impor-
tance even in point of size and, according to the critic’s own ver-
dict, so devoid of all merit, as must excite in the most candid
mind the suspicion, either that dislike or vindictive feelings were
at work; or that there was a cold prudential pre-determination
to increase the sale of the review by ﬂattering the malignant
passions of human nature. That I may not myself become sub-
ject to the charge, which I am bringing against others, by an
accusation without proof, I refer to the article on Dr. Rennell’s
sermon in the very ﬁrst number of the EDINBURGH REVIEW as an
illustration of my meaning. If in looking through all the suc-
ceeding volumes the reader should find this a solitary instance, I
must submit to that painful forfeiture of esteem, which awaits a
groundless or exaggerated charge.

The second point of objection belongs to this review only in
common with all other works of periodical criticism ; at least, it
applies in common to the general system of all, whatever excep-
tion there may be in favor of particular articles. Or if it attaches
to THE EDINBURGH REVIEW, and to its only corrival (THE QUAR-
TERLY), with any peculiar force, this results from the superiority
of talent, acquirement, and information which both have so un-
deniably displayed ; and which doubtless deepens the regret
though not the blame. I am referring to the substitution of as.
sertion for argument; to the frequency of arbitrary and some
times petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even by a single
quotation from the work condemned, which might at least have

’I—I—
M
*

450 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

explained the critic’s meaning, if it did not prove the justice 01
his sentence. .Even where this is not the case, the extracts are
too often made without reference to any general grounds or rules
from which the faultiness or inadmissibility of the qualities attrib-
uted may be deduced; and without any attempt to show, that
the qualities are attributable to the passage extracted. I have
met with such extracts from Mr. Wordsworth’s poems, annexed
to such assertions, as led me to imagine,t that the reviewer, hav-
ing written his critique before he had read the w01,k had then
game/cad with a pin for passages, wherewith to illustrate the va-
rious branches of his preconceived opinions. By what principle
of rational choice can we suppose'a critic to have been directed
(at least in a Christian country, and himself, we hope, a Chris-
tian) who gives the following lines, portraying the fervor of soli-
tary devotion excited by the magniﬁcent display of the Almighty’s
works, as a proof and example of an author’s tendency to down-
right musings, and absolute unintelligibility ?

“ 0 then what soul was his, when on the tops
Of the high mountains he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked—
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
And ocean’s liquid'mass, beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice ofjoy: his spirit drank
The spectacle! sensation, soul, and form,
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being , in them did he live,
And by them did be live: they were his life.”*

 

*9 [Excursion (Book I. P. WV. vi. p. 10. The passage now begins thus:

“ Such was the Boy—but for the growing Youth
\Vhat soul was his, when, from the naked top
Of some bold headland, he beheld, &c.”

Compare with this Goethe’s Sunset (in the dialogue between Faust and
Wagne1 after the scene of out- door festivity), the diction and versiﬁcation
of which are exquisite:

0 glucklich ! wer noch hqfen kann ‘
Aus diescm Zlfeer des Irrthums aquutauchen, (be.

The two passages, in each of which the tone of reﬂection is beautifully
accordaut with the natural i111age,—in Goethe’s with a setting, as in that

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 457

Can it be expected, that either the author or his admirers,
should be induced to pay any serious attention to decisions which
prove nothing but the pitiable state of the critic’s own taste and
sensibility? On opening the review they see a favorite passage,
of the force and truth of which they had an intuitive certainty in
their own inward experience conﬁrmed, if confirmation it could ‘
receive, by the sympathy of their most enlightened friends; some?
of whom perhaps, even in the world’s opinion, hold a higher in-f
telleetual rank than the critic himself would presume to claim;
And this very passage they ﬁnd selected, as the characteristic
effusion of a mind deserted by 7'eason.’—as furnishing evidence
that the writer was raving, or he could not have thus strung
words together without sense or purpose! No diversity of taste
seems capable of explaining such a contrast in judgment.

That I had over-rated the merit of a passage or poem, that I -
had erred concerning the degree of its excellence, I might be
easily induced to believe or apprehend. But that lines, the sense
of which I had analyzed and found consonant with all the best
convictions of my understanding; and the imagery and diction
of which had collected round those convictions my noblest as well
as my most delightful feelings ; that I should admit such lines to
be mere nonsense or lunacy, is too much for the most ingenious '
arguments to effect. But that such a revolution of taste should
be brought about by a few broad assertions, seems little less than
impossible. On the contrary, it would require an effort of charity
not to dismiss the criticism with the aphorism of the wise man.
in animam malevolam sapz'emz'a, baud intrare potest.

What then if this very critic should have cited a large number
of single lines and even of long paragraphs, which he himself ac-
knowledges to possess eminent and original beauty '3 What if he
himself has owned, that beauties as great are scattered in abund-
ance throughout the whole book? And yet, though under this
impression, should have commenced his critique in vulgar exulta-
tion with a prophecy meant to secure its own fulﬁlment? With
a “This won’t do i” What? if after such acknowledgments ex-

from The Excursion, with a rising sun,—might be pendants to each other,
and form such a bright pair as Mr. Turner’s two pictures called the Rise
and Decline of Carthage,—“ or brighter.” Would that the hues of the ma-
terial paintings were as fadeless as those of the poetry, for they too deserve
to live—S. 0.] '

VOL. m U

458 ‘ BIO GRAPHIA LITERARIA.

torted from his own judgment he should proceed from charge to
charge of tameness and raving ; ﬂights and ﬂatness ; and at
length, consigning the author to the house of inCurables, should
conclude with a strain of rudest contempt evidently grounded in
the distempered state of his own moral associations? Suppose
too all this done without a single leading principle established or
even announced, and without any one attempt at argumentative
deduction, though the poet had presented a more than usual op-
portunity for it, by having previously made public his own prin-
ciples of judgment in poetry, and supported them by a connected
train of reasoning'

The ofﬁce and duty of the poet is to select the most digniﬁed
as well as

“The gayest, happiest attitude of things.”

The reverse, for in all cases a reverse is possible, is the appropriate
business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste for which
has been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind.
When I was at Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of
Julius II. I went thither once with a Prussian artist, a man of
genius and great vivacity of feeling. As we were gazing on
Michael Angelo’s MOSES, our conversation turned on the horns
and beard of that stupendous statue ; of the necessity of each to
support the other; of the superhuman effect of the former, and
the necessity of the existence of both to give a harmony and in-
tegrity both to the image and the feeling excited by it. Conceive
them removed, and the statue would become tan-natural, without
being super-natural. We called to mind the horns of the rising
sun, and I repeated the noble passage from Taylor’s HOLY DYING.‘l‘
That horns were the emblem of power and sovereignty among
the Eastern nations, and are still retained as such in Abyssinia;
the Achelous of the ancient Greeks ; and the probable ideas and
feelings, that originally suggested the mixture of the human and
the brute form in the ﬁgure, by which they realized the idea of
their mysterious Pan, as representing intelligence blended with a
darker power, deeper, mightier, and more universal than the con-
scious intellect of man; than intelligence ;—all these thoughts
and recollections passed in procession before our minds. My

* [Akenside’s Pleasures 0f Imagination, Bk. I. l. 30. —S. 0.]
1} [Chap i. sect. 3, §2.]

7355' xi“?

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 459

companion who possessed more than his share of the hatred,
which his countrymen bore to the French, had just observed to
me, “ A Frenchman, Sir ! is the only animal £9. the human shapeJ
that ..,bLI19.12<§§ib_ilitr _can-_1ift,._it§§1£_}ap ,.t9__,rsligi9n_co.1: po_ct.ry.;’.’

 

 

when, 10! two French officers of distinction and rank entered
the church! “Mark you,” whisPered the Prussian, “the ﬁrst
thing, which those scoundrels—will notice—(for they will begin
by instantly noticing the statue in parts, without one moment’s
pause of admiration impressed by the whole)—will be the horns ~
and the beard. And the associations, which they will immedi-
ately connect with them will be those of a [Le-goat and a cuckold.”
Never did man guess more luckily. Had he inherited a portion
of the great legislator’s prophetic powers, whose statue we had
been contemplating, he could scarcely have uttered words more
coincident with the result : for even as he had said, so it came to
pass.

In THE EXCURSION the poet has introduced an old man, born
in humble but not abject circumstances, who had enjoyed more
than usual advantages of education, both from books and from
the more awful discipline of nature. This person he represents,
as having been driven by the restlessness of fervid feelings, and
from a craving intellect to an itinerant life; and as having in
consequence passed the larger portion of his time, from earliest
manhood, in villages and hamlets from door to door,

“A vagrant Merchant bent beneath his load.”6

Now whether this be a character appropriate to a lofty didactic
poem, is perhaps questionable. It presents a fair subject for con-
troversy ; and the question is to be determined by the congruity
or incongruity of such a character with what shall be proved to
be the essential constituents of poetry. But surely the critic who,
passing by all the opportunities which such a' mode of life would
present to such a man; all the advantages of the liberty of na-
ture, of solitude, and of solitary thought; all the varieties of
places and seasons, through which his track had lain, with all
the varying imagery they bring with them; and lastly, all the
observations of men,

[“ A vagrant Merchant under a heavy load
Bent as he moves”—
Book I. P. W. vol. vi. p. 15, edit. of 1840.—S. 0.]

460 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

“ Their manners, their enjoyments, and pursuits,
Their passions and their feelings— ”*6

 

which the memory of these yearly journeys must have given and
Fiecalled to such a mind—the critic, I say, who from the multitude
of possible associations should pass by all these in order to fix his
attention exclusively on the pin-papers, and stay-tapes, which
! might have been among the wares of his pack; this critic, in
§ my opinion, can not be thought to possess a much higher or much
'healthier state of moral feeling, than the Frenchmen above re- .
, corded.

7"“

 

 

 

CHAPTER XXII.

THE CHARACTERISTIC DEFECTS OF \VORDSVVORTH-S POETRY, WITH
’ THE PRINCIPLES FROM WHICH THE JUDGMENT, THAT THEY ARE
DEFECTS, IS DEDUCED—THEIR PROPORTION TO THE BEAUTIES
—FOR THE GREATEST PART CHARACTERISTIC OF HIS THEORY

-. ONLY.

IF Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which
his arguments are insufﬁcient to support, let him and those who
have adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of
those arguments, and ’by the substitution of more philosophical
principles. And still let the due credit be given to the portion
and importance of the truths, which are blended with his theory ;
truths, the too exclusive attention to which had occasioned its

1 errors, by tempting him to carry those truths beyond their proper
limits. If his mistaken theory have at all inﬂuenced his poetic
1 compositions, let the effeCts be pointed out, and the instances
given. But let it likewise be shown, how far the inﬂuence has
acted ; whether diff'usively, or only by starts ; whether the num-
ber and importance of the poems and passages thus infected be
great or triﬂing compared with the sound portion; and lastly,
whether they are inwoven into the texture of his works, or are
loose and separable. The result of such a trial would evince be
yond a doubt, what it is high time to announce decisively and

* [Book I. P. W. vol. vi. p. 15, last edit—S. 0.]

a- .I: .4 ._.p

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 461

aloud, that the supposed characteristics of Mr. Wordsworth’s
poetry, whether admired or reprobated ; whether they are sim-
plicity or simpleness; faithful adherence to essential nature, or
wilful selections from human nature of its meanest forms and
under the least attractive associations; are as little the real
characteristics of his poetry at large, as of his genius and th
constitution of his mind.

In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try
an experiment; and this experiment we will suppose to have
failed. Yet even in these poems it is impossible not to perceive
that the(natural tendency of the poet’s mind is to great objects
and elevated conceptions The poem entitled FIDELITY* is for
the greater part written in language, as unraised and naked as
any perhaps in the two volumes. Yet take the following stanza
and compare it with the preceding stanzas of the same poem.

“ There sometimes doth a leaping ﬁsh
Send through the tarn a lonely cheer;
The crags repeat the raven’s croak,
In symphony austere ;
Thither the rainbow comes—the cloud—
And mists that spread the ﬂying shroud;
And sunbeams; and the sounding blast,
That, if it could, would hurry past;
But that enormous barrier holds it fast.”

Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with
the former half :

“ Yes, proof was plain that, since the day
On which the Traveller thus had died,
The Dog had watched about the spot,

Or by his Master’s side:

How nourish’d here through such long time
He knows, who gave that love sublime,
And gave that strength of feeling, great
Above all human estimate .”’+

Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining,
which of these best represents the tendency and native character
of the poet’s genius ? Will he not decide that the one was writs

# [P. W. v. p. 43.—s. 0.]
1' [The second line of this stanz‘a is now

“ When this ill-fated Traveller died.” I S. 0.]

462 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

ten because the poet would so write, and the other because he
could not so entirely repress the force and grandeur of his mind,
but that he must in some part or other of every composition
write otherwise? In short, that his only disease is the being
out of his element ; like the swan, that, having amused himself,
for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river’s bank, soon
returns to his own majestic movements on its reﬂecting and sus-
taining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the
imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided
against the poet’s theory, as far as it is different from the prin-
ciples of the art, generally acknowledged. -

I can not here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Words-
worth’s works; but I will attempt to give the main results of
my own judgment, after an acquaintance of many years, and re—
peated perusals. And though, to appreciate the defects of a
great mind, it is necessary to understand previously its character-
istic excellences, yet I have already expressed myself with suf-
ﬁcient fulness, to preclude most of the ill effects that might arise
from my pursuing a. contrary arrangement. I will therefore
commence with what I deem the prominent defects of his poems
hitherto published. ‘v‘

The rst characteristic, though only occasional defect, which 1
appear to myself to ﬁnd in these poems is the inconstanm of the
style. Under this nameI refer to the suddenm
transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity—(at all
events striking and original)—t0 a style, not only unimpassioned
but undistinguished. He sinks too often and too abruptly to that
style, which I should place in the second division of language,
dividing it into the three species ; ﬁrst, that which is peculiar to
poetry; second, that which is only proper in prose; and third,
the neutral or common to both. There have been works, such
as Cowley’s Essay on Cromwell,* in which prose and verse are

’* [This is an eloquent declamation against Cromwell, in the guise of an
argument, the defence of “the late man, who made himself to be called
Protector,” being put into the mouth of one whose appearance was “ strange
and terrible,” and whose ﬁgure was taller than that of a giant, or “the
shadow of any giant in the evening.” This personage turns out to be the
‘Nieked One himself, and the discourse which he utters is, indeed, most
dramatically appropriate to him, however unserviceable to the cause of
Cromwell. After despatching the Protector’s religion and morals, dispar-
aging his powers, reducing his parts to diligence and dissimulation, and

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. $63

intermixed (not as in the Consolation of Boetius,* or the ARGENIS
of Barclayj by the insertion of poems supposed to have been
spoken or composed on occasions previously related in prose, but)
the poet passing from one to the other, as the nature of the
thoughts or his own feelings dictated. Yet this mode of com-
position does not satisfy a cultivated taste. There is something
unpleasant in the being thus obliged to alternate states of feel-
ing so dissimilar, and this too in a species of writing, the pleas
ure from which is in part derived from the preparation and pre-
vious expectation of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness
is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern
comic operas ; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as
to whose exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever

making away with his achievements at home and abroad, or bringing them
very nearly to nothing, the Evil One’s opponent proceeds to demolish his
intellectual pretensions ; and here he attacks him on the side of his speeches,
Which Mr. Carlyle has lately brought forth from the shadows in which
they have so long been lying.

According to this essay, all the war and bloodshed at the time of the
Rebellion, was on account of “ a little ship-money,” or to revenge the loss
“of three or four ears,”—not to decide whet-her the country was to be
governed by an absolute or a limited monarchy; whether the Church of
England should be approximated to Rome or maintained in the spirit of the
Reformation; whether ecclesiastical rulers were to ﬁne, scourge, mutilate,
and immure for life in wretched prisons any who opposed their views and
proceedings, or whether they must learn to uphold the Church in a man-
ner more conformable to Christianity. Yet Cowley, while he thus could
represent the cause of Hampden, exalts that of Brutus !—whom Dante
places for his rebellion in the lowest deep of punishment ; such is poetical
injustice! Methinks this whole discourse against old N011 is like “the
shadow of a giant in the evening”——big and black, but of no force or sub-
stance.

Cowley wrote eleven other discourses by way of essays in verse and
prose, ib. pp. 7 9148. This remarkable writer and worthy man died July
28, 1667, aged forty-nine. -—S. C.]

9* [An. Man]. Sever. Boétii Consolatiom's Plzilosophz'az, Lib. v. Boétius or
Boéthius, was born about AND 470. -—S. 0.]

1. [The Argenis, quoted toward the end of chap. ix. is a sort of didac-
tic romance, in imitation of the Satyricon of Petronius. The author,
John Barclay, was born 1582, died 1621. He ﬂourished at the Court of
James I. (who was delighted with his Satyrz'con Euphormiom's)—and pub«
lished, beside several prose works, a collection of poems in two vols. 4t0.
It is said that his prose is superior to his verse, but that all his works dis
cover wit and genius—S. 0.]

1""

462 BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARIA.

ten because the poet would so write, and the other because he
could not so entirely repress the force and grandeur of his mind,
but that he must in some part or other of every composition
write otherwise? In short, that his only disease is the being
out of his element ; like the swan, that, having amused himself,
for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river’s bank, soon
returns to his own majestic movements on its reﬂecting and sus-
taining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the
imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided
against the poet’s theory, as far as it is diffe1ent from the prin-
ciples of the art, generally acknowledged. -

I can not here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Words-
worth’s s works , but I will attempt to give the main results of
my own judgment, after an acquaintance of many years, and re-
peated perusals. And though, to appreciate the defects of a
great mind, it is necessary to understand previously its character-
istic excellences, yet I have already expressed myself with suf-
ﬁcient fulness, to preclude most of the ill effects that might arise
from my pursuing a contrary arrangement. I will therefore
commence with what I deem the prominent defects of his poems
hitherto published. \W'

The rst characteristic, though only occasional defect, which 1
appear to myself to ﬁnd in these poems is the inconstancr of the
style. Under this nameI refer to the suddenm
transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity—(at all
events striking and original)—to a style, not only unimpassioned
but undistinguished. He sinks too often and too abruptly to that
style, which I should place in the second division of language,
dividing it into the three species ; ﬁrst, that which is peculiar to
poetry; second, that which is only proper in prose; and third,
the neutral or common to both. There have been works, such
as Cowley’s Essay on Cromwell,* in which prose and verse are

’* [This is an eloquent declamation against Cromwell, in the guise of an
argument, the defence of “the late man, who made himself to be called
Protector,” being put into the mouth of one whose appearance was “ strange
and terrible,” and whose ﬁgure was taller than that of a giant, or “the
shadow of any giant in the evening.” This personage turns out to be the
IVicked One himself, and the discourse which he utters is, indeed, most
dramatically appropriate to him, however unserviceable to the cause of
Cromwell. After despatching the Protector’s religion and morals, dispar-
aging his powers, reducing his parts to diligence and dissimulation, and

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. $63

intermixed (not as in the Consolation of Boetiusﬁ“ or the ARGENIS
of Barclay,’r by the insertion of poems supposed to have been
spoken or composed on occasions previously related in prose, but)
the poet passing from one to the other, as the nature of the
thoughts or his own feelings dictated. Yet this mode of com-
position does not satisfy a cultivated taste. There is something
unpleasant in the being thus obliged to alternate states of feel-
ing so dissimilar, and this too in a species of writing, the pleas
ure from which is in part derived from the preparation and pre-
vious expectation of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness
is 'felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern
comic operas ; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as
to whose exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever

making away with his achievements at home and abroad, or bringing them
very nearly to nothing, the Evil One’s opponent proceeds to demolish his
intellectual pretensions ; and here he attacks him on the side of his speeches,
which Mr. Carlyle has lately brought forth from the shadows in which
they have so long been lying.

According to this essay, all the war and bloodshed at the time of the
Rebellion, was on account of “a little ship-money,” or to revenge the loss
“ of three or four ears,”—not to decide whether the country was to be
governed by an absolute or a limited monarchy; whether the Church of
England should be approximated to Rome or maintained in the spirit of the
Reformation ; whether ecclesiastical rulers were to ﬁne, scourge, mutilate,
and immure for life in wretched prisons any who opposed their views and
proceedings, or whether they must learn to uphold the Church in a man-
ner more conformable to Christianity. Yet Cowley, while he thus could
represent the cause of Hampden, exalts that of Brutus !—whom Dante
places for his rebellion in the lowest deep of punishment ; such is poetical
injustice! Methinks this whole discourse against old Noll is like “the
shadow of a giant in the evening”—big and black, but of no force or sub-
stance.

’ Cowley wrote eleven other discourses by way of essays in verse and
prose, ib. pp. 79—148. This remarkable writer and worthy man died July
28, 1667, aged forty-nineH—S C.]

5* [Au Maul. Sever. Boétii Consolationis Philosophies, Lib. v. Boétius or
Boéthius, was born about A. D. 470. —S. C.]

+ [The Argenis, quoted toward the end of chap. ix. is a sort of didac-
tic romance, in imitation of the Satg/ricon of Petrom’us. The author,
John Barclay, was born 1582, died 1621. He ﬂourished at the Court of
James I. (who was delighted with his Satyrz’con Euphormz'om's)—and pub‘
lished, beside several prose works, a collection of poems in two vols. 4to.
It is said that his prose is superior to his verse, but that all his works dis
cover wit and genius—S. 0.]

3:. “ﬂ"

464: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

doubts may be entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly
placed the and at the end of the scene, at the same time that
he almost always raises and impassions the style of the recita-
tive immediately preceding.% Even in real life, the difference
1s great and evident between words used as the arbitrary marks
of thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse, with the

_i_mage and superscription worn out by currency ; and those which

convey pictures either borrowed from one outward object to en-
liven and particularize some other ; or used allegorically to body
forth the inward state of the person speaking ; or such as are at
least the exponents of his peculiar turn and unusual extent of fac-
ulty. So much so, indeed, that in the social circles of private life
we often ﬁnd a striking use of the latter put a stop to the general
ﬂow of conversation, and by the excitement arising from concen
tred attention, produce a sort of damp and interruption for some
minutes after. But in the perusal of works of literary art, we
prepare ourselves for such language; and the business of the
writer, like that of a painter Whose subject requires unusual
splendor and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral tints,
that what in a different style would be the commanding colors,
are here used as the means of that gentle degradation requisite in
order to produce the effect of a whole. Where this is not achieved
in a poem, the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in
order to disappoint them ; and where this defect occurs frequently,
his feelings are alternately startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax.

I refer the .reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another
purpose from THE-BLIND HIGHLAND Boy; and then annex, as

being in my opinion instances of rth1s 61W, the

two following : _ ,

* [The popular Italian dramatic poet, Pietro Metastasio, whose original
name was Trapassi, was born at Rome on the 3d of January, 1698, died
April 12th, 1782.

Metastasio, though not born to afﬂuence or gentility, was pursued
through life by the favors of the rich and powerful, as well as the admira-
tion of the crowd. He was a favorite of Nature in such a way as made
him also a favorite of Fortune, and possessed all admirable qualities of
mind and person that are understood at ﬁrst sight. He took the ecclesias-
tical habit and the title of Abate, though his life and writings, so closely
connected with the stage, were not much in accordance with the exterior
of a grave spiritual calling. But the Church of Rome has never disdained
attractive worldly alliances—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ' 465

“ And one, the rarest, was a shell,
Which he, poor child, had studied well:
The shell of a green turtle, thin
And hollow ;—you might sit therein,
It was so wide, and deep.”

“Our Highland Boy oft visited
The house which held this prize ; and, led
By choice or chance, did thither come
One day, when no one was at home,
And found the door unbarred.”*

 

* [Mix Wordsworth has interposed three new stanzas between the ﬁrst
and second of the quotations, and has altered the ﬁrst thus :

“The rarest was a turtle-shell
Which he, poor child, had studied well:
A shell of ample size and light
As the pearly car of Amphitrite,
That sportive dolphins drew.”

The history of the Blind Boy’s choice of a vessel is now told in nine stanzas
—-—(besides a tenth at the end of the whole poem)—originally in these thrm.

Strong is the current; but be mild,
Ye waves, and spare the helpless child!
If ye in anger fret or chafe,
A bee-hive would be ship as safe
As that in which he sails.

But say what was it ? Thought of fear !

Well may ye tremble when ye hear l

— A Household Tub, like one of those

Which women use to wash their clothes.
This carried the blind Boy.

Close to the water he had found
This vessel, pushed it from dry ground,
Went into it; and without dread,
Following the fancies in his head,
He paddled up and down.
Vol. ii. pp. 72—3, edit. 1807.

l‘hcre are some lovers of poetry, and Mr. Wordsworth’s especially, whc
can not help preferring these three stanzas to the. nine of later date; if the
words in italics could be replaced by others less anti-poetic. The advan-
tage of the real incident they think, is that, as being more simple and seem-
ing natural, and capable of being quickly told, it detains the mind but a
little while from the main subject of interest: while the other is so pecu
liar that it claims a good deal of separate attention. The new stanzas are
beautiful, but being more ornate than the rust of the poems, they look

466 ‘ BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Or page 172, vol. i.*

“ ’Tis gone forgotten, let me do
Jig best. There was a smile or two—
I can remember them, I see
The smiles worth all the world to me.
Dear Baby! I must lay thee down:
Thou troublest me with strange alarms;
Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own;
I can not keep thee in my arms ;
For they confound me: as it is,
I have forgot those smiles of his 1”

Or page 269, vol. i.’r

“ Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest,
And though little troubled with sloth,
Drunken lark l thou would’st be loth
To be such a traveller as I.

Happy, 'happy liver 1
With a soul as strong as a mountain river
Pouring out praise to th’ Almighty giver,

 

rather like a piece of decorated architecture introduced into a building in
an earlier and simpler style. Such are the whims of certain crazy lovers
of the Wordsworthian Muse, who are so loyal to her former self that they
sometimes forget the deference due to her at present—S. 0.]

9* [P. W. i. p. 186. Mr. Wordsworth has altered some lines in the ﬁfth
stanza of this deeply affecting poem, thus :

’Tis gone—like dreams that we forget
There was a smile or two—yet—yet
I can remember them, I see, &c.

Smiles hast thou, bright ones of thy own;

I can not keep thee in my arms ;

For they confound me ;—where—where is

That last, that sweetest smile of his ? S. 0.]

f [R W. ii. p. 29. After
“Joy and jollity be with us both I"

the poem now ends thus:

Alas! my journey, rugged and uneven,

Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind;

But hearing thee, or others of thy kind,

As full of gladness and as free of heaven,

I, with my fate contented, will plod on,

And hope for higher raptures, when Life’s day is done. S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 467

Joy and jollity be with us both!
Hearing 'thee or else some other,
As merry a brother
I on the earth will go plodding on
By myself cheerfully till the day is done.”

The incongruity, which I appear to. ﬁnd in this passage, is
that of the two noble lines in italics with the preceding and fol-
lowing. So vol. ii. page 30*

“Close by a Pond, upon the further side,
He stood alone; a minute’s space, I guess,
I watch’d him, he continuing motionless :
To the Pool’s further margin then I drew;
He being all the while before me full in view.”+

Compare this with the repetition of the same image, in the
next stanza but two.

“ And, still as I drew near with gentle pace,
Beside the little pond or moorish ﬂood
Motionless as a Cloud the Old Man stood,

That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
And moveth altogether; if it move at all.”

Or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared
both with the ﬁrst and the third.

* [R W. i. p. 117. The poem is entitled Resolution and Independence,
and is sometimes spoken of as The Leech-gatherer.]

l [Mr. Wordsworth has now done away the original ixth stanza to which
these ﬁve lines belonged, and concludes the viiith thus:

Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven
I saw a Man before me unawares:
The oldest man he seemed that ever wore gray hairs.

instead of:

And I with, these untoward thoughts had striven,
I saw a Man, &c.

some regret the old conclusion of stanza xiv.

“He answered me with pleasure and surprise;
And there was, while he spake, a ﬁre about his eyes.

which now stands thus :

“ Ere he replied, a ﬂash of mild surprise
Broke from the sable orbs of his yet vivid eyes.”-——S 0.]

1’

/

/

468 BIOGRAPHIAi LI’fER'ARIA. ‘ 9

“My former‘ thoughts returned; the fear that kills
And hope that is unwilling to be fed;
Cold, pain, and labor, and all ﬂeshly ills;
And mighty Poets in their misery dead.
But now, perplex’d by what the Old Man had said
My question eagerly did I renew,
‘ How is it that you live, and what is it you do 3’

He with a smile did then his words repeat ;

And said, that, gathering Leeches, far and wide
He travelled; stirring thus about his feet

The waters of the Ponds where they abide.

‘ Once I could meet with them on every side;

But they have dwindled long by slow decay;

Yet still I persevere, and ﬁnd them where I may.

7

While he was talking thus, the lonely place,

The Old Man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me:
In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,

Wandering about alone and silently.”

Indeed this ﬁne poem is especially characteristic of the author
There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it

:' would not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to re-

peat that this defect is only occasional. From a careful re-perusal
of the two volumes of poems, I doubt whether the-objectionable
passages would amount in the whole to one hundred lines ; not
the eighth part of the number of pages. In THE EXCURSION the
feeling of incongruity is seldom excited by the diction of any pas-
sage considered in itself, but by the sudden superiority of some
other passage forming the context.

The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if
the reader will pardon an uncouth and new coined word. There

is, I should say, not seldom a malterzof-Zactness in certain poems.

This may be divided into, ﬁrst, a laborious minuteness and
fidelity in the representation of objmons, as
they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, W [aa-
0' pcircumstances, in 011323? to the full explanation of his liv-
ing cha ters e ispositions an actions; which-”circum-
stances might be necess Minty of a state-
ment in real life, where nothing is taken for granted by the
bearer; but appear superﬂuous in poetry; where the reader is
willing to believe for his own sake. To‘this accidentality I ob
ject, as contravening the essence of poetry, which Aristotle pro-

‘

   

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 469

nounces to be onovdmdrazoy xal (pilooogoo'naror yérog,* the most
intense, weighty, and philosophical product of human art ; add~
ing, as the reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The
following passage from Davenant’s prefatory letter to Hobbes well
expresses this truth. “ When I considered the actions which I
meant to describe (those inferring the persons), I was again per.
‘éuaded rather to choose those of a former age, than the present ;
and in a century so far removed, as might preserve me from their
improper examinations, who know not the requisites of a poem,
nor how much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of
heroic poesy are not unproﬁtable), who take away the liberty of
a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian. Fer
why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune
by more delightful conveyances of probable ﬁctions, because aus-
. tere historians have entered into bond to truth ? An obligation,
which were in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is the bondage
of false martyrs, who lie in chains for a mistaken opinion. But
by this I would imply, that truth, narrative and past, is the
idol of historians (who worship a dead thing), and truth ope-
rative, and by ejects continually alive, is the mistress of poets,
who hath not her existence in matter, but in reason.”1L

For this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the
lines in THE EXCURSION, pp. 96, 97, and 98, may be taken, if
not as a striking instance, yet as an illustration of my meaningi
It must be some strong motive—(as, for instance, that the descrip-
tion was necessary to the intelligibility of the tale)——which could
induce me to describe in a number of verses what a draughtsman
could present to the eye with incomparably greater satisfaction
by half a dozen strokes of his pencil, or the painter with as many
touches of his brush. Such descriptions too often occasion in the
mind of a reader, who is determined to understand his author, a
feeling of labor, not very dissimilar to that, with which he would
construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical proposi-
tion. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map
out of its box. We ﬁrst look at one part, and then at another,

* [Ate Kat ¢Lhooo¢érepov Kai arrovdatérepov noino'tg lo‘ropiag éon’v. IIEP]
HOIHTIKHE. See the quotation, p. 399. (Note).—S. 0.]

1» [From the Preface before Gondibert. To his much honored friend, Mr
Hobbes, dated Louvre in Paris, Jan. 2, 1650.——S. 0.]

1' [Book iii. P. W. vi. pp. 78-9—8. 0.]

470 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

then JOIII and dove-tail them ; and when the successive acts of
attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of
mind to behold it as a whole. The ' oet d ain to
ipnﬂgination, not to the fancy ; an I know no happier case to ex-
empliTy the distinction between these two faculties. Master-
pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound in the wri-
tings of Milton, for example :

“ The ﬁg-tree ; not that kind for fruit renown’d,
But such as at this day, to Indians known,
In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms
Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
The bended twigs take root, and daughters groan
About the mother-tree, a pillar’d shade
High over-arch’d, and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN:
There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat,
Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds
At hoop-holes cut through thickest shade :”—*

This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such,
and with such co-presence of the whole picture ﬂashed at once
upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the
poet must likewise understand and command what Bacon calls
the vestigia communia of the senses, the latency of all in each,
and more especially as by a magical penna duplex, the excite-
ment of vision by sound and the exponents of sound. Thus,
“ The echoing walks between,” may be almost said to reverse the
fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the Egyptian
statue.’r Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in
the world of imagination.

The second division respects an apparent minute adherence to
matter-offact in character and incidents ; a. biographical atten-
tion to probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect

* [Pan Lost, Book ix. 1. 1101.]

+ [The Statue of Memnon, one of two statues called Shamy and Damy,
which stand at a little distance from Medinet Abou, towards the Nile, look-
ing eastward, directly opposite to the Temple of Luxor, was said to utter a
sound like the snapping asunder of a. musical string, when it was struck by
the ﬁrst beams of the sun. There is no doubt, that before Cambyses broke
this colossus, it uttered sounds when the sun shone on it : the statue is com-
posed of a quartzy sandstone, highly crystallized, containing a considerable
portion of iron, and this material, when struck, gives a metallic ring. The
excitement of vision by the suggestion of sound ,is the converse of the ex.
eitement of sound by the impulse of light—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 471

Under this head I shall deliver, with no feigned difﬁdence, the
results of my best reﬂection on the great int 0 c i -
tween Mr. Wordsworth and his objectors ; namely, 91W
W I have already declared, and I trust justiﬁed,
my utter dissent from the mode of argument which his critics
have hitherto employed. TQﬂzei¢ question,—“ Why did you choose
such a character, or a character from such a rank of .life ?”—the
poet might in my opinion fairly retort : why with the conception
of my character did you make.wilful choice of mean or ludicrous
associations not furnished by me, but supplied from your ow
sickly and fastidious feelings? How was it, indeed, probable,
that such arguments could have any weight with an author,
whose plan, whose guiding principle, and main object it was to
attack and subdue that state of association, which leads us to
place the chief value on those things on which man differs from
man, and to forget or disregard the high dignities, which belong
to Human Nature, the sense and the feeling, which may be, and
.ought to be, found in all ranks? The feelings with which, as
Christians, we contemplate a mixed congregation rising or kneel-
ing before their common Maker, Mr. Wordsworth would have us
entertain at all times, as men, and as readers; and by the ex-
citement of this lofty, yet prideless impartiality in poetry, he
might hope to have encouraged its continuance in real life. The
praise of good men be his 3 In real life, and, I trust, even in my
imagination, .I honor a virtuous and wise man, without reference
to the presence or absence of artiﬁcial advantages. Whether in
the person of an armed baron, a laurelled bard, or of an old I’ed-
ler, or still older Leech-gatherer, the same qualities of head and
heart must claim the same reverence. And even in poetry I am
not conscious, that I have ever suffered my feelings to be dis-
turbed or offended by any thoughts or images, which the poet
himself has not presented.

But yet I object, nevertheless, and for the following reasons.
First, because the object in view, as an immediate object, be-
mthe moral philosopher, and would be pursued, not only
'more appropriately, but in my opinion with far greater proba-
bility of success, in sermons or moral essays, than in an elevated ,
poem. It seems, indeed, to destroy the main fundamental dis-
tinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even between
philosophy and works of ﬁction, inasmuch as it proposes truth

 

.___

472 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

for its immediate object, instead of pleasure. Now till the bless
ed time shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure, and both
shall be so united, as to be distinguishable in words only, not in
feeling, it will remain the poet’s ofﬁce to proceed upon that state
of association, which actually exists as general; instead of at-
tempting ﬁrst to make it what it ought to'be, and then to let the
pleasure follow. But here is unfortunately a small lag/stemm-
proteron. For the communication of pleasure is the introduc-
tory means by which alone the poet must expect to moralize his
readers. ,Secondly : though I were to admit, for a moment, this
argument to be groundless: yet how is the moral effect to be
produced, by merely attaching the name of some low profession
to powers which are least likely, and lo qualities which are as-
suredly not more likely, to be found in it ? The Poet, speaking
in his own person, may at once delight and improve us by senti-
ments, which teach us the independence of goodness, of wisdom,
and even of genius, on the favors of fortune. And having made
a due reverence before the throne of Antonine, he may bow with
equal awe before Epictetus among his fellow-slaves— '

 

“ and rejoice
In the plain presence of his dignity.”

.Who is not at once delighted and improved, when the Poet

Wordsworth himself exclaims,

“ Oh! many are the Poets that are sown
By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,
Nor having e’er, as life advanced, been led
By circumstance to take unto the height
The measure of themselves, these favored Beings,
All but a scattered few, live out their time,
Husbanding that which they possess within,
And go to the grave, unthought of. Strongest minds
Are often those of whom the noisy world
Hears least?”l6

To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do
one’s heart good; though I for my part, have not the fullest

"‘ [The Excursion, Book I. P. W. vi. p. 10. After “ accomplishment of
verse” there is a parenthesis of ﬁve lines omitted in the extract; the little
quotation that occurs just before is from the same place—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 478

faith in the truth of the observation. On the contrary I believe
the instances to be exceedingly rare ,_@nd should feel almost as
strong an objection to introduce such a character 1n a poetic ﬁc-
tion, as a pair of black swans on a lake, 1n a fancy landscape.
When I think how many, and how much better books than
Homer, or even than Herodotus, Pindar or ZEschylus, could have
read, are in the power of almost ever’y man, in a country where
almost every man is instructed to read and write ;- and how rest-
less, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are ; and yet
find even in situations the most favorable, according to Mr.
Wordsworth, for the formation of a pure and poetic language; in
situations which insure familiarity with the grandest objects of
the imagination; but one Burns, among the shepherds of Scot~
land, and not a single poet of humble life among those of English
lakes and mountains, I conclude, that PoWy
a very d.§ligaje...huLaJery_rare plant;

But be this as it may, the feelings with which, V/

“ I think of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul, that perished in his pride;
Of Burns, who walk’d in glory and in joy
Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side”—*

are widely different from those with which I should read a poem,
where the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and
a philosopher in the fable of his narration, had chosen to make
him a chimney-sweeper ; and then, in order to remove all doubts
on the subject, had invented an account of his birth, parentage
and education, with all the strange and fortunate accidents
which had concurred in making him at once poet, philosopher,
and sweep! Nothing but biography can justify this. If it
be admissible even in a novel, it must be one in the manner
of De Foe’s, that were meant to pass for histories, not in the
manner of Fielding’s: in THE LIFE OF MOLL FLﬁNDERS, or
COLONEL JACK, not in a TOM JONES or even a JOSEPH ANDREWS.
Much less then can it be legitimately introduced in a. poem, the
characters of which, amid the strongest individualization, must
stLl remain representative. The precepts of Horace, on this

' [“ Of him who walked in glory and in joy
Following his plough, along the mountain side :”-—-
P. W. ii. p. 119.—S 0.]

474 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of the huv
man mind.* They are not more peremptory, than wise and
prudent. For in the ﬁrst place a deviation from them perplexes
the reader’s feelings, and all the circumstances which are feigned
in Order to make such accidents less improbable, divide and dis-
quiet his faith, rather than aid and support it. Spite of all at-
tempts, the ﬁction will appear, and unfortunately not as ﬁctitious
but'as false. (the reader not only knows, that the sentiments
and ”language are the poet’s own, and his own too in his artiﬁcial
character, as poet; but by the fruitless endeavors to make him
think the contrary, he is not even suffered to forget it) The effect 5
is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when the fable and
the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in THE
MESSIAII or KLOPSTOCK, or in CUMBERLAND’S CALVARY :‘r and

* [There are many precepts in Herace De Arte Poetica that bear on this
subject, as those on congruity at the beginning, and those on giving suitable
attributes to every character, and duly regarding the exemplar of life and
manners, v. 309—18; but none, I think, that forbids the choice of too pecu-
liar a subject, except so far as this is implied in the condemnation of what
appears improbable.

Ficta voluptatis causa, sint proxima veris :
lVe, guodcungue volet, poseat sébifabula credi. v. 338.

Mr. Coleridge’s observation on laborious ﬁdelity in representations, and an
anxiety of explanation and retrospect, are supported, in a general way, by
those lines of Horace: '

Semper ad eventum festinat, et in medias res,
Non secus ac notas, auditorem rapit: et quae
Desperat tractata nitescere posse, relinqnit. v. 148.—-S. 0.]

1- [This Epic is written in blank verse, and is a studied imitation of Mil-
ton. In its best passages, as the Assembling of the Devils, in the ﬁrst book,
it is but a mocking-bird strain, with scarce a note in it of native music; and
generally where the-Poem is not tame it borders on the burlesque. The
dispute in B. VII. between Satan and Death, who, rather unnaturally, re-
fuses to harbor his old father, and is informed, as it appears, in reward of
this conduct, that he may live till the end of the world, seems to have been
written in order to serve as a foil to Milton’s grand episode of Satan’s en-
counter with his “ fair Son” at the gates of Hell :—it brings our moral. and
metaphysical ideas into such an odd sort of conﬂict and confusion. , By com-
paring the two, we see clearly how little this allegorical subject supports
itself; how soon it sinks into the ridiculous in unequal hands, how com-
pletely its sublimity in those of Milton is the result of consummate skill and
high poetic genius. Perhaps too it may be questioned whether the author
has not too much interfered with the Scriptural representations of Death

 

BIOGRAPHIA 'LITERARIA. 475

not merely suggested by it as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton.
That illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative
faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by
their own force, 'without either denial or afﬁrmation of their real
existence by the judgment, is rendered impossible by their im-
mediate neighborhood to words and facts of known and absolute -
truth. A faith, which transcends even historic belief, must ab-
solutely put out this mere poetic analogon'of faith, as the summer
sun is said to extinguish our household ﬁres, when it shines full
upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded to as

by making him turn out mild and amiable, and oppose himself to the great
Enemy. Revelation, as . essinO' 'v ' 1 his ‘ssay on this subject, has
made him the “king of terrors,” the awful offspring of Sin, and the dread
way to its punishment; though to the imagination of the ancient Heathen
world, Greek or Etrurian, he was a youthful Geniusf—the twin brother of
Sleep—or a lusty boy with a torch held downward. But the accomplished
author of The Cholerie Man has dramatized him as freely as if he were but '
a Jack Nightshade; although he avers that there is “ very little of the au-
dacity of fancy in the composition of Calvary.”

The poem shows want of judgmrnt, if not audacity, in another way also.
Of all subjects in the wide range 'of thought the Death of Christ is that
Which Fiction should approach most warily. Milton left it untouched.
The “ narrow basis” of the Paradise Regained seems to me one of the num-
berless proofs of the mighty master’s judgment; the whole poem is com-
prised within the limits of that passage of our Lord’s history, which is least
deﬁned in Holy Writ,—the sojourn in the wilderness,—and could best bear
to have an invention grafted into it. To bring angels and devils, not men-
tioned in the Scripture narrative of the Death and Passion, around the
cross or into any sort of connection with it, either in foreground or back
ground, that narrative being so full as it is of actual facts and particulars,
‘ is to jar, if not absolutely to shock, the feelings of most readers. When
fanciful ﬁction is brought so near to sacred history of the most deﬁnite
character, we recoil, and feel as if the former, clashed with the latter, and
was broken . O'ainst it, like the china vase against the vessel of iron. This
collision the plan of Cumberland’s poem involved, and poets of greater ge-
nius than he, in an enterprise of like nature, have but failed, I think, more
splendidly. The author of Calvary thought himself well off, because he had
so much ﬁne subject ready to his hand. It was just that which ruined him.
He had net capital enough to invest in such an undertaking; for the more
is given, in this way, to the poet, the more is required out of his own brain,
for the aoinotg‘, which must be made with materials furnished by himself,
whatever he adopts for the foundation matter. A man may even take from
Various places a certain amount of material ready wrought, as Milton did,
and yet add that, in the using of it, which makes the result entirely his
own—S. C.]

$7 6 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

pleasing ﬁction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect
produced in this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is
in a less degree brought about in the instances, ,to which I have
been objecting, by the bafﬂed attempts of the author to ‘make him
believe.
Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the
roject and of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support.
Es there one word for instance, attributed to the pedler in THE
EXCURSION, characteristic of a Pedler? One sentiment, that
might not more plausibly, even without the aid of any previous
explanation, have proceeded from any wise and beneﬁcent old
man, of a rank or profession in which the language of learning
and reﬁnement are natural and to be expected '3 Need the rank
have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the
knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? When on the
contrary this information renders the man’s language, feelings,
sentiments, and information a riddle, which must itself be solved
by episodes of anecdote? Finally when this, and this alone,
could have induced a genuine Poet to inweave in a poem of the
loftiest style, and on subjects the loftiest and of most universal
interest, such minute matters of fact (not unlike those furnished
for the obituary of a magazine by the friends of some obscure
~‘ ornament of society lately deceased” in some obscure town), as

“Among the hills of Athol he was born:
There, on a small hereditary Farm,
An unproductive slip of rugged ground,
His Father dwelt; and died in poverty ;
While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace,
The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe,
A little One—unconscious of their loss.
But ere he had outgrown his infant days
His widowed Mother, for a second Mate,
Espoused the teacher of the Village School;
Who on her oﬁ'spring zealously bestowed
Needful instruction.”

“From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak,
In summer, tended cattle on the Hills;
But, through the inclement and the perilous days
Of long—continuing winter, be repaired
To his Step-father’s Sehool,”—&c.”*

‘4_.

' [Book 1'. l‘ “7 vi. p. 7. The ﬁrst three 'lines of the ﬁrst passage are

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 477

For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration,
might, with triﬂing alterations, have been far more apprapriately,
and with far greatw told of a poet in the charac«
ter i9. 3,313.99“ an W1t out incurring another defect, which I
shall now mention, and a sufﬁcient illustration of which will have
been here anticipated.

Third ; an undue predilection for the (ngmgﬂg fgrm in certain
pomm which one or other of two evils result. Either the
thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then
there arises an incongruity of style ; or they are the same and in-
distinguishable, and then it presents a Species of ventriloquism,
where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man
only speaks. ‘

- The for rth class of defects is closely connected with the former ;
but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling dis-
proportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects de-
scribed, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of
the most cultivated classes ; and with which therefore few only,
and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to
sympathize : En this class, I comprise occasional prolixity, rep
etition, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought.) As
instances, see pages 27, 28, and 62 of the Poems, Vol. i.*

now alone retained. The story of the Step-father is left out, aud the narra-
tive proceeds thus:

“ His parents, with their numerous offspring, dwelt:
“ A virtuous household,” &c.

In the next paragraph the ﬁfth line now is
“Equipped with satchel, to a school, that stood,” &c. S. 53.]

3* [The anecdote for Fathers: stanzas 4—13. Two of these stanzas are
now condensed into one, and a new one is added. P. 62 in vol. i. is a blank.
Probably Mr. C. referred to the same page in vol. ii., which contains Song
at the Feast of Brougham Castle, from the line

O’er whom such thankful tears were shed

_ . When Falcons were abroad for prey.
I have heard my father object to the paragraph
Alas when evil men are strong,

I believe on account of its too much retarding the impassioned ﬂow of the

478 'BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

and the ﬁrst eighty lines of the VIth Book of THE EXCUR-
srorvﬁt

W thoquthe subject.

This is an approximation to what might be called mental bomv
past, as istinouish ‘ verbal ' for, as in the latter there is
a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there
is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion.
This, by the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is
capable. It is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with
‘he distaff‘ of Omphale.

It is a well-known fact, that bright colors in motion both
make and leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is
more likely too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus
originated, may become the link of association in recalling the

poem, and thus injuring its general effect, though the passage is beautiful
in itself and in harmony with the rest.

The transitions and vicissitudes in this noble Lyric I have always thought
rendered it one of the ﬁnest specimens of modern subjective poetry which
our age has seen. The ode commences in a tone of high gratulation and
festivity—a tone not only glad but comparatively even jocund and light-
hearted. The Cliﬂ‘ord is restored to the home, the honors and estates of his
ancestors. Then it sinks and falls away to the remembrance of tribula-
tion—times of war and bloodshed, ﬂight and terror, and hiding away from
the enemy—times of poverty and distress, when the Clifford was brought,
a little child, to the shelter of a northern valley. After a while it emerges
from those depths of sorrow—gradually rises into a strain of elevated tran-
quillity and contemplative rapture; through the power of imagination, the
beautiful and impressive aspects of nature are brought into relationship
with the spirit of him, whose fortunes and character form the subject of the
piece, and are represented as gladdening and exalting it, whilst they keep
it pure and ans-potted from the world; Suddenly the Poet is carried on with
greater animation and passion :—he has returned to the point whence he
started—ﬂung himself back into the tide of stirring life and moving events.
Allis to come over again, struggle and conﬂict, chances and changes of war,
victory and triumph, overthrow and desolation. I know nothing, in lyric
poetry, more beautiful or affecting than the ﬁnal transition from this part
of the ode, with its rapid metre, to the slow elegiac stanzas at the end,
when from the warlike fervor and eagerness, the jubilant menacing strain
which has just been described, the Poet passes back into the sublime silence
of Nature, gathering amid her deep and quiet bosom a more subdued and
solemn tenderness than he had manifested before :——it is as if from the
heights of the imaginative intellect his spirit had retreated into the recesses
of a profoundly thoughtful Christian heart-S. 0.]

* [R W. vi. pp. 205—8—as far as “ genuine 'fruits.”—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. 479

feelings and images that had accompanied the original impression
But if we describe this in such lines, as

“ They ﬂash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude!”

in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when
the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass
before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye : which is
indeed “ the bliss of solitude ?” Assuredly we seem to sink most
abruptly, not to say burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from
this couplet to—

“ And then my heart with pleasure ﬁlls,
And dances with the dqﬂ'odils.”* Vol. i. p. 328.

The second instance is from Vol. ii. page 12,1L where the poet

* [I wandered lonely. P. W. ii. p. 93. And yet the true poetic heart
“With pleasure ﬁlls” in reading or remembering this sweet poem. How
poetry multiplies bright images like a thousand-fold kaleidoscope—for how
many “inward eyes” have those daffodils danced and ﬂuttered in the breeze,
the waves dancing beside them 1—8. 0.]

. f [Gipsies P. W. ii. p. 105. These lines are in themselves very grand.
The last three are now replaced thus:

“Oh better wrong and strife

(By nature transient) than this torpid life ;

Life which the very stars reprove

As on their silent tasks they move 1
Yet, witness all that stirs in heaven or earth!
In scorn I speak not ; they are what their birth

And breeding suffer them to be:

Wild outcasts of society.”

I hope it is not mere poetic partiality, regardless of morality, that makes so
many readers regret the sublime conciseness of the original conclusion.

“ Oh better wrong and strife !

Better vain deeds or evil than such life 1”

if unexplained, might pass for a strong ﬁgure of speech, the like to which
might be shown both in sacred and profane writings. Thus in the Blind
Highland Boy the Poet exclaims '

“ And let him, let him go his way I”

though his way was probably to destruction, in order to express with
vivacity the special Providence that seems to watch over the “forlorn un-
fortunate,” who are innocent like this poor sightless voyager.

Some may object that the Gipsies have tasks of their own. such as Mr.

480 BIO GRAPHIA LITERARIA.

having gone out for a day’s tour of pleasure, meets early in the
morning with a knot of Gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-
tents and straw-beds, together with their children and asses, in
some ﬁeld by the road-side. At the close of the day on his return
our tourist found them in the same place. “ Twelve hours,” says
he,
“Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I.
Have been a traveller under open sky,

Much witnessing of change and cheer,
Yet as I left I ﬁnd them here l”

Whereat the poet, without seeming to reﬂect that the poor tawny
wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together
through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequent- ,
ly must have been right glad to rest themselves, their children
and cattle, for one whole day ; and overlooking the obvious truth,
that such repose might be quite as necessary for them, as a walk

Wordsworth himself has beautifully described in the two following stanzas
of his Female Vagrant, a poem which has much of the peculiar pathos of
Crabbe conveyed in a more deeply poetical medium than that very interest-
ing and powerful writer was able to adopt. I say more deeply poetical,
for I see a great deal of true poetry in Crabbe’s productions, pitched in a
grave key accordant with the nature of his thoughts.

Rough potters seemed they, trading soberly

With panniered asses driven from door to door;

But life of happier sort set forth to me,

And other joys my fancy to allure ;

The bag-pipe dinning on the midnight moor,

In barn uplightcd; and companions boon

Well met from far with revelry secure,

Among the forest glades, while jocund June

Rolled fast along the sky his warm and genial moon.

But ill they suited me—those journeys dark

O’er moor and mountain, midnight theft to hatch I

To charm the surly house-dog’s faithful bark,

Or hang on tip-toe at the lifted latch.

The gloomy lantern and the dim blue match,

The black disguise, the warning whistle shrill,

And ear still busy on its nightly watch,

Were not for me brought up in nothing ill.

Besides on griefs so fresh my thoughts were brooding still.

But these are the 1r1egular doings of men too idle and undisciplined for
negular employment, and do but conﬁrm the Poet’s sentence Ipon them as
taskless loiterers. —-S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 48]

of the same continuance was pleasing or healthful for the more
fortunate poet ; expresses his indignation in a series of lines, the
diction and imagery of which would have been rather above,
than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense
empire of China improgressive for thirty centuries :

“ The weary Sun betook himself to rest :—
—Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west,
Outshining, like a visible God,

The glorious path in which he trod.

And now, ascending, after one dark hour,
And one night’s diminution of her power,
Behold the mighty Moon! this way

She looks, as if at them—but they

Regard not her z—oh, better wrong and strife,
Better vain deeds or evil than such life!

The silent Heavens have goings on :

The stars have tasks ?—but these have none I”

The last instance of this defect (for I know no other than these
already cited), is from the Ode, page 351, Vol. ii.,* where,
speaking of a child, “a six years’ darling of a pigmy size,” he
thus addresses him :

“Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the Eternal Mind,—
Mighty Prophet! Seer blestl
On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to ﬁnd 1
Thou, over whom thy Immortality

Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by I”

Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which
connects the epithets “deaf and silent,” with the apostrophized
eye .' or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, “Philoso-
pher”) the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage ; and with-
out examining the propriety of making a “Master brood o’er a
Slave,” or “ the Day” brood at all; we will merely ask, what
does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that age 2'
Philosopher? In what sense does he read “the eternal deep 1’”

* [Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.
P. W. v. 337.] .
von 11:. X 7

482 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

In what sense is he declared to be “forever haunted” by the
Supreme Being ? or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles
of a ZVIz'ghtg/ Prophet, a blessed Seer ? By reﬂection ? by knowl-
edge? by conscious intuition? or by any form or modiﬁcation of
consciousness? These would be tidings indeed; but such as
would pre-suppose an immediate revelation to the inspired com-
municator, and require miracles to authenticate his inspiration.
Children at this age give us no such information of themselves ;
and at what time were we dipped in the Lethe, which has pro-
duced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike? There are
many of us that still possess some remembrances, more or less
distinct, respecting themselves at six years old; pity that the
worthless straws only should ﬂoat, while treasures, compared
with which all the mines of Golconda and Mexico were but
straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into some un
known abyss.

But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as hav-
ing been the poet’s meaning ; if these mysterious gifts, faculties,
and operations, are not accompanied with consciousness; who
else is conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it
be no part of the child’s conscious being? For aught I know,
the thinking Spirit within me may be substantially one with the
principle of life, and of vital operation. For aught I know, it
may be employed as a secondary agent in the marvellous organ-

? ization and organic movements of my body. But, surely, it
would be strange language to say, that I construct my heart .’ or
that I propel the ﬁner inﬂuences through my nerves .’ or that I
compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my

~, own eyes! Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems,

\both Pantheists; and among the ancients there were philoso-
phers, teachers of the EN KAI HAN, who not only taught that
God was All, but that this All constituted God. Yet not even
these would confound the part, as a part, with the whole, as the
whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between the indi-
vidual and God, between the Modiﬁcation and the one only Sub-
stance, more sharply drawn, than in that of Spinoza. J acobi*

* [Fr. H. Jacobi was born at Dusseldorf, in 1743, was President of the
Academy of Sciences at Munich from 1804, died March 16, 1819.

He wrote upon Spinoza and against Mendelsohn, on Realism and Ideal-
ism, on the Undertaking of Criticism to convert Reason into the Under

.BIOGRAPHI'A: LITERARIA. 483

indeed relates of Lessin , that, after a conversation with him at
the house of the Poet, 5181111 (the T yrtaeus and Anacreon of the
G’erman Parnassus), in which conversation Wd

ivatel to a bi his reluctan t an 67 307m xist:
WWW-
cWand while t ey were sitting at table ' a
s ower 0 rain came on un W
gret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their
wine in the garden , upon which Lessing, in one of his half1
earnest, half-joking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, “It is I,
perhaps, that am doing that,” i. e. raining.’—and Jacobi an-
swered, “Or perhaps I ;” Gleim contented himself with staring
at them both, without asking for any explanation.”‘=

So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the mag-
niﬁcent attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child,
which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog,
or a ﬁeld of com; or even to a ship, or tc the wind and waves
that propel it? The omnipresent Spirit works equally in them,
as in the child; and the child is equally unconscious of it as they.
It can not surely be, that the four lines, immediately following,
are to contain the explanation? ,

“ To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense ur sight

Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie ;”—+

 

standing, and other works of metaphysical controversy. His complete
works in 5 vols. 8vo. Leipzig, 1812—1822, includl his celebrated philosophiv
cal romances. Cousin’s Manuel, vol. ii. pp. 330 331, Note. Gleim died in
1803, at the age of eighty-four. Taylor says of him: “ Gleim had a loving
heart, a house always open to literary guests, and a passion for correspond-
ing with all his acquaintance, especially with young men of letters, in whom
be anticipated rising genius. His scrutoire has been edited; and it abounds
with complaints that his friends are less fond of writing useless epistles
than himself, and were one by one letting drop an intercourse which amused
his leisure, but interrupted their in ’iustry. Klopstock and Kleist were
among his favorite correspondents.”——S. 0.]

V ‘ 9* [Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza. Works, iv. 8. 7 9. An attack upon Spl-
uoza, in letters to Mendelsohn.—Am. Ed.]

1- [These lines are now omitted; after the line,

. “ Which we are toiling all our lives to ﬁnd,”
we now read,
“ ‘ mdarkness lost, the darkness of the grave ’-—.S 0.]

484 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Surely, it can not be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a
comment on the little poem, “ We are Seven ?”*—that the whole
l, meaning of the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child.
who .by-the-by at six years old would have been better instructed
in most Christian families, has no other notion of death than that
xof lying in a dark, cold place? And still, I hope, not as in a
place of thought .’ not the frightful notion of lying awake in his
grave ! The analogy between death and sleep is too simple, tor
natural, to render so horrid a belief possible for children; even
had they not been in the habit, as all Christian children are, of
hearing the latter term used to express the former. But if the
child’s belief be only, that “he is not dead, but sleepeth 2”
wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother, or any
other adult and instructed person ’3 To form an idea of a thing’s
becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing; is impossiv
ble to all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however edu-
cated or uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in gen-
eral. If the words are taken in the common sense, they convey
an absurdity; and if, in contempt of dictionaries and custom,
they are so interpreted as to avoid the absurdity, the meaning
dwindles into some bald truism. , Thus you must at once under«
stand the words contrary to their common import, in order to ar~
rive at any sense ,' and according to their common import, if you
are to receive from them any feeling of snblimity or admira—
tion.

‘2‘" Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth’s
poems are so few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely
just to attract the reader’s attention toward them; yet I have
dwelt on it, and perhaps the more for this very reason. For
being so very few, they can not sensibly detract from the reputa-
tion of an author, who is even characterized by the number of
profound truths in his writings, which will stand the severest
analysis; and yet few as they are, they are exactly those passages
which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able,
to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed Wordsworth,
may be mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by plagiar-
ists; but he can not be imitated, except by those who are not.
born to be imitators. For without his depth of feeling and his
imaginative power his sense would want its vital warmth and

* [R W. i. p. 19,—S. 0.}

BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA. 485

peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his mysticism would
become sickly—mere fog, and dimness !

To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only
occasional, I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the
dissent of any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the
most part correspondent) excellencies. Ell—St, an austere purity
of language both ' o— icall ; in short a perfect
appropriateness of the words to the meaning. Of how high
value I deem this, and how particularly estimable I hold the ex—
ample at the present day, has been already stated: and in part
too the reasons on which I ground both the moral and intellectual
importance of habituating ourselves to a strict accuracy of ex
pression. It is noticeable, how limited an acquaintance with the
master-pieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even a sen~
sitive taste, where none but master-pieces have been seen and
admired ; while on the other hand, the most correct notions, and
the widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of " all ages
and countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious
familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of tastelessness
or of a perverted taste. If this be the case, as it notoriously is,
.with the arts of music and painting, much more difﬁcult will it
be, to 'avoid the infection of multiplied and daily examples in the
practice of an art, which uses words, and words only, as its instru-
ments. In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the
ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely
possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose
as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely, its uni/rans-
lamblencss in words of the same language without injury to the
meaning. Be it observed, however, that I include in-the @-
ing of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all
the associations which it recalls. For the language is framed to
Convey not the object alone, but likewise the character, mood
and intentions of the person who is representing it. In poetry it
is practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affecta-
tions and misappropriations, which promiscuous authorship, and
reading not promiscuous only because ,it is disProportionally'most
Conversant with the compositions of the day, have rendered gen-
eral. Yet even to the poet, composing in his own province, it is
an'arduous work: and as the result and pledge of a watchful
good sense, of ﬁne and luminous distinction, and of complete self

486 BIOGRAPHI‘A' LITERARIA.

possession, may justly claim all the honor which belongs to an
attainment equally difﬁcult and valuable, and the more valuable
for being rare. It is at all times the proper food of the under-
standing ; but in, an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food and
antidote.

In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our
style wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets
us everywhere, from the sermon to the newspaper, from the
harangue of the legislator to the speech from the convivial chair,
announcing a toast or'sentiment. Our chains rattle, even while we
are complaining of them. The poems of Boetius rise high in our
estimation when we compare them with those of his contempo-
raries, as Sidonius Apollinarisﬁ“ and others. They might even
be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are
set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age 01
the writer. Much however may be eﬁected by education. I
believe not only from grounds of reason, but from having in a
great measure assured myself of the fact by actual though limited
experience, that, to a youth led from his ﬁrst boyhood to investigate
the meaning of every word and the reason of its choice and position,
logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under new names.

On some future occasion, more especially demanding such dl8¢
quisition, Ishall attempt to prove the close connection between
veracity and habits of mental accuracy ; the beneﬁcial after-
elfects of verbal precision in the preclusion of fanaticism, which
masters the feelings more especially by indistinct watch-words;
and to display the advantages which language alone, at least
which language with incomparably greater ease and certainty
than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing
modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and
as it were by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time
the formation of a second nature. When we reﬂect, that the cul-
tivation of the judgment is a positive command of the moral
law, since the reason can give the principle alone, and the con-
science bears witness only to the motive, while the application
and effects must depend on the judgment: when we consider,
that the greater part of our success and comfort in life de-
pends on distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is

* [Sidonius Apollinaris was a Christian writer born A.D. 430, author of
Letters and .l’oems.——S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 437-

peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common witl'
others, so as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely
possible or positively unﬁt, we shall learn to value earnestly and
with a practical seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by
nature and society, of teaching the young mind to think well and
wisely by the same unremembered process and with the same
never forgotten results, as those by which it is taught to speak
and converse. Now how much warmer the interest is, how
much more genial the feelings of reality and practicability, and
thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation are, which
a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet, ex-
cites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in
the earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add, that all
the praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a
purpose so important, joined with that which must be claimed
for the infrequency of the same excellence in the same perfection,
belongs in full right to Mr. Wordsworth. I am far however
from denying that we have poets whose general style possesses
the same excellence, as Mr. Moore, Lord Byron, Mr. Bowles,
and, in all his later and more important works, our laurel-honor-
mg Laureate. But there are none, in whose works I do not ap-
pear to myself to ﬁnd more exceptions, than in those of Words-
worth. Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out of
place, and must be left for the critic who doubts and would in-
validate the justice of this eulogy so applied.

The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth’s

works is: corres ondent weight and t the Though

Sentiments ,—w0n, no ooks—meLfronNLppet s own
MIC ﬂesh and have the dew upon

them. HTS muse, at least when in her strength of wing, and
when she hovers aloft in her proper element,
Makes audibly a linked lay of truth,

Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay,
Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes 1*

        
   

Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one,
which is not rendered valuable by some just and original reﬂection.

See page 25, vol. ii. :1 or the two following passages in one of
his humbler compositions.

* [Coleridge’s Poet. Works, p. 160.—-S. 0.] -
1' [Star-Gazers, stanzas 3—6. P. W. ii. p. 98.——S. 0.]

488 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

“ 0 Reader 1 had you in your mind
Su( ‘1 stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader 1 you would ﬁnd
A tale in every thing.”

“I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas ! the gratitude of men
Has oftener left me mourning.”*

er in a still higher strain the six beautiful quatrains, page 134

“ Thus fares it still in our decay :
And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.

The Blackbird in the summer trees,
The Lark upon the hill,

Let loose their carols when they please,
Are quiet when they will.

With Nature never do they wage

A foolish strife; they see

A happy youth, and their old age

Is beautiful and free!

But we are pressed by heavy laws;
And often, glad no more,

. We wear a face of joy, because
We have been glad of yore.

If there is one, who need bemoan

His kindred laid in earth,

The household hearts that were his own,
It is the man of mirth.

My days, my Friend, are almost gone, 1
My life has been approved,

And many love me; but by none

Am I enough beloved.”1-

or the sonnet on Bonaparte, page 202, vol. ii. ;I or ﬁnally (for a

* [Simon Lee. P. W. v. p. 1‘7.—S. 0.]
f [The Fountain. P. W. v. pp. 34—5—8. 0.]
1: [Sonnet-s dedicated to Liberty. Part I. Sonnet IV. P. W. iii. p. 17 8.

I grieved for Bonaparte, with a vain

And an unthinking grief! for who aspires

To genuine greatness but from just desires
And knowledge such as He could never gain?
’Tis not in battles that from youth we train

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. ‘499

volume would scarce sufﬁce to exhaust the instances), the last
stanza of the poem on the withered Celandine, vol. ii. p. 312*

“ To be a Prodigal’s Favorite-—then, worse truth,
A Miser’s Pensioner—behold our lot!
0 Man! that from thy fair and shining youth
Age might but take the things Youth needed not.”

Both in respect of this and of the former excellence, Mr. Words-
worth strikingly resembles Samuel Daniel, one of the golden
writers of our golden Elizabethan age, now most causelessly neg-
lected ; Samuel Daniel, whose diction bears no mark of time, no
distinction of age, which has been, and as long as our language
shall last, will be so far the language of the to-day and forever,
as that it is more intelligible to us, than the transitory fashions of
our own particular age. A similar praise is due to his senti'-'
ments. No frequency of perusal can deprive them of their fresh-
ness. For though they are brought into the full daylight of
every reader’s comprehension; yet are they drawn up from
depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, into which
few in any age have courage or inclination to descend. If Mr
Wordsworth is not equally with Daniel alike intelligible to all
readers of average understanding in all passages of his works,
the comparative difﬁculty does not arise from the greater impu-
rity of the ore, but from the nature and uses of the metal. A
poem is not necessarily obscure, because it does not aim to be
popular. It is enough, if a work be perspicuous to those for
whom it is written, and

“ Fit audience ﬁnd, though few."

To the “ Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollec-

The Governor who must be wise and good,

And temper with the sternness of the brain
Thoughts motherly, and weak as womanhood.
Wisdom doth live with children round her knees:
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk

Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk

Of the mind’s business : these are the degrees

By which true Sway doth mount; this is the stalk
True Power doth grow on; and her rights are there.

['he third and fourth lines and part of the second are now a little altered
_--S 0.]
'*' [The Small Celandine. P. W. v. p. 294.—S. 0.}
. ﬂ:

490 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

tions of early Childhood” the poet might have preﬁxed the lines
which Dante addresses to one of his own Canzoni—

“ Canzone, i’ credo, che saranno radi
Color, che tua ragione intendan bene,
Tanto lor sci faticoso ed alto.”"E

“ O lyric song, there will be few, think I,
\Vho may thy import understand aright:
Thou art for them so arduous and so high!”

But the ode was intended for such readers only as had been
accustomed to watch the ﬂux and reﬂux of their inmost nature,
to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and
to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they
know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and
alien, but which yet can not be conveyed, save in symbols of time
and space. For such readers the sense is sufﬁciently plain, and
they will be as little disposed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with
believing the Platonic pre-existence in the ordinary interpretation
of the words, as I am to believe, that Plato himself ever meant
or taught it.

Holld 6t 1371" dyxé-
v0; ducs’a ﬁshy
{vdov év‘rl gbapérpag‘
dwvdvra ovvsroww' £9
6:? n3 arch) éplunvéwv
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7ta sidcbg (pvgi'
paﬁévreg (53 ZdBpot
wan/locale, Képaxsg dig,
dxpavra yapiierov
Atop ape; (Spin/ya 1982014’

 

‘* [Canzoni illorali, lib. iv. canz. i. Tanto lor parli. faticoso e forte is the
original third line—S. 0.]

f [Olymp. ii. v. 150.
Beneath mine elbow a full quiver lies
Of ﬂeetest arrows, sounding to the wise ;
But for the crowd they need interpreters.
His skill is most who learns in Nature’s school
All else, expert by rule, .
Are none of hers ;
Mere tongues in vehement gabble idly heard,
Clamoring, like daws, at J ove’s celestial bird.

This is one of the good passages of Mr. Cary’s translations of Pindar. -S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. - 49]

Third (and wherein he soars far above Daniel), t e sinew
strm and originality of single lines a1Lparagrap1ls: the fre-
quent curiosafelz'citas of his diction, of which I need not here
give specimens, having anticipated them in a preceding page.
This beauty, and as eminently characteristic of Wordsworth’s
poetiy, his rudest] assailants have felt themselves compelled to
acknowledge and admire.

/’ F;ourt_h the perfect truth of nature in his images and descrip-
1 from nature, amnga longand

geanery spirit which gives the W
exprgWre—moﬂhature. L1ke a green ﬁeld re-
ﬂected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is
distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and lus-
tre. Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither
distorts nor false-colors its objects; but on the contrary brings
out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the eye of com-
mon observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been
often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the
dusty high-road of custom.

Let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. i. pages
42 to 47,* especially to the lines

“ So through the darkness and the cold we ﬂew,
And not a voice was idle: with the din
Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud;

The leaﬂess trees and every icy crag

Tinkled like iron ; while the distant hills

Into the tumult sent an alien sound

Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.”

Or to the poem on THE GREEN LINNET, vol. i. p. 244.’r What can
be more accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding stanzas?

“ Upon yon tuft of hazel-trees,
That twinkle to the gusty breeze,
Behold him perched in ecstasies,

Yet seeming still to hover °,
There ! where the ﬂutter of his wings
Upon his back and body ﬂings
Shadows and sunny glimmerings,

That cover him all over.

 

*1 [Inﬂuence of Natural Objects. P. W. i. p. 38.—S. 0.]
f [P. W. ii. p. 27. The last stanza is now a little altered—S. 0.]

492

BIO GRAPHIA. LITERARIA.

While thus before my eyes he gleams,
A Brother of the Leaves he seems:
When in a moment forth he teems

His little song in gushes:
As if it pleased him to disdain
And mock the Form which he did feign,
While he was dancing with the train

Of Leaves among the bushes.”

Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noontide silence,
p 284 ;* or the poem to the cuckoo, p. 299 ;’r or, lastly, though

4' [1). W. ii. p. '71.

Where is he that giddy Sprite
Blue-cap, with his colors bright,
Who was blest as bird could be,
Feeding in the apple-tree ;

Made such wanton spoil and rout,
Turning blossoms inside out;
Hung with head towards the ground,
Fluttered, perched, into a round
Bound himself and then unbound;
Lithest, gaudiest Harlequin!
Prettiest Tumbler ever seen !
Light of heart, and light of limb!
\Vhat is now become of Him?
Lambs, that through the mountains went
Frisking, bleating merriment,
When the year was in its prime,
They are sobered by this time.

If you look to vale or hill,

If you listen, all is still,

Save a little neighboring Rill,
That from out the rocky ground
Strikes a solitary sound.

Vainly glitters hill and plain,
And the air is calm in vain!
Vainly Morning spreads the lure
Of a sky serene and pure;
Creature none can she decoy

Into open sign of joy:

Is it that they have a fear

0f the dreary season near!

Or that other pleasures be
Sweeter even than gayety 2”-—-S. 0.]

f [P. W. ii. p. 81.] p ’

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 493

I might multiply the references to ten times the number, to the
poem, so completely VVordsworth’s, commencing

“ Three years she grew in sun and shower”—*

Fifth : a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought
with sensibquith man‘asmM.L1h§-SlmPﬁthy
indeemcontem la a fellow-suﬂererorgg-rnate,
(spectator, [mud pm'ticeps) but of a contemplator, from whose
view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature ;
no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or even of ignorance,
wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and.
the image of the Creator still remain legible to him under the
dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-
barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and ﬁnd themselves
in each other, the one as gloriﬁed, the latter as substantiated. In
this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me
without a compeer. Such as he is : so he writes. See vol. i.
pages 134 to 136,1‘ or that most affecting composition, THE AF-

9“ [Lucy. P. W. ii. p. 91. This poem contains those most beautiful
stanzas—-
She shall be Sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And her’s shall be the breathing balm,
And her’s the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.

The ﬂoating clouds their state shall lend
To her ; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould the maiden’s form
By silent sympathy.

The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face—S. C.]

if [’Tis said, that some have died forlove. P. W. i. p. 154. _

Amongst the Poems founded on the Aﬁ'ections is one called, from its ﬁrst
line, “I travelled among unknown men,” which ends with these lines
wherein the poet addresses his native land:

494 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

FLICTION OF MARGARET —— or ———,* pages 165 to 168,
which no mother, and if I may judge by my own experience, no
parent can read without a tear. Or turn to that genuine lyric,
in the former edition, entitled, THE MAD IVIOTHER,']‘ pages 174 to
178, of which I can not refrain from quoting two of the stanzas,
both of them for their pathos, and the former for the ﬁne tran-
sition in the two concluding lines of the stanza, so expressive of
that deranged state, in which, from the increased sensibility, the
suﬂ'erer’s attention is abruptly drawn off by every triﬂe, and in
the same instant plucked back again by the one despotic thought,
bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing power of Imagi-
nation and Passion, the alien object to which it had been so ab-
ruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate.

“ Suck, little babe, oh suck again 1
It cools my blood; it cools my brain ;
Thy lips, I feel them, baby! they
Draw from my heart the pain away.
Oh I press me with thy little hand ;
It loosens something at my chest ;
About that tight and deadly band
I feel thy little ﬁngers prest.
The breeze I see is in the tree I
It comes to cool my babe and me.”

“ Thy father cares not for my breast,
’Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest ;
’Tis all thine own !-——and, if its hue
Be changed, that was so fair to view,
’Tis fair enough for thee, my dove!
My beauty, little child, is ﬂown,

 

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed
The bowers where Lucy played ;

And thine too is the last green ﬁeld
That Lucy’s eyes surveyed.

A friend. a true poet himself, to whom I owe some new insight into the
merits of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry, and who showed me, to my surprise,
that. there were nooks in that rich and varied region, some of the shy treasures
of which I was not perfectly acquainted with, ﬁrst made me feel the great
beauty of this stanza; in which the Poet, as it were, spreads day and night
over the object of his affections, and seems, under the inﬂuence of passionate
feeling, to think of England, whether 1n light or darkness, only as her play-
place and verdant home. —S. 0.]

* [The Afﬂiction of Margar et. P. W. 1. p. 177.—-—S. 0.]

+ [Her eyes are wild. P. \V. i. p. 256.—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 495

But thou wilt live with me in love;
And what if my poor cheek be brown 3
’Tis well for me thou canst not see
How pale and wan it else would be. ”" .

Last, and pre- eminently I challenge for this poet the gift 01
Imag mat “on in the highest and stiictest sense of the w01d. In
thé‘ﬁrafﬂ‘f' fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always
graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally
too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of View, or is such as
appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spon-
taneous presentatlon. Indeed his fancy seldom displays itself as
mere and unmodiﬁed fancy.1 But in imaginativemphe
Wernw wr1te1s to ShakspearenndMilton;

 

* [" Meditative pathos,” ‘ the union of subtle thought with sensibility,’
is highly manifested in a poem among those On the Naming of Places, en-
titled “ “Then to the attractions of the busy world.” The last paragraph
contains those lines of marked expression

Even so didst thou become

A silent poet; from the solitude

Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart

Still couchant, an inevitable ear,

And an eye practised like a blind man’s touch.

P. W. ii. p. 301.

The speech of Francis to his sister in Canto ii. of The White Doe, espe
cially from the lines
' For thee, for thee, is left the sense

Of trial past without offence

To God or man,

 

is a beautiful and lofty strain, breathing, amid deep pathos, a spiritual ele
vation, for which dignity seems a poor word—S. 0.]

1. [How true this is l The Fancy in Mr. Wordsworth’s poems I feel
disposed, in my own mind, to resign to my Father’s stricture ; it is rather
like the miniature painting of one who has been accustomed to a bold style
in crayons. But most of the poems, placed by the author himself under
the head of Fancy, are superﬁcially fancvful, but internally far more. The
Green Linnet derives its charm from the exquisite description of the bird,
and the feeling conveyed through him, of vernal rapture—of “ the music
and the bloom, And all the mighty ravishment of Spring.” In the little
poem To a Sexton, Farley does but ﬂit, like a swallow, over a depth of hu-
man tenderness. Stanzas viii. and ix. of The Oak and Broom contain a
lovely natural description. The ﬁrst poem To the Daisy is full of sweet
sentiment, reminding one a little of Burns. The poems to the Celandine

a";

496 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

argryet in a kind perfectly uWn. To employ
his own words, which are at once an instance an an illustration,

he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects—

 

 

“ add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet’s dream.”

I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting
this faculty'; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render
my analysis of Imagination, its origin ani characters, thoroughly
intelligible to the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this
poet’s works without recognizing, more or less, the presence and
the inﬂuences of this faculty.

From the poem on the YEW TREES,’I‘ vol. i. pages 303, 304.

abound in happy expressions and images. What truth of nature poetically
exhibited is there in this stanza!

Ere a leaf is on a bush,

In the time before the thrush

Has a thought about her nest,
Thou wilt come wi half a call,
Spreading out thy g ossy breast
Like a careless Pro igal; ‘

Telling tales about the sun

When we’ve little warmth or none

Of all common ﬂowers the small celandine is the most burnished: it seems
as if the Sun had inelosed a bit of gold in its cup when he sent it forward
as his harbinger. In the poems To a Skylark and The Danish Boy the
general conception seems to me imaginative, though the particulars in each
case are instances of Fancy. To call up that “spirit of Noon-day,” to
clothe him with the attributes of Spring and of Day-time, and by an ex-
quisite metathesis to invest his habitation,—the “lovely dell” in which “he
walks alone,”—with the spirituality of his presence, was surely the work
of imagination; no mere effort of memory, or of the associative power
alone, for the result of the whole is something which acts upon the mind
“like a new existence.” (See Mr. Wordsworth’s Preface to the edit. of
1815. P. W. p. xxviii.) This poem seems to illustrate the joint action of
Fancy and Imagination. The mere “aggregation or association” of images,
—that part of the process, in any example, however, upon the whole, ima-
ginative,—my Father would, I suppose, have assigned to Fancy; for how
otherwise can w e deﬁne her ofﬁce? But this operation may be carried on
more or less, in subse1v1ence to the higher law of poetic creation, as iu
seems to me to be 111 The Danish Boy. —S. 0.] ~
* [From Elegiac Stanzas. P. W. v. p. 311.—S. 0.]
4} [From Yew Trees. P. W ii. p. 84.—-S. 0.]

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 4:97

“ But worthier still of note
Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
Joined in one solemn and capaeious grove ;
Huge trunks !——and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted ﬁbres serpentine
Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved:
Not uninformed with phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane ;——a pillared shade,
Upon whose grassless ﬂoor of red-brown hue,
By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged*
Perennially—beneath whose sable roof
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked
With unrejoicing berries—ghostly shapes
May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE,
SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton,
And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate,
As in a natural temple scattered o’er
With altars undisturb’d of mossy stone,
United worship ; or in mute repose
To lie, and listen to the mountain ﬂood
Murmuring from Glazamara’s inmost caves.”

The effect of the old man’s ﬁgure in the poem of RESOLUTION
AND INDEPENDENCE, vol. ii. page 33.

“ While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The Old Man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me:
In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently.”‘r

Or the 8th, 9th, 19th, 26th, 31st, and 33d, in the collection
of miscellaneous sonnetsi—the sonnet on the subjugation of Swit

‘* [“ Pz'n'ing umbrage” in all the editions. I have left my Father’s sub
stitution, as a curious instance of a possible different reading. “ Piny shade"
and “ piny verdure” we read of in the poets ; but “ pina ” I believe is new.
Pining, which has quite a different sense, is doubtless still better; but per-
haps my Father’s ear shrunk from it after the word “ sheddings” at the be-
ginning of the line—S. 0.]

f [P. W. ii. p. 123. Stanza xix—S. 0.] _

1‘ [“ Where lies the Land.” Ib. iii. p. 33. “ Even as a Dragon’s Eye,”
p. 66. “ 0 Mountain Stream!” iv. 1). 20. “Earth has not any thing tc
show more fair,” iii. p. 7b. "Methought I saw the foctsteps of a throne,"
p. 30. “It is a beauteous Evening—calm and free.” (Now—“ Air sleeps.
--from strife or stir the clouds are free”) p. 32.—S. 0.]

498 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

zerland, page 2103‘: or the last ode, from which I especially select
the two following stanzas or paragraphs, pages 349 to 350+

ainur birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy 1
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy;
But He beholds the light, and whence it ﬂows,
He sees it in his joy !
The Youth who daily further from the East
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

 

* [“ Two voices are there.” P. IV. iii. p. 186.

The Sonnet “ I heard (alas ! ’twas only in a dream)” iii. p. 47, is a bean—
tiful companion to “ Methought I saw.” I have sometimes amused myself
with ﬁnding this sort of cognateness or companionable character amongst
the sonnets of Mr. \Vordsworth; as we play with a wreath of gems, placing
them in many different lights and positions for the gratiﬁcation of the eye,
so playing with these jewels of poetry I have coupled the splendid sonnet,
“Fair Star of Evening,” 1). 176, with that composed on lVestmz’nster bridge,
1). 178 ;—“ Two voices are there,” ib. p. 186, with “Once did she hold the
gorgeous earth in fee,” ib. p. 180 ;——“ The world is too much with us,” ib. p.
35, with “ I watch and long have watched,” ib. p. 46 ;—and, not to trouble the
readel with the whole of my mateh- making fancies, “It is not to be thought
.af,’ ib. p. 190, or “When I have borne in memory,” ib. p. 191, witl- that
truly majestic one,

—Inland, within a hollow vale, I stood : ib. p. 185.

which begins with such a quiet gravity, and ﬂows on so naturally into the
excess of solemn grandeur. My Father quoted this noble sonnet in The
Friend, when it ﬁrst appeared, but the Public of 1809 cared little for The
Friend and its philosophy, or for the strains of the great philosophic Poet.
Mr. \Vordsworth’s sonnets have been collected and published separately in
one vol. by Moxon, 1838. The ﬁnest set, in my opinion, is Part i. of those
dedicated to Liberty. (P. W. iii. pp. 175—200.) The three sonnets to Sleep,
ib. pp. 14, 15, 1.6, and the four on Personal Talk, ib. pp. 39, 40, 41, 42, are
very beautiful and peculiar; not Miltonic or Shakspearian, or Petrarchian;
nor like the productions of any later sonneteers; but entirely Wordsworth-
ian and inimitable—S. 0.]
+ [R W. v. p. 340.—-S. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 490

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended ;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.”

And pages 352 to 354 of the same ode.*

“ 0 joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
\Vhat was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benedictions : not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simplecreed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-ﬂedged hope still ﬂuttering in his breast :—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
0f sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blanl; misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts, before which our moral Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised 1
But for those ﬁrst affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us—cherish—and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake
To perish never ;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy !
Hence. in a'season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal see
Which brought us hither ;
Can in a moment travel thither,—
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore ”

 

* [P' W- v. pp. Si‘l—t—S. OJ

500 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

And since it would be unfair to conclude with an extract,
which, though highly characteristic, must yet, from the nature
of the thoughts and the subject, be interesting or perhaps intelli-
gible, to but a limited number of readers; I will add, from the
poet’s last published work, a passage equally VVordsworthian;
of the beauty of which, and of the imaginative power displayed
therein, there can be but one opinion, and one feeling. See White
Doe, page 5*

“Fast the church-yard ﬁlls ;—anon
Look again and they all are gone;
The cluster round the porch, and the folk
Who sate in the shade of the Prior’s Oakl
And scarcely have they disappeared
Ere the prelusive hymn is heard :—
With one consent the people rejoice,
Filling the church with a lofty voice 1
They sing a service which they feel:
For ’tis the sunrise now of zeal;
And faith and hope are in their prime
In great Eliza’s golden time.”

“A moment ends the fervent din,
And all is hushed, without and within ;
For though the priest, more tranquilly,
Recites the holy liturgy,
The only voice which you can hear i
Is the river murmuring near. ‘
—When soft l—the dusky trees between,
And down the path through the open green,
\Vhere is no living thing to be seen;
And through you gateway, where is found.
Beneath the arch with ivy bound,
Free entrance to the church-yard ground-
And right across the verdant sod,
Towards the very house of God;
Comes gliding in with lovely gleam,
Comes gliding in serene and slow,
Soft and silent as a dream,
A solitary Doe!
White she is as lily of J unc,
And beauteous as the silver moon
When out of sight the clouds are driven
And she is left alone in heaven ! '

 

3‘ [P. W. iv. pp. 48—50. There are now two or three slight altera-
tions—S. 0.]

BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. 501/ .1

' Or. like a. ship some gentle day
In sunshine sailing far awa [—
A glittering ship that hath the plain

Of ocean for her own domain.”
as are ee- 91: as ex-

“ What harmonious pensive changes
Wait upon her as she ranges
Round and through this Pile of state
Overthrown and desolate!

Now a step or two her way

Is through space of open day,
Where the enamored sunny Lght
Brightens her that was so bright ;
Now doth a. delicate shadow fall,
Falls upon her like a breath,
From some lofty arch or wall,

As she passes underneath.”

The following analogy will, I am apprehensive, appear dim
and fantastic, but in reading Bartram’s Travels I could not help
transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected
simile and metaphor of Wordsworth’s intellect and genius.—
“ The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep‘stratum of tena-
' eious clay; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break
through both strata, lifting their backs above the surface.* The
trees which chieﬂy grow here are the gigantic, black oak ; mag-
nolia grandi-ﬂora; fraximus excelsior ; platane ; and a few stately
tulip-trees.” What Mr. Wordsworth will produce, it is not for
me to prophcsy: but I could pronounce with the liveliest con-

victions what he is capable of producing. [t iW-

INE' PHILosorHlo POEM.1'
MM

. * [Travels through North and South Carolina, &c., and the Cherokee
country, &c., by W. Bartram, 1792, p. 36. At p. 397 of this book Mr.
Wordsworth may have found his authority for the strawberry gathering
of the Cherokee girls spoken of in Ruth. “He told of girls—a happy
rout!” &c.—S. C.]

+ [Mr. Coleridge has spoken of “ the poem so completely Wordsworth’s
commencing

Three years she grew in sun and shower.”

It is indeed exquisitely Wordsworthian, and there are many others of our
great poet which, like this, some in an equal degree, are characterized by a
most transparent diction which holds, as in a crystal unrine, a subtle strain
of thought and feeling, that seems so intimately united with the peculiar
- words in'whieh it is uttered as to be almost one with them. Such are the

‘ 502 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

The preceding criticism will not, I am aware, avail to over-
come the prejudices of those, who have made it a business to
attack and ridicule Mr. VVordsworth’s compositions. ’

Truth and prudence might be imaged as concentric circles
The poet may perhaps have passed beyond the latter, but he has
confined himself far within the bounds of the former, in designat»
ing these critics, as “too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet,

Lines to H. 0. six years old. The Highland Girl, She was a Phantom of
delight, and others.

Due honor is done to Peter Bell, at this time, by students of poetry in
general, but some, even of Mr. VVordsworth’s greatest admirers, do not
quite satisfy me in their admiration of the Wagoner, a poem which my
dear uncle, Mr. Southey, preferred even to the former. [ch will meme
Dcwkngsart Morin nicmanden mzfdringen, as Lessinggays' : I will force
my way of thinking on nobodv, but take the libert r, for my own gratiﬁca-
tion, o expre ' reeketeies of hillxant va ley in this poem have a
lightness and spirit—an Alchdistinguishing them from the grave
and elevated splendor which characterizes Mr. \Vordsworth’s representa-
tions of Nature in general, and from the pensive tenderness of those in The
White Doe, while it harmonizes well with the human interest of the piece:
indeed it is the harmonious sweetness of the composition which is most
dwelt upon by its ‘special admirers. In its course it describes. with bold
brief touches, the striking mountain tract from Grasmere to Keswick; it
commences with an evening storm among the mountains, presents a lively
interior of a country inn during midnight, and concludes after bringing us
in sight of St. John’s Vale and the Vale of Keswick seen by daybreak—
“Skiddaw touched with rosy light,” and the prospect from Nathdale Fell
“hoar with the frost-like dews of dawn :” thus giving a beautiful and well-
contrasted l.’anorama, produced by the most delicate and masterly strokes
of the pencil. \Vell may Mr. Ruskin, afine observer and eloquent describe)
of various classes of natural appearances, speak of Mr. \Vordsworth as the
great poetic landscape painter of the age. But Mr. Ruskin has found how
seldom the great landscape painters are powerful in expressing human pas-
sions and affections on canvass, or even successful in the introduction of hu-
man figures into their foregrounds: whereas in the poetic paintings of Mr.
“’ordsworth the landscape is always subordinate to a higher interest; cer
tainly, in the Wagoner, the little sketch of human nature which occupies,
as it were, the front of that encircling back-ground, the Picture of Benjamin
and his temptations, his humble friends and the mute companions of his
way, has a character of its own, combining with sportiveness a homely
pathos, which must ever be delightful to some of those who are thoroughly
conversant with the spirit of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry. It may be com-
pared with the ale-house scene in Tam O’Shanter, parts of Voss’s Luise or
01 id’s Baueis and Philemon ; though it differs from each of them as much
as they differ from each other. The Epilogue carries on the feeling of the
piece very beautifully.-- S. 0.] l '

 

BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARIA. 503

and too feeble to grapple with him ;*** men of palsied imagina
tions, in whose minds all healthy action is languid ;”“”“”‘= who,
therefore, feed as the many direct them, or with the many are
greedy after vicious provocatives.””“

So much for the detractors from Wordsworth’s merits. On the
other hand, much as I might wish for their fuller sympathy, I
dare not ﬂatter myself, that the freedom with which I have de-
clared my opinions concerning both his theory and his defects,
most of which are more or less connected with his theory, either
as cause or effect, will be satisfactory or pleasing to all the poet’s
admirers and advocates. More indiscriminate than mine their
admiration may be : deeper and Ingjesincerejt,_e_a_n,,not_he. But
Ihave advanced no opinion either for praise or censure, other
than as texts introductory to the reasons which compel me t(-
form it. Above all, I was fully convinced that such a criticisn
was not only wanted ; but that, if executed with adequate abilitv,
it must conduce, in no mean degree, to Mr. VVordsworth’s m
lat/ion. is fame belonrrs to another age, and can neither be
accelerated nor retardeds How small the proportion of the de-
fects are to the beauties, I have repeatedly declared; and that
no one of them originates in deﬁciency of poetic genius. Had
they been more and greater, I should still, as a friend to his liter
ary character in the present age, consider an analytic display of
them as pure gain; if only it removed, as surely to all reﬂecting
minds even the foregoing analysis must have removed, the strange
mistake, so slightly grounded yet so widely and industriously
propagated, of Mr. VVordsworth’s turn for simplicity ,’ I am not
half as much irritated by hearing his—enemies abuse him for vul-
garity of style, subject, and conception; as I am disgusted with
the gilded side of the same meaning, as displayed by some affected
admirers, with whom he is, forsooth, a “§.YY§9L_.§IIEPI§“E9F?§in
and so natural, that little master Charles and his younger sister
are so charmed with them, that they play at “Goody Blake,” or
at “ Johnny and Betty Foy l”

Were the collection of poems, published with these biographio
cal sketches, important enough (which I am not vain enough to

‘~‘ [Supplement to the Preface. P. W. iii. p. 322.
The next paragraph to this sentence, with a small footnote, is with
drawn; respecting which see the Introduction—S. CJ

504 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

believe), to deserve such a distinction; even as I have done, so
would I be done unto.

For more than eighteen months have the volume of Poems,
entitled SIBYLLINE LEAVES, and the present volumes, up to this
page, een printed, and ready for publication. But, ere I speak
of myself in the tones, which are alone natural to me under the
circumstances of late years, I would fain present myself to the
Reader as I was in the ﬁrst dawn of my literary life .'

When Hope grew round me, like the climbing vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seeni’d mine 1’

For this purpose I have selected from the letters, which I
wrote home from Germany, those Which appeared likely to be
most interesting, and at the same time most pertinent to the title
of this work.

"’ [Coleridge's Poetical Works, p. 181.—S. C.
. .lIiraturguc novas frondes, at 7207. sua poma. Georg. II. v. 82.——EJ.1

SATYRANE’S LETTERS.

.__.____._+

 

'LETTER L

ON Sunday morning, September 16, 1798, the Hamburg packet
set sail from Yarmouth: and I, for the ﬁrst time in my life,
beheld my native land retiring from me. At the moment of its
disappearance—in all the kirks, churches, chapels, and meeting-
houses, in which the greater number, I hope, of my countrymen ~.
were at that time assembled, I will dare question whether there)
was one more ardent prayer offered up to heaven, than that
which I then preferred for my country. “ N ow then,” (said I to
a gentleman who was standing near me), “we are out of our
country.” “Not yet, not yet I” he replied, and pointed to the
sea; “This, too, is a Briton’s country.” This 6072 mot gave a
ﬁllip to my spirits, I rose and looked round on my fellow-passen-
gers, who were all on the deck. We were eighteen in number,
videlicet, ﬁve Englishmen, an English lady, a French gentleman
and his servant, an Hanoverian and his servant, a Prussian, a
Swede, two Danes, and a Mulatto boy, a German tailor and his
wife (the smallest couple I ever beheld), and a Jew. We were
all on the deck ; but in a short time I observed marks of dismay.
The lady retired to the cabin in some confusion, and many of the
faces round me assumed a very doleful and. frog-colored appear-
ance ; and within an hour the number of those on deck was
lessened by one half. I was giddy, but not sick, and the giddi-
ness soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of appetite,
which I attributed, in great measure, to the sasva Mephz'tz's of
the bilge-water ; and it was certainly not decreased by the exper-
tations from the cabin. However, I was well enough to join the
able-bodied passengers, one of whom observed not inaptly, that

VOL. 111 Y

500 BIOGRAPHIA' LITERARIA.

Momus might have discovered an easier way to see a man’s m-
side, than by placing a window in his breast. He needed only
have taken a salt-water trip in a packet-boat.

I am inclined to believe, that a packet is far superior to astage-
coach, as a means of making men open out to each other. In the
latter the uniformity of posture disposes to dozing, and the de-
ﬁnitiveness of the period, at which the company will separate
makes each individual think more of those to whom he is going
than of those with whom he is going. But at sea, more curiosity
is excited, if only on this account, that the pleasant or unpleasant
qualities of your companions are of greater importance to you,
from the uncertainty how long you may be obliged to house with
them. Besides, if you are countrymen, that now begins to form
a distinction and a bond of brotherhood ; and if of different coun-
tries, there are new incitements of conversation, more to ask and
more to communicate. I found that I had interested the Danes
in no common degree. Ihad crept into the boat on the deck
and fallen asleep ; but was awakened by one of them, about
three o’clock in the afternoon, who told me that they had been
seeking me in every hole and corner, and insisted that I should
join their party and drink with them. He talked English with
such ﬂuency, as left me wholly unable to account for the singu-
lar and even ludicrous incorrectness with which he spoke it. I
went, and found some excellent wines and a dessert of grapes
with a pine-apple. The Danes had christened me Doctor Teology,
and dressed as I was all in black, with large shoes and black
worsted stockings, I might certainly have passed very well for a
Methodist missionary. However I disclaimcd my title. What
then may you be? A man of fortune? No l—A merchant?
No !»A merchant’s traveller? No l—A clerk? No l—Un

‘; Philosophe, perhaps ? It was at that time in my life, in which
i of all possible names and characters I had the greatest disgust to
lthat of “ 2m, Philosophe.” But I was weary of being questioned,
and rather than be nothing, or at best only the abstract idea of a
man, I submitted by a how, even to the aspersion implied in the
worc “ 2m Plailosophe.”—-The Dane then informed me, that all
in the present party were Philosophers likewise. Certes we were
not of the Stoic school. For we drank and talked and sung, till
we talked and sung all together ; and then we rose and danced
on the deck a set of dances, which in one sense of the word at

. SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 507

least,i' were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels.
The passengers, who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of
sea-sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment

a tune
Harsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint?‘

 

I thought so at the time ; and (by way, I suppose, of supporting
my newly assumed philosophical character) I thought too, how
closely the greater number of our virtues are connected with the
fear of death, and how little sympathy we bestow on pain, where
there is no danger.

The two Danes were brothers. The one was a man with a
clear white complexion, white hair, and white eyebrows ; looked
silly, and nothing that he uttered gave the lie to his looks. The
other, whom, by way of eminence, I have called the Dane, had
likewise white hair, but was much shorter than his brother, with
slender limbs, and a very thin face slightly pock-fretten. This
man convinced me of the justice of an old remark, that many a
faithful portrait in our novels and farces has been rashly censured
for an outrageous caricature, or perhaps nonentity. I had re
tired to my station in the boat—he came and seated himself by
my side, and appeared not a little tipsy. He commenced the
conversation in the most magniﬁc style, and, as a sort of pioneer-
ing to his own vanity, he ﬂattered me with such grossness ! The
parasites of the old comedy were modest in the comparison. His
language and accentuation were so exceedingly singular, that I
determined for once in my life to take notes of a conversation.
Here it follows somewhat abridged, indeed, but in all other
respects as accurately as my memory permitted.

THE DANE. Vat imagination ! vat language I vat vast science 5
and vat eyes 3 vat a milk-Vite forehead ! O my heafen ! vy,
you’re a Got !

ANSWER. You do me too much honor, Sir.

THE DANE. 0 me 3 if you should dink I is ﬂattering you !—
N o, no, no ! I haf ten tousand a year—yes, ten tousand a year—
yes, ten tousand pound a year ! Vell—and vat is dhat ? a mere
triﬂe ! I ’ouldn’t gif my sincere heart for ten times dhe money.
Yes, you’re a Got ! I a mere man ! But, my dear friend ! dhink
of me, as a man! Is, is—I mean to ask you now, my dear

* [Milton’s Samson Agonistes, i. 661.—S. 0.]

‘n-ug' . N ,

508 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

friend—is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak English“ very
ﬁne?

ANsw. Most admirably! Believe, me, Sir ! I have seldom
heard even a native talk so fluently.

THE DANE. (Squeezing my hand with great vehemence.) My
dear friend I vat an affection and ﬁdelity ve have for each odher !
But tell me, do tell me,—Is I not, now and den, speak some fault?
Is I not in some wrong ?

ANsw, Why, Sir ! perhaps it might be observed by nice critics
in the English language, that you occasionally use the word “is”
instead of “am.” In our best companies we generally say I am,
and not I is or Tse. Excuse me, Sir I it is a mere triﬂe.

THE DANE. O !—is, is, am, am, am. Yes, yes—I know. I
know.

ANsw. I am, thou art, he is, we are, ye are, they are.

THE DANE. Yes, yes—I know, I know—Am, am, am, is dhe
prcesens, and is is dhe perfectum—yes, yes—and are is dhe plus-
quam perfectum.

ANSW. And art, Sir! ' -—— ?

THE DANE. My dea1 fis'iend' it is dhe plusquam perfectum,
no, no—dhat is a great he , ale is dhe plusguam perfectum—
and art is dhe plusquam pluc-perfectum—(then, swinging my
hand to and fro, and. cocking his little bright hazel eyes at me,
that danced with vanity and wine)—You see, my dear friend?
that I too have some lehrning.

ANsw. Learning, Sir? Who dares suspect it ? Who can listen
to you for a minute, who can even look at you, without peroelv.
ing the extent of it ?

THE DANE. My dear friend l—(then with a would-be humble
look, and in a tone of voice as if he was reasoning) I could not
talk so of prazsens and imperfectum, and futurum and plusguam-
plue perfectum, and all dhat, my dear friend! without some
lehrning? ‘ i. _

ANsw. Sir I a man like you can not talk on any subject with-
out discovering the depth of his information.

THE DANE. Dhe grammatic Greek, my friend; ha! ha! ha!
(laughing, and swinging my hand to and fro—then with a
sudden transition to great solemnity.) Now I will tell you,
my dear friend I Dhere did happen about me vat de whole his-
toria of Denmark record no instance about nobody else. Dhe

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 509

bishop did ask me all dhe questions about all dhe religion in dhe
Latin grammar.

ANSW. The grammar, Sir ? The language, I presume

THE DANE. (A little aﬁended.) Grammar is language, and
language is grammar—

ANS W; Ten thousand pardons !

THE DANE. Vell, and I was only fourteen years——

ANsw. Only fourteen years old ?

THE DANE. N o more. I vas fourteen years old—and he asked
me all questions, religion and philosophy, and all in dhe Latin
language—and I answered him all every one, my dear friend!
all in dhe Latin language.

ANsw. A prodigy ! an absolute prodigy !

’ THE DANE. No, no, no! he was a bishop, a great superin-
tendent.

ANSW. Yes! abishop.

THE DANE. A bishop—not a mere predicant, not a prediger—

ANsw. My dear Sir! we have misunderstood each other. I
said that your answering in Latin at so early an age was a
prodigy, that is, a thing that is wonderful; that does not often
happen.

THE DANE. Often ! Dhere is not von instance recorded in dhe
whole historia of Denmark.

ANSW. And since then, Sir ?

THE DANE. I was sent ofer to dhe Vest Indies—to our Island,
and dhere I had no more to do vid books. No! no ! I put my
genius anodher way—and I haf made ten tousand pound a year.
Is not dhat ghem'us, my dear friend ?—But vat is money ?—I
dhink dhe poorest man alive my equal. Yes, my dear friend!
my little fortune is pleasant to my generous heart, because I can
do good—no man with so little a fortune ever did so much gener-
osity—no person,—no man person, no woman person ever denies
it. But we are all Got’s children.

Here the Hanoverian interrupted him, and the other Dane, the
Swede, and the Prussian, joined us, together with a young Eng-
lishman who spoke the German ﬂuently, and interpreted to me
many of the Prussian’s jokes. The Prussian was a travelling
merchant, turned of threescore, a hale man, tall, strong, and
stout, full of stories, gesticulations, {and buffoonery, with the soul
as well as the look of a mountebank, who, while he is making

 

510 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid all his droll looks and droll
gestures, there remained one look untouched by laughter; and
that one look was the true face, the others were but its mask.
The Hanoverian was a pale, fat, bloated young man, whose
father had made a large fortune in London, as an army-contrac-
tor. He seemed to emulate the manners of young Englishmen
of fortune. He was a good-natured fellow, not without informa~
tiun or literature ; but a most egregious coxcomb. He had been
in the habit of attending the House of Commons, and had once
spoken, as he informed me, with great applause in a debating
society. For this he appeared to have qualiﬁed himself with
laudable industry: for he was perfect in Walker’s Pronouncing
Dictionary, and with an accent, which forcibly reminded me of
the Scotchman in Roderic Random, who professed to teach the
English pronunciation, he was constantly deferring to my supe-
rior judgment, whether or no I had pronounced this or that word
with propriety, or “the true delicacy.” When he spoke, though
it were only half a dozen sentences, he always rose ; for which I
could detect no other motive, than his partiality to that elegant
phrase so liberally introduced in the orations of our British legis-
lators, “While I am on my legs.” The Swede, whom for rea-
sons that will soon appear, I shall distinguish by the name of
Nobility, was a strong-featured, scurvy-faced man, his complexion
resembling, in color, a red hot poker beginning to cool". He ap-
peared miserably dependent on the Dane ; but was, however, in-
comparably the best informed and most rational of the party.
Indeed his manners and conversation discovered him to be both
a man of the world and a gentleman. The Jew was in the hold:
the French gentleman was lying on the deck so ill, that I could
observe nothing concerning him, except the affectionate attentions
of his servant to him. The poor fellow was very sick himself;
and every now and then ran to the side of the vessel, still keep-
ing his eye on his master, but returned in a moment and seated
himself again by him, now supporting his head, now wiping his
forehead and talking to him all the while in the most soothing
tones. There had been a matrimonial squabble of a very ludi«
crous kind in the cabin, between the little German tailor and his
little wife. He had secured two beds, one for himself and one
for her. This had struck the little woman as avery cruel action;
she insisted upon their having but one, and assured the mate in

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 511

the most piteous tones, that she was his lawful wife. The mate
and the cabin boy decided in her favor, abused the little man
for his want of tenderness with much humor, and hoisted him
into the same compartment with his sea-sick wife. This quarrel
was interesting to. me, as it procured me a bed, which I other-
wise should not have had.

In the evening, at seven o’clock, the sea rolled higher, and the
Dane, by means of the greater agitation, eliminated enough of
what he had been swallowing to make room for a great deal
more. His favorite potation was sugar and brandy, 2'. e. a very
little warm water with a large quantity of brandy, sugar, and
nutmeg, His servant boy, a black-eyed Mulatto, had a good-
natured round face, exactly the color of the skin of the walnut-
kernel. The Dane and I were again seated, téte-d-téte, in the ship’s
boat. The conversation, which was now indeed rather an oration
than a dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that I ever heard.
He told me that he had made a large fortune in the island of
Santa Cruz, and was now returning to Denmark to enjoy it. He
expatiated on the style in which he meant to live, and the great
undertakings which he proposed to himself to commence, till, the
brandy aiding his vanity, and his vanity and garrulity aiding the
brandy, he talked like a madman—entreated me to accompany
him to Denmark—there I should see his inﬂuence with the gov-
ernment, and he would introduce me to the king, &c. 850. Thus
he went on dreaming aloud, and then passing with a very lyrical
transition to the subject of general politics, he declaimed, like a
member of the Corresponding Society, about (not concerning)
the Rights of Man, and assured me that, notwithstanding his
fortune, he thought the poorest man alive his equal. “All are
equal, my dear friend! all are equal! Ve are all Got’s chil-
dren. The poorest man haf the same rights with me. J ack!
Jack ! some more sugar and brandy. Dhere is dhat fellow now !
He is a Mulatto—but he is my equal—That’s right, Jack !
(taking the sugar and brandy.) Here you, Sir! shake hands
with dhis gentleman ! Shake hands with me, you dog ! Dhere,
dhere !——We are all, equal my dear friend! Do I not speak
like Socrates, and Plato, and Cato—they were all philosophers,
my dear philosophe.’ all very great men !——and so was Homer
and Virgil—but they were poets. Yes, yes ! I know all about it!
——But what can any body say more than this '3 We are all equal,’

 

512 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

all Got’s children. I haf ten tousand a year, but I am no more
dhan de meanest man alive. I haf no pride; and yet, my dear
friend! I can say, do! and it is done. Ha! ha! ha! my dear
friend I Now dhere is dhat gentleman (pointing to Nobility) he
is a Swedish baron—you shall see. Ho I (calling to the Swede)
get me, will you, a bottle of wine from the cabin. SVVEDE.——
Here, Jack! go and get your master a bottle of wine from the
cabin. Dane. N o, no, 110-! do you go now—you go yourself——
you go now! Swede! Pah l—Dame. Now go! Go, Ipray
you. And the Swede went! .’

After this. the Dane commenced. an harangue on religion, and
mistaking me for em philosophe in the continental sense of the

H word, he talked of Deity in a declamatory style very much re-

l

sembling the devotional rants of that rude blunderer, \Ir. Thomas

A Paine, in his Age of Reason, and whispered in my ear, what

¥

damned hypocnsm all Jesus Christ’ s business was. I dale aver,
that few men have less reason to charge themselves with indulg-
ing in pcrsiﬂage than myself. I should hate it, if it were only
that it is a Frenchman’s vice, and feel a pride in avoiding it, be-
cause our own language is too honest to have a word to express
it by. But in this instance the temptation had been too powerful,
and I have placed it on the list of my offences. Pericles an-
swered one of his dearest friends, who had solicited him on a
case of life and death, to take an equivocal oath for his preserva-
tion : D6660 amicis opitula'rz', sed usque ad Deos.* Friendship
herself must place her last and boldest step on this side the altar.
What Pericles would not do to save a friend’s life, you may be
assured, I would not hazard merely to mill the chocolate-pot of a
drunken fool’s vanity till it frothed over. Assuming a serious
look, I professed myself a believer, and sunk at once an hundred
fathoms in his good graces. He retired to his cabin, and Iwrap-
ped myself up in my great coat, and looked at the water. A
beautiful white cloud of foam at momently intervals coursed by
the side of the vessel with a roar, and little stars of ﬂame danced
and sparkled and went out in it ; and every now and then light
detachments of this white cloud-like foam dartedioff from the ves-
sel’s side, each with its own small constellation, over the sea, and
scoured out of sight like a Tartar troop over a wilderness.

* Translation. It behooves me to side With my friends, but only as far
a the go is

SATY RAN E’S LETTERS. 1313

It was cold, the cabin was at open war with my olfactories,
and I found reason to rejoice in my great coat, a weighty high-
caped, respectable rug, the collar of which turned over, and
played the part of a night-cap very passably. In looking up at
two or three bright stars, which oscillated with the motions of
the sails, I fell asleep, but was awakened at one o’clock, Monday
morning, by a shower of rain. I found myself compelled to go
down into the cabin, where I slept very soundly, and awoke with
.a very good appetite at breakfast time, my nostrils, the most
placable of all the senses, reconciled to, or indeed insenSible of
the mephitis.

Monday, September 17th, I had a long conversation with the
Swede, who spoke with the most poignant contempt of the Dane,
whom he described as a fool, purse-mad; but he conﬁrmed the
boasts of the Dane respecting the largeness of his fortune, which
he had acquired in the ﬁrst instance as an advocate, and after-
wards as a planter. From the Dane and from himself I collected
that he was indeed a Swedish nobleman, who had squandered a
fortune, that was never very large, and had made over his prop-
erty to the Dane, on Whom he was now utterly dependent. He
seemed to suffer very little pain from the Dane’s insolence. He
was in a high degree humane and attentive to the English lady,
who suffered most fearfully, and for whom he performed many
little oﬂices With a tenderness and delicacy which seemed to prove
real goodness of heart. Indeed his general manners and conver-
sation were not only pleasing, but even interesting ; and I strug-
gled to believe his insensibility respecting the Dane’s philosophical
fortitude. For though the Dane was now quite sober, his charac-
ter oozed out of him at every pore. And after dinner, when he
was again ﬂushed with wine, every quarter of an hour or per-
haps oftener he would shout out to the Swede, “ Ho! Nobility,
go—do such a thing 3 Mr. Nobility Y—tell the gentlemen such 'a
story, and so forth ;” with an insolence whichmust have excited
disgust and detestation, if his vulgar rants on the sacred rights
of equality, joined to his wild havoc of general grammar no less
than of the English language, had not rendered it so irresistibly
laughable. - ' .

At four o’clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves,
a single, solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how in

teresting a thing it looked in that round, objectless desert of we
Yak

514 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

ters. I had associated such a feeling of immensity with the
ocean, that I felt exceedingly disappointed, when I was out of
sight of all land, at the narrowness and neawzess, as it were, of
the circle Of the horizon. So little are images capable of satis-
fying the obscure feelings connected with words. In the evening
the sails were lowered, lest we should run foul of the land, which
can be seen only at a small distance. And at four o’clock, on
Tuesday morning, I was awakened by the cry of “land! land 1”
’ It was an ugly island rock at’a distance on our left, called Eei; .
,l ligel‘and, well known to many passengers from Yarmouth to Ham-
burg, ’who have been obliged by stormy weather to pass weeks
and weeks in weary captivity on it, stripped of all their money
by the exorbitant demands of the wretches who inhabit it. So
at least the sailors informed me.——About nine o’clock we saw the
main land, which seemed scarcely able to hold its head above
water, low, ﬂat, and dreary, with light-houses and landmarks
which seemed to give a character and language to the dreari-
ness. We entered the mouth of the Elbe, passing Neu-werk;
though as yet the right bank only of the river was visible to us.
On this I saw a church, and thanked God for my safe voyage, not
without affectionate thoughts of those I had left in England. At
eleven o’clock on the same morning we arrived at Cuxhaven, the
ship dropped anchor, and the boat was hoisted out, to carry the
Hanoverian and a few others on shore. The captain agreed to
take us, who remained, to Hamburg for ten guineas, to which the
Dane contributed so largely, that the other passengers paid but
half a guinea each. Accordingly we hauled anchor, and passed
gently up the river. At Cuxhaven both sides of the river may
be seen in clear weather ; we could now see the right bank only.
We passed a multitude of English traders that had been waiting
many weeks for a wind. In a short time both banks became
visible, both ﬂat and evidencing the labor of human hands by
their extreme neatness. On the left bank I saw a church or two
in the distance ; on the right bank we passed by steeple and wind-
mill and cottage, and windmill and single house, windmill and
windmill, and neat single house, and steeple. These were the
objects and in the succession. The shores were very green, and
planted with trees not inelegantly. Thirty-ﬁve miles from Cux«
haven the night came on us, and, as the navigaticn of the Elbe
is perilous, we dropped anchor.

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 515

Over what place, thought I, does the moon hang to your eye,
my dearest friend? To me it hung over the left bank of the
Elbe. Close above the moon was a huge volume of deep black
cloud, while a very thin ﬁllet crossed the middle of the orb, as
narrow and thin and black as a ribbon of crape. The long
trembling road of moonlight, which lay on the water and reached
to the stern of our vessel, glimmered dimly and obscurely. We
saw two or three lights from the right bank, probably from bed-
rooms. I felt the striking contrast between the silence of this
majestic stream, whose banks are populous with men and wo-
men and children, and ﬂocks and herds—between the silence by
night of this peopled river, and the ceaseless noise, and uproar,
and loud agitations of the desolate solitude of the ocean. The
passengers below had all retired to their beds ; and I felt the in-
terest of this quiet scene the more deeply from the circumstance
of having just quitted them. For the Prussian had, during the
whole of the evening, displayed all his talents to captivate the
Dane, who had admitted him into the train of his dependents.
The young Englishman continued to interpret the Prussian’s
jokes to me. They were all without exception profane and
abominable, but some suﬂiciently witty, and a few incidents,
which he related in his own person, were valuable as illustrating
the manners of the countries in which they had taken place. .

Five o’clock on Wednesday morning we hauled the anchor,
but were soon obliged to drop it again in consequence of a thick
fog, which our captain feared would continue the whole day ; but
about nine it cleared off, and we sailed slowly along, close by the
shore of a 'very beautiful island, forty miles from Cuxhaven, the
wind continuing slack. This holm or island is about a mile and
a half in length, wedge-shaped, well wooded, with glades of the
liveliest green, and rendered more interesting by the remarkably
neat farm-house on it. It seemed made for retirement without
solitude—a place that would allure one’s friends, while it pre-
cluded the impertinent calls of mere visitors. The shores of the
Elbe now became more beautiful, with rich meadows and trees
running like a low wall along the river’s edge ; and peering over
them, neat houses and (especially on the right bank) a profusion
of steeple-spires, white, black, or red. An instinctive taste
teaches men to build their churches in ﬂat countries with spire.
steeples, which, as they can not be referred to any other object,

5 16 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

point, as with silent ﬁnger, to the sky and stars, and sometimes.
when they reﬂect the brazen light of a rich though rainy sunset|
appear like a pyramid of ﬂame burning heavenward. I remem-
ber once, and once only, to have seen a spire in a narrow valley
of a mountainous country. The effect was not only mean but
ludicrous, and reminded me against my will of an extinguisher;
the close neighborhood of the high mountain, at the foot of
which it stood, had so completely dwarfed it, and deprived it of
all connection with the sky or clouds. Forty-six English miles
from Juxhaven, and sixteen from Hamburg, the Danish village
Vcder ornaments the left bank with its black steeple, and close
by it is the wild and pastoral hamlet of Schulau. Hitherto
both the right and left bank, green to the very brink, and level
with the river, resembled the shores of a park canal. The trees
and houses were alike low, sometimes the low trees Overtopping
the yet lower houses, sometimes the low houses rising above the
yet lower trees. But at Schulau the left bank rises at once forty
or ﬁfty feet, and stares on the river with its perpendicularfagade
of sand, thinly patched with tufts of green. The Elbe continued
to present a more and more lively spectacle from the multitude
of ﬁshing boats and the ﬂocks of sea-gulls wheeling round them,
the clamorous rivals and companions of the ﬁshermen ; till we
came to Blankaness, a most interesting village scattered amid
scattered trees, over three hills in three divisions. Each of the
three hills stares upon the river, with faces of bare sand, with
which the boats with their bare poles, standing in ﬁles along the
banks, made a sort of fantastic harmony. Between each facade
lies a green and woody dell, each deeper than the other. In
short it is a large village made up of individual cottages, each
cottage in the centre of its own little wood or orchard, and each
with its own separate path : a village with a labyrinth of paths,
or rather a neighbmhood of houses! It is inhabited by ﬁsher-
men and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in great re‘
quest through the whole navigation of the Elbe. Here ﬁrst we
saw the spires of Hamburg, and from hence, as far as Altona,
the left bank of the Elbe is uncommonly pleasing, considered as
the vicinity of an industrious and republican city—in. that style
of beauty, or rather prettiness, that might tempt the citizen into
the country, and yet gratify the taste which he had acquired in
the town. Summer-houses and Chinese show-work are every-

. SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 517

where scattered along the high and green banks ; the boards of
the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily painted with green
and yellow ; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes and made
to remind the human being of his own power and intelligence
instead of the wisdom of nature. Still, however, these are links
of connection between town and country, and far better than
the afl‘eetation of tastes and enjoyments for which men’s habits
have disqualiﬁed them. Pass them by on Saturdays and Sun-
days with the burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the
women and children feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and
Lt becomes a nature of its own. On Wednesday, four o’clock, we
-eft the vessel, and passing with trouble through the huge masses
of shipping that seemed to choke the wide Elbe from Altona up-
ward, we were at length landed at the Boom House, Hamburg.

 

LETTER II. To A LADY.
Ratzeburg.

Meme licbe Frezmdinn,

See how natural the German comes from me, though I have
not yet been six weeks in the country l—almost as ﬂuently as
English from my neighbor the Amtsschreiber (or public secre-
tary) who as often as we meet, though it should be half a dozen
times in the same day, never fails to greet me with—“ * * ddam
your pleat zmt eyes, my dearest Englander.’ thee goes it .”’—
which is certainly a proof of great generosity on his part, these
words being his whole stock of English. I had, however, a bet-
ter reason than the desire of displayng my proﬁciency: for I
wished to put you in good-humor with a language, from the ac-
quirement of which I have promised myself much ediﬁcation
and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and
your sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this
V better than by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies ?
Our English afﬁx, ass, is, I believe, confined either to words de-
rived from the Latin, as actress, directress, &c., or from the
' French, mistress, duchess, and the like. But the German, inn,
enables us to designate the sex in every possible relation of life.
Thus the Amtmann’s lady is the Frau Amtmanm'mo—the secre-

518 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

tary’s wife (by-the-bye the handsomest woman I have yet seen
in Germany) is die allerliebste Frau Amtsschre’iberinn—thc
colonel’s lady, die Frau Obv'istinn or Colonelz'nn—and even the
parson’s wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am especially pleased
‘with their Fz'eundinn, which, unlike the amica of the Romans,
is seldom used but in the best and purest sense. Now, I know it
will be said, that a friend is already something more than a
friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that‘
this friend is a female ; but this I deny—in that sense at least in
vhich the objection will be made. I would hazard the impeach-
ment of heresy, rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex
in our souls as well as in their perishable garments ; and he who
does not feel it, never truly loved a sister—nay, is not capable
even of loving a wife as she deserves to be loved, if she indeed
be worthy of that holy name.

New I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to
:yourself—“ This is so like him! running away after the ﬁrst
bubble, that chance has blown off from the surface of his fancy;
twhen one is anxious to learn where he is and what he has seen.”
Well then ! that I am settled at Ratzeburg, with my motives and
the particulars of my journey hither>——-—— will inform you.
My ﬁrst letter to him, with which doubtless he has ediﬁed your
whole ﬁreside, left me safely landed at Hamburg on the Elbe
Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I was
amused by the contents of the passage-boat which crosses the
river once or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was
stowed close with all people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses;
the men all with pipes in their mouths, and these pipes of all
shapes and fancies—straight and wreathed, simple and complex,
long and short, cane, clay, porcelain, wood, tin, silver, and ivory;
most of them with silver chains and silver bole-covers. Pipes
and boots are the ﬁrst universal characteristic of the male Ham~
burgers that would strike the eye of a raw traveller. But I for-
get my promise of journalizing as much as possible.—Therefore,
Scptr. 19th Afternoon. My companion who, you recollect, speaks
the French language with unusual propriety, had formed a kind
of conﬁdential acquaintance with the emigrant, who appeared to
be a man of sense, and whose manners were those of a perfect
gentleman. He seemed about ﬁfty or rather more. Whatever
is unpleasant in French manners from the excess in the degree.

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 519

had been softened down by age or afﬂiction ; and all that is de-
lightful in the kind, alacrity and delicacy in little attentions, &c.,
remained, and without bustle, gesticulation, or disproportionate
eagerness. His demeanor exhibited the minute philanthropy of
a polished Frenchman, tempered by the sobriety of the English
character disunited from its reserve. There is something strangely
attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the
word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is
more easy to feel than to deﬁne. It neither includes the posses-
sion of high moral excellence, nor of necessity even the orna-
mental graces of manner. I have now in my mind’s eye a per‘
son whose life would scarcely stand scrutiny even in the court of
henor, much less in that of conscience ; and his manners, if
nicely observed, would of the two excite an idea of awkwardness
rather than of elegance : and yet every one who conversed with
him felt and acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the
matter, I believe to be this—we feel the gentlemanly character
present to us, whenever, under all the circumstances of social
intercourse, the trivial not less than the important, through the
whole detail of his manners and deportment, and with the ease
of a habit, a person shows respect to others in such a war, as at
the same time implies in his own feelings an habitual and as-
sured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to himself. In
short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling of
Equality acting, as a Habit, yet ﬂexible to the varieties of Rank,
and modiﬁed without being disturbed or superseded by them.
This description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of
your own remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting
dialogue concerning the causes of the corruption of eloquence.
“What perfect gentlemen these old Romans must have been 3 I
was impressed, I remember, with the same feeling at the time I
was reading a translation of Cicero’s philosophical dialogues and
of his epistolary correspondence : while in Pliny’s letters I seemed
to have a different feeling—he gave me the notion of a very fine
gentleman.” You uttered the words as if you had felt that the
adjunct had injured the substance and the increased degree
altered the kind. Pliny was the courtier of an absolute monarch
—Cicero an aristocratic republican. For this reason the charac-
ter of gentleman, in the sense to which I have conﬁned it, is
frequent in England, rare in France, and found, where it is found

520 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

in age or the latest period of manhood ; while in Germany the
character is almost unknown. But the proper antipode of a
gentleman is to be sought for among the Anglo-American demo-
crats.

I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable
Frenchman, and of humiliation for myself. For in a little con-
troversy between us on the subject of French poetry, he made
me feel my own ill-behavior by the silent reproof of contrast,
and whenI afterwards apologized to him for the warmth of my
language, he answered me with a cheerful expression of surprise,
and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman might both
make with dignity'and receive with pleasure. I was pleased,
therefore, to find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take
up our quarters in the same house. My friend went with him
in search of an hotel, and I to deliver my letters of recommenda-
tion.

Iwalked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by
any thing I actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for
the ﬁrst time in my life on the continent of our planet. Iseemed
to myself like a liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary,
who now, after his ﬁrst soar of freedom, poises himself in the
upper air. Very naturally I began to wonder at all things, some
for being so like, and some for being so unlike the things in Eng-
land—Dutch women with large umbrella hats shooting out
half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of petticoat
behind—the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the caul
with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace
which stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes
sparkled through it—the Hanoverian women with the fore part.
of the head bare, then a stiff lace standing up like a wall per-
pendicular on the cap, and the cap behind tailed with an enor-
mous quantity of ribbon which lies or tosses on the back;

“ Their visnomies seem’d like a goodly banner
Spread in deﬁance of all enemies.”

 

The ladies all in English dresses, all ranged, and all with
had teeth : which you notice instantly from their contrast to the
almost animal, too glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the
regularity of the teeth of the laughing, loud-talking country-
women and servant-girls, who, with their clean white stockings

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 521

and with slippers without heel quarters, tripped along the dirty
streets, as if they were secured by a charm from the dirt : with
a lightness, too, which surprised me, who had always considered
it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an Inn, that I had to
clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets narrow ; to my
English nose sufﬁciently offensive, and explaining at ﬁrst sight
the universal use of boots ; without any appropriate path for the
foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the
street, some in the ordinary triangular form and entire, as the
botanists say; but the greater number notched and scolloped
with more than Chinese grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck
with the profusion of windows, so large and so many, that the
houses look all glass. Mr. Pitt’s window tax, with its pretty little
‘ additzonals sprputino out from it like young toadlcts on the back 7

_-__D

 

ofﬁaWS/urinam toad, would certainly improve the appearance of
_. the NI-Iambulg houses, which have a slight summer look, not in
keepzng with their size, incongruous with the climate, and pre-
cluding that feeling of retirement and self-content, which one
wishes to associate with a house in a noisy city. But a conﬂa-\
gration would, I fear, be the previous requisite to the production
of any architectural beauty in Hamburg : for verily it is a ﬁlthy
town. I moved on and crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with
huge black deformities of water wheels close by them. The
water intersects the city everywhere, and would have furnished
to the genius of Italy the capabilities of all that is most beautiful
and magniﬁcent in architecture. It might have been the rival
of Venice, and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and stagnation.
The fungfer Stieg (that is, Young Ladies’ Walk), to which my
letters directed me, made an exception. It was a walk or prom-
enade planted with treble rows of elm-trees, which, being yearly
pruned and cropped, remain slim and dwarf-like. This walk
occupies one side of a square piece of water, with many swans
on it perfectly tame, and, moving among the swans, showy
pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by their husbands or
lovers. * * *5 =16 as 3e :1:
(Some paragraphs have been here omitted.)
#9 * ’18 thus embarrassed by sad and solemn politeness, still more
than by broken English, it sounded like the voice of an old friend
when I heard the emigrant’s servant inquiring after me. He
had come for the purpose of guiding me to our hotel. Through

522 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

streets and streets I pressed on as happy as a child, and, I doubt
not, with a. childish expression of wonderment in my busy eyes,
amused by the wicker wagons with movable benches across
them, one behind the other (these were the hackney-coaches);
amused by the sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles
sold within are painted, and that too very exactly, though in a
grotesque confusion (a useful substitute for language in this great
mart of nations) ; amused with the incessant tinkling of the shop
and house-door bells, the bell hanging over each door, and struck
with a small iron rod at every entrance and exit ;—and ﬁnally,
amused by looking in at the windows, as I passed along; the
ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee or playing cards, and the
gentlemen all smoking. I wished myself a painter, that I might
have sent you a sketch of one of the card parties. The long pipe
of one gentleman rested on the table, its bowl half a yard from
his mouth, fuming like a ccnscr by the ﬁsh-pool—the other gen-
tleman, who was dealing the cards, and of course had both
hands employed, held his pipe in his teeth, which hanging down
between his knees, smoked beside his ankles. Hogarth himself
never drew a more ludicrous distortion both of attitude and physc
iognomy, than this effort occasioned : nor was there wanting be-
side it one of those beautiful female faces which the same Ho-
garth, in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty
which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly intro—
duces, as the central ﬁgure, in a crowd of humorous deformities,
which ﬁgure (such is the power of true genius!) neither acts,
nor is meant to act as a contrast ; but diffuses through all, and
over each of the group, a spirit of reconciliation and human
kindness ; and, even when the attention is no longer consciously
directed to the cause of this feeling, still blends its tenderness
with our laughter : and thus prevents the instructive merriment
at the whims of nature or the foibles or humors of our fellow-men
from degenerating into the heart-poison of contempt or hatred.
Our hotel DIE WILDE MAN (the sign of which was no bad like-
ness of the landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a
restless grin, that was at every man’s service, and which indeed,
like an actor rehearsing to himself, he kept playing in expecta‘
tion of an occasion for it)—neither our hotel, I say, nor its land-
lord were of the genteelest class. But it has one great advantage
for a stranger, by being in the market-place, and the next neigh-

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 523

bor of the huge church of St. Nicholas : a church with. shops and
houses built up against it, out of which wens and warts its high
massy steeple rises, nee/clawed near the top with a round of large
gilt balls, A better pole-star could scarcely be desired. Long
shall I retain the impression made on my mind by the awful
echo, so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-toned clock
Within this church, which awoke me at two in the morning from
a distressful dream, occasioned, I believe, by the feather-bed, which
is used here instead of bed-clothes. I will rather carry my blane
ket about with me like a wild Indian, than submit to this abom-
inable custom. Our emigrant acquaintance was, we found, an
intimate friend of the celebrated Abbé de Lisle: and from the
large fortune which he possessed under the monarchy, had res-
cued sufﬁcient not only for independence, but for respectability.
He had offended some of his fellow-emigrants in London, whom
he had obliged with considerable sums, by a refusal to make fur-
ther advances, and in consequence of their intrigues had received
an order to quit the kingdom. I thought it one proof of his in-
nocence, that he attached no blame either to the alien act, or to
the minister who had exerted it against him ; and a still greater,
that he spoke of London with rapture, and of his favorite niece,
who had married and settled in England, with all the fervor and
all the pride of a fond parent. A man sent by force out of a
country, obliged to sell out of the stocks at a great loss, and ex-
iled from those pleasures and that style of society which habit
had rendered essential to his happiness, whose predominant feel-
ings were yet all ofa private nature, resentment for friendship
outraged, and anguish for domestic affections interrupted—such a
man, I think, I could dare warrant guiltless of espionage in any
service, most of all in that of the present French Directory. He
spoke with ecstacy of Paris under the Monarchy: and yet the
particular facts, which made up his description, left as deep a.
conviction on my mind, of Erenthvprthlessness, as his own tale
had done of emigrant ingratitude. Sinceiriy arrival in Germany,
I have not met a single person, even among those who abhor the
Revolution, that spoke with favor, or even charity, of the French
emigrants. Though the belief of their inﬂuence in the organi-
zation of this disastrous war (from the horrors of which, North
Germany deems itself only reprisved, not secured), may have
some share in the general aversion with which they are regarded

r
l“

524 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

yet I am deeply persuaded that the far greater part is owing to
their own profligacy, to their treachery and hard-heartedness to
each other, and the domestic misery or corrupt principles which
so many of them have carried into the families of their prottct-
ors. My heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled to mmd
the stern yet amiable characters of the English patriots, who
sought refuge on the Continent at the Restoration! 0 let not
,our civil war under the ﬁrst Charles be paralleled with the
:lFrench revolution! In the former, the chalice overﬂowed from
.‘excess of principle; in the latter, from the fermentation of the
tl‘dregs! The former, was a civil war between the virtues and
virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the latter, between the
vices. The Venetian glass of the French monarchy shivered and
ﬂew asunder with the working of a double poison.

Sept. 20th. I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the broth 1‘ of
the poet, who again introduced me to professor Ebeling, an intel-
ligent and lively man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was
a painful effort to talk with him, as we were obliged to drop all
our pearls into a huge ear-trumpet. From this courteous and
kind-hearted man of letters (I hope, the German literati in gen-
eral may resemble this first specimen), I heard a tolerable Italian
pun, and an interesting anecdote. When Bonaparte was in
Italy, having been irritated by some instance of perﬁdy, he said
in a loud and vehement tone, in a public company—“ ’Tis a true
proverb, gli Italiani tutti latlroni”—(that is, the Italians all
yﬂmzderers). A lady had the courage to reply, “Non tutti;
lma BUONA PARTE,” (not all, but a good part, or Buonaparte).
This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one of the many good
things that might liai'e been said. The anecdote is more valu-
able ; for it instances the ways and means of French insinuation.
Hoche had received much information concerning the face of the
country from a map of unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker
of which, he heard, resided at Diisseldorf. At the storming of
Dusseldorf by the French army, Hoche previously ordered, that
the house and property of this man should be preserved, and in-
trusted the performance of the order to an ofﬁcer on whose troop
he could rely. Finding afterwards, that the man had escaped
before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, “ HE had no
reason to flee! It is for such men, not against them, that the

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 525

French nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its
children.” You remember Milton’s sonnet—

“ The great Eniathian conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus When temple and tower
Went to the ground” —— 9*

 

 

Now though the Diisseldorf map-maker may stand in the same
relation to the Theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by
lines of ﬁlm on the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars
sunward and beats the tempest with its wings ; it does not there—
fore follow, that the Iacobin of France may not be as valiant a
general and as good a politician, as the madman of Macedon.

From Professor Ebeling’s Mr. Klopstock accompanied my
friend and me to his own house, where I saw a fine bust of his
brother. There was a solemn and heavy greatness in his coun-
tenance, which corresponded to my preconceptions of his style and
genius—I saw there, likewise, a very fine portrait of Lessing,
Whose works are at present the chief object of my admiration.
His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if any thing, rather larger
and more prominent. But the lower part of his face and his nose
—0 what an exquisite expression of elegance and sensibility !—
There appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in the
forehead—The whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a
man of quick and voluptuous feelings; of an active but light
fancy ; acute ; yet acute not in the observation of actual life, but
in the arrangements and management of the ideal world, that is,
in taste, and in metaphysics. I assure you, that I wrote these
very words in my memorandum-book with the portrait before my
eyes, and when I knew nothing of Lessing but his name, and
that he was a German writer of eminence.

We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the
table d’héte. “Patience at a German ordinam , smiling at time.”
The Germans are the worst cooks in Europe. There is placed
for eVery two persons a bottle of common wine—Rhenish and
Claret alternately; but in the houses of the opulent, during the
many and long intervals of the dinner, the servants hand round
glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin’s they came in
this order. Burgundy—Madeira—Port—Frontiniac—Pacchia-
retti—Old Hock—Mountain—Champagne—Hock again—Bish op.

"‘ f Sonnet viii. “ Captain, or Colonel, or Knight in arms.”]

526 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

and lastly, Punch. A tolerable quantum, methinks ! The last
dish at the ordinary, viz. slices of roast pork (for all the larger
dishes are brought in, cut up, and ﬁrst handed round; and then
set on the table), with stewed prunes and other sweet fruits, and
this followed by cheese and butter, with plates of apples, re-
minded me of Shakspeareﬁ“ and Shakspeare put it in my head to
go to the French comedy.
as at 3g

Bless me ! why it is worse than our modern English plays ! The
ﬁrst act informed me, that a court-martial is to be held on a
Count Vatron, who had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his
brother-in-law. The ofﬁcers plead in his behalf—in vain ! His
wife, the Colonel’s sister, pleads with most tempestuous agonies
—-in vain! She falls into hysterics, and faints away, to the
dropping of the inner curtain! In the second act sentence of
death is passed on the Count—his wife, as frantic and hysteric as
before; more so (good industrious creature !) she could not be.
The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic indeed!
——the soldiers just about to ﬁre, the handkerchief actually drop-
ped ; when reprieve ! reprieve ! is heard from behind the scenes :
and in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife
it» still frantic, only with joy ; that was all !

O dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is
followed by melancholy : for such is the kind of drama, which is
now substituted everywhere for Shakspeare and Racine. You
well know, that I offer violence to my own feelings in joining
these names. But however meanly I may think of the French
serious drama, even in its most perfect specimens; and with
whatever right I may complain of its perpetual falsiﬁcation of
the language, and of the connections and transitions of thought,
which Nature has apprOpriated to states of passion ; still, how-
ever, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the
olfspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a ﬁtness in the
parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their
own, though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the

* “ Slender. I bruised my shin with playing with sword and dagger for
a dish of stewed prunes, and by my troth I can not abide the smell of hot
meat since.”—So . (rain, Evans. “ I will make an end of my dinner : there’s
pippins and cheese to come.” [Merry Wives of Windsor. Act. i. sc. 1, and
so. 2 —S. (3.]

SATYRANE‘S LETTERS. 527

spectators to active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence.
<The soul is not stupefied into me1e sensations by a worthless sym-
Jpathy with our own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for
[the surprising, undigniﬁed by the language or the situations which '
(awe and delight the imagination What (I would ask of the
crowd, that press forward to the pantomimic tragedies and weep-
ing comedies of Kotzebue and his imitators"), what are you seek
ing? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of Shakspeare and
Moliére the more accurate the knowledge, and the more pro-
foundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with
my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers por-
tray are ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and
exquisitely ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the hu-
man mind, and such as, with more or less change in the drapery,
I can apply to my own heart", or at least to whole classes of
my fellowsci'eatures. How often are not the moralist and the
metaphysician obliged for the happiest illustrations of general
truths and the subordinate laws of human thought and action
to quotatiohs, not only, from the tragic characters, but equally
from the J aques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and clowns of
Shakspeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and Hypocrite,
of Moliére! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions : for
these class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of
a character, are so modiﬁed and particularized in each person of
the Shaksperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more dis-
tinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real exist-
ence. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the essential proper-
ties of geometry is not less essential to dramatic excellence, and
(if I may mention his name without pedantry to a lady) Aristotle
has accordingly required of the poet an involution of the univer-
sal in the individual. The chief differences are, that in geometry
it is the universal truth itself, which is uppermost in the con-
sciousness, in poetry the individual form in which the truth is
clothed. With the ancients, and not less with the elder drama-
tists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were
considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy
to make us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry
faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the cloth-
ing of common-place morals in metaphors drawn from the shops

* [See note at the end of this letter.] '

\‘\_44

528 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

or mechanic occupations of their characters; nor did they con-
descend in tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the specta-
tors, by representing before them fac-similes of their own mean
selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on their sluggish
sympathies by a pathos not agwhit more respectable than the
maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant
to affect us indeed, but within the bounds of pleasure, and in
union with the activity both of our understanding and imagina-
tion. They wished to transport the mind to a sense of its possi-
ble greatness, and to implant the germs of that greatness during
the temporary oblivion of the worthless “thing, we are” and of
the peculiar state, in which each man happens to be ; suspend-
ing our individual recollections, and lulling them to sleep amid
the music of nobler thoughts.

Hold .’—(methinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply,
and we will listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defen-
dant)

DEFENDANT. Hold 3 are not our modern sentimental plays
ﬁlled with the best Christian morality?

PLAINTIFF. Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it,
which you can exercise without a single Christian virtue—with—
out a single sacriﬁce that is really painful to you l—just as much
as ﬂatlcrs you, sends you away pleased with your own hearts,
and quite reconciled to your vices, which can never be thought
very ill of, when they keep such good company, and walk hand
in hand with so much compassion and generosity; adulation so
loathsome, that you would Spit in the man’s face who dared offer
it to you in a private company, unless you interpreted it as in-
sulting irony, you appropriate with inﬁnite satisfaction, when you
share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble it out of a
common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards—no Antony,
no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache !—

D. No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain
citizen of London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens,
and your old school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body
knows the stories : and what curiosity can we feel

P. What, Sir, not for the manner ?—not for the delightful
language of the poet ?——not for the situations, the action and re-
action of the passions ?

D. You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 529

story: and how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play,
or be surprised by it, when we know how it will turn out?

P. Your pardon, for having interrupted you 3 we now under-
stand each other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men
of old held for the highest effort of human genius, the same
gratiﬁcation, as that you receive from a new novel, the last Ger-
man romance, and other dainties of the- day, which can be en-
joyed but once. If you carry these feelings to the sister art of
Painting, Michael Angelo’s Sixtine Chapel, and the Scripture
Gallery of Raphael can expect no favor from you. You [mow
all about them beforehand ; and are, doubtless, more familiar
with the subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales
of the historic or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore,
in your preference of contemporary writers: for the great men of
former times, those at least who were deemed great by our an-
cestors, sought so little to gratify this kind of curiosity, that they
seemed to have regarded the story in a not much higher light,
than the painter regards his canvass : as that on, not by, which
they were to display their appropriate excellence. N 0 work, re-
sembling a tale or romance, can well show less variety of inven-
tion in the incidents, or less anxiety in weaving them together,
than the DON QUIXOTE of Cervantes. Its admirers feel the dis-
position to go back and re-peruse some preceding chapter, at least
ten times for once that they ﬁnd any eagerness to hurry forwards:
or open the book on those parts which they best recollect, even as
we visit those friends oftenest whom we love most, and with
whose characters and actions we are the most intimately acquaint-
ed. In the divine Ariosto (as his countrymen call this, their
darling poet), I question whether there be a single tale of his own
invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to the
readers of “old romance.” Iwill pass by the ancient Greeks,
who thought it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its
substance should be previously known. That there had been at
least ﬁfty tragedies with the same title, would be one of the mo-
tives which determined Sophocles and Euripides, in the choice of.
Electra, as a subject. But Milton—-

D. Aye Milton, indeed l—but do not Dr. Johnson and other
great men tell us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task?

P. So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly.
said! But why then do you pretend to admire Shakspearc?

VOL. 111. - , Z

580 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

The greater part, if not all, of his dramas were, as far as the
names and the main incidents are concerned, already stock plays.
All the stories, at least, on which they are built, pre-existed in
the chronicles, ballads, or translations of contemporary or preced-
ng English writers. Why, I repeat, do you pretend to admire
Shakspeare? Is it, perhaps, that you only pretend to admire
him? However, as once for all, you have dismissed the well-
known events and personages of history, or the epic muse, what
have you taken in their stead? Whom has your tragic muse
armed with her bowl and dagger ? the sentimental muse I should
have said, whom you have seated in the throne of tragedy?
What heroes has she reared on her buskins ?

D. O 3 our good friends and next-door neighbors—honest trades-
men, valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay ofﬁcers, philanthropic
Jews, virtuous courtesans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimen~
tal rat-catchers l—(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous,
tender-hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and
all our misanthropes very tender-hearted.)

P. But I pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting
can such men be engaged?

D. They give away a great deal of money ; ﬁnd rich dowries
for young men and maidens who have all other good qualities:
they browbeat lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they
are as bold as Hector !)——they rescue stage-coaches at the instant
they are falling down precipices ; carry away infants in the sight
of opposing armies; and some of our performers act a muscular
able-bodied man to such perfection, that our dramatic poets, who
always have the actors in their eye, seldom fail to make their
favorite male character as strong as Samson. And then they
take such prodigious leaps ! I And what is done on the stage is
more striking even than what is acted. I once remember such a
deafening explosion, that I could not hear a word of the play for
half an act after it : and a little real gunpowder being set ﬁre to
at the same time, and smelt by all the spectators, the naturalness
of the scene was quite astonishing l

P. But how can you connect with such men and such actions
that dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives sc
lofty an interest to the personages of Shakspeare, and the Greek
Tragedians ? How can you connect with them that sublimest of
all feelings, the power of destiny and the controlling might. of

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 58]

heaven, which seems to elevate the characters which sink beneath
its irresistible blow?

D. O mere fancies! We seek and ﬁnd on the present stage
our own wants and passions, our own vexations, losses and em-
barrassments.

P. It is your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you de-
sire to have represented before you ?—not human nature in its
height and vigor? But surely you might ﬁnd the former with
all its joys and sorrows, more conveniently in your own houses
and parishes.

D. True! but here comes a difference. Fortune is blind, but
the poet has his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as for-
tune is capricious. He makes every thing turn out exactly as we
would Wish it. He gratifies us by representing those as hateful
or contemptible whom we hate and wish to despise.

P. (aside) That is, he gratiﬁes your envy by libelling your
superiors.

D. He makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be bet-
ter than their neighbors, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors,
and hard-hearted villains ; and your men of spirit, who take their
girl and their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of
honor, and (that no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied)
reform in the last scene, and leave no doubt on the minds of the
ladies, that they will make most faithful and excellent husbands :
though it does seem a pity, that they should be obliged to get rid
of qualities which had made them so interesting ! Besides, the
poor become rich all at once ; and in the ﬁnal matrimonial
choice the opulent and high-born themselves are made to confess,
that VIRTUE Is THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY, AND THAT A LOVELY
WOMAN Is A Downr or IIERSELF ! !

P. Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant ﬂashes
of loyalty, those patriotic praises of the King and Old England,
which, especially if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the
shop, so often solicit and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit !
I give your prudence credit for the omission. For the whole sys- f.“
tem of your drama is a moral and intellectual Jacobim'sm of thcll
most dangerous kind, and those common-place rants of loyalty,"
are no better than hypocrisy in your playwrights, and your own
sympathy with them a gross self-delusion. For the whole secret
of dramatic popularityrconsists with you in the-confusion and sub-

532 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

version of the natural order of things, their causes and their ef-
fects ; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the qualities
of liberality, reﬁned feeling, and a nice sense of honor (those things
rather which pass among you for such) in persons and in classes
of life where experience teaches us least to expect them ; and in
rewarding with all the sympathies, that are the dues of virtue,
those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excom-
municated from our esteem !

And now—good night ! Truly ! Imight have written this last
sheet without having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself
talking to you by your own ﬁre-side, and can you think it a small
pleasure to me to forget now and then, that I am not there?
Besides, you and my other good friends have made up your
minds to me as I am, and from whatever place I write you will
expect that part of my “ Travels” will consist of the excursions
'n my own mind.

“ Kotzebue and his imitators." Note.

[Kotzebue was born May 3d, 17 61, at Weimar, assassinated at Manheim,
as being a “foe to freedom and too great afriend to Russia,” his adopted
:ountry, March 11th, 1819. His father, a counsellor of legation, died early,
ind left him to the sole care of the young widow his mother, whose mind
.eems to have moulded his so far as early inﬂuences could mould it.

" According to my judgment,” says Mr. Ta lor in his survey of German
Poetry, “ Kotzebue is the greatest dramas evolved
since Shakspeare. In the hundred-fold variety of his effusions are eompre« ‘
bended plays of every form: farees,—-melodrama,—mixt or sentimental
dramas, JlIisant/z ropg/ and Repentance (known on our stage as The Stranger)
The Natural Son, die—household tragedies,——classieal tragedies—and
especially that vaster and more difficult form of art, which may best be de-
nominated the gothic tragedy, of which Shakspeare’s Macbeth, and Schiller’s
le'l/wlm Tell,” (Macbeth aud— Wilhelm Tell!) “are perhaps the noblest
specimens, but of which Kotzebue has added a full score to the dramatic
repertory of Europe: Virgin of the Sun, Spaniards in Peru, Count of Bur-
gundy, Gustavus Vasa,” (to. (to.

Mr. Carlyle thinks that this playwright has added nothing to the dramatic

repertory of Europe. " Kotzebue,” says he, in his animated Review of the
Survey,—“Kotzebue, whom all nations and kindreds and tongues and

peoples, his own people the foremost, after playing with him for some
foolish hour, have swept out of doors as a lifeless bundle of dyed rags, is
here seientiﬁeall y examined, measured, pulse-felt. and pronounced to be living
and a divinity.” “ Such is the table,” says he, after giving a sarcastic sketch
of one of his plays, “which Mr. Taylor has spread for Pilgrims in the Prose
Wilderness of Life: thus does he sit like a kind host ready to carve; and

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 533

though the viands and beverage are but as it were, stewed garlic, Yaamouth
herrings, and blue ruin, praises them as ‘ stimulant,’ and courteously presses
the universe to fall to.”

This is substantially the same doctrine as that of my Father’s ﬁrst Letter
from Germany, which I believe to be unexceptionable, though I doubt
whether the application of it to Kotzebue has not been a little too sweeping.
I stick to the principle of giving Old Nick his due and (i fortzori all whom
the world associates with him. The genius of Kctzebue was a theatrical
rather than a dramatic genius, and hence its products were in their nature
, transitory, though I can not agree with Mr. Taylor that “ all comedies are
local and transient.” The Present lends her most powerful aid to those who
rely upon her aid alone, and pay no homage to the Permanent. I should
think that Kotzebue was as great a master of st. 0'e effect, as Whitﬁeld of
effect in the pulpit, and was as warm an enthusiast in his lower vocation as
the ﬁeld-preacher in his loftier one : it may be seen from his autobiography,
of which Mr. Taylor gives an interesting abridgment, how from his earliest
years a passion for the representable was nourished in him rather than alove
of literature; how he came to be a great scene-painter and adapted his pic
tures to pit and boxes rather than to mankind. In this line he was ﬁrst
rate, and ﬁlled a broad space; perhaps the species of art displayed in it
rather deserves to be called of slight worth than worthless, or altogether a
vain and spurious thing.

Of course I speak thus of these stage-pieces only so far as they were in-
nocent. Mr. Taylor thinks that their morality has been too seriously con-
demned; that on one point only they were reprehensible, and “trod upon
the brink of moral licentiousness.” “ But on the higher virtues,” says he,
“ their author everywhere bestows a digniﬁed approbation”———“ he has painted
more disinterestedly virtuous characters, who, under adversity, persecution,
and misrepresentation, remain content with the consciousness of duty per-
formed, and ﬁnd, in a triumphal self-complacence, an antidote to injustice,
and a consolation in death, than any other dramatist ancient or modern.”
The plays of Kotzebue with all the stimulants they held in solution, are now
evaporated, but their character and the acceptance they found belong to the
history of the past and are worth recording. To judge from Mr. Taylor’s
specimens and analysis I should say that there was in them an alloy, but
that they were by no means wholly immoral, or to be compared for vileness
and corruptive tendencies with a class of productions which have obtained
a great deal of favor in France and, occasionally, 'some passing favor even
amongst ourselves—that most despicable class, in which base desires, morbid
feelings, and distempcred thoughts form the very staple of the piece; in
which there is not one breath of air that has blown in the face of heaven.
Kotzebue’s ﬂashy dramas exhibit a genuine admiration of what is noble and
,virtuous, while they openly protect certain kinds of vice; it seems as if in
them a mistaken philosophy were encroaching on the ground of morals,
while in those worse productions corrupt moral feeling is brought face to
face with a cold correct morality, and the glow of unworthy passion, sedu-
lously revealed in all its workings and w ith all that excites it. is met not

534 ' BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

quenched by cool breezes of respect, on the author’s part, for the sternes'-
and purest virtue. Mr. Taylor describes the marvellous combinations and
moral prodigies which Kotzebue resorted to in his demand for the impress
sive, and condemns them; but thinks the liveliness of his dialogue, and its
“boldness of appeal to the fairest sentiments and dearest feelings of our
nature,” deserving of commendation. He has stated fairly enough in what

erits of Kotzebuc consisted nl he ma e the sin ' of com-
in'ured the cause
‘ of the s age—hero by bringing orwar dialogues from his defunct spectacle-
pieces for readers to peruse in the cool of their closets. They were never
meant for that; it was as though we should transport a clever scene-paint-
ing into a picture-gallery, or spell out at home a popular preacher’s manu-
script sermon. He should have conﬁned himself to celebrating the life,
movement, and stirring adventure of these dramas, which, by a small hyper
hole, he might have compared to the pictures of Rubens ;—their “facility,
fertility, n1utability”—“ as of English weather ;”—their costume, “full of
discrimination and pictorial effect ;”—the scope they gave for the exhibition
of brilliant spectacle (especially in The Virgin of the Sun) and for the dis-
play of an actor’s noble ﬁgure, as in Rolla ;—above all the skill with which
they made advantage of the passions and excitements of the day—conducting
into their own circle the electric ﬂuid of emotion, which had been generated
elsewhere :—whence, in part, they gained their “sudden power” over the
feelings, compared by the author of the Survey to “magic metamorphosis.”

Mr. Carlyle says of Mr. Taylor’s parallel between Schiller, Goethe and
Kotzebue, in his “ smiting” way, that it is almost as if we should compare
scientiﬁcally Paradise Lost, the Prophecies of Isaiah, and Mat. Lewis’s
Tales of Terror. Goethe has something of the Seer in him, I dare say : all
powerful thinkers and writers have: but Religion and Virtue—whether
they have not even more serious quarrel with the immortal author of Faust,
than with him whose productions are now “ swept forth as a bundle of dyed
rags”—I more than doubt. Goethe’s poison is subtler, better disguised,
than that of such writers as Kotzebue; but it is the strong-minded Goethes
of the age that mould the transiently powerful Kotzebues; and it seems
likely enough that the author of The Stranger received some of his French
Revolution principles from the author of \Verter.

The Present will ever have her special votaries in the world of letters,
who collect into their focus, by a kind of burning-glass, the feelings of thc
day. Amongst such Kotzebue holds a high rank. Those “ dyed rags” of
his once formed gorgeous banners, and ﬂaunted in the eyes of reﬁned com
panies from London to Madrid, from Paris to Moscow—S. 0.]

    
    

       

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 535

L E T T E R III.
Ratzeburg.

No little ﬁsh thrown back again into the water, no ﬂy unim-
prisoned from a child’s hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its ele-
ment, than I this clean and peaceful house, with this lovely View
(of the town, groves, and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at
which I am writing. My spirits certainly, and my health I fan-
cied, were beginning to sink under the noise, dirt, and unwhole-
some air of our Hamburg hotel. I left it on Sunday, Sept. 23d,
with a letter of introduction from the poet Klopstock, to the Amt-
mamz of Ratzeburg. The Amtmamz received me with kindness,
and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board and
lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The
vehicle, in which I took my place, was considerably larger than
an English stage-coach, to which it bore much the same propor-
tion and rude resemblance, that an elephant’s ear does to the
human. Its top was composed of naked boards of different col-
ors, and seeming to have been parts of different wainscots. In-
stead of windows there were leathern curtains with a little eye
of glass in each : they perfectly answered the purpose of keeping
out the prOSpect and letting in the cold. I could observe little,
therefore, but the inns and farm-houses at Which we stopped,
They were all alike, except in size: one great room, like a barn,
with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts
through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and
the ﬂoor of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a
street, sometimes one, sometimes two smaller ones, are inclosed
at one end. These are commonly ﬂoored. In the large room
the cattle, pigs, poultry, men, women, and children, live in ami-
cable community: yet there was an appearance of cleanliness
and rustic comfort. One of these houses I measured. It was
an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken off from
one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small in-
\erspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-
two where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each
side eight feet in depth. The faces of the cows, Sac. were turned
towards the room; indeed they were in it, so that they had at

5°6 BI OGRAPHIA . LITERARIA.

'J

least the comfort of seeing each other’s faces. Stall-feeding 1:
universal in this part of Germany, a practice concerning which
the agriculturist and the poet are likely to entertain opposite
opinions—or at least, to have very different feelings. The wood-
work of these buildings on the outside is left unplastered, as in
old houses among us, and, being painted red and green, it cuts
and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within three miles
of Hamburg almOst 'to Molln, which is thirty miles from it, the
country, as far as I could see it, was a dead ﬂat, only varied by
woods. At Molln it became more beautiful. Iobserved a small
lake nearly surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belong-
ing to the King of Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector
of the Forests. We were nearly the same time in travelling the
thirty-ﬁve miles from Hamburg to Ratzeburg, as we had been in
going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred and twenty-six
miles.

The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine
miles in length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half
a mile. About a mile from the southernmost point it is divided
into two, of course very unequal, parts by an island, which, being
connected by a bridge and a narrow slip of land with the one
shore, and by another bridge of immense length with the other
' shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this island the town of
Ratzeburg is built. The pastor’s house or Vicarage, together
with the A.7nt77za727z’s Amtsschreiber’s, and the church, stands
near the summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land
and the little bridge, from which, through a superb military gate,
you step into the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself
a little hill, by ascending and descending which, you arrive at
the long bridge, and so to the other shore. The water to the
south of the town is called the Little Lake, which however al-
most engrosses the beauties of the whole: the shores being just
often enough green and bare to give the proper effect to the mag
nificent groves which occupy the greater part of their circumfer
ence. From the turnings, windings, and indentations of the
shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the-whole has
a sort of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the north of.
the Great Lake, and peeping over it, I see the seven church tow.
ers of Lubec, at the distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as
distinctly as if they were not three The only defect in the View

- SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 537

is, that Ratzeburg is built entirely of red bricks, and all the-

houses roofed with red tiles. To the eye, therefore, it presents a
clump of brick-dust red. Yet this evening, Oct. 10th, twenty
minutes past ﬁve, I saw the town perfectly beautiful, and the
whole softened down into complete keeping, if I may borrow a
term from the painters. The sky over Ratzeburg and all the
cast was a pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered
with light sandy clouds. Hence a deep red light spread over the
whole prospect, in undisturbed harmony with the red town, the
brown-red woods, and the yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the
lake. Two or three boats, with single persons paddling them,
ﬂoated up and down in the rich light, which not only was itself
in harmony with all, but brought all into harmony.

I should have told you thatI went back to Hamburg on Thurs-
day (Sept. 27th), to take leave of my friend, who travels south-
ward, and returned hither on the Monday following. From
Empfelde, a village half-way from Ratzcburg, I walked to Ham-
burg through dcep sandy roads and a dreary ﬂat : the soil every-
where white, hungry, and excessively pulverized; but the ap-
proach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses, which
you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with
arbors and trellis-work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in
cloisters and piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and
green seats within the rails. Every object, whether the growth
of nature or the work of man, was neat and artiﬁcial. It pleased
me far better, than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure-ﬁelds,
had been in a nobler taste : for this nobler taste would have been
mere apery. The busy, anxious, money-loving merchant of Ham-
burg could only have adopted, he could not have enjoyed the
simplicity of nature. The mind begins to love nature by imi-
tating human conveniences in nature ; but this is a step in in
tellect, though a low one—and were it not so, yet all around me
spoke of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered
with unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts
even of the busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg.
In this charitable and catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts
of the city. These are huge green cushions, one rising above the
other, with trees growing in the interspaces, pledges and symbols
of a long peace. Of my return I have nothing worth communi-

cating, except that I took extra post, which answers to posting
. 2*

”:1... ,mv m-.. .- ~\ -' '

538 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

in England. These north German post-chaises are uncovered
wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of ﬁnery, a chef
d’wzwre of mechanism, compared with them : and the horses 3—
a savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numera-
tion-table. Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle
with the brown rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfast-
ing together ; only the horses had no gin to their water, and the
postilion no water to his gin. N ow and henceforward for sub.
jects of more interest to you, and to the objects in search of
which I left you : namely, the literati and literature of Germany.

Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits,
as W——— and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house
of his brother, the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile
from the city gate. It is one of a row of little common-place
summer-houses (for so they looked), with four or ﬁve rows of
young meagre elm-trees before. the windows, beyond which is a
green, and then a dead ﬂat intersected with several roads.
Whatever beauty (thought I) may be before the poet’s eyes at
present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We
waited a few minutes in a neat little parlor, ornamented with the
ﬁgures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which
I were from Klopstock’s odes.* The poet entered. I was much
: disappointed in his countenance, and recognized in it no likeness
l to the bust. There was no comprehension in the forehead, no

* [“ There is a rhetorical amplitude and brillianey in the Messias,” says
Mr. Carlyle, “which elicits in our critic Mr. ‘- r ' ' stinet truer than
his philosophy is. Neither has the still purer spirit of Klopstock’s odes
escaped him. Perhaps there is no writing in our language that offers so
correct an emblem of him as this analysis.” I remember thinking Taylor’s
“clear outline” of the Messias the most satisfying account of a poem I
ever read: it ﬁlls the mind with a vision of pomp and magniﬁcence, which
it is pleasanter to contemplate, as it were, from afar, massed together in
that general survey, than to examine part by part. Mr. Taylor and Mr.
Carlyle agree in exalting that ode of Klopstock’s, in which he represents
the Muse of Britain and the Muse of Germany running a race. The piece
seems to me more rhetorical than strictly poetical; and if the younger
Muse’s power of keeping up the race depends on productions of this sort,
I would not give a penny for her chance, at least if the contest relates
to pure poetry. Klopstock’s Herman (mentioned afterwards), consists
of three chorus-dramas, as Mr. Taylor calls them: The Battle of Her-man,
Herman and the Princes, and The Death of Herman. Herman is the Ar

minius of the Roman historians—S. 0.]

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 589

weight over the eyebrows, no expression of peculiarity, moral or
intellectual, on the eyes, no massiveness in the general counte
nance. He is, if any thing, rather below the middle size. He
wore very large half-boots, which his legs ﬁlled, so fearfully were
they swollen. However, though neither VV———- nor myself
could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his
physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness,
and his kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French to my
friend, and with difﬁculty spoke a few sentences to me in Eng
li'sh. His enunciation was not in the least affected by the entire
want of his upper teeth. The conversation began on his part
by the expression of his rapture at the surrender of the detach-
ment of French troops under General Humbert. Their proceed-
ings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they had
_ appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to
have given the poet great entertainment. He then declared his
sanguine belief in Nelson’s victory, and anticipated its conﬁrma-
tion with a keen and triumphant pleasure. His words, tones,
locks, implied the most vehement Anti-Gallicanism. The sub-
ject changed to literature, and I inquired in Latin concerning the
history of German poetry and the elder German poets. To my
great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little on the
subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their
elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits.
Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every infor-
mation of this kind : the subject had not particularly excited his
curiosity. He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought
Glover’s blank verse superior to Milton’s.* W—-—- and my-
self expressed our surprise : and my friend gave his definition and.

9* [Leonidas, an epic poem, by R. Glover, ﬁrst appeared in May, 1737 :
in the ﬁfth edition, published in 1770, it was corrected, and extended from
nine books to twelve. Glover was the author of Boadicea and Medea,
trz o‘edies, which had some success on the stage. I believe that Leonidas
has more merit in the conduct of the design, and in the delineation of char-
acter, than as poetry.

“ He write an epic poem,” said Thomson, “ who never saw a mountain 1”
Glover had seen the sun and moon, yet he seems to have looked for their
poetical aspects in Homer and Milton, rather than in the sky. “There is
not a single simile in Leonidas,” says Lyttleton, “that is borrowed from any
of the ancients, and yet there is hardly any poem that has such a variety
of beautiful comparisons.” The similes of Milton come so ﬂat and dry out

 

I
l

540 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

notion of harmonious verse, that it consisted (the English iambic
blank verse above all), in the apt arrangement of pauses and ca-
dences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,

 

——-— “ with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,”

and not in the even ﬂow, much less in the prominence or anti-
of Glover’s mangle, that they are indeed quite another thing from What they
appear in the poems of that Immortal: ex. gr.

Like wintry clouds, which, opening for a time,
Tinge their black folds with gleams of scattered light :—

Is not this Milton’s “ silver lining” stretched and mangled?

The Queen of Night
Gleam’d from the centre of th’ ethereal vault,
And o’er the raven plume of darkness shed
Her placid light.

This is ﬂattened from the well-known passage in Comus,

Soon will savage Mars
Deform the lovely rimglets of thy shrubs.

A genteel improvement upon Milton’s “ bush with frizzled hair implicit.”
Then we have

 

 

 

delicious to the sight
Soft dales meand’ring show their ﬂowery laps
Among rude piles of nature,

spoiled from

 

 

 

the ﬂowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread its store.

Thus does this poet shatter and dissolve the blooming sprays of anather
man’s plantation, instead of pushing through them some new shoots of his
own to crown them with fresh blossoms.

Milton himself borrowed as much as Glover. Aye, ten times more; yet
every passage in his poetry is Miltonic,—more that than any thing else. On
the other hand, his imitators Miltonize, yet produce nothing worthy of Milton,
the important characteristic of whose writings my Father well expressed.
when he said, “The reader of Milton must be always on his duty: he is
surrounded with sense.” A man must have his sense to imitate him worthil y.
How we look through his words at the Deluge, as he ﬂoods it upon us in
Book xi. 1. 738-53 l—The Attic bees produce honey so ﬂavored with the
thyme of Hymettus that it is scarcely eatable.‘though to smell the herb
itself in a breezy walk upon that celebrated Mount would be an exceeding
pleasure; thus certain epic poems are overpoweringly ﬂavored with herbs
of Milton, while yet the fr. 0't'ant balm and fresh breeze of his poetry is not
to be found in them—S. 0.]

. SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 54]

thetic vigor, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the
total effect, except where they were introduced for some speciﬁc
purpose. Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to conﬁne
Glover’s superiority to single linesﬂ“ He told us that he had read

* [The “abrupt and laconic structure” of Glover’s periods appears at
the very commencement of Leonidas, which has something military in its
movement, but rather the stiff gait of the drilled soldier than the proud
[march of the martial hero.

The virtuous Spartan who resign’d his life

To save his country at th’ Oetzean straits,
Thermopylae, when all the peopled east

In arms with Xerxes ﬁlled the Grecian plains,

O Muse record! The Hellespont they passed
O’erpowering Thrace. The dreadful tidings swift
To Corinth ﬂew. Her Isthmus was the seat

Of Grecian council. Orpheus thence returns

To Lacedaemon. In assembly full, &c.

Glover’s best pass. 0‘es are of a soft character. This is a pleasing Homer-
csm :
Lycis dies,
For boist’rous war ill-chosen. He was skill’d
To tune the lulling ﬂute, and melt the heart;
Or with his pipe’s awak’ning strains allure
The lovely dames of Lydia to the dance.
They on the verdant level graceful mov’d
In vary’d measures; while the cooling breeze
Beneath their swelling garments wanton’d o’er
Their snowy breasts, and smooth Cayster’s stream
Soft-gliding murmur’d by. The hostile blade, dzc. Bk 'iii.

And here is a pleasing expansion of Pindar, Olymp. ii. 109:

Placid were his days,
Which ﬂow’d through blessings. As a river pure,
\Vhose sides are ﬂowery, and whose meadows fair,
Meets in his course a subterranean void;
There dips his silver head, again to rise,
And, rising, glide through ﬂow’rs and meadows new;
So shall Oileus in those happier ﬁelds,
Where never tempests roar, nor humid clouds
In mists dissolve. nor white descending ﬂakes
Of winter violate th’ eternal green;
Where never gloom of trouble shades the mind,
Nor gust of passion heaves the quiet breast,
Nor dews of grief are sprinkled. Bk. x.—S. OJ

542 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Milton, in a prose translation, when he was fourteen.* I under‘
stood him thus myself, and W interpreted Klopstock’s French
as I had already construed it. He appeared to know very little
of Milton or indeed of our poets in general. He spoke with
great indignation of the English prose translation of his MESSIAH.
All the translations had been bad, very bad—but the English
was no translation—there were pages on pages not in the origis
nal :—and half the original was not to be found in the translation.
W told him that I intended to translate a few of his odes as
specimens of German lyrics—he then said to me in English, “I
wish you would render into English some select passages of THE
NIESSIAH, and revenge me of your countryman!” It was the
liveliest thing which he produced in the whole conversation. He
told us, that his ﬁrst ode was ﬁfty years older than his last. I
looked at him with much emotion—I considered him as the ven-
erable father of German poetry; as a good man ; as a Christian ;
seventy-four years old ; with legs enormously swollen ; yet active,
lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt as
if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing
there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect
of his physiognomy—Klopstock wore the same, powdered and
frizzled. By-the-bye, old men ought never to wear powder—the
contrast between a large snow-white wig and the color of an old
V. man’s skin is disgusting, and wrinkles in such a neighborhood ap-
pear channels for dirt. It is an honor to poets and great men,
i that you think of them as parts of nature ; and any thing of trick
and fashion wounds you in them, as much as when you see ven-
erable yews clipped into miserable peacocks—The author of THE
MESSIAII should have worn his own gray hair.—His powder and
periwig were to the eye what .Zl/I’r. Virgil would be to the ear.
Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the Ger-
man language possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he
had often translated parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and
a German line proved always sufficient for a Greek or Latin one.
In English you can not do this. I answered, that in English we

 

 

* This was accidentally conﬁrmed to me by an.old German gentleman at
Helmstadt, who had been Klopstock’s school and bed-fellow. Among other
boyish anecdotes, be related that the young poet set a particular value on
In translation of the PARADISE Losr, and always slept with it under his pil-
0W.

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 543

could commonly render one Greek heroic line in a line and a half
of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that this line and
a half would be found to contain no more syllables than one
German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me 2* and
I, who wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad
that he did not.

We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French

9* Klopstock’s observation was partly true and partly erroneous. In the
literal sense of his words, and, if we conﬁne the comparison to the average
of space required for the expression of the same thought in the two lane
guages, it is erroneous. I have translated some German hexameters into
English hexameters, and ﬁnd, that on the average three English lines will
express four lines German. The reason is evident: our language abounds
in monosyllables and dissyllables. The German, not less than the Greek,
is a polysyllable language. But in another point of view the remark was
not without foundation. For the German possessing the same unlimited
privilege of forming compounds, both with propositions and with epithets, as
the Greek, it can express the richest simple Greek word in a single German
one, and is thus freed from the necessity of weak or ungraceful paraphrases.
I will content myself with one example at present, viz. the use of the pre-
ﬁxed participles oer, zer, ant, and weg; thus reisscn to rend, vcrreissen to
rend away, zerrcissen to rend to pieces, entrcissen to rend off or out of a.
thing, in the active sense: or 8011771612672. to melt—ver, zer, ent, schmelzen—
and in like manner through all the verbs neuter and active. If you consider
only how much we should feel the loss of the preﬁx be, as in bedropt, be-
sprinkle, besot, especially in our poetical language, and then think that this
same mode of composition is carried through all their simple and compound
prepositions, and many of their adverbs; and that with most of these the
Germans have the same privilege as we have of dividing them from the
verb and placing them at the end of the sentence; you will have no difﬁ—
culty in comprehending the reality and the cause of this superior power in
German of condensing meaning. in which its great poet exulted. It is im-
possible to read half a dozen pages of \Vieland without perceiving that in
this respect the German has no rival but the Greek. And yet I feel, that
concentration or condensation is not the happiest mode of expressing this
excellence, which seems to consist not so much in the less time required for
conveying an impression, as in the unity and simultaneousness with which
the impression IS conveyed. It tends to make their language more pictu-
resque: it depictures images better. We have obtained this power in part
by our compound verbs derived from the Latin: and the sense of its great
effect no doubt induced our Milton both to the use and the abuse of Latin
derivatives. But still these preﬁxed particles, conveying no separate or
separable meaning to the mere English reader, can not possibly act on the
mind with the force or liveliness of an original and homogeneous language
such as the German is, and besides are conﬁned to certain words.

544. BIOGRAPH’IA‘ LITERARIA.

Revolution Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received
some honorary presents from the French Republic (a golden
crown, I believe), and, like our Priestley, was invited to a seat
in the legislature, which he declined. But when French liberty
metamorphosed herself into a fury, he sent back these presents
with a paZ-i'nodz'a, declaring his abhortence of their proceedings ;
and since then he has been' perhaps more than enough an Anti-
Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation of
the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to
forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Provi-
dence; and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so
are their iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klop-
stock’s house we walked to the ramparts, discoursing together on
the poet and his conversation, till our attention was diverted to
the beauty and singularity of the sunset and its effects on the
objects around us. There were woods in the distance. A rich
sandy light (nay, of a much deeper color than sandy), lay over
these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of the
woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy
mist ﬂoated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving
to and fro between them, were cut or divided into equal seg-
ments of deep shade and brassy light. Had the trees, and the
bodies of the men and women, been divided into equal segments
by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions could not have been
more regular. All else was obscure. It was a fairy scene 3—
and to increase its romantic character, among the moving ob-
jects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a
beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English
child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other ac-
coutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid.
Before I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained
a day or two longer than I otherwise 'should have done, in order
to be present at the feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of
Hamburg, expecting to see .the civic pomp of this commercial
Republic. Iwas however disappointed. There were no pro-
cessions, two or three sermons were preached to two or three old
women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and his pat-
ronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of en-
tertainment, theatre, 850., being shut up on this day. In Harn-
burg there seems to be no religion at all ; in Lubec it is conﬁned

- SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 545

to the women. I The men seem determined to be divorced from
their wives in the other world, if they can not in this. You
will not easily conceive a more singular sight, than is presented
by the vast aisles of the principal church at Lubec seen from the
organ-loft ; for, being ﬁlled with female servants and persons in
the same class of life, and all their caps having gold and silver
cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold and silver.

I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes,
which my friend W made of his conversations with Klop-
stock, during the interviews that took place after my departure.
On these I shall make but one remark at present, and that will
appear a presumptuous one, namely, that Klopstock’s remarks on
the venerable sage of KOnigsberg are to my own knowledge in-

 

jurious and mistaken ; and so far is it from being true, that his ,

system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of Ger-
many therc is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean
or a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean,
and pre-Supposes its truth ; or lastly, who, though an antagonist
of Kant, as to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or
in part his moral system, and adopted part of his nomenclature.
“ Klopstock having wished to see the CALVARY of Cumberland,
and asked what was thought of it in England, I went to Rem-
nant’s (the English bookseller), where I procured the Analytical
Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland’s CAL-
VARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a
blank verse translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this
to Klopstock, and he had a great desire to see them. I walked
over to his house and put the book into his hands. On adverting
to his own poem, he told me he began THE MESSIAII when he
was seventeen : he devoted three entire years to the plan with-
out composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in what
manner to execute his Work. There were no successful speci-
mens of versiﬁcation in the German language before this time.
The ﬁrst three cantos he wrote in a species of measured or nu-
merous prose. This, though done with much labor and some suc-
cess, was far from satisfying him. He had composed hexameters
both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and there had been

\_,_,_ A

also in the German language attempts in that style of versiﬁca- '

tion. These were only of very moderate merit-One day he
was struck with the idea of what could be done in this way——

546 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

he kept his room a whole day, even went without his dinner,
and found that in the evening he had written twenty- three hex-
amcters, versifying a part of what he had before written in prose.
. From that time, pleased with his efforts, he composed no more in
prose. To-day he informed me that he had ﬁnished his plan
before he read Milton. He was enchanted to see an author who
before him had trod the same path. This is a contradiction of
what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his poem to
any one till it was ﬁnished: but some of his friends who had
seen what he had ﬁnished, tormented him till he had consented
to publish a few books in a journal. He was then, I believe,
very young, about twenty-ﬁve. The rest was printed at different
periods, four books at a time. The reception given to the ﬁrst
specimens was highly ﬂattering. He was nearly thirty years in
ﬁnishing the whole poem, but of these thirty years not more than
two were employed in the composition. He only composed in fa-
vorable moments; besides he had other occupations. He values
himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical
writers of gross deﬁciency in this respect. I laid the same accu-
sation against Horace : he would not hear of it—but waived the
discussion. He called Rousseau’s ODE TO FORTUNE a moral dis-
sertation in stanzas.* I spoke of Dryden’s ST. CECILIA ; but he

* [A la Fortune. Liv. ii. Ode vi. CEuvres de Jean Baptiste Rousseau, p.
121, edit. 1820. One of the latter strophes of this ode concludes with two
lines, which, as the editor observes, have become a proverb, and of which
the thought and expression are borrowed from Lucretius: eripitur, persona,
manet res: iii. v. 58.

Montrez nous, guerriers magnanimes,
Votre vertu dans tout son jour :
Voyons comment vos cceurs sublimes
Du sort soutiendront le retour.

’ Tant que en faveur vous seconde,
Vous étes les maitres du monde,
Votre gloire nous éblouit:
Mais au moindre revers funeste,
Le masque tombc, l’lzomme Taste,
Et lei/zeros s‘évanouit.

Horace, says the Editor, en traitant ce méme sujet, liv. x. ode xxxv. et Pin-
dare en l’esquissant a grands traits, au commencement de sa douziéme
Olympique, n’avoient laissé a leurs successeurs que son coté moral a envi-
sager, ct c’est 1e parti que prit Rousseau. The general sentiment of the
ode is handled with great dignity in Paradise Regained. Bk. iii. 1. 43—157

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 54'?

did not seem familiar with our writers. He wished to know the
distinctions between our dramatic and epic blank verse. He rec-
ommended me to read his HERMANN beforel read either THE
MESSIAH or the odes. He ﬂattered himself that some time or
other his dramatic poems would be known in England. He had
not heard of Cowper. He thought that Voss in his translation
of THE ILIAD had done violence to the idiom of the Germans, and
had sacriﬁced it to the Greeks, not remembering sufﬁciently that
each language has its particular spirit and genius.* He said

-—a passage which, as Thyer says, contains the quintessence of the subject.
Dante has some noble lines on Fortune in the viith canto of the Inferno,—
lines worthy of a great mystic poet. After referring to the vain com-
plaints and maledictions of men against this Power, he beautifully con-

cludes: ” ..
Ma ella s c beata e 010 non ode:

Con l’altre prime creature lieta
Valve sua spam, 8 beata Si gode.

J. B. Rousseau was born in 1669, began his Career at the close of the agaof
Louis Quatorze, died at Brussels, March 17, 1741. He had been banished
from France, by an intrigue, on a false charge, as now seems clear, of hav-
ing composed and distributed defamatory verses, in 1712; and it was en-
graved upon his tomb that he was “thirty years an object of envy and thirty
of compassion.” Belonging to the classical school of the 17th century, of
which he was the last survivor, he came somewhat into conﬂict with the
spirit of the 18th, which was preparing a new vintage, and would have none
but new wine in new bottles. Rousseau, however, was a very ﬁnished
writer in his way, and has been compared to Pindar, Horace, Anacreon and
Malherbe. His ode to JL’ lc Comte du Lac is as ﬁne an example as I know
of the modern classical style. This is quite different from that which is ex-
empliﬁed in Mr. VVordsworth’s Laodamia and Sergeant Talfourd’s Ion; for
in them the subjects only are ancient, while both the form and spirit are
modern; whereas in the odes of Rousseau a modern subject is treated, as
far as difference of times and language will allow, in the manner and tone
of the Ancients. Samson Agonistes and Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris are
conformed to ancient modes of thought, but in them the subject also is taken
from antiquity. Rousseau’s works consist of Odes, Epistles in verse, Can-
tatas, Epigrams, &c. the. He wrote for the stage at the beginning of his lit
erary life, but with no great success—S. 0.]

9“ [V035, who lived from Feb. 20, 1’7 51, to March, 1826, was author of
the Luise, “ a rural epopaea of simple structure divided into three idyls.
which relate the betrothment and marriage of the heroine.” This is a
pleasing and very peculiar poem, composed in hexameter verse. ‘ The
charm of the narrative,” says Mr. T., “ consists in the minute description of
the local domestic manners of the personages.” The charm consists, Ithink,
in the blending of these manners with the beauty of nature, and the ease

54s BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Jﬁgsjng was—IMWLdmmatigwriters. I complained of

NATHAN as tedious. He said there was not enough of action in
it ; but that Lessing was the most chaste of their writers. He
spoke favorably of Goethe ; but said that his SORRows OF WER-
TER was his best work, better than any of his dramas: he pre
ferred the first written to the rest of Goethe’s dramas. Schiller’s
ROBBERS he found so extravagant, that he could not read it. I
Spoke of the scene of the setting sun.* He did not know it. He
said Schiller could not live. He thought DON CARLOS the best
of his dramas ; but said that the plot was inextricable.—It was
evident he knew little of Schiller’s works: indeed, he said, he
could not read them. Biirgcr, he said, was a true poet, and
would live ; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be forgot-
ten ; that he gave himself up to the imitation Cf Shakspeare, who
often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times
more sot He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an im-

and suitability of the versiﬁcation. Voss’s translation of the Odyssey is
praised for being so perfect an imitation of the original. The Greek has
been rendered, “ with a ﬁdelity and imitative harmony so admirable, that
it suggests to the scholar the original wording, and reﬂects. as from a mir-
ror, every beauty and every blemish of the ancient poem.” Hist. Survey
pp. 61—68.—S. 0.]

* [Act iii. sc. 2. The night scene, which is the 5th of Act iv. is ﬁne
too in a frantic way. The songs it contains are very spirited. That sung
by the Robbers is worthy of a Thug: it goes beyond our notions of any
European bandit. and transports us to the land of J aggernat.—S. 0.]

f [The works of Burger, who was born on the ﬁrst day of 1748, died
J unc 8, 17 94, consist of Poems (2 vols.), Macbeth altered from Shakspeare
(pronounced by Taylor,—no good judge of ShakSpeare,—in some respects
superior to the original), Munchausen’s Travels; Translations (of the six
ﬁrst books of the Iliad, and some others); Papers philological and political.
His fame rests chieﬂy on three ballads, The Wild Hunter, the Parson’s
Daughter, and Lenore. The powerful diction and admirable harmony,—
rhythm, sound, rhyme of these compositions Mr. Taylor describes as the
result of laborious art; it strikes me, from the outline which he has given
of Burger’s history, that the violent feelings, the life-like expression of
which constitutes their power and value, may have been partly the reﬂex
of the poet‘s own mind. His seems to have been a life of mismanagement
from youth till middle age. Like Milton, he lost a beloved second wife by
childbed in the ﬁrst year of marri. 0'0: like him, he married a third time,
but without his special necessity—blindness and unkind daughters. He
wedded a lady who had fallen in love with his poetry, or perhaps his poeti-
cal reputation: an union founded, as it appears, in vanity, ended in vexa-

SATYRANE’S LETTERS. . 549

moral author in the ﬁrst place, and next, as deﬁcient in power
At Vienna, said he, they are transported with him; but we do
not reckon the people of Vienna either the wisest or the wittiest
people of Germany. He said Wieland was a charming author,
and a sovereign master of his own language ; that in this respect
Goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could any body
else. He said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance. I
told him the OBERON had just been translated into English. He
asked me if I was not delighted with the poem. I answered,
that I thought the story began to ﬂag about the seventh or eighth
book ; and observed, that it was unworthy of a man of genius to
make the interest of a long poem turn entirely upon animal
gratiﬁcation. He seemed at ﬁrst disposed to excuse this by say—
ing, that there are different subjects for poetry, and that poets are
not willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered, thatI
thought the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of
poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of
pleasing to ﬁx the attention of the reader through a long poem
on the mere appetite. Well! but, said he, you see, that such
poems please every body. I answered, that it was the province

of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to descend Celeb

to theirs. He agreed, and confessed, that on no account whatso-
ever would he have written a work like the OBERON. He spoke
in raptures of Wieland’s style, and pointed out the passage where
Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely beautifulﬂ“ I said

tion of spirit: and as Death, which had deprived him of two wives, did not
release him from a third, he obtained his freedom, at the end of little more
than three years, from a court of justice. Why did Klopstock undervalue,
by preference of such a poet, the lofty-minded Schiller—the dearest to
England of all German bards ? Perhaps because the author of \Vallenstein
was a philosopher, and had many things in his philosophy which the author
of The Messiah could not ﬁnd in his heaven and earth—S. 0.]

' * [Oberon, Canto viii. stanzas 69—80. The little touch about the new
born babe’s returning its mother’s kiss is very romantic: though put
modestly in the form of a query:

——Und scheint nicht jeden Kuss
Sein kleiner mund dem ihren zu entsaugen?

The word entsaugen (suck of ) is expressive—it very naturally characterizes
the kiss of an infant ﬁve minutes of age. Wieland had great nursery ex-
perience. “ My sweetest hours,” says he, in a letter quoted in the Survey

\3

r
.12-‘ m. sagas

r150 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

thatI did not perceive any very striking passages; but that I
made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. Of the
thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so. exquisitely managed, that
the greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He con-
sidered the books and fables of old romance writers in the light of
the ancient mythology, as a sort of common property, from which
a man was free to take whatever he could make a good use of.
An Englishman had presented him with the odes of Collins,
which he had read with pleasure. He knew little or nothing of
Gray, except his ELEGY written in a country CHURCH-YARD. He
complained of the fool in LEAR. I observed that he seemed to
give a terrible wildness to the distress ; but still he complained.
He asked whether it was not allowed, that Pope had written
rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our writers—I said I
preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater variety in
their movement. He thought my reason a good one ; but asked
whether the rhyme of Pope were not more exact. This question
I understood as applying to the ﬁnal terminations, and observed
to him that I believed it was the case ; but that I thought it was
easy to excuse some inaccuracy in the final sounds, if the general
sweep of the verse was superior. I told him that we were not so
exact with regard to the ﬁnal endings of lines as the French.
He did not seem to know that we made no distinction between
masculine and feminine (i. 6. single or double) rhymes: at least
he put inquiries to me on this subject. He seemed to think, that

{Inc language could be so far formed as that it might not be en-

I. riched by idioms borrowed from another tongue. I said this was
a very dangerous practice ; and added, that I thought Milton had
l often injured both his prose and verse by taking this liberty too
i frequently I recommended to him the prose works of Dryden as
models of pu1e and native English. I was heading upon tender
ground, as I have reason to suppose that he has himself liberally
indulged 1n the practice.
The same dayI dined at Mr. Klopstock’s, whereI had the
pleasure of a third interview with the poet. IV e talked princi-
pally about indifferent things. I asked him what he thought of

“‘m e tlmsc 111 which I see about me, in all thci1 glee of childhood, my whole
posse of little 11: llf— w 11y things between apes and angels’

M1. Sothoby’ s t11mslation of the Obe1 on made the poem popular in this
swuntry. The original ﬁrst appeared in 1780.—S. 0.]

- SATYRANE’S LETTERS. 551

Kant. He said that his reputation was much on the decline in
Germany. That for his own part he was not surprised to ﬁnd it
so, as the works of Kant were to him utterly incomprehensible—-
that he had often been p'estered by the Kanteans ; but was rarely
lin the practice of arguing with them. LIIis custom was to pro-
duce the book, open it and point to a passage, and beg they would
explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do by substituting
]their own ideasl Ido not want, I say, an explanation of your
own ideas, but of the passage which is before us. In this way I
generally bring the dispute to an immediate conclusion. He
spoke of Wolfe as the ﬁrst Metaphysician they had in Germany.
Wolfe had followers ; but they could hardly be called a sect, and
luckily till the appearance of Kant, about ﬁfteen years ago, Ger-
many had not been pestered by any sect of philosophers whatso-
ever ; but that each man had separately pursued his inquiries un
controlled by the dogmas of a master. Kant had appeared am-
bitious to be the founder of a sect ; that he had succeeded : but
that the Germans were now coming to their senses again. That
Nicolai and Engel had in different ways contributed to disenchant
the nation ;* but above all the incomprehensibility of the philoso-
pher and his philosophy. He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet
Kant’s doctrines had not met with many admirers in England—-
did not doubt but that we had too much wisdom to be duped by
a writer who set at deﬁance the common sense and common un-
derstandings of men. We talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate
highly the power of exciting tears—I said that nothing was more
easy than to deluge an audience, that it was done every day by
the meanest writers.

I must remind you, my friend, first that these notes are not in-
tended as specimens of Klopstock’s intellectual power, or even
“ colloquial prowess,” to judge of which by an accidental conver-
sation, and this with strangers, and those too foreigners, would be
not only unreasonable, but calumnious. Secondly, I attribute
little other interest to the remarks than what is derived from the
celebrity of the person who made them. Lastly, if you ask me,
whether I have read THE MESSIAH, and what I think of it? I
answer—as yet the ﬁrst four books only : and as to my opinion—
(the reasons of which hereafter)—you may guess it from what I
could not help muttering to myself, when the good pastor this

* [See note at the end of the letter.—S. 0.]

552 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

morning told me, that Klopstock was the German Milton—-“ 0
very German Milton indeed ! l 1’ Heaven preserve you, and
S. T. COLERIDGE.

 

 

[These disenchanters put one in mind of the ratcatchers, who are said and
supposed to rid houses of rats, and yet the rats, somehow or other, continue
to swarm. The Kantean rats were not aware, I believe, when Klopstock
spoke thus, of the extermination that had befallen them : and even to this
day those acute animals infest the old house, and steal away the daily bread
of the children,—if the old notions of Space and Time, and the old proofs
of religious verities by way of the understanding, and speculative reason,
must be called such. Whether or no these are their true spiritual suste-
nauce, or the necessary guard and vehicle of it, is perhaps a question.

But who were Nicolai and Engel, and what did they against the famous
enchanter? The former was born in 1733, at Berlin, where he carried on
his father’s business of book—selling, pursued literature with marked suc-
cess, and attained to old age, full of literary honors. By means of three
critical journals (the Literatur-Briefe, the Bibliolhek der Schénen lVissen-
schaftern, and the Allgemeine dents-cite Bibliothek), which he conducted with
the powerful co-operat-ion of Lessing, and of his intimate friend Mendelso
sohn, and to which he contributed largely himself, he became very consider-
able in the German world of letters, and so continued for the space of
twenty years. Jordens, in his Lexicon, speaks highly of the effect of Nico—
lai's writings in promoting freedom of thought, enlightened views in theol-
ogy and philosophy, and a sound taste in ﬁne literature—describes him as a
brave battler with intolerance, hypocrisy, and confused conceptions in re-
ligion; with empty subtleties, obscuritics, and terminologies, that can but
issue in vain fantasies, in his controversial writings on the “ so-named criti-
cal philosophy.” He engaged with the Kritik der reinen Vermmft, on its
appearance in 1781, in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek; ﬁrst explained
his objections to it in the 11th vol. of his Reisebeschreibung (Description of
a Journey through Germany and Switzerland in the year 1781), and after-
wards, in his romance entitled, The Life and Opinions of Sempronius Gun
(libert, a German Philosopher, sought to set forth the childish crotehets and
abuses imputablc to many disciples of this philosophy in their native alr
surdity. The rats-bone alluded to by Klopstock, was doubtless contained in
the above-named romance, which the old poet probably esteemed more than
N icolai’s more serious polemics.

Gundibert has had its day, but in a ﬁction destined to a day of longer
duration,—Goethe’s Faust,—the Satirist is himself most effectively satirized.
There he is, in that strange yet beautiful temple, pinned to the wall in a
ridiculous attitude, to be laughed at as long as the temple itself is visited
and admired. This doom came upon him, not so much for his campaign
against the Kanteans, as for his Joys of WeﬂefL—becausc he had dared to
ridicule a book. which certainly offered no small temptations to the parodist.

SATYRANE‘S LETTERS. ’ 553

Indeed he seems to have been engaged in a series of hostilities with Fichte,
Lavater, Wieiand, Herder, and Goethe.* In the W’alpurgisnacht of the
Faust he thus addresses the goblin dancers :

Ihr seyd noch immer da I N ein das ist unerhort!
Verschwindet doch! Wir haben ja aufgeklart!

“ Fly I
Vanish I Unheard of impudence ! What, still there I
In this enlightened age too, when you have been
Proved not to exist 2”-——Shelley’s Translation.

Do we not see the doughty reviewer before us magisterially waving his
hand, and commanding the apparitions to vanish ?—then with despondent
astonishment exclaiming :

Das Teufelspack es fragt nach keiner Regel.
Wir sind so klug und dennoch spukt’s in Tegel.

So wise we are! yet what fantastic fooleries still stream forth from my con-
temporary’s brains; how are we still haunted l The speech of Faust con-
cerning him is mis-translated by Shelley, who understood the humor of the
piece, as well as the poetry, but not the particular humors of it. Nothing
can be more expressive of a conceited, narrow-minded reviewer. “ Oh he!
—he is absolutely everywhere,—-What others dance, he must decide upon.
If he can’t chatter about every step, ’tis as good as not made at all. Noth-
ing provokes him so much as when we go forward. If you’d turn round and
round in a circle, as he does in his old mill, he’d approve of that perhaps;
especially if you’d consult him about it.”

“A man of such spirited habitudes,” says Mr. Carlyle, after afﬁrming
that Nicolai wrote against Kant’s philosophy without comprehending it, and
judged of poetry, as of Brunswick Mum, by its utility, “is now by the
Germans called a Philister. Nicolai earned for himself the painful pre-
eminence of being Erz Philister, Arch Philistine.” “He, an old enemy of
Goethe’s,” says Mr. Hill, in explanation of the title in which he appears in
the Walpurgz'snacht, “had published an account of his phantasmal illusions,
pointing them against Fichte’s system of idealism, which he evidently con-
founded with what Coleridge would have called Subjective Idolism.”

Such was this wondrous disenchanter in the eyes of later critics than
Klopstock: a man strong enough to maintain a long ﬁght against genius,
not wise enough to believe in it and befriend it. How many a controver-
sialist seems a mighty giant to those who are prediposed to his opinions,
while, in the eyes of others, he is but a blind ﬂoundering Polyphemus, who
knows not how to direct his heavy blows; if not a menacing scarecrow, with
a stake in his hand, which he has no power to drive home! I remember
reading a thin volume in which all metaphysicians that had ever left their

 

* [See Mr. Hayward’s excellent translation of Faust, of which I have
heard a literary German say that it gave a better notion of the original than
any other which he had seen]

VOL. 111. 2 A

554 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

thoughts behind them were declared utterly in the wrong—all up to, out
not including, the valiant author himself. The world had lain in darkness
till he appeared, like a new Phcebus, on the scene. This great man dis-
patched Kant’s system—(never having read a syllable of any work of Kant’s)
-—in a page and a quarter ; and the exploit had its celebraters and admirers.
Yet strange to say, the metaphysical world went on just as if nothing had
happened l—after the sun was up, it went groping about, as if it had never
been enlightened, and actually ever since has continued to talk as if Locke,
Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and other metaphysicians understood the nature of
the things they wrote about rather more than the mass of mankind, instead
of less! Verschwindet dock ! might this author say, as Nicolai said to the
speetres of the Brocken and the phantoms of literature,

Verschwindet doch! l-Vir Izabm ja azgfgekldrt.

Engel opposed Kant in philosophical treatises, one of which is entitled
Zwei Gerprc'ic/w den lVerth der K ritik betrqfend. He too occupied a con-
siderable space in literature—his works ﬁll twelve volumes, besides a few
other pieces. “ To him,” says J ordens, “the criticism of taste and of art,
speculative, practical, and popular philosophy, owe many of their later
advances in Germany.” ,Jordens pronounces his romance, entitled Lorenz
Stark, a masterpiece in its way, and says of his plays, that they deserve a
place beside the best of Lessing’s. He was the author of a miscellaneous
work, entitled The Philosopher of the World, and is praised by Cousin as a
meritorious anthropologist. Engel was born September 11, 1741, at Par-
chim, of which his father was pastor, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin; died June
28, 1802. Neither Nicolai nor Engel is noticed by Cousin among the ad-
versaries of Kant’s doctrine: the intelligent adversaries—who assailed it
with skill and knowledge, rather proved its strength than discovered its
weakness. Fortins acri ridiculum; but this applies only to transient triumphs,
where the object of attack, though it furnishes occasion for ridicule. affords
no just cause for it.—S. 0-]

“kn—-

. .4- : rah-Own.“ .nu.‘ ._

 

CHAPTER XXIII.

Quid quad prafatione prwmunierim libellum, qud conor omncm oﬂ'endiculi
ansam praacidere ?* Aregue guicguam addubz'to, quin ea candidis omnibus
faciat satis. Quid autem facias istis, qui ml 06 ingenii pertinaciam sibi
satisﬁerz' nolz’nt, vel stupidiores sint, quam ut satisfactionem intelligant ?
Nam quemadmodum Simonides dixit, Thessalos hebetiores csse, quam ut
possint a se decz'pz', éta quosdam videas stupidiores, quam ut placari queant.
Adhaec, non mimm est invem're quad calumnietur, qui nihil aliud qurem't,
m'si quod calumm'etur. ERASMUS ad Dorpz'um, Theologum.

IN the rifacimemo of THE FRIEND, I have inserted extracts
from the CONCIONES AD POPULUM, printed, though scarcely pub-
lished, in the year 1795, in the very heat and height of my anti-
ministerial enthusiasm : these in proof that my principles of poli—
tics have sustained no change—In the present chapter, I have
annexed to my Letters from Germany, with particular reference
to that, which contains a disquisition on the modern drama, a
critique on the ‘Tra ed of BERIMM, written within the last
twelve months: in proof, that I have been as falsely charged
with any ﬁckleness in my principles of taste—The letter was
written to a friend: and the apparent abruptness with which it
begins, is owing to the omission of the introductory sentences.

You remember, my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before
his death, proposed to the assembled subscribers of Drury Lane
Theatre, that the concern should be farmed to some responsible
individual under certain conditions and limitations : and that his
proposal was rejected, not without indignation, as subversive of
the main object, for the attainment of which the enlightened and
patriotic assemblage of philo-dramatists had been induced to risk
their subscriptions. Now this object was avowed to be no less
than the—redemption of the British Stage not only from horses,
dogs. elephants, andthe like zoological rarities, but also from the
more pernicious'barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals and taste.

"‘ Precludere calumm'am, in the original.

556 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Drury Lane was to be restored to its former classical renown;
Shakspeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the expurgated muses of
Vanbrugh, Congreve, and Wycherley, were to be re-inaugurated
in their rightful dominion over British audiences ;* and the Her-
culean process was to commence, by exterminating the speaking
monsters imported from the banks of the Danube, compared with
which their mute relations, the emigrants from Exeter ’Change,
and Polito (late Pidcock’s) show-carts, were tame and inoffensive.
Could an heroic project, at once so reﬁned and so arduous, be
consistently intrusted to, could its success he rationally expected
from, a mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the
lucri bonus odor would conciliate a bill of health to the plague
in person ? N o 3 As the work proposed, such must be the work-
masters. Rank, fortune, liberal education, and (their natural
accompaniments, or consequences) critical discernment, delicate
tact, disinterestedness, unsuspected morals, notorious patriotism,
and tried Maecenasship, these were the recommendations that in-
fluenced the votes of the proprietary subscribers of Drury-Lane
Theatre, these the motives that occasioned the election of its Su
preme Committee of Management. This circumstance alone
would have excited a strong interest in the public mind, respect-

* [My eldest brother says of Congreve’s comedies, after declaring them
“considerably more decorous than those of his predecessors,” “They are
too cold to be mischievous: they keep the brain in too incessant action to
allow the passions to kindle. For those who search into the powers of in-
tellect, the combinations of thought which may be produced by volition,
the plays of Congreve may form a proﬁtable study. But their time is ﬂed
-—on the stage they will be received no more; and of the devotees of light-
reading such as could read them without disgust would probably peruse
them with little pleasure.”—\V0rthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire, by
Hartley Coleridge, p. 693.

My father says, in a marginal note on the Life from which I quote,
“ Wickedness is no subject for Comedy. This was Congreve’s great error,
and almost peculiar to him. The Dramatis Personae of Dryden, Wycherley
and others, are often vicious, indecent, but, not like Congreve’s, wicked.”

Speaking of The lVay of the lVoer, my brother says, “It has no moral
interest. Vice may be, and too often has been, made interesting; but cold-
hearted, unprincipled villany, never can—It is impossible to read this
comedy without wonder and admiration; but it is an admiration altogether
intellectual, by which no man is made better.” - My father remarks, in the
margin, “Virtue and Wickedness are not sub eodem genere. The absence
of Virtue is no deﬁciency in a genuine comedy: but the presence of Wick-
edness a great defect.”—-S. 0.]

CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. ' 55':

ing the ﬁrst production of the Tragic Muse which had been an-
nounced under such auspices, and had passed the ordeal of such
judgments : and the tragedy, on which you have requested my
judgment, was the work on which the great expectations, justi-
ﬁed by so many causes, were doomed at length to settle.

But before I enter on the examination of BERTRAM, or TI-n
CASTLE OF ST. ALDOBRAND, I shall interpose a few words, on the
phrase German Drama, which I hold to be altogether a mis-
nomer. At the time of Lessing, the German stage, such as it
Was, appears to have been a ﬂat and servile copy of the French.
It was Lessin who ﬁrst introduced the name and the works of
Shakspeare to the admiration of the Germans ; and I should not
perhaps go too far, if I add, that it was Lessing who ﬁrst proved
to all thinking men, even to Shakspeare’s own countrymen, the
true nature of his apparent irregularities. . These, he demon
strated, were deviations only from the accidents of the Greek
tragedy; and from such accidents as hung a heavy weight on
the wings of the Greek poets, and narrowed their ﬂight within
the limits of what we may call the heroic opera. He proved,
that, in all the essentials of art, no less than in the truth of na-
ture, the Plays of Shakspeare were incomparably more coincident
with the principles of Aristotle, than the productions of Corneille
and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter.*
Under these convictions were Lessing’s own dramatic works com-
posed. Their deficiency is in depth and imagination : their ex-
cellenee is in the construction of the plot; the good sense of the
sentiments ; the sobriety of the morals ; and the high polish of
the diction and dialogue. In short, his dramas are the very an-
tipodes of all those which it has been the fashion of late years at
once to abuse and enjoy, under the name of the German drama.
Of this latter, Schiller’s ROBBERS was the earliest specimen ; the
ﬁrst fruits of his youth (I had almost said of his boyhood), and as
such, the pledge, and promise of no ordinary genius. Only as
such, did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the Play.
During his whole life he expressed himself concerning this prc-
duction with more than needful asperity, as a monster not less
offensive to good taste, than to sound morals; and, in his latter
.years, his indignation at the unwonted popularity of the ROBBERS

* [See his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, especially vol. ii. Works, 1841
vol. vii.——S. 0.]

558 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

seduced him into the contrary extremes, viz. a studied feeblenesl
of interest (as far as the interest was to be derived from incidents
and the excitement of curiosity); a diction elaborately metrical;
the aﬂectation of rhymes; and the pedantry of the chorus.

But to understand the true character of the ROBBERS, and of
the countless imitations which were its spawn, I must inform you,
or at least call to your recollection, that, about that time, and for
some years before it, three of the most popular books in the Ger-
man language were, the translations of YOUNG’s NIGHT THOUGHTS,
HERVEY’S MEDITATIONS, and RICHARDSON’S CLARISSA HARLOW.*

9* [Night I. of The Complaint: or Night Thoughts, was before the world
in 1742 : Hervey’s .Meditatz'ons among the Tombs, and Reﬂections in a
Flower Garden, appeared in 1746: the ﬁrst two vols. of Clarissa in 1748.
This work of Richardson’s and his Pamela were written purposely to guard
the morals of the young, and of the latter it was said, Pamela is like snow:
she covers all things with her whiteness. Snow, when much trodden under
a warm sun, is soon converted into slop—which coalesces ere long into mud
and mire; in this respect the moral lessons of Pamela and Clarissa do indeed
resemble snow; they seem ﬁtter to stir up the mud of the soul—“ the
earthly mire” of its nature,—than permanently to cleanse and whiten it.—- -
See Comparison of Richardson with Fielding, WorksIIV. p. 380.

Young’s great peem is a notable instance of the want of reserve and
poetical economy. In the poetry of Cowper, Burns, Crabbe, we have abun-
dance of sadness, and it is all the more truly and deeply sad, because it
seems to come unsought, nay, rather shunned. The poet’s soul appears to
crave the sunshine: he “ does not love the shower nor seek the cold,” but
only yields to mournful reﬂections because they force. themselves upon him
in aworld of woe. But when Young so resolutely makes love to Gloom and
sets his cap at Melancholy, we suspect that both are in masquerade, and
that blooming forms are beneath the sable stole; when he surrounds his
head with cypress, we imagine a snug velvet cap under the dusky wreath;
when he “ sits by alamp at mid—day, and has skulls, bones, and instruments
of death for the ornaments of his study,” we feel disposed to think that he
makes sin, death, and sorrow a poetical amusement, and takes up these
topics because they offer facilities for impressive writing more than to re-
lieve their pressure on a burdened heart. Iwould not say the same of Her-
vey’s piety, though it has such an air of what, in a colloquial not philosoph-
ical sense, may be called determinism. The author of The Doctor says that
some styles are ﬂowery, but that the Meditationist’s is a weedg style: allud-
ing, I suppose, to its luxuriant common-place, and vulgar showiness, as of
corn—poppies and wild mustard. But Hervey seems to have been a simple
earnest clergyman, with his heart in his parish: whereas it is difﬁcult not
to look upon Young as a solemn worldling; though, as many a mountain-
brow looks from a distance a sheer precipice, yet, when we approach,
appears passable to the foot of man; so many a life viewed afar off seems

CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 559

Now we have only to combine the bloated style and peculiar
rhythm of Hervey, which is poetic only on account of its utter un-
ﬁtness for prose, and might as appropriately be called prosaic,
from its utter unﬁtness for poetry; we have only, I repeat, to
combine these Herveyisms with the strained thoughts, the ﬁgura-
tive metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on the one hand ;
and with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid
consciousness of every thought and feeling in the whole ﬂux and
reﬂux of the mind. in short the self-involution and dreamlike con-
tinuity of Richardson on the other hand; and then to add the
horriﬁc incidents, and mysterious villains (geniuses of supernatural
intellect, if you will take the authors’ words for it, but on a level
with the meanest rufﬁans of the condemned cells, if we are to
judge by their actions and contrivances)—to add the ruined cas-
tles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-
‘blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author
(themselves the literary brood of the CASTLE OF OTRANT0,* the
translations of which, with the imitations and improvements
aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise
in Germany as their originals were making in England),—and
as the compound of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recog-
nize the so-called German drama. The olla podrida thus
cooked up, was denounced, by the best critics in Germany, as the
mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a sickly imagination on
the part of the author, and the lowest provocation of torpid feel-
ing on that of the readers. The old blunder, however, concerning
the irregularity and wildness of Shakspeare, in which the Ger-
man did but echo the French, who again were but the echoes of
our own critics, was still in vogue, and Shaksp’eare was quoted
as authority for the most anti-Shaksperean drama. We have
indeed twopoets who wrote as one, near the age of Shakspeare,
to whom (as the worst characteristic of their writings), the Cory-
phaeus of the present drama may challenge the honor of being a
poor relation, or impoverished descendant. For if we would
eharitably consent to forget the comic humor, the wit, the felici-
ties of style, in other words, all the poetry, and nine tenths of all

hard and worldly, but shows its humanity and Christianity to those who see

it closely—S. 0.]
* [This tale, by Horace Walpole, afterwards Earl of Oxford, was pub

lished in 1765.——S. 0.]

560 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

the genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, that which would remain
becomes a Kotzcbue.

The. so-called Gamma drama, thereforeI is thglz‘sh in“ its
JﬁgWSth—WEnglish by re-ado tion ;
and till we can prove that Kotzebue, Mme‘d
of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or romantic writers, or writers
of romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other shelf in the
libraries of well-educated Germans than were occupied by their
originals, and apes’ apes in their mother country, we should sub
mit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders ; or rather con-
sider it as a lack-grace returned from transportation with such
improvements only in growth and manners as young transported
convicts usually come home with.

I know nothing that contributes more to a clear insight into
the true nature of any literary phaenomenon, than the comparison
of it with some elder production, the likeness of which is striking,
yet only apparent, while the difference is real. In the present
case this opportunity is furnished us, by the old Spanish play, en
titled Atheism Fulmimto, formerly, and perhaps still, acted in
the churches and monasteries of Spain, and which, under various
names (Don Juan, the Libertine, ($0.) has had its day of favor
in every country throughout Europe. A popularity so extensive,
and of a work so grotesque and extravagant,‘claims and merits
philosophical attention and investigation. The ﬁrst point to be
noticed is, that the play is throughout imaninative. Nothing of
it belongs to the real world, but the names of the places and per-
sons. The comic parts, equally with the tragic ; the living,
equally with the defunct characters, are creatures of the brain;
as little amenable to the rules of ordinary probability, as the
Satan of PARADISE Losr, or the Caliban of THE TEMPEST, and
therefore to be understood and judged of as impersonated abstrac-
tions. Rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal
accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health, and con-
stitutional hardihood,——all these advantages, elevated by - the
habits and sympathies of noble birth and national character, are
supposed to have combined in Don Juan, so as to give him the
means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine
of a godless nature, as the sole ground-and efﬁcient cause not
only of all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our
thoughts, sensations, impulses and actions. Obedience to nature ‘

CRITIQUE 0N BERTRAM. 561

IS the only virtue: the gratiﬁcation of the passions and appetites
her only dictate : each individual’s self-will the sole organ through
which nature utters her commands, and

“ Self-contradiction is the only wrong 1
For, by the laws of spirit, in the right
Is every individual character
That acts in strict consistence with itself.”

That speculative opinions, however impious and daring they
may be, are not always followed by correspondent conduct, is
most true, as well as that they can scarcely in any instance be
systematically realized, on account of their unsuitableness to hu-
man nature and to the institutions of society. It can be hell,
only where it is all hell : and a separate world of devils is ne-
cessary for the existence of any one complete devil. But on the
other hand it is no less clear, nor, with the biography of Carrier’r
and his fellow-atheists before us, can it be denied without wilful
blindness, that the (so called) system of nature (that is, materi-
alism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility, of a pres-

* [First Part of Wallenstein, translated from Schiller. Coleridge’s
Poet. Works, p. 570.—S. 0.]

f [This man ﬁgured in that last and worst state of the French Revolu-
tion, that state of sevenfold possession, when Jacobinism, having borne
down its rival opponents, was riding in triumph through the land, like
Death in the Revelations. In this drama of dream-like horrors Carrier
sustained his part so as to be “ famous forever.” Mr. Carlyle, in that chap
ter of the French Revolution which is headed Destruction, gives an awful
account of Representative Carrier’s proceedings in La Vendée, and of his
horrid ban-mots, worthy of a laughing hyzena possessed by the spirit of
cruelty. “Sentence of Deportation,” writes Carrier, “was executed verti-
cally.” That is, a gabarre with ninety priests under hatches, was sunk in
the Loire, on signal given. “This was the ﬁrst of the Noyades, which we
may call Drownages, of Carrier.” —“ By degrees daylight itself wit-
nesses N oyades ; women and men are tied together, feet and feet, hands and
,hands: and ﬂung in; this they call ﬂfaw'iage Républicain, Republican Mar-
riage—Dumb, out of suffering now, as pale swoln corpses, the victims
tumble confusedly seaward along the Loire stream : the tide rolling them
back: clouds of ravens darken the river : wolves prowl on the shoal places
Carrier writes, ‘ Quel torrent revolutiomzaire. “That a torrent of Revolu
tion 1’ For the man is rabid and the time is rabid. These are the N oyadel
of Carrier, twenty-ﬁve by the tale.” Mr. Carlyle calls this “the blackest
aspect of the consummation of Sansculottism.” The worst part of his ac
count is too dreadful to quote. See also Revolutionary Plutarch, vol. iii
p. 105.—S. 0.]

 

562 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

ent Providence, and of both present and future retribution) may
inﬂuence the characters and actions of individuals, and even of
communities, to a degree that almost does away the distinction
between men and devils, and will make the page of the future
historian resemble the narration of a madman’s dreams. It is
not the wickedness of Don Juan, therefore, which constitutes the
character an abstraction, and removes it from the rules of proba-
bility ; but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and
incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumula-
tion of his gifts and desirable qualities, as co-existent with entire
wickedness in one and the same person. But this likewise is
the very circumstance which gives to this strange play its charm
and universal interest. Don Juan is, from beginning to end, an
intelligible character : as much so as the Satan of Milton. The
poet asks only of the reader, what, as a poet, he is privileged to
ask : namely, that Sort of negative faith in the existence of such
a being, which we willingly give to productions professedly ideal,
and a disposition to the same state of feeling, as that with which
we contemplate the idealized ﬁgures of the Apollo Belvidere,
and the F arnese. Hercules. What the Hercules is to the eye in
corporeal strength, Don Juan is to the mind in strength of char-
acter. The ideal consists in the happy balance of the generic
with the individual. The former makes the character represen-
tative and symbolical, therefore instructive; because, mutatis
mutamlis, it is applicable to whole classes of men. The latter
gives its living interest ; for nothing lives and is real, but as deﬁ-
nite and individual. To understand this completely, the reader
need only recollect the speciﬁc state of his feelings, when in look-
ing at a picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or
heroic) class, he objects to a particular ﬁgure as being too much
of a portrait ; and this interruption of his complacency he feels
without the least reference to, or the least acquaintance with,
any person in real life whom he might recognize in this ﬁgure.
It is enough that such a ﬁgure is not ideal; and therefore not
ideal, because one of the two factOrs or elements of the ideal is
in excess. A similar and more powerful objection he would feel
towards a set of ﬁgures which were mere abstractions, like those
of Cipriani, and what have been called Greek forms and faces,
that is, outlines drawn according to a recipe. These again are
not ideal ; because in these the other element is in execss

CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 563

“ Format formans per formam formatam translucens,“ is the
deﬁnition and perfection of ideal art.
This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don Juan, that
- it is capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without
words, as in our pantomime of that name. We see clearly how
the character is formed ; and the very extravagance of the inci-
dents, and the superhuman entireness of Don Juan’s agency,
prevents the wickedness from shocking our minds to any painful
degree. We do not believe it enough for this effect; no, not
even with that kind of temporary and negative belief or acqui-
escence which I have described above. Meantime the qualities
of his character are too desirable, too ﬂattering to our pride and
our wishes, not to make up on this side as much additional faith
as was lost on the other. There is no danger (thinks the specta-
tor or reader) of my becoming such a monster of iniquity as Don
Juan I I never shall be an atheist ! I shall never disallow all
distinction between right and wrong ! I have not the least in-i' «'
clination to be so outrageous a drawcansir in my love affairs!
But to possess such a power of captivating and enchanting the 9 .
affections of the other sex l—to be capable of inspiring in a,
charming and even virtuous woman a love so deep, and so en-
tirely personal to me .’—that even my worst vices (if I were
vicious), even my cruelty and perﬁdy (if I were cruel and per
ﬁdious), could not eradicate the passion l—to be so loved for my
own self, that even with a distinct knowledge of my character,
she yet died to save me I—this, sir, takes hold of two sides of
our nature, the better and the worse. For the heroic disinter
estedness to which love can transport a woman, can not be con
templated without an honorable emotion of reverence towards
womanhood : and, on the other hand, it is among the miseries,
and abides in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an
outward conﬁrmation of that something Within us, which is our
we'ry seéf, that something, not made up of our qualities and rela-
tions, but itself the supporter and substantial basis of all these.
Love me, and not my qualities, may be a vicious and an insane
wish, but it is not a wish wholly without a meaning,

a"'Better thus: Forma Speciﬁca per formam individualem translucens.

or better yet—Species individualizata, sz've Individuum cuilibet Speciei de«

. terminate in 0mm? parte correspondens et quasi versione quadam eam {Mew
pretans ct repetens.

564 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Without power, virtue would be insufﬁcient and incapable of
revealing its being. It would resemble the magic transformation
of Tasso’s heroine into a tree, in which she could only groan and
need?“< Hence power is necessarily an object of our desire and
of our admiration. But of all power, that of the mind is, on
every account, the grand (Zesidemtum of human ambition. We
shall be as Gods in knowledge, was and must have been the
first temptation : and the co-existence of great intellectual lord
ship with guilt has never been adequately represented without
exciting the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in this bad
and heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the intellect
of man more exclusively as a separate self-subsistence, than in its
proper state of subordination to his own conscience, or to the will
of an infinitely superior being.

This is the sacred charm of'Shakspeare’s male characters in
general. They are all cast in the mould of Shakspeare’s own
gigantic intellect ; and this is the open attraction of his Richard,
Iago, Edmund, and others in particular. But again; of all in-
tellectual power, that of superiority to the fear of the invisible
world is the most dazzling. Its inﬂuence is abundantly proved
by the one circumstance, that it can bribe us into a voluntary
submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all our
judgment derived from constant experience, and enable us to
peruse with the liveliest interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wiz-
ards, genii, and secret talismans. On this propensity, so deeply
rooted in our nature, a specific dramatic probability may be raised
by a true poet, if the whole of his work be in harmony ; a d7'a-
matic probability, sufﬁcient for dramatic pleasure, even when the
component characters and incidents border on impossibility. The
poet does not require us to be awake and believe ; he solicits us
only to yield ourselves to a dream ; and this too with our eyes
open, and with our judgment perdue behind the curtain, ready to
awaken us at the ﬁrst motion of our will : and meantime, only.
not to disbelieve. And in such a state of mind, who but must be
impressed with the cool intrepidity of' Don John on the appear-
ance of his father’s ghost :

“ Gnosr.~Monster ! behold these wounds !
D. J elm—I do I They were well meant and. well performed, I see.

 

* { Gerusalemme Liberata. Canto xiii. st. 38, et seq.—S. 0.]

CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. '565

Gnosr.—— Repent, repent of all thy villanies.
My clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries,
Heaven will pour out his judgments on you all.
Hell gapes for you, for you each ﬁend doth call,
And hourly waits your unrepenting fall.
You with eternal horrors they’ll torment,
Except of all your crimes you suddenly repent. (Ghost sinks.)
D. Joan—Farewell, thou art a foolish ghost. Repent, quoth be! What
:Ould this mean? Our senses are all in a mist, sure.
D. ANTONIo.——(one of D. Juan’s reprobate companions.) They are not!
’Twas a ghost.
D. Lorna—(another reprobate.) I ne'er believed those foolish tales
before.
D. JOHN.—Come! ’Tis no matter. Let it be what it will, it must be
natural.
D. Arm—And nature is unalterable in us too.
D. JOHN.—’Tis true ! The nature of a ghost can not change ours.”

Who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous
consistency with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like
a second Prometheus ?

“ Chorus of Devils.
STATUE-GHOST.—Will you not relent and feel remorse 3
D. J OHN.—Could’st thou bestow another heart on me I might. But with
this heart I have, I can not.
D. LOPEz.—These things are prodigious.
D. ANTON.-—I have a sort of grudging to relent, but something holds
me back.
D. Lon—If we could, ’tis now too late. I will not.
D. ANT.—-We defy thee !
Gnosr.—Perish, ye impious wretches, go and ﬁnd the punishments laid
up in store for you 1
(Thunder and lightning. D. Lop. and D. Ant. are swallowed up.)
GHOST to D. J curt—Behold their dreadful fates, and know that thy
last moment’s come! .
D. Joann—Think not to fright me, foolish ghost; I’ll break your marble
body in pieces and pull down your horse.
(Thunder and lightning—chorus of devils, d’c.)
D. Joan—These things I see with wonder, but no fear.
Were all the elements to be confounded,
And shufﬂed all into their former chaos;
Were seas of sulphur ﬂaming round about me,
And all mankind roaring within those ﬁres,
I could not fear, or feel the least remorse.
To the last instant I would dare thy.power.
Here I stand ﬁrm, and all thy threats contemn.

566 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Thy murderer (to the ghost of one whom he had murdered)
Stands here I Now do thy worst 1”
(He is swallowed up in a cloud of ﬁre.)

In ﬁne the character of Don John consists in the union of every
thing desirable to human nature, as means, and which therefore
by the Well-known law of association become at length desirable
on their own account. On their own account, and, in their own

dignity, they are here displayed, as being employed to ends sol

unhuman, that in the effect, they appear almost as means with-
out an end. The ingredients too are mixed in the happiest pro-
portion, so as to uphold and relieve each other—more especially
.‘ in that constant interpoise of wit, gaiety and social generosity,
which prevents the criminal, even in his most atrocious moments,
from sinking into the mere ruﬁian, as far at least, as our imagi-
nation sits in judgment. Above all, the ﬁne suffusion through
the whole, with the characteristic manners and feelings of a
highly bred gentleman gives life to the drama. Thus having in-
vited the statue-ghost of the governor, whom he had murdered,
to supper, which invitation the marble ghost accepted by a nod
of the head, Don John has prepared a banquet.

“ D. Joust—Some wine, sirrah ! Here’s to Don Pedro’s ghost—he should
have been welcome.

D. Lon—The rascal is afraid of you after death.

[One knocks hard at the door.)

D. JOHN .—(to the servant)—Rise and do your duty.

“ SERV. —-Oh the devil, the de\ 111 (Marble ghost enters.)

“ D. J cum—Ha I ’tis the ghost ! Let’s rise and receive him I Come,
Governor, you are welcome, sit there; if we had thought you would have

come, we would have stayed for you.
'35- ¥ 955 "E ~36 *- it' 41‘ it

Here, Governor, your health! Friends, put it about! Here’s excellent
meat, taste of this ragout. Come, I’ll help you, come eat, and let old quar-
rels be forgotten.
(The Ghost threatens him with vengeance.)
D. J 0HN.—-‘Ve are too much conﬁrmed—curse on this dry discourse.
Come, here’s to your mistress, you had one when you were living: not for-
getting your sweet sister.
(Devils enter.)
1). JOHN. —-Are these some of your retinue? Devils, say you? I’m
sorry I have no burnt brandy to tr eat’ em with, that’s drink ﬁt for devils, ”
(to.

9

Nor 1s the scene from which we quote interesting, in dramatic

CRITIQUE 0N BERTRAM. 567

probability alone ; it is susceptible likewise of a sound moral ; of
a moral that has more than common claims on the notice of a
too numerous class, who are ready to receive the qualities of
gentlemanly courage, and scrupulous honor (in all the recognized
laws of honor) as the substitutes of virtue, instead of its orna-
ments. This, indeed, is the moral value of the play at large,
and that which places it at a world’s distance from the spirit of
modern jacobinism. The latter introduces to us clumsy copies
of these showy instrumental qualities, in order to reconcile us to
vice and want of principle ; while the Atheism Fulminato pre-
sents an exquisite portraiture of the same qualities, in all their
gloss and glow, but presents them for the sole purpose of display-
ing their hollowness, and in order to put us on our guard by dc-
monstrating their utter indifference to vice and virtue, whenever
these and the like accomplishments are contemplated for them
selves alone.

Eighteen years ago I observed, that the whole secret of the
modern jacobinieal drama (which, and not the German, is its ap
propriate designation) and of all its popularity, consists in the con-
fusion and subversion of the natural order of things in their causes
and effects : namely, in the excitement of surprise by representing
the qualities of liberality, reﬁned feeling, and a nice sense of honor
(those things rather which pass amongst us for such) in persons
and in classes where experience teaches us least to expect them;
and by rewarding with all the sympathies which are the due
of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have
excommunicated from our esteem.

This of itself would lead me back to BERTRAM, or the CASTLE
OF ST. ALDOBRAND ;* but, in my own mind, this tragedy was

* [“ Before the tragedy of Bertram was produced at Drury Lane,” says
a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine of Jan. 1825, “ and received with such
distinguished approbation, Mr. Maturin was the humble, unknown, and un-
noticed Curate of St. Peter's, Dublin.” The play was performed through
the inﬂuence of Lord Byron, who is said to have sent the author £500 in
consequence of an unfavorable review of one of his works—(probably this
very critique of Mr. Coleridge’s)——with a note, “ that he was better qualiﬁed
to review his reviewers than they him.” He gained perhaps more than a
thousand pounds by this performance (besides the ﬁve hundred whiCh the
censure of it procured him). A few months after the success of Bertram he
produced a second tragedy, which failed. He had published one or two
novels before he became famous: in his later years he composed works of

568 BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA.

brought into connection with THE LIBERTINE (Shadwell’s adap-
tation of the Atheism Fulmz'nato to the English stage in the
reign of Charles the Second) by the fact, that our modern drama
is taken, is the substance of it, from the ﬁrst scene of the third
act of THE LIBERTINE. But with what palpable superiority of
judgment in the original ! Earth and hell, men and spirits are
up in arms against Don John ; the two former acts of the play
have not only prepared us for the supernatural, but accustomed
us to the prodigious. It is, therefore, neither more nor less than
we anticipate when the Captain exclaims : “ In all the dangersI
have been, such horrors I never knew. I am quite unmanned :”
and when the Hermit says, that he had “beheld the ocean in
wildest rage, yet ne’er before saw a storm so dreadful, such hor-
rid ﬂashes of lightning, and such claps of thunder, were never in
my remembrance.” And Don John’s burst of startling impiety
is equally intelligible in its motive, as dramatic in its effect.

But what is there to account for the prodigy of the tempest at
Bertram’s shipwreck '? It is a mere supernatural effect, without
even a hint of any supernatural agency ; a prodigy, without any
circumstance mentioned that is prodigious ; and a miracle intro-
duced without a ground, and ending without a result. Every
event and every scene of the play might have taken place as
well as if Bertram and his vessel had been driven in by a com-
mon hard gale, or from want of provisions. The ﬁrst act would
have indeed lostpits greatest and most sonorous picture ; a scene
for the sake of a scene, without a word spoken ; as such, there-

romance, which evinced “great powers of imagination and fecundity of
language, with lamentable carelessness in the application of both ;” and,
writing “for money not for fame,” drew a “ considerable revenue from the
sale of his productions.” In 1821 he brought out a poem in blank verse
called The Universe.

The writer, from whose account these notices are taken, speaks most
highly of Mr. Maturin’s merits and popularity as a preacher. “His six
controversial sermons,” says he, “ preached during last Lent, show the
author to have been a profound scholar and an acute reasoner ; never since
Dean Kirwan’s time were such crowds attracted to the Parish Church as
du1ing the delivery of these sermons; neither rain nor storm could subdue
the anxiety of all classes and all persuasions to hear them, and did he leave
no other monuments whereon to rest his fame, these sermons alone would
be sufﬁcient.” The Rev. R. Charles Maturin died Oct. 30, 1824. It was said
that Sir Walter Scott offered his editorial services to Mr. Maturin’s widow
with respect to some of his unpublished manuscripts—S. C.]

CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 569

fore (a rarity without a precedent) we must take it, and be
thankful I In the opinion of not a few, it was, in every sense of
the word, the best scene in the play. I “am quite certain it was
the most innocent : and the steady, quiet uprightness of the ﬂame
of the wax-candles, which the monks held over the roaring bil-
lows amid the storm of wind and rain, was really miraculous.
The Sicilian sea-coast: a convent of monks: night: a most
portentous, unearthly storm: a vessel is wrecked: contrary to
all human expectation, one man saves himself by his prodigious
powers as a swimmer, aided by the peculiarity ofhis destination-—

 

 

“' PRIOR. —All, all did perish—
Fmsr MONK—Change, change those drenched weeds—-
PRIOR—I wist not of them—every soul did perish-—

Enter third xlfonk hastily.

THIRD Moms—No, there was one did battle with the storm
With careless desperate force; full many times
His life was won and lost, as tho’ he rccked not——
No hand did aid him, and he aided none
Alone he breasted the broad wave, alone
That man was saved.”

 

Well! This man is led in by the monks, supposed dripping wet,
and to very natural inquiries he either remains silent, or gives
most brief and surly answers, and after three or four of these
half-line courtesies, “dashing off the monks” who had saved him,
he exclaims in the true sublimity of our modern misanthropic
heroism—

“ Off 1 ye are men—there’s poison in your touch.
But I must yield, for this” (what .9) “ hath left me strengthless.”

So end the three ﬁrst scenes. In the next (the Castle of St. A1-
dobrand), we find the servants there equally frightened with this
unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent
storms we are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9—

“ Plain—Hugo, well met. Does e’en thy age bear
Memory of so terrible a storm?

Hood—They have been frequent lately.

Pram—They are ever so in Sicily.

HUGo.—So it is said. But storms when I was young
Would still pass o’er like Nature’s ﬁtful fevers,
And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage

570 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Sent thus unseasonable and proﬁtless,
Speaks like the threats of heaven.”

A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo l
and what is very remarkable, not apparently founded on any
great familiarity of his own with this troublesome article. For
when Pietro asserts the “ever more frequency” of tempests in
Sicily, the old man professes to know nothing more of the fact,
but by hearsay. “ So it is said.”—But why he assumed this
storm to be unseasonable, and on what he grounded his prophecy
(for the storm is still in full fury), that it would be proﬁtless, and
without the physical powers common to all other violent sea-
winds in purifying the atmosphere, we are left in the dark ;' as
Well concerning the particular points in which he knew it, during
its continuance, to differ from those that he had been acquainted
with in his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady
Imogine, who, we learn, had not rested “ through” the night;
not on account of the tempest, for

“Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures
Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep.”

Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, shc informs us—
First, that portrait-painters may make a portrait from memory—-

“ The limner’s art may trace the absent feature.”

For surely these words could never mean, that a painter may
have a person sit to him who afterwards may leave the room or
perhaps the country ? Secondly, that a portrait-painter can ena-
ble a mourning lady to possess a good likeness of her absent lover,
but that the portrait-painter can not, and who shall—

“ Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?”

The natural answer would have been—Why the scene-painter, to
be sure I But this unreasonable lady requires in addition sundry
things to be painted that have neither lines nor colors—

“ The thoughts, the recollections, sweet and bitter,
Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved.”

Which last sentence must be supposed to mean ; when they were
present, and making love to each other. Then, if this por-
trait could speak, it would “ acquit the faith of womankind.”
How? Had she remained constant ? No. she hasbeen married

CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 571

to another man, whose wife she now is. How then. " Why, that

in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to yearn and
crave for her former lover—

“This has her body, that her mind:
Which has the better bargain ?”‘*

The lover, however, was not contented with this precious ar-
rangement, as we shall soon ﬁnd. The lady proceeds to inform
'us, that during the many years of their separation, there have
happened in the different parts of the world, a number of “ such
things,” even such, as in a course of years always have, and till
the Millennium, doubtless always will happen somewhere or
other. Yet this passage, both in language and in metre, is per-
haps among the best parts of the play. The lady’s loved com-
panion and most esteemed attendant, Clotilda, now enters and
explains this love and esteem by proving herself a most passive
and dispassionate listener, as well as a brief and lucky querist,
who asks by chance, questions that we should have thought made
for the very sake of the answers. In short, she very much re-
minds us of those puppet-heroines, for whom the showman con-
trives to dialogue without any skill in ventriloquism. This, not—
withstanding, is the best scene in the Play, and though crowded
with solecisms, corrupt diction, and oH'ences against metre, would
possess merits sufﬁcient to outweigh them, if we could suspend
the moral sense during the perusal. It tells well and passion-
ately the preliminary circumstances, and thus overcomes the
main difﬁculty of most ﬁrst acts, to wit, that of retrospective nar-
ration. It tells us of her having been honorably addressed by a
noble youth, of rank and fortune vastly superior to her own: of
their mutual love, heightened on her, part by gratitude; of his
loss of his sovereign’s favor ; his disgrace ; attainder ; and ﬂight ;
that he (thus degraded) sank into a vile rufﬁan, the chieftain of
a murderous banditti ; and that from the habitual indulgence of
the most reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he had become
so changed, even in appearance and features,

“ That she who bore him had recoiled from him,

Nor known the alien visage of her child,
Yet still she (Imogine) lov’d him.”

 

* [Altered from the last lines of a Song in Congreve’s Poems on Swarm
Occasions. Works, vol. ii. p. 168.—-S. 0.]

572 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

She is compelled by the silent entreaties of a father, perishmg
with “ bitter shameful want on the cold earth,” to give her hand,
with a heart thus irrevocably pre-engaged, to Lord Aldobrand,
the enemy of her lover, even to the very man who had bafﬂed
his ambitious schemes, and was, at the present time, intrusted
with the execution of the sentence of death which had been
passed on Bertram. Now, the proof of “ woman’s love,” so in~
dustriously held forth for the sympathy, if not the esteem of the
audience, consists in this, that, though Bertram had become a
robber and a murderer by trade, a ruﬁian in manners, yea, with
form and features at which his own mother could not but
“recoil,” yet she (Lady Imogine), “ the wife of a most noble, hon-
ored Lord,” estimable as a man, exemplary and affectionate as a
husband, and the fond father of her only child—that she, notwith-
standing all this, striking her heart, dares to say to it—

“ But thou art Bertram’s still, and Bertram’s ever.”

A Monk now enters, and entreats in his Prior’s name for the
wonted hospitality, and “free noble usage” of the Castle of St.
Aldobrand for some wretched shipwrecked souls, and from this
we learn, for the ﬁrst time, to our inﬁnite surprise, that notwith-
standing the supernaturalness of the storm aforesaid, not only
Bertram, but the whole of his gang, had been saved, by what
means we are left to conjecture, and can only conclude that they
had all the same desperate swimming powers, and the same sav-
ing destiny as-the hero, Bertram himself. So ends the ﬁrst act,
and with it the tale of the events, both those with which the
tragedy begins, and those which had occurred previous to the
date of its commencement. The second displays Bertram in dis-
turbed sleep, which the Prior, who hangs over him, prefers calling
a “starting trance,” and with a strained voice, that would have
awakened one of the seven sleepers, observes to the audience—

“ How the lip works! How the bare teeth do grind!
And beaded drops course* down his writhen brow!”

The dramatic effect of which passage we not only concede to tle

*-

 

“The big round tears
Cours’d one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase,”1

 

‘ [As you like it.. Act ii. sc. 1.-—S. 0.]

CRITIQUE ON BER-TEAM. 578

admirers of this tragedy, but acknowledge the further advantage
of preparing the audience for the most surprising series of wry
faces, proﬂated mouths, and lunatic gestures that were ever
“ lanched” on an audience to “ sea?” the sense.”*

“ PRIOR.—I will awake him from this horrid trance.
This is no natural sleep! Ho, wake thee, stranger 1”

This is rather a whimsical application of the verb reﬂex we
must confess, though we remember a similar transfer of the agent
to the patient in a manuscript tragedy, in which the Bertram of
the piece, prostrating a man with a single blow of his ﬁst, ex-
claims—“ Knock me thee down, then ask thee if thou liv’st.”
Well; the stranger obeys, and whatever his sleep might have
been, his waking was perfectly natural ; for lethargy itself could
not withstand the scolding Stentorship of Mr. Holland, the Prior
We next learn from the best authority, his own confession, that
the misanthropic hero, whose destiny was incompatible with
drowning, is Count Bertram, who not only reveals his past for-
tunes, but avows with open atrocity, his Satanic hatred of Imo-
gine’s lord, and his frantic thirst of revenge; and so the raving
character raves, and the scolding character scolds—and what
else? Does not the Prior act? Does he not send for a posse of
constables or’thief-takers to handcuff the villain, or take him
either to Bedlam or N ewgate '3 Nothing of the kind ; the author
preserves the unity of character, and the scolding Prior from ﬁrst
to last does nothing but scold, with the exception indeed of the

Says Shakspeare of a wounded stag hanging its head over a stream: natu-
rally, from the position of the head, and most beautifully, from the associa~
tion of the preceding image, of the chase, in which “the poor sequester’d
stag from the hunter’s aim had ta’cn a hurt.” In the supposed position of
Bertram, the metaphor, if not false, loses all the propriety of the original.

5* Among a number of other instances of words chosen without reason,
Imogine in the ﬁrst act declares, that thunder-storms were not able to in-
tercept her prayers for “the desperate man, in desperate ways who
halt”—

“Yea, when the lanched bolt did sear her sense,
Her soul’s deep orisons were breathed for him ;”

that is, when a red-hot bolt, lanched at her from althunder-cloud, had
cauterized her sense, in plain English, burnt her eyes out of her head, she
kept still praying on.

“ Was not this love? Yea, thus doth woman love I”

574 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

last scene of the last act, in which, with a most surprising revo-
lution, he whines, weeps, and kneels to the condemned blasphem-
ing assassin out of pure affection to the high-hearted man, the
sublimity of whose angel-sin rivals the star-bright apostate (that
is, who was as proud as Lucifer, and as wicked as the Devil),
and, “had thrilled him” (Prior Holland aforesaid), with wild ad~
miration.

Accordingly in the very next scene, we have this tragic
Macheath, with his whole gang, in the Castle of St. Aldobrand,
without any attempt on the Prior’s part either to prevent him, or
to put the mistress and servants of the Castle on their guard
against their new inmates; though he (the Prior) knew, and
confesses that he knew, that Bertram’s “ fearful mates” were as-
sassins so habituated and naturalized to guilt, that—

“ When their drenched hold forsook both gold and gear,
They griped their daggers with a murderer’s instinct ;”

and though he also knew, that Bertram was the leader of a band
whose trade was blood. To the Castle however he goes, thus
with the holy Prior’s consent, if not with his assistance; and
thither let us follow him.

N o sooner is our hero safely housed in the Castle of St. Aldo-
brand, than he attracts the notice of the lady and her conﬁdante,
by his “ wild and terrible dark eyes,” “ mufﬂed form,” “fearful
form,”* “darkly wild,” “proudly stern," and the like common-
place indeﬁnites, seasoned by merely verbal antitheses, and at
best, copied with very slight change, from the Conrade of Southey’s
JOAN or ARC. The lady Imogine, who has been (as is the case,
she tells us, with all soft and solemn spirits) worshipping the

* This sort of repetition is one of this writer’s peculiarities, and there is
scarce a page which does not furnish one or more instances—Ex. gr. in the
ﬁrst page or two. Act i. line 7th, “And deemed that I might sleep.”—Line
10, “Did rock and quiver in the bickering glare.”—Lines 14, 15, 16, “But.
by the momently gleams of sheeted blue, Did the pale marbles glare so
sternly on me, I almost deemed they lived.”—Line 37, “ The glare of Hell.”
—-—Line 35, “ O holy Prior, this is no earthly storm.”—Line 38, “This is no
earthly storm.”—Line 42, “ Dealing with us.”—Line 43, “ .Deal thus sternly.”
—-Line 44, “ Speak! thou hast something seen ?”—“ A fearful sight l”—Line
45, “ W'hat hast thou seen ,2 A piteous, fearful sight.”—Line 48, “ Quivering
gleams.”—Line 50, “In the hollow pauses of the storm.” -—Line 61, “The
pauses of the storm, &c.’

CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. - 575

moon on a terrace or rampart within View of the Castle, insists
on having an interview'with our hero, and this too téte-d-téte.
Would the reader learn why and wherefore the conﬁdante is ex
cluded, who very properly remonstrates against such “ conference,
alone, at night, with one who bears such fearful form ;” the rea-
son follows—“ why, therefore send him I” I say, follows, be-
cause the next line, “all things of fear have lost their power
over me,” is separated from the former by a break or pause, and
besides that it is a very poor answer to the danger, is no answer
at all to the gross indelicacy of this wilful exposure. We must
therefore regard it as a mere after-thought, that a little softens
the rudeness, but adds nothing to the weight, of that exquisite
woman’s reason aforesaid. And so exit Clotilda and enter Ber-
tram, who “stands without looking at her,” that is, with his
lower limbs forked, his arms akimbo, his side to the lady’s front,
the whole figure resembling an inverted Y. He is soon however
roused from the state frantic, and then follow raving, yelling,
cursing, she fainting, he relenting, in runs Imogine’s child, squeaks
“mother. "’ He snatches it up, and with a “God bless thee,
child ! Bertram has kissed thy child,”—the curtain drops. The
third act is short, and short be our account of it. It introduces
Lord St. Aldobrand on his road homeward, and next Imogine in
the convent, confessing the foulness of her heart to the Prior, who
ﬁrst indulges his old humor with a fit of senseless scolding, then
leaves her alone with her rufﬁan paramour, with whom she
makes at once an infamous appointment, and the curtain drops,
that it may be carried into act and consummation.

I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with
which I witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as
a melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind. The
Whit of Jacoblnism seemed no longer conﬁned to politics.
The familiarity With atrocious events and characters appeared to
have poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorgan-
ized the moral principles, and left the feelings callous to all the
mild appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most out-
rageous stimulants. The very fact then present to our senses,
that a British audience could remain passive under such an in-
sult to common decency, nay, receive with a thunder of applause,
a human being supposed to have come reeking from the consum-
mation of this complex foulness and baseness, these and the like

576 BIOGRAPHIA LITERABIA.

reﬂections so pressed as with the weight of lead upon my heart,
that actor, author, and tragedy would have been forgotten, had
it not been for a plain elderly man sitting beside me, who, with
a very serious face, that at once expressed surprise and aversion,
touched my elbow, and, pointing to the actor, said to me in a
half-whisper—“ Do you see that little fellow there ? he has just
been committing adultery l” Somewhat relieved by the laugh
which this droll address occasioned, I forced back my attention to
the stage sufﬁciently to learn, that Bertram is recovered from a
transient ﬁt of remorse by the information, that St. Aldobrand
was commissioned (to do, what every honest man must have
done without commission, if he did his duty) to seize him and
deliver him to the just vengeance of the law; an information
which (as he had long known himself to be an attainted traitor
and proclaimed outlaw, and not only a trader in blood himself,
but notoriously the Captain of a gang of thieves, pirates and as-
sassins), assuredly could not have been new to him. It is this,
however, which alone and instantly restores him to his accus-
tomed state of raving, blasphemy, and nonsense. Next follows
[mogine’s constrained interview with her injured husband, and
his sudden departure again, all in love and kindness, in order to
attend the feast of St. Anselm at the convent. This was, it must
be owned, a very strange engagement for so tender a husband to
make within a few minutes after so long an absence. But ﬁrst
his lady has told him that she has “a vow on her,” and wishes
“that black perdition may gulf her perjured soul,”—(Note : she
is lying at the very time)—if she ascends his bed, till her pen-
ance is accomplished. How, therefore, is the poor husband to
amuse himself in this interval of her penance? But do not be
distressed, reader, on account of the St. Aldobrand’s absence!
As the author has contrived to send him out of the house, when
a husband would be in his, and the lover’s way, so he will doubt-
less not be at a loss to bring him back again as soon as he is
wanted. Well! the husband gone in on the one side, out pops
the lover from the other, and for the ﬁendish purpose of harrow-
ing up the soul of his wretched accomplice in guilt, by announ~
cing to her, with most brutal and blasphemous execrations, his
ﬁxed and deliberate resolve to assassinate her husband ; all this
.1 too is for no discoverable purpose on the‘ part of the author, but
l that of introducing a series of super-tragic starts, pauses, screams,

CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 577

struggling, dagger-throwing, falling on the ground, starting up;‘
again wildly, swearing, outcries for help, falling again on thei
ground, rising again, faintly tottering towards the door, and, to
end the scene, a most convenient fainting ﬁt of our lady’s, just in
time to give Bertram an opportunity of seeking the object of his
hatred, before she alarms the house, which indeed she has had
full time to have done before, but that the author rather chose
she should amuse herself and the audience by the above-described
ravings and startings. She recovers slowly, and to her enter
Clotilda, the conﬁdante and mother-confessor ; then commences,
what in theatrical language is called the madness, but which the
author more accurately entitles, delirium, it appearing indeed a
sort of intermittent fever with ﬁts of light-headedness off and on,
Whenever occasion and stage effect happen to call for it. A con-
venient return of the storm (we told the reader beforehand how
it would be), had changed—

“ The rivulet, that bathed the convent walls,
Into a foaming ﬂood: upon its brink
The Lord and his small train do stand appalled.
\Vith torch and bell from their high battlements
The monks do summon to the pass in vain;
He must return to-night.”—-

Talk of the Devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb:
and sure enough, within ten lines of the exit of the messenger,
sent to stop him, the arrival of Lord St. Aldobrand is announced.
Bertram’s rufﬁan band now enter, and range themselves across
the stage, giving fresh cause for Imogine’s screams and madness.
St. Aldobrand, having received his mortal wound behind the
scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die at the feet of
this double-damned adultress.

Of her, as far as she is concerned in this fourth act, we have
two additional points to notice : ﬁrst, the low cunning and J es-
uitical trick with which she deludes her husband into words of
forgiveness, which he himself does not understand ; and secondly,
that everywhere she is made the object of interest and sympathy,
and it is not the author’s fault, if, at any moment, she excites
feelings less gentle, than those weyare accustomed to associate
with the self-accusations of a sincere religious penitent. And did
a British audience endure all this ?—They received it with plan-
dits, which, but for the rivalry of the carts and hackney coaches

'vOL. III. ' 2 B' i ' i

578 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

might have disturbed the evening prayers of scanty week day
congregation at St. Paul’s cathedral.

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.

Of the ﬁfth act, the only thing noticeable (for rant and nonsense,
though abundant as ever, have long before the last act become
things of course) is the profane representation of the high altar
in a chapel, with all the vessels and other preparations for the
holy sacrament. A hymn is actually sung on the stage by the
chorister boys I For the rest, Imogine, who now and then talks
deliriously, but who is always light-headed as far as her gown
and hair can make her so, wanders about in dark woods with
cavern-rocks and precipices in the back-scene ; and a number of
mute (lrwmatis persona: move in and out continually, for whose
presence, there is always at least this reason, that they aﬂbrd
something to be seen, by that very large part of a Drury Lane
audience who have small chance of hearing a word. She had,
it appears, taken her child with her, but what becomes of the
child, whether she murdered it or not, nobody can tell, nobody
can learn ; it was a riddle at the representation, and after a most
attentive perusal of the Play, a riddle it remains.

“ No more I know, I wish I did,
And I would tell it all to you;
For what became of this poor child
There’s none that ever knew.”

Our whole informatiomL is derived from the following words—

“ Pmon.—Where is thy child?
CLoriL.—(Pointing to the cavern into which she has looked)
Oh he lies cold within his cavern-tomb 1
Why (lost thou urge her with the horrid theme?
PRIOR—(who will not, the reader may observe, be disappointed of his close
of scolding)
It was to make (query wake) one living cord 0’ th’ heart,
And I will try, tho’ my own breaks at it.
Where is thy child?
IMOG.——('with a frantic laugh)

 

5* [W'ordsworth’s Thorn, P. W. ii. p. 131.—S. 0.]

1 The child is an important personr rre, for I see not by what possible
means the author could have ended the second and third acts but for its
timely app‘e‘aranc‘e. How ungrateful then not further to notice its fate!

CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. . 579

The forest ﬁend hath snatched him—
He (who? the ﬁend or the child?) rides the night-mare thro’ tl'e wizard
woods.”

0

Now these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism from the
counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear, who, in imitation of the
gipsy incantations, puns on the old word main a bag; and the
no less senseless adoption of Dryden’s forest ﬁendflQ and the wizard
stream by which Milton, in his Lycidas, so ﬁnely characterizes
the spreading Deva, fabulosus amnisq‘ Observe too these images
stand unique in the speeches of Imogine, without the slightest re-
semblance to any thing she says before or after. But we are
weary. The characters in this act frisk about, here, there, and
everywhere, as teasingly as the Jack o’Lantern-lights which mis-
chievous boys, from across a narrow street, throw with a looking-
glass on the faces of their opposite neighbors. Bertram disarmed,
out-heroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces the collected
knights of St. Anselm (all in complete armor), and so, by pure
dint of black looks, he outdares them into passive poltroons. The
sudden revolution in the Prior’s manners we have before noticed,
and it is indeed so out'rc’, that a number of the audience imagined
a great secret was to come out, viz. : that the Prior was one of
the many instances of a youthful sinner metamorphosed into an
old scold, and that this Bertram would appear at last to be his
son. Imogine re-appears at the convent, and dies of her own ac-
cord. Bertram stabs himself, and dies by her side, and that the
play may conclude as it began, to wit, in a superfetation of blas-
phemy upon nonsense, because he had snatched a sword from a
despicable coward, who retreats in terror when it is pointed to-
wards him in sport ; this fclo de se, and thief-captain—this loath-
some and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and
cowardly assassination,—this monster, whose best deed is, the
having saved his betters from the degradation of hanging him,
by turning Jack Ketch to himself; ﬁrst recommends the chari-
table Monks and holy Prior to pray for his soul, and tl‘ en has.
the folly and impudence to exclaim—

“ I die no felon’s death,
A warrior’s weapon freed a warrior’s soul l”——-

"‘ [Theodore and Honoria.—S. 0.]
f I.“ Nor yet where Deva spreads her Wizard stream.” i. 55.—-—S. 0.]

580 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

[Great displeasure was excited among the patrons of Mr. Maturin by this
review of his tragedy, and to those who deemed such a production worthy
of patronage it must naturally have appeared an unwarrantablc piece of
violence. I have even heard a friend of Mr. Coleridge object to it, not as
unjust, but as having been called forth by an occasion unworthy to occupy
his thoughts. For my own part, I feel some dislike to the literary censuree
which accompany the moral exposure, because I think they tend to weaken
its effect :——though a corrupt taste is often so intricated with a corrupt mo-
rality that it is difﬁcult to exhibit either separately ;—the moral exposure
itself I do not consider unworthy of one, who never wanted generosity to
point out what was noble and admirable, at the risk of throwing his own
performances into shade, and who never lacked courage openly to denounce
what he knew to be wrong and injurious,—especially in his own province
of literature,—by which the public might be affected.

It appears in the Life of Sir \Valter Scott, that a ﬁerce attack upon Mr.
Coleridge, in consequence of these strictures, had been prepared by the
author of Bertram, and that this was suppressed by the advice of the au-
thor of Waverley, who admonished his correspondent, that the world might
not sympathize with his indignation to the extent in which he had poured
it forth; and also that it might injure the effect of his forthcoming romance,
into some part of which the tirade had been introduced—that such an out-
burst of rage in such a place would be like a stream of lava rushing from
the side of a peaceful green hill. Some of the hills which were raised in
those days by writers of the Satanic school would have been little the worse
for a volcanic cruption,—so ﬂamy and sulphureous were they in their own
nature. This, from Sir VValtcr’s description, must have been of a milder
sort. As far as Mr. Coleridge was concerned, he could not have been mate-
rially the worse had one more ﬁery libel, designed for the blasting of his
credit, been sent off to whiz and blaze and burn blue for a moment. Could
Mr. Maturin have justiﬁed his play? Could he have washed it white in its
moral complexion? Any thing to that effect ought not to have been sup-
pressed. Vthther the Public would have sympathized with his natural
anger I know not, but of this I am sure, that he could not have blackened
my father’s reputation as a writer with the unprejudiced part of it, or on
any point in which the Public had any concern.

But in default of other weapons of adequate force Mr. Maturin may have
snatched up in his haste the dagger of personality; indeed it may be con-
jecf-ured that he did so, because, Sir \Valter Scott, in a spirit of conciliation,
alludes to Mr. Coleridge’s bad habits. At that very time my father was
taking measures and making efforts to break the chain of those habits; he
had never abandoned himself wholly to their effects, but had still striven,
in one way or other, to labor usefully to the public and proﬁtably for his
family, to whose use he had devoted the annuity spoken of in these pages.
Could the noble-hearted man, who thus aided him, have looked into the
future and there beheld all that his friend was to do in his vocation, and
all that his doing would be really worth, he would, I am conﬁdent, have
been well satisﬁed with this disposal of a part of his worldly wealth, though

CRITIQUE ON BERTRAM. 581

the performance might not have been exactly in the form that he antici
pated. Did any private fault disqualify my father for pronouncing cen
sures on what he considered to be public wrongs committed, whether. blindly
or no, yet deliberately? Thoughtful persons will rather say that his strong
sense of evil and fearless denunciation of it, from whatever quarter it came,
whether from Statesman or Judge or Reviewer, Imperial Despot or popu-
lar Dramatist, together with his free confession of what he called his “ sin,”
and earnest endeavor to save others from falling into the same snare by the
darkest representation of its nature and consequences, go a great way to-
ward expiating that error of his course, so far as aught of expiation can be
imputed to the human will itself, apart from the Redemptive power by
which it is ﬁlled and actuated, in all that it does and is, in conformity to
the Divine Will and Reason. The unworthy thoughts which Lord Byron
entertained on this subject, unworthy of his own better mind, found no en-
trance, I trust, into that of Sir \Valter Scott, whether he was or was not
aware of the warm admiration which my father felt and expressed for his
genius, attended as the fruits of it had been, by a popularity and a success
unspeakably more enviable than any that was enjoyed by the author of
Bertram.

The critique lays to the charge of the play a spirit of immorality, not in
the way of direct inculcation, but in the only way in which a modern British
audience would have endured it, the only way in which it could have been
insidiously pernicious. Now this is a charge that could have no effect except
just so far as it was substantiated by the play itself and the moral sense
of its auditors. When a man is accused publicly of private faults he may
ﬁnd it painful and difﬁcult to clear away the cloud from his character; he
must unveil his private life in order to justify it, and such a necessity is in
itself a grievance. If his poetry is ridiculed it may be made the laughing-
stock of the public for a season, though destined to be held in esteem ever
after; if his religious writings are accused of false doctrine on subtle points,
-—and all theology is subtlc,—he may have to bear the stigma of heresy
during his whole life-time: Pantheism, Pelagianism, Socinianism, denial of
Objective Religion or of the Inspiration of Scripture—all these fundamen-
tal errors may be plausibly though falsely imputed, and the accusations
will, in certain cases, be more readily and generally admitted than the de-
fence, becausc grounded on ordinary and popular modes of thought and ex-
pression, while the accused views presuppose a corrected and re-adjusted
philosophy. But the charge against Bertram had nothing subtle in the na-
ture of it, and the sentiments which it involves have since been adopted
and brought to bear on the French stage in the Quarterly Review.9k Eng-
lishmen have denounced the French dramatists for polluting the public
mind by a stimulant display of atrocities and vilenesses “in all their odious
details,” though they admit such things to be abominable, and show that
the end of them is destruction; shall they shelter and encourage any ap'
proach to such J acobinism in literature at home? “We do not forget,” says
the article on the French Drama to which I refer, “ that crime and the

 

‘—

* [Quarterly Review of March, 1834, p. 211.]

582 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

worst. cause (sort?) of crime, has been in all ages the domain of tragedy
We do not forget the families of Atreus and Laius, and the whole tribe of
mythological and historical tragedies, in all languages—but most of these
inculcate moral lessons—none of them offend decency—none of them inﬂame
criminal passions.” The distinction between the ancient dramas and the
vicious modern class, which my father stigmatized, is clear and broad. In
the former guilty passion is not the immediate subject of the piece, or that
in which the auditors are to be interested, but the consequences and pun-
ishment of criminal acts. They do not deal with low emotions at all, much
less present them to advantage. They represent sin, not as it appears to
the sinner in its rise and progress, its true lineaments and colors lost amid
the glow of excited feeling; but as it appears after its consummation, livid,
ghastly, and appalling. Sin seemed beautiful to Lucifer. when she was
bringing about his fall; hideous and detestable after his fall, when he ﬁnds
her at Hellgatc and fails to recognize her features. The ancient drama
presents her in the latter aspect,—not as she showed herself in the courts
above. In the Orestean trilogy we are led to regard with awful interest
the workings of Divine retribution; we sympathize with Clytemnestra not
as the paramour of 1Egisthus, who seems only the tool of her stern designs,
but as the avenger of the bloody sacriﬁce of a child; we sympathize with
Orestes as the avenger of a father’s murder. (Edipus and Jocasta are the
victims of fate; to the latter not one light feeling or evil passion is imputed;
and it is impossible to conceive a more digniﬁed demeanor under humili-
ating circumstances than is assigned her in the play of Sophocles. ‘We are
interested for the former because his misfortunes exceed the measure of his
crimes, so far as they were voluntary. In the Medea of Euripides it is
the just punishment of Jason to which attention is directed; the Sorceress
appears an avenging Fury in human form. These ancient dramas are staid
and solemn in their procedure; they present to the mind awfully signiﬁcant
events, stern thoughts, and elevating reﬂections; they have no tendency to
enervate and lower the tone of feeling. The corrupt drama, on the other
hand, exhibits what is essentially base in a form as interesting as it can be
made to assume; things in themselves “rank and gross,” mean and con-
temptible, it arrays in a glittering veil of sentiment; its power consists in
the force with which it appeals to the lowest and most easily excitable
parts of man’s nature. ‘

How far this injurious character is fairly imputable to the play of Ber-
tram readers will judge for themselves. That the author erred, if it be
admitted that he did err, unconsciously, and considered his choice of sub.
ject to be quite within the legitimate range of tragedy, and justiﬁed by
precedent, may be easily conceived; that he had talents, beth as a writer
and a man, is not impugned either by the critique itself or these remarks
upon it.—S. 0.]

CHAPTER XXIV.

CONCLUSION.

IT sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by
incidents, in the causation of which these faults had no share :
and this I have always felt the severest punishment. The wound
indeed is of the same dimensions ; but the edges are jagged, and
there is a dull underpain that survives the smart which it had
aggravated. For there is always a consolatory feeling that ac-
companies the sense of a proportion between antecedents and con-
sequents. The sense of Before and After becomes both intelligi-
ble and intellectual when, and only when, we contemplate the
succession in the relations of Cause and Effect, which, like the
two poles of the magnet, manifest the being and unity of the one
power by relative opposites, and give, as it were, a substratum
of permanence, of identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy
ﬂux of Time. It is Eternity revealing itself in the phenomena,
of Time : and the perception and acknowledgment of the propor-
tionality and appropriateness of the Present to the Past, prove to
the afﬂicted Soul, that it has not yet been deprived of the sight
of God, that it can still recognize the effective presence of a
Father, though through a darkened glass and a turbid atmos-
phere, though of a Father that is chastising it. And for this
cause, doubtless, are we so framed in mind, and even so organized
in brain and nerve, that all confusion is painful. It is within the
experience of many medical practitioners, that a patient, with
strange and unusual symptoms of disease, has been more distressed
in mind, more wretched, from the fact of being unintelligible to
himself and others, than from the pain or danger of the disease :
nay, that the patient has received the most solid comfort, and re-
sumed a genial and enduring cheerfulness, from some new symp-
tom or product, that had at once determined the name and nature
of his complaint, and rendered it an intelligible effect of an in~

584 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

telligible cause : even though the discovery did at the same mo-
ment preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the mystic theolo‘
gians, whose delusions we may more conﬁdently hope to separate
from their actual intuitions, when we condescend to read their
works without the presumption that whatever our fancy (always
the ape, and too often the adulterator and counterfeit of our
memory) has not made or can not make a picture of, must be
nonsense,—hence, I say, the Mystics have joined in representing
the state of the reprobate spirits as a dreadful dream in which
there is no sense of reality, not even of the pangs they are endur-
ing—an eternity without time, and as it were below it—God
present without manifestation of his presence. But these are
depths, which we dare not linger over. Let us turn to an in-
stance more on a level with the ordinary sympathies of mankind.
Here then, and in this same healing inﬂuence of Light and dis-
tinct Beholding, we may detect the ﬁnal cause of that instinct
which, in the great majority of instances, leads, and almost com
pels the Afﬂicted to communicate their sorrows. Hence too
ﬂows the alleviation that results from “opening out our griefs :”
which are thus presented in distinguishable forms instead of the
mist, through which whatever is shapeless becomes magnified and
(literally) enormous. Casimir, in the fifth Ode of his third Book.
has happily" expressed this thought.
Illa longus silendi
Edit amor, facilesque luctus
Hausit medullas. Fugerit ocyus,
Simul negantem visere jusseris
Aures amicorum, et loquacem
Questibus evacuaris iram.

 

* Classically too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy of the
modern, that still striving to project the inward, contradistinguishes itself
from the seeming ease with which the poetry of the ancients reﬂects the
world without. Casimir affords, perhaps, the most striking instance of this
characteristic difference—For his style and diction are really classical: while
Cowley, who resembles Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his
Latinity, and even his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts.
That Dr. Johnson should have passed a contrary judgment, and have even
preferred Cowley’s Latin Poems to Milton’s, is a caprice that has, if I mis-
take not, excited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused last sum
rner with the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet perused a page
of Cowley’s Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm with which he ﬁrst
ran through, and then read aloud, Milton’s Jlfmisus and Ad Patrem.

“"134; I a.

BIO GRAPH IA LITERARIA. 585

Olim querendo desinimus queri,
Ipsoque ﬂetu lacrynia perrlitur :
N ec fortis* aeque, si per omnes
Cura volat residetque ramos.

Vires amieis perdit in auribus,
Minorque semper dividitur dolor,
Per multa permissus vagari

Pectora—

I shall not make this an excuse, however, for troubling my
readers with any complaints or explanations, with which, as
readers, they have little or no concern. It may suffice (for the
present at least) to declare, that the causes that have delayed the
publication of these volumes fer so long a period after they had
been printed off, were not connected with any neglect of my own;
and that they would form an instructive comment on the chapter
Concerning authorship as a trade, addressed to young men of
genius in the ﬁrst volume of this work. I remember the ludicrous
effect produced on my mind by the ﬁrst sentence of an auto-biog-
raphy, which, happily for the writer, was as meagre in incidents
as it is well possible for the life of an individual to be——“ The
eventful life which I am about to record, from the hour in which
I rose into existence on this planet, &-c.” Yet when, notwith-

standing this warning example of self-importance before me, I re- ,

view my own life, I can not refrain from applying the same epi-
thet to it, and with more than ordinary emphasis—and no private
feeling, that affected myself only, should prevent me from pub-
lishing the same (for write it I assuredly shall, should life and
leisure be granted me), if continued reﬂection should strengthen
my present belief, that my history would add its contingent to the
enforcement of one important truth, to wit, that we must not only
love our neighbors as ourselves, but ourselves likewise as our
neighbors ; and that we can do neither unless we love God above

both.
Who lives, that’s not
Depraved or depraves? Who dies, that bears ‘
Not one Spurn to the grave—of their friends’ gift .3}

 

9* Flectit, or if the metre had allowed, premit would have supported the
metaphor better.
1- [Tz'mon of Athens. Act i. so. ii. “Their graves” in Shakspeare.--
S. 0.]
2 3*

i
t

it

586 BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA.‘

Strange as the delusion may appear, yet it is most true, that
three years ago I did not know or believe that I had an enemy
in the world : and now even my strongest sensations of gratitude
are mingled with fear, and I reproach myself for being too often
disposed to ask,—Have I one friend ?—During the many years
which intervened between the composition and the publication of
the CHRISTABEL, it became almost as well known among literary
men as if it had been on common sale ; the same references were
made to it, and the same liberties taken with it, even to the very
names of the imaginary persons in the poem. From almost all
of our most celebrated poets, and from some with whom I had no
personal acquaintance, I either received or heard of expressions
of admiration that (I can truly say) appeared to myself utterly
disproportionate to a work, that pretended to be nothing more
than a common Fairy Tale. Many, who had allowed no merit
to my other poems, whether printed or manuscript, and who have
frankly told me as much, uniformly made an exception in favor '
of the CHRISTABEL and the poem entitled LOVE. Year after year,
and in societies of the most different kinds, I had been entreated
to recite it : and the result was still the same in all, and altogether
different in this respect from the effect produced by the occasional
recitation of any other poems I had composed—This before the
publication. And since then, with very few exceptions, I have
heard nothing but abuse, and this too in a spirit of bitterness at
least as disproportionate to the pretensions of the poem, had it
been the most pitiably below mediocrity, as the previous eulogies,
and far more inexplicable. This may serve as a warning to au-
thors, that in their calculations on the probable reception of a
poem, they must subtract to a large amount from the panegyric,
which may have encouraged them to publish it, however unsus-
picious and however various the sources of this panegyrie may
have been. And, ﬁrst, allowances must be made for private en-
mity, of the very existence of which they had perhaps entertained
no suspicion—for personal enmity behind the mask of anonymous
criticism; secondly for the necessity of a certain proportion of
abuse and ridicule in a Review, in order to make it salable, in
consequence of which, if they have no friends behind the scenes,
the chance must needs be against them ; but lastly and chieﬂy,
for the excitement and temporary sympathy of feeling, which the
recitation of the poem by an admirer, especially if he be at once

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 587

a warm admirer and a man of acknowledged celebrity, calls forth
in the audience. For this is really a species of animal magne-
tism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual comment of
looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to
his auditors. They live for the time within the dilated sphere of
his intellectual being. It is equally possible, though not equally
common, that a reader left to himself should sink belowthe poem,
as that the poem left to itself should ﬂag beneath the feelings of
the reader.—But, in my own instance, I had the additional miss
fortune of having been gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics,
and worse than all, to a system incomparably nearer to the
visionary flights of Plato, and even to the jargon of the Mystics,
than to the established tenets of Locke. Whatever therefore ap—
peared with my name was condemned beforehand, as predestined
metaphysics. In a dramatic poem, which had been submitted by
me to a gentleman of great inﬂuence in the theatrical world,
occurred the following passage :—

“ O we are qucrulous creatures 1 Little less
Than all things can sufﬁce to make us happy:
And little more than nothing is enough
To make us wretched.”ale

Aye, here now ! (exclaimed the critic) here come Coleridge’s meta-
physics .’ And the very same motive (that is, not that the lines
were unﬁt for the present state of our immense theatres ; but that
they were metaphysics’r) was assigned elsewhere for the rejec-
tion of the two following passages. The ﬁrst is spoken in an-
swer to a usurper, who had rested his plea on the circumstance,
that he had been chosen by the acclamations of the people.—

“ What people? How convened? or, if convened,
Must not the magic power that charms together
Millions of men in council, needs have power

 

* [Coleridge’s Poetical \Vorks, p. 414. S. 0.]

1' Poor unlucky Metaphysics! and what are they? A single sentence
expresses the object, and thereby the contents of this science. T2200:
asavrov: ' ‘

 

.Noscc te épsum,
Tugue Deum, quantum licet, inque Deo omnia noscas.

Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to a
creature, and in God all things.-'-Surely, there is a strange—nay, rather a
too natural—aversion in many to know themselves.

588 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

To win or wield them '9’ Rather, 0 far rather
Shout forth thy titles to you circling mountains,
And with a thousand-fold reverberation

Make the rocks ﬂatter thee, and the volleying air,
Unbribed, shout back to thee, King Emerick !

By wholesome laws to embank the sovereign power,
To deepen by restraint, and by prevention

Of lawless will to amass and guide the ﬂood

In its majestic channel, as man’s task

And the true patriot’s glory ! In all else

Men safelier trust to Heaven, than to themselves
When least themselves : even in those whirling crowds
Where folly is contagious, and too oft

Even wise men leave their better sense at home,

To chide and wonder at them, when returned?“16

The second passage is in the mouth of an old and experience!)
uourtier, betrayed by the man in whom he had most trusted.

“And yet Sarolta, simple, inexperienced,
Could see him as he was, and often warned me.
\Vhence learned she this ?——0 she was innocent !
And to be innocent is Nature’s wisdom!
The ﬂedge-dove knows the prowlers of the air,
Feared soon as seen, and ﬂutters back to shelter.
And the young steed recoils upon his haunches,
The never-yet—seen adder’s hiss ﬁrst heard.
0 surer than suspicion’s hundred eyes
Is that ﬁne sense, which to the pure in heart,
By mere oppugnancy of their own goodness,
Reveals the approach of evil.”+

As therefore my character as a writer could not easily be more
injured by an overt act than it was already in consequence of
the report, I published a work, a large portion of which was pro-
fessedly metaphysical. A long delay occurred between its ﬁrst
annunciation and its appearance ; it was reviewed therefore
by anticipation with a malignity, so avowedly and exclusively
personal, as is, I believe, unprecedented even in the present con-
tempt of all common humanity that disgraces and endangers the
liberty of the press; After its appearance, the author of this

5* [Coleridge’s Poetical Works, p. 403—8. 0.] + [1b. p. 450.———S. 0.]

1 [Political Essays by William Hazlitt, p. 118 et seq. “It may be proper
to notice,” says a note to the Essay on the Lay Sermon, “that this article
was written before the Discourse, which it professes to criticize, had ap-
peared in print.” There is some wit in this libel caricature: it is unlike

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 589

lampoon undertook to review it in the Edinburgh Review ; and
under the single condition, that he should have written what he
himself really thought, and have criticized the work as he would
have done had its author been indiHbrent to him, I should have
chosen that man myself, both from the vigor and the originality

those portraits of my Father, scrawled in the dark, by enemies, who had
no sense of his character and genius; but looks like a. minute study from
life curiously distorted in every part, and with every distortion enormously
magniﬁed. Many of these distortions are injurious falsehoods: as for in-
stance. “ He takes his notions of religion from the ‘ sublime piety’ of Gior-
dano Bruno, and considers a belief in God as a very subordinate question to
the worship of the three persons of the Trinity. The Thirty-nine Articles
and Athanasius’s creed are, upon the same principle, much more fundamen-'
tal parts of the‘Christian religion than the miracles or Gospel of Christ.
He makes the essence of devotion to consist in Atheism, the perfection of
morality in a total disregard of consequences. He deﬁnes J acobinism to be i
an abstract attachment to liberty, truth, and justice ; and ﬁnding that this i
principle has been abused and carried to excess, he argues that Anti-Jac-
obinism, or the abstract principles of despotism, superstition, and oppres-
sion, are the safe, sure, and undeniable remedy for the former, and the only
means of restoring liberty, truth, and justice in the world.” (The italics
are mine.)

Any one who compares this rhapsody and the review of the Lay Sermo-
after its appearance, in the Political Essays, with the article on that pro-
duction in the Edinburgh Review, must see that they are by the same
hand; only that the Scorner of the Edinboro’ is a degree more cold, hard,
and unrelenting, than the lampooner of the Essays : to the latter, “ even as
it is,” S. T. Coleridge “hardly appears

Less than arch-angel ruined and the excess
’5
Of glory ObSCUl‘C( ;”

—the former keeps his glory well mufﬂed up in clouds of affected contempt
and genuine political hatred : yet it beams through a little in spite of him,
and such abuse is more complimentary than many a panegyric. The re-
view of Christabel (two sentences relating to the supposed authorship of
which are removed from the text) shows its political animus at the end.
After declaring that the poem exhibits “not a ray of genius,” that no other
productions of the Lake school, except the White Doe and some of the lau-
reate odes, is so devoid of any “gleam of feeling or of fancy,” the writer
indignantly exelaims, “Must we then be doomed to hear such a mixture of
raving and driv’ling, extolled as the work of a ‘ wild and original genius,’
simply because Mr. C. has now and then written ﬁne verses, and a brother
poet chooses, in his milder mood, to laud him from courtesy or from inter-
est? Are such panegyrics to be echoed by the mean tools of a political
faction, because they relate to one whose daily prose is understood to be
dedicated to the support of all that courtiers think should be supported ?”

590 BIOGRAPE IA LITERARIA.

of his mind, and from his particular acuteness in speculative
reasoning, before all others—I remembered Catullus’s lines,

Desine dc quoquam quicquam bene velle mereri,
Aut aliquem ﬁeri posse putare pium.
Omnia sunt ingrata: nihil fecisse benigne est :
Immo, etiam teedet, tzedet obestque magis ;
Ut mihj, quem nemo gravius nec acerbius urget,
Quam modo qui me unum atque unicum amicum habuit.

But I can truly say, that the grief with which I read this
rhapsody of predetermined insult, had the rhapsodist himself for
its whole and sole object.*

\Vho the partisans were that exerted themselves to cram my Father’s non-
sense and bad poetry “down the throats of all the loyal and well affected,”
it would be hard to discover,

And much like Samson’s riddle, in one day
Or seven, though one should musing sit.

Many a ﬁerce article may be taken for an ordinary wild ass of criticism,
till it lifts up the beak and claws of the political satirist, and thus shows
itself to be a sort of hippogriﬁ—S. 0.]

9* “ ﬂlr. Coleridge’s Description of a Green Field.”

[With these words the Edinburgh Reviewer announces and holds up to
ridicule the following passage from the notes to the Lay Sermon. After
the quotation he concludes with: “This will do. It is well observed by
Hobbes, that ‘ it is by words only that a man becometh excellently wise or
excellently foolish.’ ”

“ I have at this moment before me, in the ﬂowery meadow, on which my
eye is now reposing, one of its most soothing chapters, in which there is no
lamenting word, no one character of guilt or anguish. For never can I
look and meditate on the vegetable creation without a feeling similar to
that with which we gaze at a beautiful infant that has fed itself asleep at
its mother’s bosom, and smiles in its strange dream of obscure yet happy
sensations. The same tender and genial pleasure takes possession of me,
and this pleasure is checked and drawn inward by the like aching melan-
choly, by the same whispered remonstrance, and made restless by a similar
impulse of aspiration. It seems as if the soul said to herself : From this
state hast thou fallen! Such shouldst thou still become, thy self all per-
meable to a holicr power ! thy self at once hidden and gloriﬁed by its own
transparency, as the accidental and dividuous in this quiet and harmonious
object is subjected to the life and light of nature; to that life and light of
nature, I say, which shines in every plant and ﬂower, even as the trans
mitted power, love and wisdom of God over all ﬁlls, and shines through,
nature 1 But what the plant is by an act not its own and unconsciously—-
that must thou make thyself to become—must by prayer and by a watch-

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 59]

1% it =X= it! it: 'ﬁ

I refer to this review at present in consequence of information
having been given me, that the innuendo of my “potential inﬁ-
delity,” grounded on one passage of my ﬁrst Lay Sermon, has
been received and propagated with a degree of credence, of
which I can safely acquit the originator of the calumny. I give
the sentences as they stand in the sermon, premising only that I
was speaking exclusively of miracles worked for the outward
senses of men. ’ “ It was only to overthrow the usurpation exer-
cised in and through the senses, that the senses were miraculous-
ly appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE.
The natural sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere
he is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he
calls up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapors of the
night-season, and thus converts the air itself into the minister of
its own puriﬁcation; not surely in proof or elucidation of the
light from heaven, but to prevent its interception.”

“ Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances co-exist with the
same moral causes, the principles revealed, and the examples re-
corded, in the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous; and
1f we neglect to apply truths in expectation of wonders, or under

ful and unresisting spirit, join at least with the preventive and assisting
grace to make thyself, in that light of conscience which inﬂameth not, and
with that knowledge which puffeth not up. l" pp. 267— 8. —ed. 1839.

I can not help thinking how ML. Hazlitt (if M1. 0. witsrio'ht 1n asc1ibing
the review of the La ay Sermon in the. Edinliﬁ‘ng—Reyiew to his pgn) must
havemilero himself, as he thus concluded his a1t1cle at the anticipated
gullibility of his readels, who, if the No1thern O1acle had c1ied out in de-
rision at the Cupid of Praxiteles, would straightway have begun to throw
stones at the statue. For he in his heart admired, as he has eloquently
described, the poetic fervor of my Father’s mind, so characteristically dis-
played in this excerpt, which seems to me as emblematic of the soft, rich,
radiant imagination of its author as the red~hot cones of the city of Dis are
emblematic of the ﬁery genius of Dante. And in him only the will was
wanting to appreciate the sense of the passage ; for surely it conveys sound
sense, as true poetry ever does, and teaches the highest doctrine of the spirit
in language not unworthy of such a theme. True enough it is that by words
a man beeometh excellently wise or excellently foolish ; and perhaps there
is no one thing in which the power of folly in words is more thoroughly
manifested, than in that sort of designing shallowness and clever, crafty
superﬁciality, assumed for the sake of sneering depreciation, and even of
insidious defamation, of which this review of the Lav Sermon is a notable
specimen—S. 0.]

., ,rd.‘ o.....'-n a.

592 B [OGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

pretext of the cessation of the latter, we tempt God, and merit
the same reply which our Lord gave to the Pharisees on a like
occasion.”*"

In the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the
necessity of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted.
“ The testimony of books of history (that is, relatively to the signs
and wonders, with which Christ came) is one of the strong and
stately pillars of the church; but it' is not the foundation .”’1‘
Instead, therefore, of defending myself, which I could easily effect
by a series of passages, expressing the same opinion, from the
Fathers and the most eminent Protestant Divines, from the Ref-

llormation to the Revolution, I shall merely state what my belief
lis, concerning the true evidences of Christianity. 1. Its consis-
tency with right Reason, I conside1 as the outer court of the
temple—the common area, within which it stands. 2. The
miracles, with and through which that Religion was first revealed
and attested, I regard as the steps, the vestibule, and the portal
of the temple. 3. The sense, the inward feeling, in the soul of
each believer of its exceeding desirableness—the experience, that
he needs something, joined with the strong foretokening, that the
ledemption and the graces propounded to us in Christ are what
he needs—this I hold to be the true foundation of the spiritual
Ediﬁce. With the strong a priori probability that ﬂows in from
1 and 3 on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man
can refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. But,
4, it is the experience derived from a practical conformity to the
conditions of the Gospel—it is the opening eye; the dawning
light; the terrors and the promises of spiritual growth; the
blessedness of loving God as God, the nascent sense of sin hated
as sin, and of the incapability of attaining to either without
Christ ; it is the sorrow that still rises up from beneath, and the
consolation that meets it from above ; the bosom treacheries of
the principal in the warfare and the exceeding faithfulness and
long-suffering of the uninterested ally ;—in a word, it is the actual
trial of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments and results,
that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is the com-
pleting key-stone. In order to an efﬁcient belief in Christianity,
8. man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argu-

* [First Lav Sermon, I. pp. 441, 442—8. C.)
l [Note A, to ﬁrst L. S., I. p. 471.—S. C.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 593

mmmm in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths, to every sub-
ject not presentable under the forms of Time and Space, as
long as we attempt to master by the reﬂex acts of the Under-
standing what we can only know by the act of becoming. Do
the will of my Father, and ye shall know whether I am of Godﬂ“
These four evidences I believe to have been and still to be, for
the world, for the whole Church, all necessary, all equally neces-
sary :~ but at present, and for the majority of Christians born in
Christian countries, I believe the third and the fourth evidences
to be the most operative,'not as superseding but as involving a
glad, undoubting faith in. the two former. Creclieli, z'cleoque in
tellexi, appears to me the dictate equally of Philosophy and Re
ligion, even as I believe Redemption to be the antecedent of
Sanctiﬁcation, and not its consequent. All spiritual predicates
may be construed indiﬂerently as modes of Action or as states of
Being. Thus Holiness and Blessedness are the same idea, now
seen in relation to act and now to existence. The ready belief
which has been yielded to the slander of my “ potential inﬁdel-
ity,” I attribute in part to the openness with which I have
avowed my doubts, whether the heavy interdict, under which
the name of Benedict Spinoza lies, is merited 011 the whole or to
the whole extent. Be this as it may, I Wish, however, that I
could ﬁnd in the books of philosophy, theoretical or moral, which
are alone recommended to the present students of theology in our
established schools, a few passages as thoroughly Pauline, as com-
pletely accordant with the doctrines of the Established Church,
as the following sentences in the concluding page of Spinoza’s
Ethics. Deimle quo mens hoe amo're divino, seu beatituclzme
magis gaudet, eo plus intelligit, hoc est, eo majorem in afectus
habet potentiam, et ea minus ab hfeelibus, qui mall sum, pati-
tm'; atgue acleo ex ea, quad mens hoc amore divine, sew beati-
z‘udz'ne gaudet, potesmtem habet libidines, coércemlz'; et quid,
humamt potentia (Ml coércemlos aﬂecms in solo intellectu con~
sistit; 67 go memo beatituclihe gauclet, quiet aﬁectus coércuit,
serl comm potestas lzbzdines coé7eenclz' ert z'psa, beatztuclme omtur. 1‘
With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted :4
that I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For 5
how should I know, what the piety of the heart may be, or what

* [John vii. 17.—S. 0.]
f [Ethiccs Pars 2). De Libertate humana.-—S. 0.]

594: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.‘ -

quantum of error in the understanding may consist with a saving
faith in the intentions and actual dispositions of the whole moral
'iseing in any one individual? Never will God reject a soul that
Hsincerely loves him : be his speculative opinions what they may :
and whether in any given instance certain opinions, be they un-
belief, or misbelief, are compatible with a sincere love of God,
God can only know.—But this I have said, and shall continue
to say : that if the doctrines, the sum of which I believe to con-
stitute the truth in Christ, be Christianity, then Unitarian’ism is
not, and Moe 'versa : and that, in speaking theologically and im-
personally, 2'. e. of Psilanthropism and Theanthropism as schemes
of belief, without reference to individuals, who profess either the
one or the other, it will be absurd to use a different language as
long as it is the dictate of common sense, that two opposites can
not properly be called by the same name. I should feel no of-
fence if a Unitarian applied the same to me, any more than if
he were to say, that two and two being four, four and four must
be eight.
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This has been my object, and this alone can be my defence—
and O I that with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE
might conclude l—the unquenehed desire I mean, not without
the consciousness of having earnestly endeavored to kindle young
minds, and to guard them against the temptations of scorners, by
showing that the scheme of Christianity, as taught in the lit-
urgy and homilies of our Church, though not discoverable by
human reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link follows
link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the
hen of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own
horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as
the (lay softens away into the sweet twilight, and twilight,
hushed and breathless, steals into the darkness. It is night,
sacred night! the upraised eye views only the starry heaven
which manifests itself alone : and the outward beholding is ﬁxed

*5 [Pindar, Nem. Carm. xi. 1. 37.—s. 0.]

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. 595

on the Sparks twinkling in the awful depth, though suns of
other worlds, only to preserve the soul steady and collected in
its pure act of inward adoration to the great I AM, and to '/
the ﬁlial WORD that re-afﬁrmeth it from eternity to eternitv.
whose 3horal echo is the universe.

QEJZI, JlIONRL 405A.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT.

 

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT
TO THE BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

BY THE LATE H. N. OOLERIDGE, ESQ., M.A.

CHAPTER I.

[1772 to 1791.]

While here, thou fed’st upon ethereal beams,
As if thou had’st not a terrestrial birth ;—
Beyond material objects was thy sight ;
In the clouds woven was thy lucid robe!
.ﬂh! who can tell how little for this sphere

_ Thatframc wasﬁtted of empyrcalﬁre !*

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was the youngest child of the Reverend
John. Coleridge, Chaplain-Priest and Vicar'of the Parish of Ottery
St. Mary, in the county of Devon, and Master of the Free Grammar,
or King’s School, as it is called, founded by Henry VIII. in that town.
His mother’s maiden name was Ann Bowdon. He was born at Ot‘
tery on the let of Octobe1, 1772, “about eleven o’clock in the fore-
noon, ’as his father, the Vicar, has, with rather unusual pa1tlcula11ty,
entered it in the registe1.

John Coleridge, who was born 1n 1719, and ﬁnished his education at
Sidney-Sussex College, CambridgenL was a country clergyman and
schoolmaster of no ordinary kind. He was a good Greek and Latin
scholar, a profound Hebraist, and, according to the measure of his
day, an accomplished mathematician. He was on terms of literary
friendship with Samuel Badcock, and, by his knowledge of Hebrew,
rendered material assistance to Dr. Kennicott, in his well-known crit~
ical works. Some curious papers on theological and antiquarian sub.
je‘cts appear with his signature in the early numbers of The Gentle.
man’s Magazine, between the years 17 45 and 1780; almost all of

* [From a Sonnet To Coleridge by Sir Egerton Bridges—written 16th Feb. 1831—8. 0.]

1 [He was matriculated at Sidney a sizar on the 18th of March, 1748, but does not ap
pear to have taken any degree at the University—S. C

600 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

which have been inserted in the interesting volumes of Selections
made several years ago from that work. In 1768 he published mis-
cellaneous Dissertations arising from the 17th and 18th chapters of the
Book of Judges; in which a very learned and ingenious attempt is
made to relieve the character of Micah from the charge of idolatry
ordinarily brought against it; and in 1772 appeared a “Critical Latin
Grammar,” which his son called “his best work,” and which is not
wholly unknown even now to the inquisitive by the proposed substi-
tution of the terms “prior, possessive, attributive, posterior, interjec-
tive, and quale-quare-quidditive,” for the vulgar names of the cases.
This little Grammar, however, deserves a philologer’s perusal, and is
indeed in many respects a very valuable work in its kind. He also
published a Latin Exercise Book, and a Sermon. His school was cel-
ebrated, and most of the country gentlemen of that generation, be-
longing to the south and east parts of Devon, had been his pupils.
Judge Buller was one. The amiable character and personal eccen-
tricities of this excellent man are not yet forgotten amongst some of
the elders of the parish and neighborhood, and the latter, as is usual
in such cases, have been greatly exaggerated. He died suddenly in
the month of October, 1781, after riding to Ottery from Plymouth, to
which latter place he had gone for the purpose of embarking his son
Francis, as a midshipman, for India.

Many years afterwards, in 1797, S. T. Coleridge commenced a series
of Letters to his friend Thomas Poole, of Nether Stowey, in the
county of Somerset, in which he proposed to give an account of his
life up to that time. Five only were written, and unfortunately they
stop short of his residence at Cambridge. This series will properly
ﬁnd a place here.

I.

TO MR. POOLE.

“MY DEAR POOLE,

“I could inform the dullest author how he might write an in-
teresting book. Let him relate the events of his own life with hon-
esty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them. I never yet
read even a Methodist’s ‘Experience’ in the Gospel Magazine without
receiving instruction and amusement; and I should almost despair of
that man who could peruse the Life of John Woolman without an
amelioration of heart. As to my Life, it has all the charms of va-
riety,—high life and low life, vices and virtues, great folly and some
wisdom. However, what I am depends on what I have been;
and you, my best friend, have a right to the narration. To me the
task will be a useful one. It will renew and deepen my reﬂections on
the past; and it will perhaps make you behold with no unforgiving

‘ ..

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 601

Jr impatient eye those weaknesses and defects in my character, which.
so many untoward circumstances have concurred in planting there.

“My family on my Mother’s side can be traced up, I know not how
:‘ar. The Bowdons inherited a good farm ’and house thereon in the
Exmoor country, in the reign of Elizabeth, as I have been told ; and
to my knowledge they have inherited nothing better since that time.
My Grandfather was in the reign of George I. a considerable woollen
trader in Southmolton; so that I suppose, when the time comes, I
shall be allowed to pass as a Sans-culotte without much opposition.
My Father received a better education than the rest of his family in
consequence of his own exertions, not of his superior advantages.
When he was not quite sixteen years of age, my Grandfather, by a
series of misfortunes, was reduced to great distress. My Father re
ceived the half of his last crown and his blessing, and walked off to
seek his fortune. After he had proceeded a few miles. he sate him
down on the side of the road, so overwhelmed with painful thoughts
that he wept audibly. A gentleman passed by who knew him, and,
inquiring into his sorrow, took him home and gave him the means of
maintaining himself by placing him in a school. At this time he
commenced being a severe and ardent student. He married his ﬁrst
Wife by Whom he had three daughters, all now alive. While his ﬁrst
wife lived, having scraped up money enough, he at the age of twenty
walked to Cambridge, entered himself at Sidney College, distinguished
himself in Hebrew and Mathematics, and might have had a fellowship
if he had not been married. He returned and settled as a school
master in Southampton, where his wife died. In 17 60 he was ap-
pointed Chaplain-Priest and Master of the School at Ottery St.
Mary, and removed to that place; and in August, 1760, Mr. Buller,
the father of the present Judge, procured for him the living from
Lord Chancellor Bathurst. By my Mother, his secOnd wife, he had
ten children, of whom I am the youngest, born October 20th,* 1772.

“These facts I received from my Mother ; but I am utterly unable
to ﬁll them up by any further particulars of times, or places, or names.
Here I shall conclude my ﬁrst Letter, because I can not pledge myself
for the accuracy of the accounts, and I will not therefore mingle it
with that for the truth of which, in the minutest parts, I shall hold
myself responsible. You must regard this Letter as a ﬁrst chapter
devoted to dim traditions of times too remote to be pierced by the
eye of investigation.

“Yours affectionately,
“Feb. 1797. Monday. “ S. T. COLERIDGE.”

' A mistake.

VOL. 111. 2 C

602 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

II.

TO MR. POOLE.

" MY DEAR POOLE,

“My Father (Vicar of, and Schoolmaster at, Ottery St. Mary
Devon) was a good mathematician, and well versed in the Greek,
Latin, and Hebrew languages. He published, or rather attempted to
publish, several works :—lst, Miscellaneous Dissertations arising from
the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges ; 2d,_Sentent2'ce Ea:-
cm'ptw, for the use of his own School ; and 3d, his best work, a Crit-
ical Latin Grammar, in the Preface to which he proposes a bold inno-
vation in the names of the cases. My Father’s new nomenclature
was not likely to become popular, although it must be allowed to be
both sonorous and expressive. Exempli girat’ia, he calls the ablative
case ‘the quare-quale-quidditive case!’ He made the world his con—
fidant with respect to his learning and ingenuity, and the world seems
to have kept the secret very faithfully. His various works, uncut,
unthumbed, were preserved free from all pollution in the family ar-
chives, where they may still be for any thing that I know. This piece
of good luck promises to be hereditary ; for all my compositions have
the same amiable home—staying propensity. The truth is, my Father
has not a ﬁrst-rate genius; he was, however, a ﬁrst-rate Christian,
' which is much better. I need not detain you with his character. In
learning, good-heartedness, absentness of mind, and excessive igno-
rance of the world, he was a perfect Parson Adams.

“My Mother was an admirable economist, and managed exclusively.
My eldest brother’s name was John. He was a Captain in the East
India Company’s service; a successful ofﬁcer aad a brave one, as I
have heard. He died in India in 1786. My second brother, William,
went to Pembroke College, Oxford. He died a clergyman in 1780,
just on the eve of his intended marriage. My brother James has been
in the army since the age of ﬁfteen, and has married a woman of for-
tune, one of the old Duke family of Otterton in Devon. Edward, the
wit of the family, went to Pembroke College, and is now a clergy-
man. George also went to Pembroke. He is in orders likewise, and
now has the same School, a very ﬂourishing one, which my Father
had. He is a man of reﬂective mind and elegant talent. He possesses
learning in a greater degree than any of the family, excepting myself.
His manners are grave, and hued over with a tender sadness. In his
moral character he approaches every way nearer to perfection than
any man I ever yet knew. He is worth us all. Luke Herman was
a surgeon, a severe student, and a good man. He died in 1790, leav-

BIOGRAPHICAL S UPPLEMENT. 603

ing one child, a lovely boy, still alive.* My only sister, Ann, died at
twenty-one, a little after my brother Luke :—

Rest, gentle Shade! and wait thy Maker’s will ;
Then rise unchang’d, and be an angel still !

Francis-Syndercombe went out to India as a midshipman, under Ad-
miral Graves. He accidentally met his brother John on board ship
abroad, who took him ashore, and procured him a commission in the
Company’s army. He died in 1792, aged twenty-one, a Lieutenant,
in consequence of a fever brought on by excessive fatigue at and after
the siege of Seringapatarn, and the storming of a hill fort, during all
which his conduct had been so gallant that his Commanding Ofﬁcer
particularly noticed him, and presented him with a gold watch, which
my Mother now has. All my brothers are remarkably handsome;
but they were as inferior to Francis as I am to them. He went by
the name of ‘the handsome Coleridge.’ The tenth and last child was
Samuel Taylor, the subject and author of these Epistles.

“From October, 1772 to October, 1773. Baptized Samuel Taylor,
my Godfather’s name being Samuel Taylor, Esquire. I had another
called Evans, and two Godmothers, both named Munday.

“From October, 1773 to October, 17 7 4. In this year I was care-
lessly left by my nurse, ran to the ﬁre, and pulled out a live coal, and
burned myself dreadfully. While my hand was being drest by Mr.
Young, I spoke for the ﬁrst time (so my Mother informs me) and
said, “Nasty Dr. Young!” The snatching at ﬁre, and the circum-
stance of my ﬁrst words expressing hatred to professional men—are
they at all ominous? This year I went to school. My Schoolmistress,
the very image of Shenstone’s, was named Old Dame Key. She was
nearly related to Sir Joshua Reynolds.

“From October, 17 7 4: to 1775. I was inoculated ; which I mention,
because I distinctly remember it, and that my eyes were bound; at
which I manifested so much obstinate indignation, that at last they
removed the bandage, and unaffrighted I looked at the lancet, and
suffered the scratch. At the close of this year I could read a chap
ter in the Bible.

“Here I shall end, because the remaining years of my life all as-
sisted to form my particular mind ;—the ﬁrst three years had nothing
in them that seems to relate to it.

“God bless you and your sincere
“ Sunday, March, 1797.” “S. T. COLERIDGE.”

A letter from Francis S. Coleridge to his sister has been. preserved

* William Hart Coleridge, the present Bishop of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands.
[He was appointed to that See in 1824, retired from it in 1842; has lately accepted the
Wardenship of St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury.—-S. 0.]

604: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

in the family, in which a particular account is given of the chance
meeting of the two brothers in India, mentioned shortly in the pre-
ceding Letter. There is something so touching and romantic in the
incident that the Reader will, it is hoped, pardon the insertion of the
original narrative here.

“DEAR NANCY,

“ You are very right, I have neglected my absent friends, but do
not think I have forgot them, and indeed it would be ungrateful in
me if I did not write to them.

“You may be sure, Nancy, I thank Providence for bringing about
that meeting, which has been the cause of all my good fortune and
happiness, which I now in fulness enjoy. ‘ It was, an affectionate meet—
ing, and I will inform you of the particulars. There was in our ship
one Captain Mordaunt, who had been in India before, when we came
to Bombay. Finding a number of his friends there he went often
ashore. The daybefore the Fleet sailed he desired one Captain Welsh
to go aboard with him, who was an intimate friend of your brother’s.
“I will,” said Welsh, “and will write a note to Coleridge to go with
us.” Upon this Captain Mordaunt, recollecting me, said there was a
young midshipman, a favorite of Captain Hicks, of that name on
board. Upon that they agreed to inform my brother of it, which
they did soon after, and all three came on board. I was then in the
lower deck, and, though you won’t believe it, I was sitting on a gun
and thinking of my brother, that is, whether I should ever see or hear
any thing of him ; when seeing a Lieutenant, who had been sent to
inform me of my brother’s being on board, I got up off the gun: but
instead of telling me about my brother, he told me that Captain Hicks
was very angry with me, and wanted to see me. Captain Hicks had
always been a Father to me, and loved me as if I had been his own
child. I therefore went up shaking like an aspen leaf to the Lieuten-
ant’s apartments, when a gentleman took hold of my hand. I did
not mind him at ﬁrst, but looked round for the Captain ; but the gen-
tleman still holding my hand, I looked, and what was my surprise,
when I saw him too full to speak, and his eyes full of tears. Whether
crying is catching I know not, but I began a crying too, though I did
not know the reason, till he caught me in his arms, and told me he
was my brother, and then I found I was paying nature her tribute,
for I believe I never cried so much in my life. There is a saying in
Robinson Crusoe, I remember very well, viz—sudden joy, like grief,
confounds at ﬁrst. We directly went ashore, having got my discharge,
and having took a most affectionate leave of Captain Hicks, I left the
ship for good and all.”

“My situation in the army is that I am one of the oldest Ensigns, '
and before you get this must in all probability be 3 Lieutenant. How

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 605

many changes there have been 1n my life, and what lucky ones they
have been, and how young I am still! I must be seven years older
bef01e I can ploperly style myself a man, and what a number of
ofﬁcers do I command, who are old enough to be my Father al-
ready?” * * >|< * >1:

III.

TO MR. POOLE.

“MY DEAREST POOLE, October 9th, 1797.

“From March to October—a long silence! But it is possible t} at
I may have been preparing materials for future Letters, and the time
can not be considered as altogether subtracted from you.

“From October, 1775, to October, 1778. These three years I con-
tinued at the Reading School, because I was too little to be trusted
among my Father’s school-boys. After breakfast I had a halfpenny
given me, with which I bought three cakes at the baker’s shop close
by the school of my old mistress; and these were my dinner every
day except Saturday and Sunday, when I used to dine at home, and
wallowed in a beef and pudding dinner. I am remarkably fond of
beans and bacon: and this fondness I attribute to my Father’s giving
me a penny for having eaten a large quantity of beans on Saturday.
For the other boys did not like them, and, as it was an economic food,
my Father thought my attachment to it ought to be encouraged. He
was very fond of me, and I was my Mother’s darling : in consequence
whereof I was very miserable. For Molly, who had nursed my
brother Francis, and was immoderately fond of him, hated me because
my Mother took more notice of me than of Frank ; and Frank hated ‘.
me because my Mother gave me now and then a bit of cake when he
had none,—quite forgetting that for one bit of cake which I had, and
he had not, he had twenty sops in the pan, and pieces of bread and
butter, with sugar on them, from Molly, from whom I received only)
thumps and ill names.

“ So I became fretful, and timorous, and a tell~tale; and the school-
boys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me. And
hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly. I
read through all gilt-cover little books that could be had at that time,
and likewise all the uncovered tales of Tom I-Iickathrift, Jack the
Giant-Killer, and the like. And I used to lie by the wall, and mope;
and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, and in a ﬂood ;—-and
then I was accustomed to run up and down the churchyard and act
over again all I had been leading on the docks, the nettles, and theﬁ
rank gras‘s' At six years of age I remember to have read Belisarius,
Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarles , and then I found the Arabian

606 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Nights’ Entertainments, one tale of which (the tale of a man who was
compelled to seek for a pure virgin), made so deep an impression on
me (I had read it in the evening, while my mother was at her needle),
that I was haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark: and I
distinctly recot.ect the anxious and fearful eagerness, with which I
used to watch the window where the book lay, and when the sun came
upon it, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read.
My father found out the effect which these books had produced, and
burned them.

“ So I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily
activity; and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate; and as I
could not play at any thing, and was slothful, I was despised and hated
by the boyzs and because I could 1ead and spell, and had, I may truly
isay, a memory and understanding fomed into almost unnatural 1ipe-
'ness I was ﬂatte1 ed and wondered at by all the old women. And so
I became ve1y vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all
near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was a characte7’.. u.
Sensibility, imagination, vanity, leth, and feelings of deep and bitter
contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding,
were even then prominent and manifest.

“From October, 1778, to 1779. That which I began to be from
three to six, I continued to be from six to nine. In this year I was
admitted into the Grammar School, and soon outstripped all of my
age. I had a dangerous putrid fever this year. My brother George
lay ill of the same fever in the next room. My poor brother, Francis,
I remember, stole up in spite of orders to the contrary, and sat by
my bedside, and read Pope’s Homer to me. Frank had a violent love
of beating me; but whenever that was superseded by any humor or
circumstances, he was always very fond of me, and used to regard
me with a strange mixture of admiration and contempt. Strange it
was not, for he had books, and loved climbing, ﬁghting, playing, and
robbing orchards, to distraction.

“My Mother relates a story of me, which I repeat here, because it
must be reckoned as my ﬁrst piece of wit—During my fever, I asked
why Lady Northcote, our neighbor, did not come and see me. My
Mother said she was afraid of catching the fever. I was piqued, and
answered, ‘Ah ! Mammal the four Angels round my bed a’n’t afraid
of catching it 1’ I suppose you know the old prayer :—

‘ Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on !—
’ Four good Angels round me spread,
Two at my feet and two at my head.’

i This prayer I said nightly, and most ﬁrmly believed the truth of it.
Frequently have I (half-awake and half-asleep; my body diseased,

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 607

and fevered by my imagination)—seen armies of ugly things bursting
.in upon me, and these four Angels keeping them off.
“ In my next I shall carry on my life to my Father’s death.
“ God bless you, my dear Poole,
“ And your affectionate,
“S. T. COLERIDGE.”

In a note written in after-life Mr. Coleridge speaks of this period
of his life in the following terms :

' “Being the youngest child, I possibly inherited the weakly state
of health of my Father, who died, at the age of sixty-two, before I
had reached my ninth year; and from certain jealousies of old Molly,
my brother Frank’s dotingly fond nurse—and if ever child by beauty
and loveliness deserved to be doted on, my brother Francis was that
child—and by the infusion of her jealousies into my brother’s mind, I
was in earliest childhood huffed away from the enjoyments of mus--
cular activity in play, to take refuge at my Mother’s side on my little
stool, to read my little book, and to listen to the talk of my elders. I
was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation. I
never played except by. myself, and then only acted over what I had
been reading or fancying, or half one, half the other, with a stick cut-
ting down weeds and nettles, as one of the ‘Seven champions of
Christendom.’ Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of the
little child, but none of the child’s habits. I never thought as a child.)
never had the language of a child.” ’

IV.

TO MR. POOLE.

“DEAR POOLE,

“From October, 1779, to 1781. I had asked my Mother one
evening to cut my cheese entire, so that I might toast it. This was
no easy matter, it being a crumbly cheese. My Mother, however, did
it. I went into the garden for something or other, and in the mean
time my brother Frank minced my cheese, to ‘disappoint the favor-
ite.’ I returned, saw the exploit, and in an agony of passion ﬂew at
Frank. He pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow, ﬂung
himself on the ground, and there lay with outstretched limbs. I hung
over him mourning and in a great fright; he leaped up, and with a
horse-laugh gave me a severe blow in the face. I seized a knife, and
was running at him, when my mother came in and tookme by the
arm. I expected a ﬂogging, and, struggling from her, I ran away to
a little hill or slope, at the bottom of which the Otter ﬂows, about a
mile from Ottery. There I stayed ; my rage died away, but my oh-

G

608 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

stinacy vanquished my fears, and taking out a shilling book, which
had at the end morning and evening prayers, I very devoutly re-
peated them—thinking at the same time with a gloomy inward satis-
faction—how miserable my Mother must be! I distinctly remember
my feelings, when I saw a Mr. Vaughan pass over the bridge at about
a furlong’s distance, and how I watched the calves in the ﬁelds be-
yond the river. It grew dark, and I fell asleep. It was towards the
end of October, and it proved a stormy night. I felt the cold in my
sleep, and dreamed that I was pulling the blanket over me, and actu-
ally pulled over me a dry thorn-bush which lay on the ground near
me. In my sleep I had rolled from the top of the hill till within three
yards of the river, which ﬂowed by the unfenced edge of the bottom.
I awoke several times, and ﬁnding myself wet, and cold, and stiff,
closed my eyes again that I might forget it.

“In the mean time my Mother waited about half an hour, expect-
ing my return when the saliva had evaporated. I not returning, she
sent into the churchyard, and round the town. Not found! Several
men and all the boys were sent out to ramble about and seek me. In
vain! My Mother was almost distracted ; and at ten o’clock at night
I was cried by the crier in Ottery, and in two villages near it, with a
reward offered for me. No one went to bed ;—indeed I believe half
the town were up all the night. To return to myself. About ﬁve in
the morning, or a little after, I was broad awake, and attempted to
get up, and walk; but I could not move. I saw the shepherds and
workmen at a distance, and cried, but so faintly, that it was impossi-
ble to hear me thirty yards off. And there I might have lain and
died ;—for I was now almost given over, the ponds and even the river,
near which I was lying, having been dragged. But providentially Sir
Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night, resolved to make one
other trial, and came so near that he heard me crying. He carried
me in his arms for nearly a quarter of a mile, when we met my father
and Sir Stafford Northcote’s servants. I remember, and shall never
forget, my Father’s face as he looked upon me while I lay in the ser-
vant’s arms—so calm, and the tears stealing down his face; for I was
the child of his old age. My Mother, as you may suppose, was out—
rageous with joy. Meantime in rushed a young lady, crying out——‘I
hope you’ll whip him, Mrs. Coleridge.’ This woman still lives at
Ottery; and neither philosophy nor religion has been able to conquer
the antipathy which I feel towards her, whenever I see her. I was
put to bed, and recovered in a day or so. But I was certainly injured;
for I was weakly and subject to ague for many years after.

“ My Father—who had so little parental ambition in him, that, but
for my mother’s pride and spirit, he would certainly have brought up
his other sons to trades—had nevertheless resolved that I should be
a parson. I read every book that came in my way without distinc-

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 609
‘tion; and my Father was fond of me, and used to take me on his
knee, and hold long conversations with me. I remember, when eight
years old, walking with him one winter evening from a farmer’s
house, a mile from Ottery; and he then told me the names of the
stars, and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world,
and that the other twinkling stars were suns that had worlds rolling
round them ; and when I came home, he showed me how they rolled
round. I heard him with a profound delight and admiration, but
without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity. For from my
early reading of fairy tales and about genii, and the like, my mind had
been habituated to the Vast; and I never regarded my senses in any
way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my
conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Ought children to be
permitted to read romances and stories of giants, magicians, and ge-
nii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my
faith in the afﬁrmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a
love of the Great and the Whole. Those who have been led to the
same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their
senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess. They contem-
plate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little, and the
universe to them is but a mass of little things. It is true, the mind
may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former
method ;—but are not the experimentalists credulous even to mad-
ness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest
truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their fa-
vor? I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is
styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when
they looked at great things, all became a blank, and they saw noth-
ing, and denied that any thing could be seen, and uniformly put the
negative of a power for the possession of a power, and called the
'want of imagination judgment, and the never being moved to rapture
‘ philosophy.

“Towards the latter end of September, 1781, my Father went to
Plymouth with my brother Francis, who was to go out as midshipman
under Admiral Graves, who was a friend of my Father’s. He settled
.Frank as he wished, and returned on the 4th of October, 1781. He
arrived at Exeter about six o’clock, and was pressed to take a bed
:thcre by the friendly family of the Harts; but he refused; and to
:avoid their entreaties he told them that he had never been super-
sstitious, but that the night before he had had a dream, which had
imade a deep impression on him. He dreamed that Death had ap-
gpeared to him, as he is commonly painted, and had touched, him with
ihis dart. Well, he returned home; and all his family, I excepted,
'were up. He told my Mother his dream; but he was in high health
land‘good spirits; and there was a bow of punch made, and my

1

I”:
\

610 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Father gave a long and particular account of his travel, and that he
had placed Frank under a religious Captain, and so forth. At length
he went to bed, very well and in high spirits. A short time after he
had lain down, he complained of a pain in his bowels, to which he was
subject, from wind. My Mother got him some peppermint water,
which he took, and after a pause, he said, ‘I am much better now,
my dear!’—-—and lay down again. In a minute my Mother heard a
noise in his throat, and spoke to him, but he did not answer; and she
spoke repeatedly in vain. Her shriek awaked me, and I said—‘ Papa
is (lead? I did not know my Father’s return; but I knew that he
was expected. How I came to think of his death, I can not tell ; but
so it was. Dead he was. Some said it was gout in the heart ;——
probably it was a ﬁt of apoplexy. He was an Israelite without guile,
simple, generous, and, taking some Scripture texts in their literal sense,
he was conscientiously indifferent to the good and the evil of this

world. God love you and
“S. T. COLERIDGE!”

He was buried at Ottery on the 10th of October, 1781. “ O! that
I might so pass away,” said Coleridge, thirty years afterwards, “if,
like him, I were an Israelite without guile! The image of my Father,
my revered, kind, learned, simple-hearted Father is a religion to me.”

At his Father’s death Coleridge was nearly nine years old. He
continued with his Mother at Ottery till the spring of 1782, when he
was sent to London to wait the appointed time for admission into
Christ’s Hospital, to which a presentation had been procured from
Mr. John Way through the inﬂuence of his father’s old pupil Sir F ran-
cis Buller. Ten weeks he lived in London with an Uncle, and was
entered in the books on the 8th of July, 1782.

V.

TO MR. POOLE.

“From October, 1781 to October, 1782. After the death of my
Father, we, of course, changed houses, and I remained with my
Mother till the spring of 1782, and was a day scholar to Parson War-
ren, my Father’s successor. He was not very deep, I believe; and I
used to delight my poor Mother by relating little instances of his de-
ﬁciency in grammar knowledge—every detraction from his merits
seeming an oblation to the memory of my Father, especially as War-
ren did certainly pulpitvz'ze much better. Somewhere I think about
April, 1782, Judge Buller, who had been educated by my Father, sent
for me, having procured a Christ’s Hospital presentation. I accord—
ingly went to London, and was received and entertained by my

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 611

Mother’s brother, Mr. Bowdon. He was generous as the air, and a
man of very considerable talents, but he was fond, as others have
been, of his bottle. He received me with great affection, and I stayed
ten weeks at his house, during which I went occasionally to Judge
Buller’s. My Uncle was very proud of me, and used to carry me
from coffee-house to coffee-house, and tavern to tavern, where I drank,
and talked,'and disputed as if I had been a man. Nothing was more
common than for a large party to exclaim in my hearing, that I was
a prodigy, and so forth; so that while I remained at my Uncle’s, I
was most completely spoilt and pampered, both mind and body.

“At length the time came, and I donned the blue coat and yellow
stockings, and was sent down to Hertford, a town twenty miles from
London, where there are about three hundred of the younger Blue—
coat boys. At Hertford I was very happy on the whole, for I had
plenty to eat and drink, and we had pudding and vegetables almost
every day. I remained there six weeks, and then was drafted up to
the great school in London, where I arrived in September, 17 82, and
was placed in the second ward, then called J eﬂ‘eries’ Ward, and in the
Under Grammar School. There are twelve wards, or dormitories, of
unequal sizes, beside the sick ward, in the great school ; and they con—
tained altogether seven hundred boys, of whom I think nearly one
third were the sons of clergymen. There are ﬁve schools,—mathe-
matical, grammar, drawing, reading, and writing all very large
buildings. Whena boy is admitted, if he reads very badly, he is
either sent to Hertford, or to the reading school. Boys are admissi-
ble from seven to twelve years of age: If he learns to read tolerably
well before nine, he is drafted into the Lower Grammar School, if not,
into the Writing School, as having given proof of unﬁtness for classi-
cal studies. If, befOre he is eleven, he climbs up to the ﬁrst form of
the Lower Grammar School, he is drafted into the Head Grammar
School. If not, at eleven years of age, he is sent into the Writing
School, where he continues till fourteen or ﬁfteen, and is then either
apprenticed or articled as a clerk, or whatever else his turn of mind
or of fortune shall have provided for him. Two or three times a year
the Mathematical Master beats up for recruits for the King’s boys, as
they are called; and all, who like the navy, are drafted into the
Mathematical and Drawing Schools, where they continue till sixteen
or seventeen years of age, and go out as midshipmen, and schoolmas-
ters in the Navy. The boys who are drafted into the Head Grammar
School, remain there till thirteen; and then, if not chosen for the
University, go into the Writing School.

“Each dermitory hasa nurse or matron, and there is a head matron
to superintend all these nurses. The boys were, when I was ad«
mitted, under excessive subordination to each other according to rank
in school ; and every ward was governed by four Monitors,—-appointed

 

612 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

by the Steward, who was the supreme governor out of school——
our temporal lord,—and by four Markers, who wore silver medals,
and were appointed by the Head Grammar Master, who was our su-
preme spiritual lord. The same boys were commonly both Monitors
and Markers. We read in classes on Sundays to our Markers, and
were catechized by them, and under their sole authority during prayers,
&c. All other authority was in the Monitors; but, as I said, the
same boys were ordinarily both the one and the other. Our diet was
very scanty. Every morning a bit of dry bread and some bad small
beer. Every evening a larger piece of bread, and cheese or butter,
whichever we liked. For dinner,—on Sunday, boiled beef and broth ;
Monday, bread and butter, and milk and water; Tuesday, roast
mutton; Wednesday, bread and butter, and rice milk; Thursday,
boiled beef and broth; Friday, boiled mutton and broth; Saturday,
bread and butter, and pease-porridge. Our food was portioned; and,
excepting on Wednesdays, I never had a belly full. Our appetites
were damped, never satisﬁed ; and we had no vegetables.”
“S. T. COLERIDGE.”

 

“ 0! what a change I” he writes in another note; “depressed,
inOping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved; at that time the por-
tion of food to the Blue-coats was cruelly insufﬁcient for those who
had no friends to supply them.” And he afterwards says :—“ When
I was first plucked up and transplanted from my birth-place and
family, at the death of my dear Father, whose revered image has ever
survived in my mind to make me know what the emotions and affec-
tions of a son are, and how ill a father’s place is likely to be supplied
by any other relation, Providence (it has often occurred to me) gave
me the ﬁrst intimation that it was my lot, and that it was best for
me, to make or ﬁnd my way of life a detached individual, a term;
ﬁlms, who was to ask love or service of no one on any more speciﬁc
relation than that of being a man, and as such to take my chance for
the free charities of humanity.”

Coleridge continued eight years at Christ’s Hospital. It was a very
curious and important part of his life, giving him Bowyer for his
teacher, and Lamb for his friend.* Numerous retrospective notices
by himself and others exist of this period; but none of his really
boyish letters have been preserved. The exquisiteEssay intituled,
“Christ’s Hospital ﬁve-and-thirty years ago,”f by Lamb, is principally
founded on that delightful writer’s recollections of the boy Coleridge,
and that boy’s own subsequent descriptions of his school-days. Cole-
ridge is Lamb’s “poor friendless boy.”—“ My parents and those who

‘ [See note at the end of the chapter.—-S. 0.]
T Prose Works ii. p. 26.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 615

should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of
theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great
city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of
me on my ﬁrst arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits.
They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few
enough; and, one after another, they all. failed me, and I felt myself
alone among six hundred playmates. D the cruelty of separating a
poor lad from his early homestead ! The yearnings which I used to
have toward it in those unﬁedged years! How, in my dreams would
my native town, far in the west, come back with its church, its trees,
and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my
heart exclaim upon sweet Ualne in Wiltshz’re !”

Yet it must not be supposed that Coleridge was an unhappy boy.
He was naturally of a joyous temperament, and in one amusement,
swimming, he excelled and took singular delight. Indeed he believed,
and probably with truth, that his health was seriously injured by his
excess in bathing, coupled with such tricks as swimming across the
New River in his clothes, and drying them on his back, and the like.
But reading was a perpetual feast to him. “From eight to fourteen,”
he writes, “I was a playless day-dreamer, a helluo librm'um, my ap-
petite for which was indulged by a singular incident ; a stranger, who
was struck by my conversation, made me free of a circulating library
in King-street, Cheapside.”—“Here,” he proceeds, “I read through
the catalogue, folios and all, whether I understood them, or did not
understand them, running all risks in skulking out to get the two
volumes which I was entitled to have daily. Conceive what I must
have been at fourteen; I was in a continual low fever. My whole
being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crum-
ple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read—fancy myself
or. Robinson Crusoe’s island, ﬁnding a mountain of plum-cake, and
eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables
and chairs—hunger and fancy!”—“ My talents and superiority,” he
continues, “made, me forever at the head in my routine of study,
though utterly without the desire to be so ; without a spark of ambi-
tion; and as to emulation, it had no meaning for me; but the differ-
ence between me and my form-fellows, in our lessons and exercises,
bore no proportion to the measureless difference between me and
them in the wide, wild wilderness of useless, unarranged book knowl-
edge and book thoughts. Thank Heaven! it was not the age for
getting up prodigies; but at twelve or fourteen I should have made
as pretty a juvenile prodigy as was ever emasculated and ruined by
fond and idle wonderment. Thank Heaven! I was ﬂogged instead
of being ﬂattered. However, as I climbed up the school, my lot was
somewhat alleviated.” ‘

614 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

“ Christ’s Hospital gave him Lamb for has friend,” p. 619.

A few particulars of this “ most remarkable and amiable man,” the well-km; wn author
of Essays by Elia, Rosamund Gray, Poems, and other works, will interest most readers
of the Biographia.

He was born on the 18th of February, 1775, in the Inner Temple; died 27th Decem-
ber, 1834, about five months after his friend Coleridge, who continued in habits of inti-
macy with him from their ﬁrst acquaintance till his death in July of the same year.
In “one of the most exquisite of all the Essays of Elia,” The Old Benchers of the Middle
Temple (Works, vol. ii. p. 188), Lamb has given the characters of his father, and of his
father’s master, Samuel Salt. The few touches descriptive of this gentleman’s “unre
lenting bachelorhood”—which appears in the sequel to have been a persistent mourner
hood—and the forty years’ hopeless passion of mild Susan P.—which very permanence
redeems and almost dignifies—is in the author’s sweetest vein of mingled humor and
pathos, wherein the latter, as the stronger ingredient, predominates.

Mr. Lamb never married, for, as is recorded in the Memoir, “ on the death of his pa-
rents he felt himself called upon by duty to repay to his sister* the solicitude with which
she had watched over his infancy. To her, from the age of twenty-one, he devoted his
existence, seeking thencefo'rth no connection which could interfere with her supremacy
in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain or to comfort her.” Mr. Coleridge speaks
of Miss Lamb, to whom he continued greatly attached, in these verses, addressed to her
brother:

“ Cheerily, dear Charles!
Thou thy best friend shalt cherish many a year;
Such warm presages feel I of high hOpe!
For not uninterested the dear maid
I’ve viewed—her soul affectionate yet wise,
Her polished wit as mild as lambent glories
That play around a saluted infant’s head.”

Mr. Lamb has himself described his dear and only sister, whose proper name is Mary
Anne, under the title of “ Cousin Bridget,” in the Essay called Mackery End, a continua~
tion of that entitled .My Relations, in which he has drawn the portrait of his elder brother.
“ Bridget Elia,” so he commences the former, “ has been my housekeeper for many a
long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We
house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness ; with such tolera-
ble comfort, upon the whole, that l, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out
upon the mountains, with the rash king‘s offspring, to bewail my celibacy.”—(lVorks,
vol. ii. p. 171.) He describes her intellectual tastes in this essay, but does not refer to
her literary abilities. She wrote Mrs. Leicester’s School, which Mr. C. used warmly to
praise for delicacy of taste and tenderness of feeling.

Miss Lamb still survives, in the words of Mr. 'l‘alfourd, “to mourn the severance of
a life-long association, as free from every alloy of selﬁshness, as remarkable for moral
beauty, as this world ever witnessed in brother and sister.” I have felt desirous to place
in relief, as far as might be, such an interesting union—to show how blest a fraternal
marriage may be, and what sufﬁcient helpmates a brother and sister have been to each
other. Marriages of this kind would perhaps be more frequent but for the want of
some pledge or solid warranty of continuance equivalent to that which rivets wedlock
between husband and wife. Without the vow and the bond, formal or virtual, no so-
ciety, from the least to the greatest, will hold together. Many persons are so constituted
that they can not feel rest or satisfaction of spirit without a single supreme object of teno
der affection, in whose heart they are conscious of holding a like supremacy,—who has
common hopes, loves, and interests with themselves. lVithout this the breezes do not
refresh nor the sunbeams gladden them. A share in ever so many kind hearts does not

 

‘ “ A word
Timidly uttered, for she lives, the meek,
The self restraining, the ever kind.”

From Mr. Wovdsworth’s mem<:ia1 poem to her brother. P. “I. v. p. 333.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 615

sutiice to their happiness; they must have the whole of one, as no one else has any part
of it, whatever love of another kind that heart may still reserve for others. There is no
reason why a brother and sister might not be to each other this second-self—this dearer
half—though such an attachment is beyond mere fraternal love, and must have something
in it “of choice- and election,” superadded to the natural tie: but it is seldom found to
exist, because the durable cement is wanting—the sense of security and permanence,
without which the body of affection can not be consolidated, nor the heart commit itself
to its whole capacity of emotion. I believe that many a brother and sister spend their
days in uncongenial wedlock, or in a restless, faintly expectant-singlehood, who might
form a “comfortable couple” could they but make up their minds early to take each
other for better for worse.

Two other poems of Mr. C. besides the one in which his sister is mentioned, are
addressed to Mr. Lamb— This Limetree-bower my Prison, and the lines To a. Friend, who
had declared his intention of writing no more Poetry. (Poet. Works, p. 155. 8; p. J57.) In
a letter to the author (Letters, i. p. 150), Lamb inveighs against the soft epithet applied
to him in the ﬁrst of these. He hOped his “virtues had done sucking”-—and declared
such praise tit only to be a “ cordial to some green-sick sonnetteer.”

Yes ! they wander on
In gladness all ; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles ! for thou hast pined
And hungered after nature, many a year,
In the great city pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul through evil and pain
And strange calamity.

In the next poem he is called “wild-eyed boy." The two epithets, “wild-eyed” and
“ gentle-hearted,” will recall Charles Lamb to the minds of all who knew him personally.
Mr. Talfourd seems to think that the special delight in the country, ascribed to him by my
father, was a distinction scarcely merited. I rather imagine that his indiﬂ‘erence to it was
a sort of “ mock apparel” in which it was his humor at times to invest himself. I have
been told that, when visiting the Lakes, he took as much delight in the natural beauties
of the region as might be expeCted from a man of his taste and sensibility.*

Mr. Coleridge’s expression, recorded in the Table Talk, that he “looked on the de-
graded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, that shines and takes
no pollution,” partly alludes to that tolerance of moral evil, both in men and books, which
was so much remarked in Charles Lamb, and was, in so good a man, really remarkable.
His toleration of it in books is conspicuous in the view he takes of the writings of Con-
greve and Wycherley, in his essay on the artificial comedy of the last century (Works,
vol. ii. p. 322), and in many of his other literary criticisms. Iiis toleration of it in men—
at least his faculty of merging some kinds and degrees of it in concomitant good, or even
beholding certain errors rather as objects of interest, or of a meditative pity and tender.
ness, than of pure aversion and condemnation, Mr. Tulfourd has feelingly described in
his Memoir (vol. ii. pp. 326-9), “ Not only to opposite Opinions,” he says, “and devious
habits of thought was Lamb indulgent; he discovered the soul of goodness in things
evil so vividly, that the surrounding evil disappeared from his mental vision.” This
characteristic of his mind is not to be identiﬁed with the idolizing propensity common to
many ardent and imaginative spirits. He “not only loved his friends in spite of their
errors,” as Mr. Talfourd observes, “but loved them, errors and all ;” which implies that
he was not unconscious of their existence. He saw the failings as plainly as any one
else, nay, fixed his gentle but discerning eye upon them ; whereas the idolizers behold
certain objects in a bedarking blaze of light, or rather of light-confounding brightness,
the multiplied and heightened reﬂection of whatever is best in them, to the obscurity or
transmutation of all their defects. Whence it necessarily follows that the world presents
itself to their eyes divided, like a chess-board, into black and white compartments—a

 

' “ Thou wert a scorner of the ﬁeld, my Friend,
But more in show than truth.”

V From Mr. W.’s poem To a good man of most dear memory, quoted in p.331.

616 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

moral and intellectual chequer-work; not that they love to make darkness, but that the)
luxuriate too eagerly in light: and their “ over-muchness” toward some men involves an
over-littloness toward others, whom they involuntarily contrast, in all their poor and pec-
cant reality, with gorgeous idealisms. The larger half of mankind is exiled from them
into a hemisphere of shadow, as dim. cold, and negative as the unlit portion of the crescent
moon. Lamb’s general tendency, though he too could warmly admire, was in a different
direction ; he was ever introducing streaks and gleams of light into darkness, rather than
drowning certain objects in ﬂoods of it; and this, I think, proceeded in him from indulgence
toward human nature rather than from indiﬂ‘erence to evil. To his friend the disposition to
exalt and glorify co-existed, in a very remarkable manner, with a power of severe analysis
of character and poignant exhibition of it,—a power which few possess without exercising
it some time or other to their own sorrow and injury. The consequence to Mr. Coleridge
was that he sometimes seemed untrue to himself, when he had but brought forward, one
after another, perfectly real and sincere moods of his mind.

In his fine poem commemorating the deaths of several poets, Mr. Wordsworth thus
ioins my Father’s name with that of his almost life-long friend:

Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source;

The rapt one of the godlike forehead,

The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth ;

And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,

Has vanished from his lonely hearth. S. C

 

CHAPTER II.

(1791 to 1795)

“Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with Hope
like a ﬁery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard !——”

_ “S. T. COLERIDGE entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, the 5th of
February, 1791. He gained Sir William Brown’s gold medal for the
Greek Ode in the summer of that year. It was on the Slave Trade.

7" The poetic force and originality of this Ode were, as he said himself,
much beyond the language in which they were conveyed. In the
winter of 17 92 3 he stood for the University (Craven) Scholarship
with Dr. Keate, the late head—master of Eton, Mr. Bethell (of York-
shire) and Bishop Butler, who was the successful candidate. In 1793
he wrote without success for the Greek Ode on Astronomy, the prize
for which was gained by Dr. Keate. The original is not known to
exist, but the reader may see what is probably a very free version of

/_ {\it by Mr. Southey in his Minor Poems (Poetical Works, vol. ii. p. 170).

' 4 “ Coleridge”—says a school—fellow of his who followed him to Cam~

bridge in 1792, “was very studious, but his reading was desultory
and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake of exer-

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. ‘ 617

eise: but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in conversa-
tion; and, for the sake of this, his room (the ground-ﬂoor room on
the right hand of the staircase facing the great gate) was a constant
rendezvous of, conve1sat10n-lovmg liiends. I will not call them loun-
gers, foi they did not call to kill time, but to enjoy it. What evenings
have I spent in those looms! What little suppe1 s, 01 sizings, as they
were called, have I enjoyed; when Eschylus, and Plato, and Thu-
cydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons and the like, to
discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon a pamphlet issued
from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book be-
fore us ;—Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening
he would repeat whole pages oerbatim.”— College Reminiscences, Gen-
tleman’s Mag. Dec. 1834.

In May and June, 1793, Freud’s trial took place in the Vice-Chan-
cellor’s Court, and in the Court of Delegates, at Cambridge. Freud
was a Fellow of Jesus, and a slight acquaintance had existed between
him and Coleridge, who however soon became his partisan. Mr. C.
used to relate a remarkable incident, which is thus preserved by Mr.
Grillman :—“ The trial was observed by Coleridge to be going against
Freud, when some observation or speech was made in his favor ;—a
dying hope thrown out, as it appeared, to Coleridge, who in the midst
of the Senate House, whilst sitting on one of the benches, extended
his hands and clapped them. The Proctor in a loud voice demanded
who had committed this indecorum. Silence ensued. The Proctor,
in an elevated tone, said to a young man sitting near Coleridge,
“ ’Twas you, Sir!” The reply was as prompt as the accusation; for,
immediately holding out the stump of his right arm, it appeared that
he had lost his hand ;——“I would, Sir,” said he, “that I had the
power!” That no innocent person should incur blame, Coleridge
went directly afterwards to the Proctor, who told him that he saw
him clap his hands, but ﬁxed on this person, who he knew had not
the power. “You have had,” said he, “a narrow escape I”—(Life of
S. T. 0. i. p. 55.)

Coleridge passed the summer of 1793 at Ottery, and whilst there
wrote his Songs of the Pixies (Poetical l’Vorlcs, p. 24), and some other
little pieces. He returned to Cambridge in October, but, in the fol-
lowing month, in a moment of despondency and vexation of spirit,
occasioned principally by some debts not amounting to £100, he sud-
denly left his college and went to London. In a few days he was re-
duced to Want, and observing a 1e01uiting adve1tisement he 1esolved
to get bread and ovei come a p1 eJudlce at the same time by becoming

asoldiei. He accordingly applied to the sergeant, and after some
delay was marched down to Reading, wheie he regularly enlisted as
a private in the 15th Light Dragoons on the 3d of December, 1793
He kept his initials under the names of Silas Titus Comberbacke

a“

w

_ ._ m“... ~4-.—»

618 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

‘ “I sometimes,’ he writes in a letter, “compare my own .ife WltD
that of Steele (yet 0 I how unlike !)——1ed to this from having myself
also for a brief time borne arms, and written ‘private’ after my
name, or rather another name; for, being at a loss when suddenly
asked my name, I answered Cumberback, and verily my habits were
so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion.”
Coleridge continued four months a light dragoon, during which time
he saw and suffered much. He rode his horse ill, and groomed him
worse; but he made amends by nursing the sick, and writing letters
for the sound. His education was detected by one of his ofﬁcers,
Captain Nathaniel Ogle, who observed the words,—Eheu! quam {w
fortunii miserrimum estfm'ssefeliceml—freshly written in pencil on
the stable-wall or door, and ascertained that Comberbacke was the
writer. But the termination of his military career was brought about
by a chance recognition in the street: his family was apprized of his
situation, and after some difﬁculty he was duly discharged on the 10th
of April, 17 94, at Hounslow.

Coleridge now returned to Cambridge, and remained there till the
commencement of the summer vacation. But the adventures of the
preceding six months had broken the continuity of his academic life,
and given birth to new views of future exertion. His acquaintance
with F rend had materially contributed to his adoption of the system
called Unitarianism, which he now openly professed, and this alone
made it imperative on his conscience to decline availing himself of
any advantages dependent on his entering into holy orders, or sub-
scribing the Articles of the English Church. He lived, nevertheless,
to see and renounce his error, and to leave on record his deep and
solemn faith in the catholic doctrine of Trinal Unity, and the Re-
demption of man through the sacriﬁce of Christ, both God and Man.
Indeed his Unitarianism, such as it was, was not of the ordinary qual-
ity. “I can truly say”—were Coleridge’s words in after-life—“ that
I never falsiﬁed the Scripture. I always told the Unitarians that

,1 their interpretations of the Scripture were intolerable upon any prin-

l ciples of sound criticism; and that if they were to offer to construe

, the will of a neighbor as they did that of their Maker, they would be
scouted out (f society. I said then plainly and openly that it was
clear enough that John and Paul were not Unitarians. But at that
time I had a strong sense of the repugnancy of the doctrine of vicari-
ous atonement to the moral being, and I thought nothing could coun-
terbalance that. ‘What care I,’ I said, ‘for the Platonisms of John,

, or the Rabbinisms of Paul ?——My conscience revolts!’ That was the
,1 ground of my Unitarianism.” (Table Talk, VI. p. 517.)

At the commencement of the Long Vacation, in June, 17 94-, Cole-
ridge went to Oxford on a visit to an old school-fellOw, intending
probably to proceed afterwards to his mother at Ottery. But an ac-

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 619

nidental introduction to Robert Southey, then an under-graduate at
Balliolj College, ﬁrst delayed, and ultimately prevented, the comple-
tion Of this design, and became, in its consequences, the hinge on
which a large part of Coleridge’s after—life was destined .to turn.
Upon the, present occasion, however, he left Oxford with an acquaint-
ance, Mr. Hucks, for a pedestrian tour in Wales.* Two other friends,
Brookes and Berdmore, joined them in the course of their ramble;
and at Caernarvon Mr. Coleridge wrote the following letter to Mr.
Masters, of Jesus College.

“DEAR MASTERS, “July 22d, 17 94

“From Oxford to Gloucester,* to Ross,* to Hereford, to Leomin-
ster, to Bishop’s Castle,* to Montgomery, to Welshpool, Llanvelling,*
Llangunnog, Bala,* Druid House,* Llangollin, Wrexham,** Ruthin,
Denbigh,* St. Asaph, Holywell,* Rudland, Abcrgeley,* Aberconway,*
Abber,* over a ferry to Beaumaris* (Anglesea), Amlock,* Copper
Mines, Gwindu, Moeldon, over a ferry to Caernarvon, have I jour-
neyed, now philos0phizing with hacks, now melancholizing by myself,
or else indulging those day-dreams of fancy, that make realities more
gloomy. To whatever place I have afﬁxed the mark *, there we
slept. The ﬁrst part of our tour was intensely hot—the roads, white
and dazzling, seemed to undulate with heat and the country, bare
and unhedged, presented nothing but stone fences, dreary to the eye
and scorching to the touch. At Ross we took up our quarters at the
King’s Arms, once the house of Mr. Kyle, the celebrated Man of Ross.
I gave the window-shutter a few verses, which I shall add to the end
of the letter. The walk from Llangunnog to Bala over the mountains
was most wild and romantic; there are immense and rugged clefts in
the mountains, which in winter must form cataracts most tremendous;
now there is just enough sun-glittering water dashed down over them
to soothe, not disturb the ear. I climbed up a precipice on which was
a large thorn-tree, and slept by the side of one of them near two hours.

“At Bala I was apprehensive that I had caught the itch from a
Welsh democrat, who was charmed with my sentiments; he bruised
my hand with a grasp of ardor, and I trembled lest some discontented
citizens of" the animalcular republic might have emigrated. Shortly
after, in came a clergyman well dressed, and with him four other gen-
tlemen. I was asked for a public character; I gave Dr. Priestley.
The clergyman whispered his neighbor, who it seems is the apothe-
eary of the parish—“ Republicans 1” Accordingly when the doctor,

 

* It is to this tour that he refers in Table Talk, VI. p. 325,—“ I took the thought of grina
ning for joy in that poem (The Ancient Mariner), from my companion’s (Berdmore’s)
remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Penmaenmaur, and were nearly dead
with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle
under a stone. He said to me,-—‘ Yc 1 grinned like an idiot.’ He had done the same ”

. - a...v-—..... _.

620 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

as they call apothecaries, was to have given a name, “ 1 gives a sen
timent, gemmen! May all republicans be gulloteened!” Up starts
the democrat; “May all fools be gulloteened, and then you will be
the ﬁrst!” Fool, rogue, traitor, liar, &c., ﬂew in each other’s faces in
hailstorms of vociferation. This is nothing in Wales—they make it
necessary vent-holes for the sulphureous fumes of their temper! I
endeavored to calm the tempest by observing that however different
our political opinions might be, the appearance of a clergyman assured
me that we were all Christians, though I found it rather difﬁcult to
reconcile the last sentiment with the spirit of Christianity! “Pho !”
quoth the clergyman; “Christianity! Why we a’nt at church now,
are we ? The gentleman’s sentiment was a very good one, because
it shows him to be sincere in his principles.” Welsh politics, how-
ever, could not prevail over Welsh hospitality; they all shook hands
with me (except the parson), and said I was an open-speaking, honest-
hearted fellow, though I was a bit of a democrat.

“On our road from Bala to Druid House, we met Brookes and
Berdmore. Our rival pedestrians, a Gemini of Powells, were vigor-
ously marching onward, in a post-chaise! Berdmore had been ill.
We were not a little glad to see each other. Llangollen is a village
most romantically situated; but the weather was so intensely hot
that we saw only what was to be admired—we could not admire.

“At Wrexham the tower is most magniﬁcent; and in the church is
a white marble monument of Lady Middleton, superior, mew quidem
sententz'a, to any thing in Westminster Abbey. It had entirely es-
caped my memory, that Wrexham was the residence of a Miss E.
Evans, a young lady with whom in happier days I had been in habits
of fraternal correspondence; she lives with her grandmother. As I
was standing at the window of the inn, she passed by, and with her,
to my utter astonishment, her sister, Mary Evans, guam (Iﬁiz'ctim e!
pe-rdz'tc amabam, yea, even to anguish. They both started, and gave
a short cry, almost a faint shriek; I sickened and well nigh fainted,
but instantly retired. Had I appeared to recognize her, my fortitude
would not have supported me :—

 

Vivit, sed mihi non vivit—novaforte marita.
ﬂh, dolor! alterius nunc a cervice popendit.
V03, maleﬁda valete accensw insomnia menu's,
Littora amata valcte; vale ah! formosd .Maria.

Hucks informed me that the two sisters walked by the window four
or ﬁve times, as if anxiously. Doubtless they think themselves de—
ceived by some face strikingly like me. God bless her! Her image
is in the sanctuary of my bosom, and never can it be torn from thence,
but by the strings that grapple my heart to life! This circumstance
made me quite ill. I had been wandering among the. wild-wood
scenery and terrible graces of the Welsh mountains to wear away, not

ﬁIOGRAPHICAL SU PPLEMEN T. 621

to revive, the images of the past ;——but love is a local anguish; I am
ﬁfty miles distant, and am not half so miserable.

“ At Denbigh is the ﬁnest ruined castle in the kingdom ; it surpassed
every thing I could have conceived. I wandered there two hours in
a still evening, feeding upon melancholy. Two well-dressed young
men were roaming there. ‘ I will play my ﬂute here,’ said the ﬁrst;
‘it will have a romantic eﬁect.’ ‘Bless thee, man of genius and sen-
sibility,’ I silently exclaimed. He sate down amid the most awful
part of the ruins ; the moon just began to make her rays predominant
over the lingering daylight ; I pre-attuned my feelings to emotion;
—and the romantic youth instantly struck up the sadly pleasing tunes
'of Miss Carey—The British Lion is my sigw—A roaring trade I drive
on, &c.

“Three miles from Denbigh, on the road to St. Asaph, is a ﬁne
bridge, with one arch of great, great grandeur. Stand at a little dis-
tance, and through it you see the woods waving on the hill—bank of
the river in a most lovely point of view. A beautiful prospect is al-
ways more picturesque when seen at some little distance through an
arch. I have frequently thought of Michael Taylor’s way of viewing
a landscape between his thighs. Under the arch was the most per-
fect echo I ever heard. Hucks sang Sweet Echo with great effect.

“At Holywell I bathed in the famous St. Winifrcd’s Well. It is
an excellent cold bath. At Rutland is a ﬁne ruined castle. Abergeley
is a large village on the sea-coast. Walking on the sea sands I was
surprised to see a number of ﬁne women bathing promiscuously with
men and boys perfectly naked. Doubtless the citadels of their chas-
tity are so impregnably strong, that they need not the ornamental
bulwarks of modesty; but, seriously speaking, where sexual distinc-
tions are least observed, men and women live together in the greatest
purity. Concealment sets the imagination a—working, and as it were
cantharadizes our desires.

“Just before I quitted Cambridge, I met a countryman with a
strange walking-stick, ﬁve feet in length. I eagerly bought it, and a
most faithful servant it has proved to me. My sudden affection for
it has mellowed into settled friendship. On the morning of our
leaving Abergeley, just before our ﬁnal departure, I looked for my
stick in the place in which I had left it over night. It was gone. I
alarmed the house; no one know any thing of it. In the ﬂurry of
anxiety I sent for the Crier of the town and gave him the following
to cry about the town and the beach, which he did with a gravity for
which I am indebted to his stupidity.

“‘Missing from the Bee Inn, Abergeley, a curious walking-stick.
On one side it displays the head of an eagle, the eyes of which rep-
resent rising suns, and the ears Turkish crescents ; on the, other is the

622 BIOGRAPHIA LI'I ERARIA.

portrait of the owner in wood-work. Beneath the head of the eagle
is a Welsh wig, and around the neck of the stick is a Queen Eliza-
beth’s ruff in tin. All down it waves the line of beauty in very ugly
carving. If any gentleman (or lady) has fallen in love with the
above described stick, and secretly carried off the same, he (or she)
is hereby earnestly admonished to conquer a passion, the continuance
of which must prove fatal to his (or her) honesty. And if the said
stick has slipped into such gentleman’s (or lady’s) hand through in-
advertence, he (or she) is required to rectify the mistake with all
convenient speed. God save the king.’

“ Abergeley is a fashionable Welsh watering-place, and so singular
a proclamation excited no small crowd on the beach, among the rest
a lame old gentleman, in whose bands was descried my dear stick.
The old gentleman, who lodged at our inn, felt great confusion, and
walked ‘homewards, the solemn Crier before him, and a various cav-
alcade behind him. I kept the muscles of my face in tolerable sub-
jection. He made his lameness an apology for borrowing my stick,
supposed he should have returned before I had wanted it, &c. 650.
Thus it ended, except that a very handsome young lady put her head
out of a coach-window, and begged my permission to have the bill
which I had delivered to the Orier. I acceded to the request with a
compliment, that lighted up a blush on her cheek, and a smile on her lip.

“We passed over a ferry to Aberconway. We had scarcely left
the boat ere we descried Brookes and Berdmore, with whom we have
joined parties, nor do we mean to separate. Our tour through Angle-
sea to anrnarvon has been repaid by scarcely one object worth see-
ing. To-morrow we visit Snowdon. Brookes, Berdmore, and my-
self, at the imminent hazard of our lives, scaled the very summit of
Penmaenmaur. It was a most dreadful expedition. I will give you
the account in some future letter.

“ I sent for Bowles’s Works while at Oxford. How was I shocked!
Every omission and every alteration disgusted taste, and mangled
sensibility. Surely some Oxford toad had been squatting at the
poet’s ear, and spitting into it the cold venom of dulness. It is not
Bowles ; he is still the same (the added poems will prove it), descrip
tive, digniﬁed, tender, sublime. The sonnets added are exquisite.
Abba Thule has marked beauties, and the little poem at Southampton
is a diamond: in whatever light you place it, it reﬂects beauty and
splendor. The ‘Shakspeare’ is sadly unequal to the rest. Yet in
whose poems, except those of Bowles, would it not have been excel-
lent? Direct to me, to be left at the Post Ofﬁce, Bristol, and tell me
every thing about yourself, how you have spent the vacation, &c.

“ Believe me, with gratitude and fraternal friendship,

“Your obliged “ S. T. COLERIDGB.”

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 623

. -On his return from this excursion Coleridge went, by appointment,
toBristol, for the purpose of meeting Southey, whose person and
conversation had excited in him the most lively admiration. This
was at the end of August or beginning of September. Southey, whose
mother then lived at Bath, came over to Bristol accordingly to re-
ceive—his new friend, who had left as deep an impression on him, and
in that city introduced Coleridge to Robert Lovell, a young Quaker,
then recently married to Mary Fricker, and residing in the Old M ar-
ket. After a short stay at Bristol, where he ﬁrst saw Sarah Fricker,
Mrs. Lovell’s elder sister, Coleridge accompanied Southey on his re-
turn to Bath. There he remained for some weeks, principally engaged
in making love, and in maturing, with his friend, the plan, which he
had for some time cherished, of a social community to be established
in America upon what he termed a pantisocratical basis. The fol-
lowing letter written at this time by Coleridge to Mr. Charles Heath,
of Monmouth, is a curious evidence of his earnestness upon this
subject :—

‘ SIR,

“Your brother has introduced my name to you; I shall there-
tore offer no apology for this letter. A small but liberalized party
have formed a scheme of emigration on the principles of an abolition
of individual property. Of their political creed, and the arguments
by which they support and elucidate it, they are preparing a few
copies—not as meaning to publish them, but for private distribution.
In this work they will have endeavored to prove the exclusive jus-
tice of the system and its practicability; nor will they have omitted
to sketch out the code of contracts necessary for the internal regula-
tion of the Society; all of which will of course be submitted to the
improvements and approbation of each component member. As
soon as the work is printed, one or more copies shall be transmitted
to you. Of the characters of the individuals who compose the party
I ﬁnd it embarrassing to speak; yet, vanity apart, I may assert with
truth that they have each a sufﬁcient strength of head to make the
virtues of the heart respectable, and that they are all highly charged
with that enthusiasm which results from strong perceptions of moral
rectitude, called into life and action by ardent feelings. With regard
to pecuniary matters it is found necessary, if twelvemen with their
families emigrate on this system, that £2,000 should be the aggregate
of their Contributions—but infer not from hence that each man’s
quota is to be settled with the littleness of arithmetical accuracy.
No ; all will strain every nerve ; and then, I trust, the surplus money
of some will supply the deﬁciencies of others. The minutiae of topo-
graphical information we are daily endeavoring to acquire; at present-
our’plan is, to settle at a distance, but at a convenient distance, from

624 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Cooper’s Town, on the banks of the Susquehanna. This, however,
will be the object of future investigation. For the time of emigration
We have ﬁxed on next March. In the course of the winter those of
us whose bodies, from habits of sedentary study or academic indo-
lence, have not acquired their full tone and strength, intend to learn
the theory and practice of agriculture and carpentry, according as
situation and circumstances make one or the other convenient.
“ Your fellow-citizen,
“S. T. COLERIDGE.”

The members of the society at that time were Coleridge himself,
Southey, Lovell, and George Burnet, a Somersetshire youth and fel—
low-collegian with Southey. Toward the beginning of September,
Coleridge left Bath, and went, for the last time, as a student, to Cam-
bridge, apparently with the view of taking his degree of BA. after
the ensuing Christmas. Here he published The Fall of Robesziierre
(Literary Remains), of which the ﬁrst act was written by himself,
and the second and third by Mr. Southey, and the particulars of the
origin and authorship of which may be found stated in an extract
from a letter of Mr. Southey’s there printed. The dedication to Mr.
Martin is dated at Jesus College, 22d of September, 17 94.

In January, 1795, he was to return—and then with Spring breezes
to repair to the banks of the SuSquehanna! But his fate withstood;
——he took no degree, nor ever crossed the Atlantic. Michaelmas
Term 17 94 was the last he kept at Cambridge ; the vacation following
was passed in London with Charles Lamb, and in the beginning of
17 95, he returned with Southey to Bristol, and there commenced
man.

The whole spring and summer of this year he devoted to public
Lectures at Bristol, making in the intervals several excursions in
Somersetshire, one memorial of which remains in the Lines composed
while climbing Brochley Combe (Poet. Works, p. 63). It was in one
of these excursions that Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth ﬁrst met
at the house of Mr. Pinney. The ﬁrst six of those Lectures consti-
tuted a course presenting a comparative view of the Civil War under
Charles I. and the French Revolution. Three of them, or probably
the substance of four or ﬁve, were published at Bristol in the latter
end of 1795, the ﬁrst two together, with the title of Conciones ad
Populum, and the third with that of The Plot discovered. The elo«
quent passage in conclusion of the ﬁrst of these Addresses was writ-
ten by Mr. Southey. The tone throughout them all is vehemently
hostile to the policy of the great minister of that day; but it is
equally opposed to the spirit and maxims of J acobinism. It was late
in life that, after a perusal of these Conciones, Coleridge wrote on a.
blank page of one of them the following words :-—“ Except the two or

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 625

three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity and Uni-
tarianism, I see little or nothing in these outbursts of my youthful
zeal to retract; and with the exception of some ﬂame-colored epithets
applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, or rather to personiﬁca-
tions—(for such they really were to me)——-as little to regret.”

Another course of six Lectures followed, “ On Revealed Religion, its
corruptions, and its political views.” The Prospectus states—“that
these Lectures are intended for two classes of men, Christians and In-
ﬁdels ;—the former that they may be able to give areasonfor the hope
that is in them ;—the latter, that they may not determine against
Christianity from arguments applicable to its corruptions only.”
Nothing remains of these Addresses, nor of two detached Lectures
on the Slave Trade and the Hair Powder Tax, which were delivered
in the interval between the two principal courses. They were all
very popular amongst the opponents of the Government; and those
on religion in particular were highly applauded by his Unitarian audi-
tors, amongst whom Dr. and Mrs. Estlin, and Mr. Hort were always
remembered by Coleridge with regard and esteem.

The Transatlantic scheme, though still a favorite subject of con
versation, was now in effect abandoned by these young Pantisocrats.
Mr. C. was married at St. Mary, Redclifi‘ church, to Sarah Fricker, on
the 4th of October, 1795, and went to reside in a cottage at Cleve-
don, on the Bristol Channel; and six weeks afterwards Mr. Southey
was also married to Edith Fricker, and left Bristol on the same day
on his route to Portugal. ‘ At Clevedon Mr. and Mrs. Coleridge re-
sided with one of Mrs. C.’s unmarried sisters and Burnet until the be-
ginning of December.

 

CHAPTER III.

[1795 to 1796.]

“ Ah ! quiet dell! dear cot, and mount sublime!
I was constrained to quit you. Was it right,
While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled,
That I should dream away th’ intrusted hours
On rose-leaf beds pampering the coward heart

With feelings all too delicate for use ?
9 I» iv * a i i»

I therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand
Active and ﬁrm, to fight the bloodless ﬁght _
Of science, freedom, and the truth in Christ.”

COLERIDGE had, in-the course of the summer of 1795, become ac
quainted with that excellent and remarkable man, the late Thomas
VOL. 111. 2 D

626 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Poole, of Nether Stowey, Somerset. In a lettei written to him on
the 7th of Octobei, C. speaks of the prospect f1om his cottage, and
of his future plans in the following way: —

“MY DEAR SIR, '

“God bless you—or rather God be praised for that he has blessed
you! On Sunday morning I was married at St. Mary’s, Redcliff——
from Chatterton’s church. The thought gave a tinge of melancholy
to the solemn joy which I felt, united to the woman, whOm I love
best'of all created beings. We are settled, nay, quite domesticated,
at Clevedon,——our comfortable cot! * * * The prospect around
is perhaps more various than any in the kingdom: mine eye glut-
tonizes. The sea, the distant islands, the opposite coast I—I shall as-
suredly write rhymes, let the nine Muses prevent it if they can. * * *
I have given up all thoughts of the Magazine for various reasons. It
is a thing of monthly anxiety and quotidian bustle. To publish a
Magazine for one year would be nonsense, and, if I pursue what I
. mean to pursue, my school-plan, I could not publish it for more than
one year. In the course of half a year I mean to return to Cam-
bridge-—-having previously taken my name off from the University’s
control—and, hiring lodgings there for myself and wife, ﬁnish my
great work of Imitations in two volumes. My former works may, I
hope, prove somewhat of genius and of erudition; this will be bet-
ter; it wlll show great industry and manly consistency. At the end
of it I shall publish proposals for a school * * * My next letter
will be long and full of something ;—this is inanity and egotism. * * "
Believe me, dear Poole, your affectionate and mindful—friend, shal.
I so soon have to say? Believe me my heart prompts it.

“S. T. COLERIDGE.”

The monthly anxiety of a Magazine justly alarmed Coleridge on the
7th of October; yet in the December following he courageously en-
gaged to conduct a weekly political Miscellany. This was The W'atch-
man, of which the fo-lowing Prospectus was in that month printed
and circulated.

“ To supply at once the places of a Review, Newspaper, and An-
nual Register.

“On Tuesday, the 1st of March, 1796, will be published No. I.
price fourpence, of a Miscellany, to be continued every eighth day,
under the name of The Watchman, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This
Miscellany will be comprised in two sheets, or thirty-two pages,
closely printed in 8vo.; the type, long primer. Its contents, 1 :—A
history of the domestic~ and foreign policy of the preceding days.
2 :—Tl1e speeches in both Houses of Parliament; and, during the rec
cess, select parliamentary speeches from the commencement of the

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 627

reign of Charles I. to the present aera, with notes historical and bio-
graphical. 3 :—Original essays and poetry. 4 :—Review of interest-
ing and important publications. Its advantages. 1. There being no
advertisements, a greater quantity of original matter will be given,
and the speeches in Parliament will be less abridged. 2. From its
form it may be bound up at the end of a year, and become an Annual
Register. 3. This last circumstance may induce men of letters to
prefer this Miscellany to more perishable publications as the vehicle
of their effusions. 4. Whenever the Ministerial and Opposition prints
diﬁ'er in their accounts of occurrences, &c. such difference will always
be faithfully stated.” -

Mr. 0. went to Bristol in the beginning of December for the pur-
pose of arranging the preliminaries of this undertaking, and at the
close of the month he set off upon the tour mentioned in Chap. X. of
this Work, to collect subscribers. It will be remembered that he was
at this time a professed Unitarian; and the project of becoming a
minister of that persuasion seems to have passed through his head.
He had previously preached, for the ﬁrst time, two sermons at Mr.
J ardine’s Chapel in Bath, the subjects being the Corn Laws and the
Hair Powder Tax. He appeared in the pulpit in a blue coat and
white waistcoat, and, according to Mr. Cottle’s testimony, who was
present, Coleridge delivered himself languidly, and disappointed every
one. But there is no doubt that he subsequently preached upon
many occasions with very remarkable effect. The following extracts
are from letters written by Mr. C. in the month of January, 1796,
during his tour, to his early and lasting friend Mr. Josiah Wade of
Bristol, and may serve as a commentary on parts of the accounts
given of the same tour in this work.

“MY DEAR WADE, “ Worcester, January, 1796.

“We were ﬁve in number, and twenty- -ﬁve in quantity. The
moment I entered the coach, I stumbled 011 a huge p103ect1on which
might be called a belly with the same p1op11ety that you might name
Mount Atlas a mole- hill. Heavens! that a man should be uncon-
scionable enough to enter a stage-coacl1,wl1o would want elbow room
if he were'walking 011 Salisbury Plain.

“The said citizen was a most violent aristocrat, but a pleasant hu-
morous fellow in other respects, and remarkably well- informed in
agricultmal science; so that the time passed pleasantly enough. We
ar11ved at Worcester at half-past two: I, of course, dined at the mn,
where I met Mr. Stevens. After dinner, I chiistianized myself, that
is, washed and changed, and marched 1n ﬁne1y and clean linen to
High Street. With legard to business, there is no chance of doing
any thing at Worcester. The aristocrats are so numerous, and the

628 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

inﬂuence of the clergy so extensive, that Mr. Barr thinks no booksel-
ler will venture to publish The Watchman. * * * *
. “S. T. COLERIDGE.”

 

“ MY DEAR FRIEND, “Birmingham, January, 1796.

* * * * “My exertions here have been incessant, for in what-
ever company I go, I am obliged to be the ﬁgurante of the circle. Yes-
terday I preached twice, and, indeed, performed the whole service,
morning and afternoon. There were about 1,400 persons present,
and my sermons (great part extempore), were preciously peppered
with politics. I have here at least double the number of subscribers
I had expected.” * * *

.__—___

“MY DEAR FRIEND, “Nottingham, January, 1796.
“You will perceive by this letter I have changed my route.
From Birmingham on Friday last (four o’clock in the morning), I pro-
ceeded to Derby, stayed there till Monday morning, and am now at
Nottingham. From Nottingham I go to Shefﬁeld ; from Sheﬂield to
Manchester; from Manchester to Liverpool; from Liverpool to Lon-
don; from London to Bristol. Ah, what a weary way! My poor
crazy ark has been tossed to and fro on an ocean of business, and I
long for the Mount Ararat on which it is to rest. At Birmingham I
was extremely unwell ; a violent cold in my head and limbs conﬁned
me for two days. Business succeeded very well ;—about a hundred
subscribers I think. -

“At Derby, also, I succeeded tolerably well. Mr. (Joseph) Strutt,
the successor of Sir Richard Arkwright, tells me I may count on forty
or ﬁfty in Derby. Derby is full of curiosities ;—the cotton and silk
mills; Wright the painter, and Dr. Darwin, the every thing but
Christian. Dr. Darwin possesses, perhaps, a greater range of knowl-
edge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of phil-
osophical men. He thinks in a new train on all subjects but relio
gion. He bantered me on the subject of religion. I heard all his ar-
guments, and told him it was inﬁnitely consoling to me, to ﬁnd that
the arguments of so great a man, adduced against the existence of a
God, and the evidences of revealed religion, were such as had startled
me at ﬁfteen, but had become the objects of my smile at twenty.
Not one new objection—not even an ingenious one! He boasted
‘ that he had never read one book in favor of such stuff, but that he
had read all the works of Inﬁdels !’

“ What would you think, Mr. Wade, of a man who, having abused
and ridiculed you, should openly declare that he had heard all that
your enemies had to say against you, but had scorned to inquire the
truth from any one of your friends? Would you think him an honest

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 629

man? I am sure you would not. Yet such are all the Inﬁdels whom
I have knoWn. They talk of a subject, yet are found to confess them-
selves profoundly ignorant of it. Dr. Darwin would have been
ashamed to reject Hutton’s theory of the Earth without having mi-
nutely examined it ;—yet what is it to us, how the earth was made, a
thing impossible to be known? This system the Doctor did not re-
ject Without having severely studied it; but all at once he makes up
his mind on such important subjects, as Whether we be the outcasts
of a blind idiot called Nature, or the children of an all-wise and inﬁ-
nitely good GodI—whether we spend a few miserable years on this
earth, and then sink into a clod of the valley; or endure the anxiety
of mortal life, only to ﬁt us for the enjoyment of immortal happiness!
These subjects are unworthy a philosopher’s investigation! He deems
that there is a certain self-evidence in Inﬁdelity, and becomes an
Atheist by intuition. Well did St. Paul say, ye have an evil heart of
unbeliqf.

. * * * “What lovely children Mr. Barr of Worcester has! After
church, in the evening, they sat round and sang hymns so sweetly
that they overpowered me. It was with great difficulty that I ah-
stained from weeping aloud; and the infant in Mrs. B.’s arms leaned
forward, and stretched his little arms, and stared, and smiled. It
seemed a picture of heaven, where the different orders of the blessed
join different voices in one melodious hallelujah; and the babe looked
like. a young spirit just that moment arrived in heaven, startled at the
seraphic songs, and seized at once with wonder and rapture. * * *

“From your affectionate friend,
- “S. T. COLERIDGE.”

“MY VERY DEAR FRIEND, “ Shefﬁeld, January, 1796.

“I arrived at this place late last night by the mail from Notting-
ham, where I have been treated with kindness and friendship, of
which I can give you but a faint idea. I preached a charity sermon
there last Sunday. I preached in colored clothes. With regard to
the gown at Birmingham (of which you inquire), I suffered myselfto
be over-persuaded. First of all, my sermon being of so politicala’
tendency, had I worn my blue coat, it would have impugned Edwards.
They would have said, he stuck a political lecturer» in his pulpit.
Secondly,_the society is of all sorts,—Socinians, Arians, Trinitarians,
&c., and I must have shocked a multitude of prejudices. And thirdly,
there is a difference between an inn and a place of residence. In the
ﬁrst, your example is of little consequence; in a single instance only,
it ceases to operate as example ; and my refusal would have been im-
puted to 'affectation, or an unaccommodating spirit. Assuredly I
Would not do it where I intended to preach often. And even in the

630 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

vestry at Birmingham, when they at last persuaded me, I told them
I was acting against my better knowledge, and should possibly feel
uneasy afterwards. So these accounts of the matter you must con-
sider as reasons and palliations, concluding, ‘I plead guilty, my
Lord 1’ Indeed I want ﬁrmness; I perceive I do. I have that within
me which makes it difficult to say, No, repeatedly to a number of
persons who seem uneasy and anxious. * * *

“My kind remembrances to Mrs. Wade. God bless her and you,
and (like a bad shilling slipped in between two guineas) your faith-
ful and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE.”

“MY DEAR FRIEND “ Manchester J anuar 1796.
1 7 y,

“I arrived at Manchester last night from Shefﬁeld, to which
place I shall only send about thirty numbers. I might have succeeded
there, at least equally well with the former towns, but I should in-
jure the sale of the Iris, the editor of which (a very amiable and in-
genious young man of the name of James Montgomery), is now in
prison for a libel on a bloody-minded magistrate there. Of course I
declined publicly advertising or disposing of The Watchman in that
town.

“ This morning I called on Mr. with H.’s letter. Mr.
received me as a rider, and treated me with insolence that was really
amusing from its novelty. ‘ Overstocked with these articles.’
‘People always setting up some new thing or other.’ ‘I read
the Star and another paper: what could I want with this paper,
which is nothing more?’ ‘Well, well, I’ll consider of it.’ To
these entertaining bans mots I returned the following repartee—‘ Good
morning, Sir.’ * * *

 

 

 

 

 

“God bless you, S. T. G.”

Mr. 0. went to Liverpool and was as successful there as elsewhere
generally in procuring subscribers to The Watchman. The late Dr.
Crompton found him out, and became his friend and patron. His
exertions, however, at Liverpool were suddenly stopped by news of
the critical state of Mrs. C.’s health, and a pressing request that he
would immediately return to Bristol, whither Mrs. C. had now gone
from Clevedon. Coleridge accordingly gave up his plan of visiting
London, and left Liverpool on his homeward trip. From Lichﬁeld he
wrote to Mr. Wade the following letter :—

“MY DEAR FRIEND, “Lichﬁeld, January, 1786.

* * * “Ihave succeeded very well here at Lichﬁeld. Belcher,
bookseller, Birmingham; Sutton, Nottingham; Pritchard, Derby;
and Thomson, Manchester; are the publishers. In every number of

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 681

The Watchman there 'will be printed these words, “ Published in
Bristol by the Author, S. T. Coleridge, and sold, 850.”

“ I verily believe no poor fellow’s idea-pot ever bubbled up so ve-
hemently with fears, doubts, and difﬁculties, as mine does at present.
Heaven grant it may not boil over, and put out the ﬁre ? I am almost
heartless. My past life seems to me like a dream, a feverish dream—-
all one gloomy huddle of strange actions and dim-discovered mo-
tives ;—friendships lost by indolence, and happiness murdered by mis-
managed sensibility. The present hour I seem in a quick-set hedge
of embarrassments. For shame! I ought not to mistrust God: but,
indeed, to hope is far more difﬁcult than to fear. Bulls have horns,
lions have talons :—

I “The fox and statesman subtle wiles insure,
The cit and polecat stink and are secure ;
Toads with their venom, doctors with their drug,
The priest and hedgehog in their robes are snug.
Oh, Nature! cruel step-mother and hard
To thy poor naked, fenceless child, the bard!
N o horns but those by luckless Hymen worn,
And those, alas! not Amalthaea’s horn !
With achingteelings, and with aching pride,
He bears the unbroken blast on every side :

Vampire booksellers drain him to the heart,
And scorpion critics cureless venom dart.” S. T. C.

Coleridge on his return to Bristol resided for a short time on Red-
cliff Hill, in a house occupied by Mrs. C.’s mother. He had procured
upwards of a thousand subscribers’ names to The Watchman, and had
certainly some ground for conﬁdence in his future success. His tour
had been a triumph; and the impression made by his personal de-
meanor and extraordinary eloquence was unprecedented, and such as
was never eﬂ'aced from the recollection of those who met with him
at this period. He seems to have employed the interval between his
arrival in Bristol and the 1st of March—the day ﬁxed for the appear-
ance 'of. The Watchman—in preparing for that work, and also in
getting ready the materials of his ﬁrst volume of poems, the copyright
of which was purchased by Mr. Cottle for thirty guineas. ' Coleridge
was a student all his life; he was very rarely indeed idle in the com-
mon sense of the term; but he was constitutionally indolent, averse
from continuous exertion externally directed, and consequently the
victim of a procrastinating habit, the occasion of innumerable dis-
tresses to himself and of endless solicitude to his friends, and which
materially impaired, though it could not destroy, the operation and
inﬂuence of his wonderful abilities. Hence, also, the ﬁts of deep
"melancholy which from time to time seized his whole soul, during
which he seemed an imprisoned man Without hope of liberty. In
February, 1796, whilst his volume was in the press, he wrote the fol-
~ zlowing letter to Mr. Cottle :—

632 BIOGRAPHIA L1TERARIA..

“ MY DEAR COTTLE,

“I have this night and to-morrow for you, being alone, and my
spirits calm. I shall consult my poetic honor, and of course your in-
terest, more by staying at home than by drinking tea with you. I
. should be happy to see my poems out even by next week, and I shall
continue in stirrups, that is, shall not dismount my Pegasus, till Mon-
day morning, at which time you will have to thank God for having

done with your affectionate friend always, but author evanescent,
. “S. T. G.”

Shortly afterwards, mistaking the object of a message from Mr.
Cottle for an application for copy for the press, Coleridge wrote the
following letter with reference to the painful subject :—

“ My DEAR SIR, “ Redcliﬁ' Hill, February 22, 1796.

“It is my duty and business to thank God for all his dispensa
tions, and to believe them the best possible; but, indeed, I think I
should have been more thankful, if He had made me a journeyman
shoemaker, instead of an author by trade. I have left my friends ; I
have left plenty; I have left that ease which would have secured a
literary immortality, and have enabled me to give to the public works
conceived in moments of inspiration, and polished with leisurely solici-
tude ; and, alas ! for what have Ileft them? For—who deserted me
in the hour of distress, and for a scheme of virtue impracticable and
romantic! So I am forced to write for bread—write the ﬂights of
poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing a groan from my
wife! Groans, and complaints, and sickness! The present hour I
am in a quick-set hedge of embarrassment, and, whichever way I turn,
a thorn runs into me. The future is cloud and thick darkness.
Poverty, perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread looking
up to me! Nor is this all. My happiest moments for composition
are broken in upon by the reﬂection that I must make haste. ‘ I am
too late.’ ‘ I am already months behind.’ ‘ I have received my pay
beforehand.’ O wayward and desultory spirit of Genius, ill can’st
thou brook a taskmaster! The tenderest touch from the hand of ob-
ligation wounds thee like a scourge of scorpions!

“I have been composing in the ﬁelds this morning, and came home
to write down the ﬁrst side of my Preface, when I heard that your
man had broughta note from you. I have not seen it, but I guess its
contents. I am writing as fast as I can. Depend on it, you shall not
be out of pocket for me. I feel what I owe you, and, independently
of this, I love you as a friend,—indeed so much that I regret, seriously
regret, that you have been my copyholder.

“ If I have written petulantly, forgive me. God knows I am sore
all over. God bless you! and believe me that, setting gratitude

 

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 633

aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as

much as my own.
“S. T. COLERIDGE.”

On the 1st of March, 1796, The Watchman was published; it ended
with the tenth number on the 13th of May following. Further re-
marks concerning that Work will be found in the notes to the tenth
chapter of this volume.* In March Mr. C. removed to a house in
Oxford Street in Kingsdown, and thence wrote the following letter
to Mr. Poole :-—— ,

.“ MY DEAR POOLE, “ 30th March, 1796.

“For the neglect in the transmission of The W'atehman, .you
must blame George Burnet, who undertook the business. I however
will myself see it sent this week with the preceding Numbers. I am
greatly obliged to you for your communication—(on the Slave Trade
in No. V.) ;—it appears in this Number. I am anxious to receive
more from you, and likewise to know what you dislike in The Watch-
man, and what you like, but particularly the former. You have not
given me your opinion of The Plot Discovered.

“Since you last saw me, I have been well nigh distracted. The
repeated and most injurious blunders of my printer out of doors, and
Mrs. Coleridge’s danger at home—added to the gloomy prospect of
so many mouths to open and shut, like puppets, as I move the string
in the eating and drinking way ;-—but why complain to you? Misery
is an article with which every market is so glutted that it can answer
no one’s purpose to export it.

“I have received many abusive letters, post-paid, thanks to the
friendly malignants! But I am perfectly callous to disapprobation,
except when it tends to lessen proﬁt. Then indeed I am all one trem-K
ble of sensibility, marriage having taught me the wonderful uses of-
that vulgar commodity, yclept Bread. The Watchman succeeds so
as to yield a bread-and-cheesish proﬁt. Mrs. Coleridge is recovering
apace, and deeply regrets that she was deprived of the pleasure of
seeing you. We are in our new house, where there is a bed at your
service whenever you will please to delight us with a visit. Surely
in Spring you might force a few days into a sojourning with us.

“Dear Poole, you have borne yourself towards me most kindly
with respect to my epistolatory ingratitude. But I know that you
forbade yourself to feel resentment towards me, because you had pre-
viously made my neglect ingratitude. A generous temper endures a
great deal from one whom it has obliged deeply.

“My poems are ﬁnished. I will send you two copies the moment
they are published. ~ IuNo. III. of The Watchman there are a few

‘ These Notes I never found. Probably they were but designed.—-S. C.
2 D*

634 BIOGRAPHIA ' LITE RARIA.

lines entitled, ‘The Hour when we shall meet again’ (‘Dim Hour!
that sleep’ston pillowing clouds afar,’) which I think you will like.
I have received two or three letters from different Anonymi, request-
ing me to give more poetry. One of them writes thus :—

“ ‘Sir, I detest your principles; your prose I think very so so; but
your poetry is so beautiful that I take in your Watchman solely on
account of it. In justice therefore to me and some others of my
Stamp, I entreat you to give us more verse, and less democratic scur-
rility. Your Admirer,—not Esteemer.’

“Have you read over Dr. Lardner on the Logos? It is, I think,
scarcely possible to read it, and not be convinced. I ﬁnd that The
TVatchman comes more easy to me, so that I shall begin about my
Christian Lectures,” (meaning a publication of the course given in
the preceding year). “I will immediately order for you, unless you
immediately countermand it, Count Rumford’s Essays; in N 0. V. of
The Watchman you will see why.” (That number contained a crit-
ique on the Essays.) “ I have inclosed Dr. Beddoes’s late pamphlets,
neither of them as yet published. The Doctor sent them to me.
* * -* My dutiful love to your excellent Mother, whom, believe
me, I think of frequently and with a pang of affection. God bless
you. I’ll try and contrive to scribble a line and a half every time the
man goes with The Watchman to you.

“NB. The Essay on Fasting I am ashamed of”—(in No. II. of
The Watchman) ;—“ but it is one of my misfortunes that I am obliged
to publish e1: tempore as well as compose. God bless you.

“S. T. COLERIDGE.”

Two days afterwards Mr. Coleridge wrote to Mr. B. Flower, then
the editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, with whom he had been
acquainted at the University :—

“DEAR SIR, “April 1, 1796.
“I transmitted to you by Mr. B a copy of my Ooneiones ad
Populam, and of an Address against the Bills,” (meaning The Plot.
Discovered). “I have taken the liberty of inclosing ten of each, car-
riage paid, which you may perhaps have an opportunity of disposing
of for me;—if not, give them away. The one is an eighteen-penny
affair ;—the other ninepence. I have likewise inclosed the Numbers
which have been hitherto published of The lVatchma-n ;—some of the
Poetry may perhaps be serviceable to you in your paper. That son-
net on the rejection of Mr. Wilberforce’s Bill in your Chronicle the
week before last was written by Southey, author of Jean of Arc, a

 

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 685

'year and a half ago, and sent to me per letter ;—-how it appeared
'Wlth the late signature, let the plagiarist answer. * * I have sent
a copy of my Poems”—(they were not yet published) :—-“ will you
send them to Lunn and Deighton, and ask of them whether they
-Would_choose to have their names on the title page as publishers;

and would you permit me to have yours? Robinson and, I believe,

Cadell, will be the London publishers. Be so kind as to send an im-
mediate answer.

“Please to present one of each of my pamphlets to Mr. Hall”—
(the late Robert Hall, the Baptist). “I wish I could reach the per-
fection of his style. I think his style the best in the English lan-

guage; if he have a rival, it is Mrs. Barbauld.

V “You have, of course, seen Bishop Watson’s Apology for the
Bible. It is a complete confutation of Paine; but that was no difﬁ-
cult matter. The most formidable Inﬁdel is Lessing, the author of
Emilia Galotti ;—-—I ought to have written, was, for he is dead. His
book is not yet translated, and it is entitled, in German, ‘Fragments
of an Anonymous Author.’ It unites the wit of Voltaire with the
subtlety of Hume and the profound erudition of our Lardner. I had
some thoughts of translating it with an Answer, but gave it up, lest
men, whose tempers and hearts incline them to disbelief, should get
hold of it; and, though the answers are satisfactory to my own mind,
they may not be equally so to the minds of others.

“I suppose you have heard that I am married. I was married on
the 4th of October.

“I rest all my poetical credit on the Religious Musings. Farewell:
with high esteem, yours sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE.”

TO MR. POOLE.

-“ MY DEAR, VERY DEAR FRIEND, “11th April, 1796.

“ I have sent the 5th, 6th, and part of the 7th Number—all as yet
printed. ' Your censures are all right ; I wish your praises were equally
so. The 'Essay on Fasts I am ashamed of. It was conceived in the
spirit, and clothed in the harsh scoﬂing, of an Inﬁdel. You wish to
have one long essay ;—so should I wish; but so do not my subscribers
wish. I feel the perplexities of my undertaking increase daily. In
London and Bristol The Watchman is read for its original matter,—
the news and debates barely tolerated. The people of Liverpool,
Manchester, and Birmingham, 850., take it as a newspaper, and regard
the essays and poems as intruders unwished for and unwelcome. In
sho1t, each ‘subscryibei instead of regarding himself as a point in the
circumference entitled to some one diverging ray, considers me as the
circumference, and himself as the cent1e to which all the rays ought
to converge. To tell you the truth, I do not think The Watchman

636 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

will succeed. Hitherto I have scarcely sold enough to pay the ex-
penses ;—no wonder, when I tell you that on the 200 which Parsons
in Paternoster Row sells weekly, he gains eight shillings more than I
do. Nay, I am convinced that at the end of the half-year he will
have cleared considerably more by his 200 than I by the proprietor-
ship of the whole work.

“ Colson has been indefatigable in my service, and writes with such
zeal for my interests, and such warmth of sorrow for my sufferings,
as if he wrote with ﬁre and tears. God bless him I I wish above all
things to realize a school. I could be well content to plod from
morning to night, if only I could secure a secure competence; but to
toil incessantly for uncertain bread weighs me down to earth.

“Your Night-dream has been greatly admired. Dr. Beddoes spoke
in high commendation ofit. Your thoughts on Elections I will in-
sert whenever Parliament is dissolved. I will insert them as the
opinions of a sensillc correspondent, entering my individual protest
against giving a vote in any way or for any person. If you had an
estate in the swamps of Essex, you could not prudently send an aguish
man there to be your manager,—he would be unﬁt for it ;—you could
not honestly send a hale hearty man there, for the situation would to
a moral certainty give him the ague. So with the Parliament :—I
will not send a rogue there; and I would not send an honest man, for
it is twenty to one that he will become a rogue.

“Count Rumford’s Essays you shall have by the next parcel. I
thank you for your kind permission with respect to books. I have
sent down to you Elegiac Stanzas by Bowles ; they were given to me,
but are altogether unworthy of Bowles. I have sent you Beddoes’s
Essay on the merits of William Pitt; you may either keep it, and 1
will get another for myself on your account, or if you see nothing in
it tolibrary-ize it, send it me back next Thursday, or whenever you
have read it. My own Poems you will welcome. I pin all my po-
etical credit on the Religious Musings. In the poem you so much
admired in The Watchman, for ‘Now life and joy,’ read ‘New life
and joy.’ ” (From The Hour when we shall meet again.) “ Chatter-
ton shall appear modernized. Dr. Beddoes intends, I believe, to give
a course of Chemistry in a most elementary manner,—-the price, two
guineas. I wish, ardently wish, you could possibly attend them, and
live with me. My house is most beautifully situated; an excellent
room and bed are at your service. If you had any scruple about
putting me to additional expense, you should pay me seven shillings
a week, and I should gain by you.

“Mrs. Coleridge is remarkably well, and sends her kind love.
Pray, my dear Poole, do not neglect to write to me every week.
Your critique on Joan of Arc and the Religious Musings I expect.
Your dear mother I long to see. Tell her I love her with ﬁlial rev

BIOGRAPHICAL S UPPLEMEN T. 637

spectfulness. Excellent woman! Farewell; God bless you and
your grateful and affectionate S. T. COLERIDGE.”

Mr. C.’s ﬁrst volume of poems was published by Mr. Cottle in the
beginning of April, 1796, and his sense of the kind conduct of the
latter to him throughout the whole affair was expressed in the follow-
ing manner in a blank leaf in a, copy of the work :—

"‘ DEAR COTTLE,

“ On the blank'leaf of my Poems I can most appropriately write
my acknowledgments to you for your too disinterested conduct in
the purchase of them. Indeed, if ever they should acquire a name
and character, it might be truly said the world owed them to you.
Had it not been for you, none perhaps of them would have been pub-
lished, and some not written.

“Your obliged and affectionate friend,
“Bristol, April 15, 1798. S. T. COLERIDGE.”

TO MR. COTTLE.

“ MY EVER DEAR COTTLE, (April) 1796.
“I will wait on you this evening at nine o’clock, till which hour I
am on ‘Watch.’ Your Wednesday’s invitation I of course accept,
but I am rather sorry that you should add this expense to former
liabilities. _

“ Two editions of my Poems would barely repay you. Is it not
possible to get 25 or 30 of the Poems ready by to-morrow, as Parsons,
of Paternoster Row, has written to me pressingly about them? ‘ Peo-
ple are perpetually asking after them. All admire the poetry in the
Watchman,’ he says. I can send them with 100 of the ﬁrst number,
which he has written for. I think if you were to send half a dozen
J cans of Arc (4to. £1 13. 0d.) on sale or return, it would not be amiss.
To all the places in the North we will send my Poems, my Conciones,
and the J cans of Arc together, per wagon. You shall pay the car-
riage for the London and Birmingham parcels; I for the Shefﬁeld,
Derby, Nottingham, Manchester, and Liverpool.

“With regard to the Poems I mean to give away, I Wish to make
it a common interest; that is, I will give away a sheet full of Son-
nets. One to Mrs. Barbauld ; one to Wakeﬁeld; one to Dr. Beddoes;
one to Wrangham—a college acquaintance of mine—:an admirer of
me, and a pitier of my principles ;———one to George Augustus Pollen,
Esq. ; one to 0. Lamb ; one to Wordsworth ; one to my brother
George; and one to Dr. Parr. These Sonnets I mean to write on the
blank leaf, respectively, of each copy. * * * *

“ God bless you, and . S. T..CoLERIDGE.”

“ The Sonnets,” says Mr. Cottle, “never arrived.”

638 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

TO MR. POOLE.

“ MY VERY DEAR FRIEND, “6th ﬂfay, 1796.

“The heart is a little relieved, when vexation converts itself
into anger. But from this privilege I am utterly precluded by my
own epistolary sins and negligences. Yet in very truth thou must
be a hard-hearted fellow to let me trot for four weeks together every
Thursday to the Bear Inn—to receive no letter. I have sometimes
thought that Milton the carrier did not deliver my last parcel, but he
assures me he did.

“This morning I received a truly fraternal letter from your brother
Richard, of Sherborn, containing good and acceptable advice. He
deems my Religious Musings ‘ too metaphysical for common readers.’
I answer—the poem was not written for common readers. In so
miscellaneous a collection as I have presented to the Public, singula
einque should be the motto. There are, however, instances of vicious
aﬁ’ectation in the phraseology of that poem ;—un3huclcler’d, anaghast—
ed, for example.” (Not in the poem now.) “Good writing is pro-
duced more effectually by rapidly glancing the language as it already
exists than by a hasty recourse to the mint of invention. The Reli-
gious Musings has more mind than the Introduction of B. ii. of Joan
of Arc (Destiny of Nations, Poet. W. p. 83), but its versiﬁcation is
not equally rich. It has more passages of sublimity, but it has not
that diﬁ‘used air of severe dignity which characterizes my epic slice.
Have I estimated my own performances rightly? * * *

“With regard to my own affairs they are as bad as the most ram-
pant philo-despot could wish in the moment of cursing. After No.
XII. I shall cease to cry the state of the political atmosphere. It is
not pleasant, Thomas Poole, to have worked fourteen weeks for
nothing—for nothing; nay, to have given to the Public in addition to
that toil, 45L When I began the Watchman I had 40lﬁworth of paper
given to me ; yet with this I shall not have received a farthing at the
end of the quarter. To be sure I have been somewhat ﬂeeced and
over-reached by my London publisher. In short, my tradesmen’s
bills for The ‘Watchman, including what paper I have bought since
the seventh number, the printing, &c., amount exactly to 5l. more
than the whole of my receipts. 0 Watchman, thou hast watched in
vain .’—said the Prophet Ezekiel, when, I suppose, he was taking a
prophetic glimpse of my sorrow-sallowed cheeks.

“My plans are reduced to two ;—the ﬁrst unpracticable,-—the sec-
ond not likely to succeed.

“Plan I. I am studying German, and in about six weeks shall be
able to read that language with tolerable ﬂuency. No W I have some
thoughts of making a proposal to Robinson, the great London book-

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 639

seller, of translating all the works of Schiller, which would make a
portly quarto, on condition that he should pay my journey and my
wife’s to and from Jena, a cheap German University where Schiller
resides, and allow me two guineas each quarto sheet, which would
maintainme. If I could realize this scheme, I should there study
chemistry and anatomy, and bring over with me all the works of
Semler and Michaelis, the German theologians, and of Kant, the great
German metaphysician. On my return I would commence a school ‘
for eight young men at 105l. each, proposing to perfect them in the
following studies in this order :——1. Man as an Animal ;—including
the complete knowledge of anatomy, chemistry, mechanics, and op-
tics :—2. Man as an Intellectual Being ;—including the ancient meta-
physics, the system of Locke and Hartley—of the Scotch philosophers
-—-and the new Kantean system :——8. Man as a Religious Being ;—in-
cluding an historic summary of all religions, and of the arguments
for and against natural and revealed religion. Then proceeding from
the individual to the aggregate of individuals, and disregarding all
chronology, except that of mind, I should perfect them: l—in the
history of savage tribes ; 2—of semi-barbarous nations ; 3—of nations
emerging from semi-barbarism; 4—-—of civilized states; 5—of luxu~
rious states ; 6—of revolutionary states ; 7 —of colonies. During
these studies I should intermix the knowledge of languages, and in-
struct my scholars in belles lattices, and the principles of composition.

“Now, seriously, do you think that one of my scholars, thus per-
fected, would make a better senator than perhaps any one member in
either of our Houses ?——Bright bubbles of the age-ebullient brain!
Gracious Heaven! that a scheme so big with advantage to this king-
dom—therefore to Europe—therefore to the world—should be de-
molishable by one monosyllable from a bookseller’s mouth !

“My second plan is to become a Dissenting Minister, and abjure
politics and casual literature. Preaching for hire is not right; be-
cause it must prove a strong temptation to continue to profess what
'I may have ceased to believe, if ever maturer judgment with wider
and deeper reading should lessen or destroy my faith in Christianity.
But, though not right in itself, it may become right by the greater
wrongness of the only alternative—the. remaining in neediness and
uncertainty. That in the one case I should be exposed to temptation
. is a mere contingency; that under necessitous circumstances I am
exposed to great and frequent temptations is a melancholy certainty.

“Write, my dear Poole! or I will crimp all the rampant Billings-
gate of Burke to abuse you. Count Rumford is being reprinted.

“ God bless you and S. T. COLERIDGE.”

On Friday, the 13th of May, 1796, the tenth and last number of
The Watchman appeared—the author having wisely accelerated the

640 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

termination of a hopeless undertaking, the plan of which was as it‘-
judicio :is as the execution of it by him for any length of time imprac«
ticable. Of the 324: pages, of which The Watchman consists, not
more than a hundred contain original matter by Coleridge, and this
is perhaps more remarkable as a test of the marvellous spring of his
mind almost immediately afterwards than for any very striking merit
of its own. Still, however, the nascent philosopher may be discov-
ered in parts ; and the Essay on the Slave-Trade, in the fourth num-
ber, may be justly distinguished as comprising a perfect summary of
the arguments applicable on either side of that question.

In the mean time Mr. Poole had been engaged in circulating a pro-
posal amongst a few common friends for purchasing a small annuity
and presenting it to Mr. Coleridge. The plan was not in fact carried
into execution ; but it was communicated to Mr. C. by Mr. Poole, and
the following letter refers to it :—

TO MR. POOLE.
“ 12th May, 1796.

“PO0LE!—The Spirit, who counts the throbbings of the solitary
heart, knows that what my feelings ought to be, such they are. If
it were in my power to give you any thing, which I have not already
given, I should be oppressed by the letter now before me. But no !
I feel myself rich in being poor; and because I have nothing to be-
stow, I know how much I have bestowed. Perhaps I shall not make
myself intelligible; but the strong and unmixed affection which I
bear to you, seems to exclude all emotions of gratitude, and renders
even the principle of esteem latent and inert. Its presence is not
perceptible, though its absence could not be endured.

“Concerning the scheme itself I am undetermined. Not that I am
ashamed to receive ;—God forbid ! I will make every possible exer-
tion; my industry shall be at least commensurate with my learning
and talents ;—if these do not procure for me and mine the necessary
comforts of life, I can receive as I would bestow, and, in either case—
receiving or bestowing—be equally grateful to my Almighty Bene-
factor. I am undetermined therefore—not because I receive with
pain and reluctance, but—because I suspect that you attribute to oth-
ers your own enthusiasm of benevolence; as if the sun should say—
‘ With how rich a purple those opposite windows are burning!’ But
with God’s permission I shall talk with you on this subject. By the
last page of No. X., you will perceive that I have this day dropped
The Watchman. On Monday morning. I will go per caravan to
Bridgewater, where, if you have a horse of tolerable meekness un-
employed, you will let him meet me.

“ I should blame you for the exaggerated terms in which‘you have
spoken of me in the Proposal, did I not perceive the motive. You

BIOGRA'PHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 641

wished to make it appear an offering—not a favor—and in excess of
delicacy have, I fear, fallen into some grossness of ﬂattery.

“God bless you, my dear, very dear Friend. The widow is calm,
and amused with her beautiful infant.* We are all become more re-
ligious than we were. God be ever praised for all things! Mrs.
Coleridge begs her kind love to you- To your dear Mother my ﬁlial
respects.

“S. T. COLERIDGE.”

The visit to Mr. Poole at Stowey was paid, and Mr. C. returned to
Bristol on the 20th of May, 1796. On his way back he wrote the
following letter to Mr. Poole from Bridgewater :—

“MY DEAR POOLE, “ 29th May, 1796.
“This said caravan does not leave Bridgewater till nine. In the
market-place stand the hustings. I mounted, and pacing the boards,
mused on bribery, false-swearing, and other foibles of election times.
I have wandered too by the river Parret, which looks as ﬁlthy as if

all the parrots in the House of Commons had been washing their \_

consciences therein. Dear Gutter of Stowey! Were I transported
to Italian plains, and lying by the side of a streamlet which murmured
through an orange grove, I would think of thee, dear Gutter of
Stowey, and wish that I were poring on thee!

“ So much by way of rant. I have eaten three eggs, swallowed
sundries of tea and bread and butter, purely for the purpose of
amusing myself, and I have seen the horse fed. When at Cross,
where I shall dine, I shall think of your happy dinner celebrated un-
der the auspices of humble independence, supported by brotherly
love. I am writing, you understand, for no other purpose but that
of avoiding anxious thoughts. Apropos of honey-piez—Galigula or
Heliogabalus (I forget which), had a dish of nightingales’ tongues
served up. What think you of the stings of bees? God bless you.
My ﬁlial love to your mother, and fraternity to your sister. Tell
Ellen Cruikshanks, that in my next parcel to you I will send my
Haleswood Poem to her Heaven piotect her, and you, and Sara,
and your Mother, and—like a bad shilling passed off in a handful of
guineas—your aﬁ‘ectionate friend and brother,

“S. T. COLERIDGE.

“P. S. Don’t forget to send by Milton my old clothes and linen that
once was clean—a pretty periphrasz’s that!”

, The month of June, 1796, was spent in Bristol, and some negoti-
ation took place as to Mr. O.’s settling in Nottingham, the particulars

. ' Mrs. Robert Lovell, whose husband had been carried oﬂ’ by a fever, about two
years after his marriage with my Anna—S. C.

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642 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

of which the Editor is unable to state. On the 4th of July Mr. Cole
ridge writes to Mr. Poole.

TO MR. POOLE.

“ MY VERY DEAR POOLE, “4th July, 1796.

“Do not attribute it to indolence that I have not written to you.
Suspense has been the real cause of my silence. Day after day I have
conﬁdently expected some decisive letter, and as often have been dis-
appointed. ‘ Certainly I shall have one to-morrow noon, and then I
will write.’ Thus I contemplated the time of my silence in its small
component parts, forgetful into what a sum total they were swelling.
As I have heard nothing from Nottingham notwithstanding I have
written a pressing letter, I have, by the advice of Cottle and Dr.
Boddoes, accepted a proposal of Mr. Perry’s, the Editor of the Morn-
ing Chronicle,—accepted it with a heavy and reluctant heart. On
Thursday Perry was at Bristol for a few hours, just time enough to
attend the dying moments of his associate in the editorship, Mr. Grey,
whom Dr. Beddoes attended. Perry desired Dr. B. to inform me
that, if I would come up to London and write for him, he would
make me a regular compensation adequate to the maintenance of my-
self and Mrs. Coleridge, and requested an immediate answer by the
post. Mr. Estlin, and Charles Danvers, and Mr. Wade, are or were
all out of town ;—I had no one to advise with except Dr. Beddoes
and Cottle. Dr. B. thinks it a good opening on account of Grey’s
death; but I rather think that the intention is to employ me as a
mere hackney without any share of the proﬁts. However, as I am
doing nothing, and in the prospect of doing nothing settled, I was
afraid to give way to the omenings of my heart; and accordingly I
accepted his proposal in general terms, requesting a line from him
expressing the particulars both of my proposed occupation and sti-
pend. This I shall receive to-morrow, I suppose; and if I do, I think
of hiring a horse for a couple of days, and galloping down to you to
have all your advice : which, indeed, if it should be for rejecting the
proposals, I might receive by post; but if for ﬁnally accepting them,
we could not interchange letters in a time sufﬁciently short for
Perry’s needs, and so he might procure another person possibly. At
all events I should not like to leave this part of England—perhaps
forever—without seeing you once more. I am very sad about it, for
I love Bristol, and I do not love London; and besides, local and tem-
porary politics have become my aversion. They nar row the under-
standing, and at least acidulate the heart; but those two giants,
yclept Bread and Cheese, bend me in compliance. I must do some~
thing. If I go, farewell, Philosophy! farewell, the Muse! farewell.
my literary Fame!

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. . 643

“My Poems have been reviewed. The Monthly hascataracted
panegyric on me; the Critical cascaded it, and the Analytical drib-
bled it with civility. As to the British Critic, they durst not condemn.
and they would not praise—so contented themselves with commend-
ing me as a poet, and allowed me ‘tenderness of sentiment and ele-
gance of ﬁction.’ I am so anxious and uneasy that I really can not
Write any further. My kind and fraternal love to your Sister, and
my ﬁlial respects to your dear Mother, and believe me to be in my
head, heart, and soul, yours most sincerely,

“ S. T. COLERIDGE.”

The Editor can ﬁnd no further trace of the proposed connection
with the Morning Chronicle; but almost immediately after the date
of the preceding letter, Mr. Coleridge received an invitation from
Mrs. Evans, then of Darley, near Derby, to visit her with a view to
his undertaking the education of her sons. He and Mrs. C. accord-
ingly went to Darley, where the matter was arranged to the satisfac-
tion of both parties; and Mr. C. returned to Bristol alone with the
intention of visiting his Mother and Brother at Ottery before leaving
the south of England for what promised to be a long absence. But
this project, like others, ended in nothing. The other guardians of
Mrs. E.’s sons considered a public education proper for them, and the
announcement of this resolution to Mr. C. at Bristol stopped his further
progress, and recalled him to Darley. After a stay of some ten days
he left Darley with Mrs. C., and visited Mr. Thomas Hawkes at
Mosely, near Birmingham, and thence he wrote to Mr. Poole:—

TO MR. POOLE.

“MY BELOVED FRIEND, “August, 1796.

“I was at Matlock, the place moncdized by Bowles, when your
letter arrived at Darley, and I did not receive it till near a week after-
wards. My very dear Poole, I wrote to you the whole truth. After
the ﬁrst moment I was perfectly composed, and from that moment to
the present have continued calm and light-hearted. I had just quitted
you, and I felt myself rich in your love and esteem; and you do not
know how rich I feel myself. 0 ever found the same, and trusted
and beloved!

“ The last sentences of your letter affected me more than I can well
describe. Words and phrases which might perhaps have adequately
expressed my feelings, the cold-blooded children of this world have
anticipated and exhausted in their unmeaning gabble of ﬂattery} I
use common expressions, but they do not convey common feelings.
My heart has thanked you. I preached on Faith yesterday. I said
that Faith was inﬁnitely better than Good Works, as the cause is
greater than the effect,—as a fruitful tree is better than its fruits, and

644 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

as a friendly heart is of far higher value than the kindnesses which it
naturally and necessarily prompts. It is for that friendly heart that
[ now have thanked you, and which I so eagerly accept; for with re-
gard to settlement, I am likely to be better off now than before, as I
shall proceed to tell you.

“I arrived at Darley on the Sunday. * * * * * Monday I
spent at Darley. On the Tuesday Mrs. Coleridge, Miss Willett, and I
went in Mrs. Evans’s carriage to Matlock, where we stayed till Saturn
day. * * * Sunday we spent at Darley, and on Monday Sara,
Mrs. Evans, and myself visited Oakover, a seat famous for a few ﬁrst-
rates of Raﬁ'ael and Titian; thence to Ilam, a quiet vale hung round
with wood, beautiful beyond expression, and thence to Dovedale, a
place beyond expression tremendously sublime. Here, in a cavern at
the head of a divine little fountain, we dined on cold meat, and re-
turned to Darley, quite worn out with the succession of sweet sensa-
tions. On Tuesday we were employed in packing up, and on Wed-
nesday we were to have set off. * * * But on the Wednes-
day Dr. Crompton, who had just returned from Liverpool, called on
me, and made me the following proposal :—-that if I would take
a house in Derby and open a day-school, conﬁning my number to
twelve scholars, he would send three of his children on these terms
——till my number should be completed, he would allow me £100 a
year for them ;—-when the number should be complete, he would give
£21 a year for each of them :—the children to be with me from nine
to twelve, and from two to ﬁve—the last two hours to be employed
with their writing or drawing-master, who would be paid by the
parents. He has no doubt but that I shall complete my number al-
most instantly. Now 12x21 guineas 2 £252, and my mornings and
evenings at my own disposal = good things. So I accepted the offer,
it being understood that if any thing better offered, I should accept
it. There was not a house to be got in Derby; but I engaged with
a man for a house now building, and which is to be completed by the
8th of October, for £12 a year, and the landlord to pay all the taxes
except the Poor Rates. The landlord is rather an intelligent fellow,
and has promised me to Rumfordize the chimneys. The plan is to
commence in November; the intermediate time I spend at Bristol, at
which place I shall arrive, by the blessing of God, on Monday night
next. This week I spend with Mr. Hawkes, at Mosely, near Birming-
ham; in whose shrubbery I now write. I arrived here on Friday,
having left Derby on Friday. I preached here yesterday.

“If Sara will let me, I shall see you for a few days in the course
of a month. Direct your next letter to S. T. 0., Oxford Street, Bris-
tol. My love to your dear Mother and Sister, and believe me aﬁ‘ec—
tionately your ever faithful friend, S. T. COLERIDGE.

“ I shall write to my Mother and Brothers to-morrow.”

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. ' 645

At the same time Mr. C. wrote to Mr. Wade in terms similar to the
above, adding that at Matlock the time was completely ﬁlled up with
seeing the country, eating, concerts, are. “I was the ﬁrst ﬁddle;—
not in the concerts—but everywhere else, and the company would
not spare. me twenty minutes together. Sunday I dedicated to the
drawing up my sketch of education, which I meant to publish, to try
to get a school!” He speaks of “the thrice lovely valley of Ilam; a
vale hung with beautiful woods all round, except just at its entrance,
where, as you stand at the other end of the valley, you see a bare
bleak mountain standing as it were to guard the entrance. It is
Without exception the most beautiful place I ever visited.” * * *
He concludes :—-—“ I have seen a letter from Mr. William Roscoe,
author of the Life of Lorenzo the Magniﬁcent; a work in two 4to.
volumes (of which the whole ﬁrst edition sold in a month); it was
addressed to Mr. Edwards, the minister here, and entirely related to
me. Of me and my compositions he writes in terms of high admi-
ration, and concludes by desiring Mr. Edwards to let him know my
situation and prospects, and saying that if I would come and settle at
Liverpool, he thought a comfortable situation might be procured for
me. This day Edwards will write to him.”

Whilst at Birmingham, on The Watchman tour, Mr. 0. had been
introduced to Mr. Charles Lloyd, the eldest son of Mr. Lloyd, an em-
inent banker of that place. At Mosely they met again, and the re-
sult of an intercourse for a few days together was an ardent desire on
the part of Lloyd to domesticate himself permanently with a man
whose conversation was to him a revelation from Heaven. Nothing,
however, was settled on this occasion, and Mr. and Mrs. C. returned
to Bristol in the beginning of September. On the 24th of September
he writes to Mr. Poole:—

TO MR. POOLE.

“ MY DEAR, VERY DEAR POOLE, “ 24th September, 1796.
“The heart, thoroughly penetrated with the ﬂame of virtuous
friendship is in a state of glory; but lost it. should be exalted above
measure, there is given to it a thorn in the ﬂesh. I mean that where
the friendship of any person forms an essential part of a man’s hap-
piness, he will at times be pestered with the little jealousies and so-
licitudes of imbecile humanity. Since we last parted I have been
gloomily dreaming that you did not leave me so affectionately as you
were wont to do. Pardon this littleness of heart, and do not think
the worse of me for it. Indeed my soul seems so mantled and
wrapped round with your love and esteem, that even a dream of
losing but the smallest fragment of it makes me shiver, as if some
tender part of my nature were left uncovered and in nakedness.

646 - BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

“Last week I received a letter from Lloyd, informing me that his
parents had given their. joyful concurrence to his residence with me,
but that, if it were possible that I could be absent from home for
three or four days, his father wished particularly to see me. I con-
sulted Mrs. Coleridge, who advised me to go. * * Accordingly on
Saturday night I went by the mail to Birmingham, and was intro-
duced to the father, who is a mild man, very liberal in his ideas, and
in religion an allegorizing Quaker. I mean that all the apparently
irrational parts of his sect he allegorizes into signiﬁcations, which for
the most part you or I might assent to. We became well acquainted,
and he expressed himself thankful to Heaven, ‘ that his son was about
to be with me.’ He said he would write to me concerning money
matters, after his son had been some time under my roof.

“ On Tuesday morning I was surprised by a letter from Mr. Mau-
rice, our medical attendant, informing me that Mrs. C. was delivered
on Monday, 19th September, 1796, half-past two in the morning, of
a son, and that both she and the child were uncommonly well. I
was quite annihilated with the suddenness of the information, and re-
tired to my room to address myself to my Maker, but I could only
offer up to Him the silence of stupeﬁed feelings. I hastened home,
and Charles Lloyd returned with me. When I ﬁrst saw the child, I
did not feel" that thrill and overﬂowing of affection which I expected.
I looked on it with a melancholy gaze; my mind was intensely con-
tomplativc, and my heart only sad. But when two hours after, I saw
it at the bosom of its mother—on her arm—and her eye tearful and
watching its little features—then I was thrilled and melted, and gave
it the kiss of a father. * * * * The baby seems strong, and the
old nurse has over-persuaded my wife to discover a likeness to me in
its face,—no great compliment to me; for in truth I have seen hand-
somer babies in my life-time. Its name is David Hartley Coleridge.
I hope that ere he be a man, if God destines him for continuance in
this life, his head will be convinced of, and his heart saturated with,
the truths so ably supported by that great master of Christian Phi-
losophy.

“Charles Lloyd wins upon me hourly; his heart is uncommonly
pure, his affections delicate, and his benevolence enlivened, but not
sicklied, by sensibility. He is assuredly a man of great genius; but
it must be in a téte-d-téte with one whom he loves and esteems that
his colloquial powers open :—and this arises not from reserve or want
of simplicity, but from having been placed in situations, where for
years together he met with no congenial minds, and where the con-
trariety of his thoughts and notions to the thoughts and notions of
those around him induced the necessity of habitually suppressing his
feelings. His joy and gratitude to Heaven for the circumstance of
his domestication with me, I can scarcely describe to'you; and I be-

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 647

Iiave his ﬁxed plans are of being always with me. His father told
me, that if he saw that his son had formed habits of severe economy,
he should not insist upon his adopting any profession; as then his
fair share of his (the father’s) wealth would be sufficient for him.

“ My dearest Poole, can you conveniently receive Lloyd and me in
the course of -a week? I have much, very much, to say to you, and
to consult with you about; for my heart is heavy respecting Derby;
and my feelings are so dim and huddled, that though I can, I am sure,
communicate them to you by my looks and broken sentences, I
scarcely know how to convey them in a letter. C. Lloyd also wishes
much to know you personally. I shall write on the other side of the
paper two of his sonnets composed by him in one evening at Bir-
mingham. The latter of them alludes to the conviction of the truth
of Christianity, which he had received from me. Let me hear from
you by post immediately, and give my kind love to your sister and
dear mother, and likewise my love to that young man with the soul-
beaming face, which I recollect much better than I do his name.”
(M. George 'Ward of Over Stowey.) “God bless you, my dear friend,
and believe me with deep affection yours,

“S. T. COLERIDGE.”

The reader of Coleridge’s Poemswill remember the beautiful lines
To a young Friend, on his proposing to domestic-ate with the Author.
(P. W., p. 186.) They were written at this time and addressed to
Lloyd; and it may be easily conceived what a deep impression of de-
light they would make on a mind and temperament so reﬁned and
enthusiastic as his. The Sonnet To a Friend who asked how I felt
when the Nurse ﬁrst presented my infant to me—(p. 190) is the metri-
cal version of a passage in the foregoing letter. A short time before
the birth of little Hartley 0., Mr. Southey had returned to Bristol
from Portugal, and was in lodgings nearly opposite to Mr. Coleridge’s
house in Oxford Street. There had been a quarrel between them on
the occasion of the abandonment of the American scheme, which was
ﬁrst announced by Mr. Southey, and he and Coleridge had ceased to
have any intercourse. But a year’s absence had dissipated all angry
feelings, and after Mr. C.’s' return from Birmingham in the end of
September, Southey took the ﬁrst step, and sent over a slip of paper
with a word or two of conciliation.* This was immediately followed
by an interview, and in an hour’s time these two extraordinary youths
were arm in arm again. They were indeed of essentially opposite
tempers, powers, and habits ; yet each well knew and appreciated the

* The paper contained a sentence in English from Schiller’s Conspiracy of Fiesco at
Genoa. Fiesko! Fiesko! (In raumst einen Platz an meiner Brust, den das Menschenge-
schlecht, drczfach genommcn, nicht mehr bcsctzen wird. F iesco! Fiesco! thou leavost a

Void in my bosom, which the human race, thrice told, will never fill up. Act v.80. 16.—
8. C.

048 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

other,-—perhaps even the more deeply from the contrast between
them. Circumstances separated them in after-life; but Mr. Coleridge
recorded his testimony to Southey’s character in this work,* and in
his Will referred to it as expressive of his latest convictions.

On the lst of November, 1796, Coleridge wrote the following letter
to his friend :— -

“MY BELOVED POOLE, “November 1, 1796.
“Many causes have concurred to prevent my writing to you, but
all together they do not amount to a reason. I have seen a narrow-
necked bottle, so full of water, that when turned upside down not a.
drop has fallen out—something like this has been the case with me.
My heart has been full, yea, crammed with anxieties about my resi—
dence near you. I so ardently desire it, that any disappointment
would chill all my faculties, like the ﬁngers of death. And entertain-
ing wishes so irrationally strong, I necessarily have day-mair dreams
that something will prevent it—so that since I quitted you, I have
been gloomy as the month which even now has begun to lower and
rave on us. I verily believe, or rather I have no doubt that I should
have written to you within the-period of my promise, if I had not
pledged myself for a certain gift of my Muse to poor Tommy: and
alas! she has been too ‘ sunk on the ground in dimmest heaviness’ to
permit me to triﬂe. Yet intending it hourly I deferred my letter a la
mode the procrastinator! Ah ! me. I wonder not that the hours ﬂy
so sweetly by me—for they pass unfreighted with the duties which

they came to demand !
as a: at: a: a: an: * >1:

“ * * * I wrote a long letter to Dr. Crompton, and received
from him a very kind letter, which I will send you in the parcel I am
about to convey by Milton.

“My Poems are come to a second edition, that is the ﬁrst edition
is sold. I shall alter the lines of the Joan of Arc, and make one poem
entitled Progress of European Liberty, a Vision ;—the ﬁrst line
“ Auspicious Reverence! hush all meaner song,” &c. and begin the
volume with it. Then the 0hatterton,—Pimies’ Parlor,—Eﬂ'usions
27 and 28—To a young Ass—Tell me on what holy ground—The
Sigh—Epitaph on an Infant——The Man of Ross—Spring in a Vil-
lage—Edmund—Lines with a poem on the French Revolution—Seven
Sonnets, namely, those at pp. 45,59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66 Shurton
Bars—My pensive Sara—Low was our pretty Cot—Religious Mu-
sings ;——-these in the order I have placed them. Then another title-
page with Ju-venilia on it, and an advertisement signifying that the
Poems 'were retained by the desire of some friends, but that they are
to be considered as being in the Author’s own opinion of very in-

 

. Chap. iii. pp. 18‘2-90.—-S. C.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMEN '1 . 649

ferior merit. In this sheet will be Absence—La Fayette—Genevieve
-—Kosciusko—Autnmnal Moon—To the Nightingale—Imitation of
Spenser—A Poem written in early youth. All the others will be
ﬁnally and totally omitted. It is strange that in the Sonnet to Schiller
I should have written—‘ that hour I would have wished to die—-
Lest—aught more mean might stamp me mortal ;’—the bull never
struck me till Charles Lloyd mentioned it. The sense is evident
enough, but the word is ridiculously ambiguous.

“Lloyd is a very good fellow, and most certainly a young man of
great genius. He desires his kindest love to you. I will write again
by Milton, for I really can write no more now—I am so depressed.
But I will ﬁll up the letter with poetry of mine, or Lloyd’s or Sou-
they’s. Is your Sister married ? May the Almighty bless her !—-may
he enable her to make all her new friends as pure, and mild, and
amiable as herself !———I pray in the fervency of my soul. Is your dear
Mother well? My ﬁlial respects to her. Remember me to Ward.
David Hartley Coleridge is stout, healthy, and handsome. He is the
very miniature of me. Your grateful and affectionate friend and
brother, S. T. COLERIDGE.”

Speaking of lines by Mr. Southey, called, Insoriptionjbr the Ceno-
taph at Ermenoneille,* written in his letter, Mr. C. says, “This is
beautiful, but instead of Ermenonville and Rousseau put Valchiusa
and Petrarch. I do not particularly admire Rousseau. Bishop Tay-
lor, old Baxter, David Hartley, and the Bishop of Cloyne are my
men.”

The following Sonnet, transcribed in the foregoing Letter, has not
been printed. ‘It puts in,’ he says, ‘no claim to poetry, but it is a
most faithful picture of my feelings on a very interesting event.’ See
the Letter to Mr. Poole of 24th September, 1796. This Sonnet shows
in a remarkable way how little the Unitarianism, which Mr. 0. pro-
fessed at this time, operated on his fundan'lental feelings as a catholic
Christian.

0n receiving a Letter informing me of the birth of a Son.

When they did greet me Father, sudden awe
Weigh’d down my spirit: I retir’d and knelt
Seeking the throne of grace, but inly felt

No heavenly visitation upwards draw

My feeble mind, nor cheering ray impart.

Ah me! before the Eternal Sire I brought

Th’ unquiet silence of confused thought

And hopeless feelings: my o’erwhelmed heart
Trembled, and vacant tears stream’d down my face.
And now once more, 0 Lord 3' to thee 1 bond,

 

* Afterwards included among the Minor Poems of Mr. 8,—8. n.
VOL. 111 2 E

' < n I-.. «dﬂpﬂﬂu‘ .13.; _-

650 BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARIA.

Lover of souls ! and groan for future grace,

That, ere my babe youth’s perilous maze have trod,
Thy overshadowing Spirit may descend,

And he be born again, achild of God!

 

It was not till the summer of 1797 that the second edition of Mr.
O.’s Poems actually appeared, before which time he had seen occasion
to make many alterations in the proposed arrangement of, and had
added some of his most beautiful compositions to, the collection. It
is curious, however, that he never varied the diction of the Sonnet to
Schiller in the particular to which he refers in the preceding Letter.

TO MR. POOLE.

“5, November, 1796.

"Thanks, my heart’s warm thanks to you, my beloved Friend,
for your tender letter! Indeed I did not deserve so kind a one; but
by this time you have received my last. To live in a beautiful coun-
try, and to inure myself as much as possible to the labors of the ﬁeld,
have been for this year past my dream of the day, my sigh at mid—
night. But to enjoy these blessings near you, to see you daily, to tell
you all my thoughts in their ﬁrst birth, and to hear yours, to be
mingling identities with you, as it were !—the vision-weaving Fancy
has indeed often pictured such things, but Hope never dared whisper
a promise. Disappointment! Disappointment! dash not from my
trembling hand this bowl, which almost touches my lips. Envy me
not this immortal draught, and I will forgive thee all thy persecu-
tions ! Forgive thee ! Impious! I will bless thee, black-vested
minister of Optimism, stern pioneer of happiness! Thou hast been
the cloud before me from the day that I left the ﬂesh-pots of Egypt,
and was led through the way of a wilderness—the cloud that had
been guiding me to a land ﬂowing with milk and honey- the milk of
innocence, the honey of friendship !

“I wanted such a letter as yours, for I am very unwell. On Wed-
nesday night I was seized with an intolerable pain from my right
temple to the tip of my right shoulder, including my right eye, cheek,
jaw, and that side of the throat. I was nearly frantic, and ran about
the house almost naked, endeavoring by every means to excite sensa-
tion in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by
creating a division. It continued from one in the morning till half-
past ﬁve, and left me pale and fainty. It came on ﬁtfully, but not so

\violently, several times on Thursday, and began severer threats

towards night; but I took between 60 and 7 0 drops of laudanum, and
sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth began to Open. On Friday it
only niggled, as if the Chief had departed, as from a conquered place.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 651

and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he had evacuated the
Corrica, and a few straggling pains only remained. But this morning
he returned in full force, and his name is Legion. Giant-Fiend of a
hundred hands, with a shower of arrowy death pangs he transpierced
me, and then he became a Wolf and lay gnawing my bones l—I am
not mad, most noble Festus! but in sober sadness I have suffered this
day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right
cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the
focus of some invisible burning-glass, which concentrated all the rays
of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether
nervous, and that it originates either in severe application, or exces-
sive anxiety. My beloved Poole, in excessive anxiety I believe it
might originate. I have a blister under my right ear, and 1 take 25
drops of laudanum every ﬁve hours, the ease and spirits gained by
which have enabled me to write to you this ﬁighty, but not exaggera-
ting, account. With a gloomy wantonness of imagination I had been
coquetting with the hideous possibles of disappointment. I drank
fears like wormwood—yea—made myself drunken with bitterness ;
for my ever-shaping and distrustful mind still mingled gall-drops, till
out of the cup of Hope I almost poisoned myself with Despair.

“Your letter is dated 2d November; I wrote to you on the lst.
Your Sister was married on that day ; and on that day I several times
felt my heart overﬂowed with such tendernesses for her, as made me
repeatedly ejaculate prayers in her behalf. Such things are strange.
It may be superstition to think about such correspondences; but it is
a superstition which softens the heart, and leads to no evil. We will
call on your dear Sister as soon as I am quite well, and in the mean-
time I will write a few lines to her.

“I am anxious beyond measure to be in the country as soon as pos—
sible. Iwould it were possible to get a temporary residence till Ads-
come is ready for us. I wish we could have three rooms in William
Poole’s large house for the winter. Will you try to look out for a ﬁt
servant for us,—simple of heart, physiognomically handsome, and
scientiﬁc in vaccimulgence. That last word is a new one, but soft in
sound, and full of expression. Vaccimulgencel I am pleased with
the word. Write to me all things about yourself; where I can not
advise, I can console; and communication, which doubles joy, halves
'sorrow.

“Tell me whether you think it at all possible to make any terms
with You know, I would not wish to touch with the edge
of the nail of my great toe the line which should be but half a bar-
lay-corn out of the circle of the most trembling delicacy! I will write
to Cruikshanks to-morrow, if God permit me. God bless and protect
you, Friend! Brother ! Beloved I Sarah’s best love and Lloyd’s.

 

652 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

David Hartley is well. My ﬁlial love to your dear Mother. Love to
Ward. Little Tommy! I often think of theei
“S. T. COLERIDGE.”

 

Charles Lloyd, spoken of in a letter of my Father’s in the last chapter as “ a young man
of great genius," was born Feb. 12th, 1775, died at Versailles Jan. 15th, 1839. He pub-
lished sonnets and other poems in conjunction with my Father and Mr. Lamb, in 1797
and these and Mr. Lamb‘s were published together, apart from my Father’s, the year af-
terwards. “ While Lamb,” says Serjeant Talfourd, “ was enjoying habits of the closest
intimacy with Coleridge in London, he was introduced by him to a young poet, whose
name has often been associated with his—Charles Lloyd—the son of a wealthy banker at
Birmingham, who had recently cast off the trammels ofthe Society of Friends, and, smit-
ten with the love of poetry, had become a student at the University of Cambridge. There
he had been attracted to Coleridge by the fascination of his discourse; and, having been
admitted to his regard, was introduced by him to Lamb. Lloyd was endeared both to
Lamb and Coleridge by a very amiable disposition and a pensive cast of thought ; but his
intellect had little resemblance to that of either. He wrote, indeed, pleasing verses, and
with great facility,—a facility fatal to excellence ; but his mind was chieﬂy remarkable for
the ﬁne power of analysis which distinguishes his London, and other of his later compo—
sitions. In this power of discriminating and distinguishing—carried to a pitch almost of
painfulness—Lloyd has scarcely ever been equalled, and his poems, though rugged in
point of versitication, will be found by those who will read them with the calm attention
they require, replete with critical and moral suggestions of the highest value.”

Beside three or four volumes of poetry, Mr. Lloyd wrote novels z—Edmund Oliver, pub—
lished soon after he became acquainted with my Father, and Isabel, of later date. After
his marriage he settled at. the lakes. “At Brathay” (the beautiful river Brathay neat
Ambleside), says Mr. Dequincey, “lived Charles Lloyd, and he could not in candor be
considered a common man. He was somewhat too Rousseauish, but he had in conversa-
tion very extraordinary powers for analysis of a certain kind, applied to the philosophy
of manners, and the most delicate nuances of social life; and his Translations of Alﬂeri,
together with his own poems, show him to have been an accomplished scholar.”

My Mother has often told me how amiable Mr. Lloyd was as a youth ; how kind to her
little Hartley; how well content with cottage accommodation; how painfully sensitive in
all that related to the affections. I remember him myself, as he was in middle life, when
he and his excellent wife were most friendly to my brothers, who were school-fellows with
their sons. I did not at that time fully appreciate Mr. Lloyd’s intellectual character, but
was deeply impressed by the exceeding refinement and sensibility marked in his counte-
nance and manners—(for he was a gentleman of the old school without its formality),—
by the ﬂuent elegance of his discourse, and, above all, by the eloquent pathos, with which
he described his painful mental experiences and wild waking dreams, caused by a dc-
ranged state of the nervous system. Le cz'cl nous rend toujours les biens qu’ fl nous
prodigue. Nervous derangement is a dear price to pay even for genius and sensibility.
Too often, even if not the direct effect of these privileges. it is the accompanying draw-
back; hypochondria may almost be called the intellectual man’s malady.

The Duke d’Ormond, which was written 524 years before its publication in 1822, that is
in 1798, soon after Mr. Lloyd’s residence at Stowey, has great merit as a dramatic poem,
in the delineation of character and states of mind; the plot is forced and unnatural ; not
only that, but what is worse, in point of effect, it is tediously subjective: and we feel the
actions of the piece to be improbable while the feelings are true to nature; yet there is
tragic effect in the scenes of the d'enouement. I understand what it was in Lloyd’s mind
which Mr. Dequincey calls Itoussrauz‘sh. Ile dwelt agood deal on the temptations to
which human nature is subject, when passions, not in themselves unworthy, become,
from circumstances, sins if indulged, and the source of sin and misery; but the effect of
this piece is altogether favorable to virtue, and to the parent and nurse of virtue, a pious
conviction of the moral government of the world. The play contains an anatomy of pas~
men, not a picture of it in a concrete form, such as the works of Richardson and of Rous-

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 653

ne'au present, a picture ﬁtted to excite feelings of baneful effect upon the mind, rather
than to awaken thought, which counteracts all such mischief. Indeed I think no man
would have sought my Father’s daily society who was not predominantly given to reﬂec-
tion. What is very striking in this play is the character of the heroine, whose earnes‘
and scrupulous devotion to her mother occasions the partial estrangement of her lover,
d’Ormond, and, in its consequences, an overwhelming misery, which overturns her reason,
and causes her death, and thus, through remorse, works the conversion of those guilty per-
sons of the drama, who have been slaves to passion, but are not all “ enslaved, nor wholly
vile.” Strong is the contrast which this play presents, in its exhibition of the female
character,with that of the celebrated French and German writers, who have treated simi-
lar subjects. Men write,—- I have heard a painter say, men even paint,—as they feel and
as they are. Goethe’s Margaret has been thought equal to Shakspeare’s Ophelia and Des-
demona; in some reSpects it is so ; but it is like a pot of sweet ointment into which some
tainting matter has fallen. I think no Englishman of Goethe’s genius and sensibility
would have described a maiden, whom it was his intention to represent, though frail on
one point, yet lovely and gentle-hearted, as capable of being induced to give her poor
old mother a sleeping potion. “ It will do her no harm.” But the risk l—aﬂ'ection gives
the wisdom of the serpent where there would else be but the simplicity of the dove. A
true Englishman would have felt that such an act, so bold and undaughterly, blighted at
once the lily ﬂower, making it “ put on darkness” and“ fall into the portion of weeds and
out-worn faces.” In Mr. Lloyd’s youthful drama even the dissipated Marchioness, who
tempts and yields to temptation, is made to play a noble part in the end, won back from
sin by generous feeling and strong sense : and the description of Julia Villeneuve’s
tender care of her mother is so characteristic of the author, that [can not help quoting
part of it here, though it is not among the powerful parts of the play.

Describing how her aged parent’s extreme inﬁrmity rendered her incapable, withou
asacriﬁce, of leaving the small dwelling to which she had been accustomed, and how
this had prevented her even from hinting her lover’s proposal for their union, Julia says.

“Though blind
She loved this little spot. A happy wife
There lived she with her lord. It was a home
In which an only brother, long since dead,
And I, were educated: ’twas to her
As the whole world. Its scanty garden plot,
The hum of bees hived there, which still she heard
On a warm summer’s day, the scent of flowers,
The honey-suckle which trailed round its porch,
Its orchard, field, and trees, her uniVerse !—
I knew she could not long be spared to me.
Her sufferings, when alleviated best,
Were most acute : and I could best perform
That sacred task. I wished to lengthen out,—
By consecraiing to her every moment,—
Her being to myself! 8w.”

“Could I leave her ?—
I might have seen her,—such was D’Ormond’s plea—
Each day, But who her evening hours could cheer?
Her long and solitary evening hours ?—
Talk her, or haply sing her, to her sleep ‘2
Read to her? Smooth her pillow ? Lastly make
Morning seem morning with a daughter’s welcome ?
For morning’s light ne‘er visited her eyes !—
W'ell ! I refused to quit her! D’Ormond grew
Absent, reserved, nay splenetic and petulant!
He left the Province, nor has he once seat
A kind inquiry so t’ alleviate
His heavy absence.”

Beritola is Italian in form, as much as Wieland’s Oberon, but the spirit is that of the
Englishman, Charles Lloyd; it contains the same vivid descriptions of mental suﬂ‘erlng,

654 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

the same reﬂective display of the lover’s passion, the same sentiments of deep domestic
tenderness, uttered as from the heart and with asyccial air of reality, as The Duke D’Or-
mond and the author’s productions in general. 'Ihe versification is rather better than
that of his earlier poems, but the want of ease and harmony in the flow of the verse is a
prevailing defect in Mr. Lloyd’s poetry, and often makes it appear prosaic, even where
the thought is not so.

This pathetic sonnet is one of a very interesting set, on the death of Priscilla Farmer,
the author’s maternal grandmother, included in the joint volume:

“ Oh, She was almost speechless! nor could hold
Awakening converse with me! (I shall bless
No more the modulated tenderness
Of that dear voice!) Alas, ’twas shrunk and cold
Her honor‘d face! yet, when I sought to Speak,
Through her half-open’d eyelids She did send
Faint looks, that said, “I would be yet thy friend !”
And (0 my chok'd breast!) e’eu on that shrunk cheek
I saw one slow tear roll! my hand She took,
Placing it on her heart—I heard her sigh
“ ’Tis too, too much !" ’Twas Love’s last agony!
I tore me from Her! ’Twas her latest look,
Her latest accents—O my heart, retain
That look, those accents, till we meet again !”—S. C.

 

CHAPTER IV.

(From Mr. VVordsworth’s Stanzas, written in my Pocket—copy of Thomson’s Castle 0]
hdolence.)
“With him there often walked in friendly guise,

Or lay upon the moss by brook or tree,

A noticeable Man with large gray eyes,

And a pale face that seemed undoubtedly

As if a blooming face it ought to be ;

lleavy his low-hung lip did 0ft appear,

Deprest by weight of musing Phantasy;

Profound his forehead was, though not severe;
Yet some did think that he had little business here :
“ Sweet heaven forefend! his was a lawful right:

Noisy he was, and gamesome as a boy ;

Ilis limbs would toss about him with delight,

Like branches when strong winds the trees annoy.

Nor lacked his calmer hours device or toy

To banish listlessness and irksome care ;

He would have taught you how you might employ

Yourself; and many did to him repair,—
And certes not in vain; he had inventions rare.”

FOR Josiah Wade, the gentleman to Whom the letters, placed at
the beginning of the last chapter, were written, the ﬁne portrait of
Mr. Coleridge by Allston (nearly full length, in oils), was painted at
Rome in 1806,—I believe in the spring of that year. Mr. Allston
himself spoke of it, as in his opinion faithfully representing his friend’s
features and expression, such as they commonly appeared. His coun

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 655

tenance, he added, in his high poetic mood, was quite beyond the
painter’s art: “it was indeed spirit made visible.”

Mr. Coleridge was thirty-three years old when this portrait was
painted, but it would be taken for that of a man of forty. The youth-
ful, even boyish look, which the original retained for some years after
boyhood, must rather suddenly have given place, to a premature ap-
pearance, ﬁrst of middle-agedness, then of old age, at least in his gen-
eral aspect, though in some points of personal appearance,——his fair
smooth skin and “large gray eyes,’ “at once the clearest and the
deepest”—so a friend lately described them to me,—-“that I ever
saw,” he grew not old to the last. Serjeant Talfourd thus speaks of
what he was at three or four and forty. “Lamb used to say that he
was inferior to what he had been in his youth; but I can scarcely
believe it; at least there is nothing in his early writing which gives
any idea of the richness of his mind so lavishly poured out at this
time in his happiest moods. Although he looked much older than he
was, his hair being silvered all over, and his person tending to cor-
pulency, there was about him no trace of bodily sickness or mental
decay, but rather an air of voluptuous repose. His benignity of man-
ner placed his auditors entirely at their case; and inclined them to
listen delighted to the sweet low tone in which he began to discourse
on some high theme. At ﬁrst his tones were conversational: he
seemed to dally with the shallows of the subject and with fantastic
images which bordered it: but gradually the thought grew deeper,
and the voice deepened with the thought; the stream gathering
strength, seemed to bear along with it all things which opposed its
progress, and blended them with its current; and stretching away
among regions tinted with ethereal colors, was lost at airy distance
in the horizon of fancy. Coleridge was sometimes induced to repeat
portions of Olw'istabel, then enshrined in manuscript from eyes pro-
fane, and gave a bewitching effect to its wizard lines. But more pe-
culiar in its beauty than this was his recitation of Kubla Khan. As
be repeated the passage——

A damsel with a dulcimor
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played
Singing of Mount Abora!

his voice seemed to mount and melt into air, as the images grew more
visionary, and the suggested associations more remote.”

Mr. Dequincey thus describes him at thirty-four, in the summer
season of1807, about a year and a half after the date of Mr. Allston’s
portrait.

“I had received directions for ﬁnding out the house where Cole-
ridge was visiting; and in riding down a main street of Bridgewater,

“-1-” v. Tﬂ_‘_,<—l—~.v.’ ;;
warm. J__..

w

- - -*~«.-o;tn_43
._.. a, A

656 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

I noticed a gateway corresponding to the description given me.
Under this was standing, and gazing about him, a man whom I shall
describe. In height he might seem to be above ﬁve feet eight (he
was in reality about an inch and a half taller, but his ﬁgure was of
an order which drowns the height); his person was broad and full,
and tended even to corpulence: his complexion was fair, though not
what painters technically style fair, because it was associated with
black hair: his eyes were large and soft in their expression: and it
was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess, which mixed
with their light, that I recognized my object. This was Coleridge. I
examined him steadfastly for a minute or more: and it struck me
that he saw neither myself nor any other object in the street. He
was in a deep reverie, for I had dismounted, made two or three tri-
ﬂing arrangements at an inn door, and advanced close to him, before
he had apparently become conscious of my presence. The sound of
my voice, announcing my own name, ﬁrst awoke him; he started,
and for a moment, seemed at a loss to understand my purpose or his
own situation ; for be repeated rapidly a number of words which had
no relation to either of us. There was no mauvvaise honte in his man-
ner, but simple perplexity, and an apparent difﬁculty in recovering
his position among daylight realities. This little scene over, he re-
ceived me with a kindness of manner so marked that it might be
called gracious.

“ Coleridge led me to a drawing-room and rang the bell for refresh-
ments, and omitted no point of a courteous reception. He told me
that there would be a very large dinner-party on that day, which
perhaps might be disagreeable to a perfect stranger; but, if not, he
could assure me of a most hospitable welcome from the family. I
was too anxious to see him, under all aspects, to think of declining
this invitation. And these little points of business being settled,
Coleridge, like some great river, the Orellana, or the St. Lawrence,
that had been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, and
suddenly recovers its volume of waters, and its mighty music, swept,
at once, as if returning to his natural business, into a continuous strain
of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most ﬁnely
illustrated, and traversing the most spacious ﬁelds of thought, by tran-
sitions. the most just and logical, that it was possible to conceive.”

I will now present him as he appeared to William Hazlitt in the
February of 1798, when he was little more than ﬁve-and-twenty; and
this brings him back to the period of his life at which the present‘
Memoir concludes. .

“It was in January, 17 98, that I rose one morning before daylight,
to walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach.
Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk
as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. ' 657

I1 3/ a des impressions que ni le temps ni les circonstcmces peiwent ef-
facer. Dusse-je cicre des siécles entiers, le down temps de ma je-unesse
ne peut renaitre pour moi, ni s’efacer jamais dans ma, mémoire.
When I got there, the organ was playing the hundredth psalm, and
when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text. ‘He
departed again into a mountain himself alone.’ As he gave out this
text his voice ‘ rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes ;’ and when
he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and
distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had
echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer
might have ﬂoated in solemn silence through the universe. The'idea
of St. John came into my mind, of one crying in the wilderness, who
had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey.
The preacher then lanched into his subject, like an eagle dallying
with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war—upon church
and state—not their alliance, but their separation—on the spirit of
the world, and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as op-
posed to one another. He talked of those who had inscribed the
cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore. He made a
poetical and pastoral excursion, and to show the fatal effects of war,
drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving
his team aﬁeld, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his ﬂock, as
though he should never be old, and the same poor country lad,
crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse,
turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end
with powder and pomatum, a long one at his back, and tricked out
in the ﬁnery of the profession of blood.

 

“ ‘ Such were the notes our once loved poet sung :’

and for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard
the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together,
Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanc-
tion of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned
home well satisﬁed. The sun that was still laboring pale and wan
through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the
good cause; and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half melted
on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in

them.”
A glowing dawn was his, but noon’s full blaze

Of perfect day ne’er ﬂll’d his heav’n with radiance.
Scarce were the ﬂow’rets on their stems upraised

When sudden shadows cast an evening gloom

O’er those bright skies l—yet still those skies were lovely ;
The roses of the morn yet lingered there

When stars began to peep,—nor yet exhaled,

Fresh dew-drops glittered near the glow-worm’s lamp,
And many a snatch of lurk-like melody

Birds of the shade trilled forth ’mid plaintive warblinc.

658 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

CHAPTER V.

“ Learning. power, and time,
(Too much of all) thus wasting in vain war
Of fervid colloquy. Sickness, ’tis trut,
Whole years of weary days, besieged him close,
Even to the gates and inlets of his life .’
But it is true, no less, that strenuous, ﬁrm,
And with a natural gladness, he maintained
The citadel unconquered, and in joy
Was strong to follow the delightful Muse.”

WITH the lel.';er of November 5, which concludes Chapter iii. the
biographical sketch left by Mr. Coleridge’s late Editor comes to an
end, and at the present time I can carry it no further than to add, that
in January, 1798, my Father removed with his wife and child, the
latter then four months old, to a cottage at Stowey, which was his
home for three years; that from that home, in company with Mr.
and Miss Wordsworth, he went, in September, 17 98, to Germany, and
that he spent fourteen months in that country, during which period
the Letters called Satyrane’s were written. Here, however, at the
end of this brief personal record, I may best introduce the. remarks
which have been made, and details which have been given, respect-
ing Mr. Coleridge’s services to The Morning Post and The Courier,
spoken of by him in Chap. x. That representation has been
excepted against by Mr. Stuart, who was Editor of the former Paper
when my Father wrote for it, and half preprietor of the other. The
view which he takes of the case he has already made public ;* he
seems to be of opinion, that the language used by Mr. Coleridge in
this work is calculated to give an impression of the amount of his
actual performances on behalf of those papers beyond what the
facts warrant; I have not thought it necessary or proper to with-
draw that portion of Chapter x. of which he complains, nor do I
see that it must necessarily bear a construction at variance with
his own statements : but neither would I republish it without giving
Mr. Stuart’s account of matters to which it refers, extracted from
letters written .by him to Mr. Coleridge’s late Editor. He writes as
follows from Wykham Park, on the 7th of October, 1835.

“In August, 1795, I began to conduct The Morning Post, the sale
of which was so low, only 350 per day, that a gentleman at that time
made a bet with me that the Paper was actually extinct.

“At Christmas, '17 97, on the recommendation of Mr. Mackintosh,

' In articles on Air. Coleridge, the Poet, and his Newspaper writings, d-c., in the Gen
“man’s Magazine of May, June, July, August, of 1838.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMEN ’1‘. 659

Coleridge sent me several pieces of poetry; up to the time of his
going to Germany, about 12 pieces.* Prose writing I never expected.
from him at that time. He went to Germany in the Summer of 1798.

“He returned, I believe, about the end of 17 99,1 and proposed to
me to come to London to reside near me, and write daily for the
paper. I took lodgings for him in King Street, Covent Garden. The
Morning Post then selling 2,000 daily. Coleridge wrote some things,
particularly, I remember, Comments on Lord Grenville’s reply to
Bonaparte’s Overtures of Peace, in January, 1800. But he totally
failed in the plan he proposed of writing daily on the daily occur-
rences.”

Mr. Stuart then gives three short letters of Mr. C.’s, showing how
often he was ill and incapable of writing for the paper, and the be.
ginning of a long one, dated Greta Hall, Keswick, 19th July, 1800, in
which he promises a second part of Pitt and Bonaparte, but speaks
of it as uncertain whether or no he should be able to continue any
regular species of employment for Mr. S.’s paper.

After noting that Mr. C. left London at the end of his first half-
year’s engagement, Mr. S. brings forward more letters, containing ex-
cuses on account of illness, but promising a number of essays: two
on the war, as respecting agriculture; one on the raising of rents;
one on the riots (corn riots in 1800); and one on the countenance by
Government of calumnies on the King ;-—-promising also a second part
of Pitt and Bonaparte, which Mr. S. supposes he was constantly dun-
ning for, the Character of Pitt, published in The M. P. early in 1800,
having made a great sensation; proposing a letter to Sir F. Burdett
on solitary imprisonment, and that all these should be published in
pamphlets, after they had been divided into pieces, and published in
the M. P., he doubting whether they were of value for a newspaper.
Some of these essays appear to have been sent; it is not specified
which or how many.

“Early in 1807,” Mr. S. says, “I was conﬁned by a violent fever.
Several weeks I was delirious, and to my astonishment, when I re-
covered, Pitt was out of place, and Home Tooke in Parliament. I
did not resume the conduct of the Paper till the spring. The 1’apei
suffered loss.”

The next letter, dated May, 1801, Keswick, speaks of ill health, and
“the habits of irresolution which are its worst consequences,” forbid-
ding him to rely on himself. Mr. S. had solicited him to write, and
offered terms, and it appears that he did form a new engagement for

* “ Short pieces,” Mr. Stuart calls them in the Gent’s. Mag. But among them was
France,lan ode, which was ﬁrst published in the M. P. in the beginning of 1798, and re-
published in the same Paper some years afterwards, and must have helped to give it a
decent poetical reputation, I think.

1‘ Nov. 27, 1799.

660 BIOGRAPHIA ,LITERARIA.

the Paper about that time. In a letter of Sept. 1801, he says, “I am
not so blinded by authorship as to believe that what I have done is
at all adequate to the money I have received.” Mr. Stuart then pro-
duces a letter with the postmark Bridgewater, of Jan. 19, 1802.
These letters show, he says, that in July and October 1800, in May
1801, on the 30th of September 1801, Coleridge was at Keswick, that
in January 1802, he was at Stowey, that he could not therefore have
materially contributed to the success of The Morning Post. “In this
last year,” says Mr. Stuart, “his Letters to Judge Fletcher, and on
Mr. Fox, at Paris, were published.” The former were not published
till 1814. The six letters appeared in The Courier on Sept. 20th,
29th, Oct. 21st, Nov. 2d, Dec. 3d, 6th, 9th and 10th. The latter ap-
peared on the 4th and 9th of Nov. 1802. Mr. Stuart speaks of it as
a mistake in those who have supposed that the coolness of Fox to Sir
James Mackintosh was occasioned by his ascribing this “violent
philippic,” as Lamb called it, to him (Sir James). “On those to
Judge Fletcher,” he says, “and many other such essays, as being
rather ﬁt for pamphlets than newspapers, I did not set much value.
On this subject hear Coleridge himself in a letter dated June 4th,
1811, when he was engaged with Mr. Street. “Freshness of effect
belongs to a newspaper and distinguishes it from a literary book: the
former being the Zenith and the latter the Nadir, with a number of
intermediate degrees, occupied by pamphlets, magazines, reviews,
&c. Besides, in a daily paper, with advertisements proportioned to
its large sale, what is deferred must four times in ﬁve be extinguished.
A newspaper is a market for ﬂowers and vegetables, rather than a
granary or conservatory; and the drawer of its Editor a common bu-
rial ground, not a catacomb for embalmed mummies, in which the de-
funct are preserved to serve in after-times as medicines for theliving.”
This freshness of effect Coleridge scarcely ever gave to either The
Morning Post or The Courier. He was occasionally in London
during my time, in The Morning Post it is true, but he never gave
the daily bread. He was mostly at Keswick. * * * * A few
months in 1800, and a few weeks in 1802, that was all the time he
ever wasted on The Morning Post, and as for The Courier, it ac-
cepted his proffered services as a favor done to him,” &c.

After speaking again of the former paper, he says, “I could give
many more reasons for its rise than those I gave in my former letter,
and among others Iwould include Coleridge’s occasional writings,
though to them I would not set down more than one hundredth part
of the cause of success, much as I esteemed his writings and much as
I would have giver. for a regular daily assistance by him. But he
never wrote a thing I requested, and, I think I may add, he never
wrote a thing I expected. In proof of this he promised me at my
earnest and endless request, the character of Bonaparte. which he

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 661

himself, at ﬁrst of his own mere motion, had promised; he promised
it letter after letter, year after year, for ten years (last for The Courier),
yet never wrote it. Could Coleridge and I place ourselves thirty-
eight years back, and he be so far a man of business as to write three
or four hours a day, there is nothing I would not pay for his assist-
ance; I would take him into partnership,” (which, I think, my Father
would have declined,) “ and I would enable him to make a large for-
tune. To write the leading paragraph of a newspaper I would prefer
him to Mackintosh, Burke, or any man I ever heard of. His obser~
vations not only were conﬁrmed by good sense, but displayed exten-
sive knowledge, deep thought and well-grounded foresight; they were
so brilliantly ornamented, so classically delightful. They were the
writings of a scholar, a gentleman and a statesman, without personal
sarcasm or illiberality of any kind. But when Coleridge wrote in his
study without being pressed, he wandered and lost himself. He
should always have had the printer’s devil at his elbow with ‘ Sir, the
printers want copy.’

“ So far then with regard to The llforni'ng Post, which I ﬁnally left
in August, 1803. Throughout the last year, during my most rapid
success, Coleridge did not, I believe, write a line for me. Seven
months afterwards I ﬁnd Coleridge at Portsmouth, on his way to
Malta.” Mr. Stuart proceeds to state that Mr. C. returned to Eng-
land in the summer of 1806, that in 1807 he was engaged with his
Play at Drury Lane Theatre, early in 1808 gave his lectures at the
Royal Institution, at the end of that year began his plan of The Friend,
which took him up 'till towards the end of 1809—in 1811 proposed
to write for The Courier on a salary. Mr. Stuart mentions that the
Essays on the Spaniards were sent in the end of 1809 by Mr. Cole-
ridge, as some return for sums he had expended on his account, not
on his (Mr. Stuart’s) solicitation. He says that Mr. C. wrote in The
Courier for his own convenience, his other literary projects having
failed, and that he wrote for it against the will of Mr. Street, the Edi-
tor, who, in accepting his services, only yielded to his (Mr. S.’s) sug-
gestion. “ The Courier,” he says, “required no assistance. It was,
and had long been, the evening paper of the highest circulation.” In
another letter, dated 7th September, 1835, he speaks thus: “ The
Courier indeed sold 8000 daily for some years, but when Street andI
purchased it at a good price in June, 1799, it sold nearly 2000, and
had the reputation of selling more. It was the apostasy of The Sun
in 1808, Street’s good management, its early intelligence, and the imo
portanee of public events, that raised The Courier.” In the same
letter he says, “Could Coleridge have written the leading paragraph
daily his services would have been invaluable, but an occasional essay
or two could produce little effect. It was early and ample accounts
of domestic occurrences. as Trials, Executions, &c., &c., exclusively

662 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

early Irish news; the earliest French news; full Parliamentary De~
Dates; Corn Riots in 1800; Procession proclaiming Peace; the attack
on the King by Hatﬁeld at the Theatre; the arrest of Arthur O’Con-
nor, respecting which I was examined at the Privy Council: it was
the earliest and fullest accounts of such things as these, while the
other papers were negligent, that raised The Morning Post from 350,
when I took it in August, 1795, to 4500, when I sold it in August,
1803, and then no other daily morning paper sold above 3000. It
was unremitting attention and success in giving the best and earliest
accounts of occurrences that made The Morning Post, and not the
writings of any one, though good writing is always an important fea-
ture. I have known the Paper served more by a minute, picturesque,
lively account of the ascension of a balloon than ever it was by any
piece of writing. There is a great diﬁ'erence among newspapers in
this respect. Most of the Sunday Papers, calling themselves Newspa-
pers, have no news, only political essays, which are read by the work-
ing—classes, and which in those papers produce astonishing success.”
In other letters he says: “The reputation of the writings of any man,
the mere reputation of them, would not serve, or in the very slight-
est degree serve, any daily newspaper.” “Mackintosh’s reputation
as a political writer was then much higher than that of Coleridge,
and he was my brother-in-law, known to have written for the Paper,
especially during one year (17 95—6), and to be on good terms with
me, yet I must confess that even to the reputation of his writing for
the Paper I never ascribed any part of its success.”

It does not appear from Mr. Stuart how many essays in all Mr.
Coleridge contributed to the Morning Post and the Courier. Mr.
C. himself mentions several in the tenth chapter of this work.
All these have been copied, and will be republished hereafter. I
happen to possess also his contributions to The Courier in 1811.
They are numerous, though not daily; if what I have form the com--
plete set for that year, which I have now no means of ascertaining.
The Critique on Bertram ﬁrst appeared in that Paper, I believe in
1816. Mr. Stuart admits that some of the poems published by Mr.
C. in The Morning Post before his going to Germany made a “great
impression :” that on Mr. C.’s proposing “personally on the spot and
by daily exertion to assist him in the conduct of the Paper,” he
“ grasped at the engagement,” and “no doubt solicited” him “in the
most earnest manner to enter upon it ;” that his “ writings produced
a greater effect in The Morning Post than any others.” In his letter
of September 19, 1835, Mr. S. says, “The most remarkable things
Coleridge published in The Morning Post were The Devil’s Thoughts
and the Character of Pitt. Each of these made a sensation, which
any writings unconnected with the news of the day rarely did.”
Elsewhere he says, “Several hundred sheets extra were sold by them.

BIOGRAPHICAL S UPPLEMEN T. 663

and the paper was in demand for days and weeks afterwards. Cole~
ridge promised a pair of portraits, Pitt and Bonaparte. I could not
walk a hundred yards in the streets but I was stopped by inquiries,
‘ When shall we have Bonaparte ?’ One of the most eager of these
inquirers was Dr. Moore, author of Zeluco.” In the letter mentioned
just above he says, “At one time Coleridge engaged to write daily for
The Courier on the news of the day, and he did attend very regularly
and wrote; but as it was in the spring, when the Paper was over-
whelmed with debates and advertisements (and Street always pre
ferring news, and a short notice of it in a leading paragraph to any
writing however brilliant), little or nothing that he wrote was insert-
ed from want of room. Of this he repeatedly complained to me,
saying that he would not continue to receive a salary without render-
ing services. I answered, ‘Wait till Parliament is up ; we shall then
have ample room, and shall be obliged to you for all you can give us.’
When Parliament rose Coleridge disappeared, or at least discontinued
his services.”

The time here spoken of was in June, 1811. In April he had pro
posed to Mr. Stuart a particular plan of writing for The Courier, and
on May 5, he writes to that gentleman, that he had stated and par-
ticularized this proposal to Mr. Street, and “found a full and in all
appearance a warm assent.” Mr. Street, he says, “expressed himself
highly pleased both at the thought of my assistance in general, and
with the speciﬁc plan of assistance. There was no doubt, he said,
that it would be of great service to the Paper.”

Mr. Stuart has been offended by Mr. Coleridge’s saying that he
“employed the prime and manhood of his intellect in these labors,”
namely for the Papers; that they “added nothing to his fortune or
reputation ;” that the “industry of the week supplied the necessities
of the week.” This he has considered as a reproach to himself, and
an unjust one. It was not—Mr. Stuart himself saw that it was not—-
so intended; Mr. Coleridge’s only object was to show that he had not
altogether suffered his talents to “rust away without any eﬂicient
exertion for his own good or that of his fellow-creatures ;” that he had
labored more than would appear from the number and size of the
books he had produced, and in whatever he wrote had aimed not
merely to supply his own temporal wants, but to beneﬁt his readers
by bringing high principles in view. “ For, while cabbage-stalks rot
in dunghills,” says he, in a letter to the late Editor of The Morning
Peat, “ I will never write what, or for what, I do not think right. All
that prudence can justify is not to write what at certain times one may
yet think.” But Mr. Stuart thought that the Public would draw infer-4
ences from Mr. C.’s language injurious to himself, though it was not
meant of him ; and hence he gave the details which I have thought it
right to bring forward. I have no doubt that Mr. Coleridge had an ex-

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664.- BIOGRAPH 1A LITERARIA.

aggerated impression of the amount of his labors for The Morning
Post and The Courier, and that when he said that he had raised the
sale of the former from a low number to 7000 daily, he mistook the
sale of the latter, which, Mr. Stuart admits, may have been 7 000 per
day in 1811, when he wrote for it constantly, with that of The Man-
ing Post, which never sold above 4500. Mr. Stuart says truly, “ Cole-
ridge had a defective memory, from want of interest in common
things ;” and of this he brings forward a strong instance. I think my
Father’s example and experience go to prove that Newspaper reading
must ever be more or less injurious to the public mind ; high and care-
ful writing for the daily journal will never answer: who could furnish
noble views and a reﬁned moral commentary on public events and
occurrences every day of the week, or even every other day, and ob-
tain a proportionate recompense? On the other hand, a coarse or
low sort of writing on the important subjects, with which the journal
deals, must do mischief. No one will deny that the character of Mr.
Q’s articles was such as he has described; he would naturally be
more alive to marks of the impression made by what he wrote in par-
ticular than any one else, even the Editor; and men are apt to judge
of their labors by intensity as much as by quantity. He perhaps ex-
pended more thought on some of those essays, of which Mr. Street-
and even Mr. Stuart thought lightly, than would have served to fur!
nish a large amount of ordinary serviceable matter. Mr. Stuart ob’
serves, “He never had a prime and manhood of intellect in the sense
in which he speaks of it in the Lit. Biogmphy. He had indeed the
great mind, the great powers, but he could not use them for the press
with regularity and vigor.* He was always ill.” This may have
been true; yet it was during what ought to have been the best years
of his life that he wrote for the Papers, and doubtless what he did
produce helped to exhaust his scanty stock of bodily power, and to
prevent him from writing as many books as he might have done, had
circumstances permitted him to use his pen, not for proeu/ring “the
necessities of the week,” but in the manner most congenial to his own
mind, and ultimately most useful to the public. “ Such things as
The Morning Post and money,” says Mr. S., in the Gentleman’s Maga-
zine, “ never settled upon his mind.” I believe that such things un-
settled his mind, and made him, as the lampooner said, with a some~
what different allusion, “Like to a man on double business bound,
who both neglects.” This was a trouble to himself and all connected
with him. Le ciel nous cend toujom’s lee biens gu’il nous prodigue,
may be applied to my poor Father emphatically.

' “He never could write a thing that was immediately required of him,” says Mr.
8., in tho Gentleman‘s Magazine, of May, 1838. “ The thought of compulsion disarmed
him. I could name other able literary men in this unfortunate plight.” One of the
many grounds of argument against the sole profession of literature.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 665

In regard to the remuneration he received, I do not bring forward
the particulars given by Mr. Stuart of his liberal dealings with Mr.
Coleridge, simply because the rehearsal of them would be tedious, and
could answer no end. Such details may be superseded by the gen-
eral declaration, that I believe my Father to have received from Mr.
Stuart far more than the market value of his contributions to the Pa-
pers which that gentleman was concerned in. Mr. Stuart says that
he “paid at the time as highly as such writings were paid for,” and
to Mr. Coleridge’s satisfaction, which my Father’s own letters cer-
tainly testify; and concludes the account of sums advanced by him to
Mr. 0., when he was not writing for the paper, by saying that he had
“ at least 7 GM. of him beside many acts of kindness.” A considerable
part of this was spent on stamps and paper for The Friend; two
hundred of it was given after the publication of the Biographia
Literaria.

Mr. Coleridge expressed his esteem for Mr. Stuart and sense of his
kindness very strongly in letters to himself, but not more strongly
than to others. He speaks of him ina letter written about the be-
ginning of 1809, addressed to a gentleman of the Quaker persuasion
at Leeds, as “a man of the most consummate knowledge of the
world, managed by a thorough strong and sound judgment, and ren-
dered innocuous by a good heart”—-—as a “most wise, disinterested,
kind, and constant friend.” In a letter to my Mother, written on his
return from Malta, he says, “Stuart is a friend, and a friend indeed.”

I have thought it right to bring forward these particulars—(I and
those equally concerned with myself’)——not only out of a regard to
truth and openness, that the language of this work respecting The
Morning Post and The Courier may not be interpreted in any way
contrary to fact, which, I think, it need not be ; but also in gratitude
to a man who was serviceable and friendly to my Father during many
years of his life; who appreciated his merits as a prose writer when
they were not generally known and acknowledged ; and by whose aid
his principal prose work, The Friend, was brought before the public.
I do not complain in the least of his stating the facts of my Father’s
newspaper Writings; in the manner in which this was done—as was
pointed out at the time—there was something to complain of. Let
me add that I consider his representation of my Father’s feelings on
certain occasions altogether incredible, and deeply regret these pieces
of bad construing, dictated by resentment, in one who was once so
tru.y his friend.

My Father certainly does not assert, as Mr. Stuart represents him
as having asserted in the Literary Biography, that he “made the for-
tunes of The Morning Post and The Courier, and was inadequately
paid.” He speaks of his writings as having been in furtherance of
Government. I have no doubt he thought that they were serviceable

G66 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

to Government and to his country, and that while they brought upon
him the enmity of the anti-ministerial and Bonapartean party, and
every possible hindrance to his literary career which the most hostile
and contemptuous criticism of a leading journal could effect, they were
unrewarded in any other quarter. There was truth in one half of
Hazlitt’s sarcasm, “ His politics turned—but not to account.” “From
Government, or the friends of Government!” says Mr. Stuart, “Why
Coleridge was attacking Pitt and Lord Grenville in 1800, who were
at the heal of the Government. In 1801, when the Addingtons came
into power, he wrote little or nothing in The Morning Post; in the
autumn of 1802, he wrote one or two able essays against Bonaparte
in relation to the Peace of Amiens, and he published in that paper,
at that time, a letter or two to Judge Fletcher.” This last sentence
is a double mistake, as I have already shown. “At that time the
newspaper press generally condemned the conduct of Bonaparte in
the severest manner; and no part of it more severely than The
Morning Post by my own writings. Cobbett attacked Fox, &c., but
The Morning Post was the most distinguished on this subject, and
the increase of its circulation was great. The qualiﬁed opposition to
Government was not given to Pitt’s ministry, but to Addington’s.
To Pitt The Morning Post was always, in my time, decidedly opposed.
I supported Addington against Bonaparte, during the Peace of Amiens,
with all my power, and in the summer of 1803 Mr. Estcourt came
to me with a message of thanks from the prime minister, Mr. A. of-
fering any thing I wished. I declined the offer. It was not till the
summer of 1804, a year after I had ﬁnally left The Morning Post that,
in The Courier, I supported Pitt against Bonaparte, on the same
grounds I had supported Mr. Addington, Pitt having become again
prime minister, to protect Lord Melville against the ﬁfth clause.
Coleridge confuses things. The qualified support of the ministry, he
alludes to, applies wholly to The Courier.” I do not see the material
discrepancy between this statement and my Father’s, when he says
that The Morning Post was “anti-ministerial, indeed, but with far
greater earnestness and zeal, both anti-jacobin and anti-gallican,” and
that it proved a far more useful ally to the Government. in its most
important objects, in consequence of its being generally considered
moderately anti-ministerial, than if it had been the avowed enlogist
of Mr. Pitt; “that the rapid increase in the sale of The Morning
Post is a pledge that genuine impartiality with a respectable portion
of literary talent will secure the success of a newspaper without min

isterial patronage,” and that from “ the commencement of the Adding-
ton administration” whatever he himself had written “in The Morn-
ing Post or Courier Was in defence of Government.” In the prece-
ding paragraph he argues that neither Mr. Percival nor “ the present
administration” pursued the plans of Mr. Pitt.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 607

In what degree my Father’s writings contributed to the reputation
and success of The Morning Pa at can not at this distance of time be
precisely settled. It must indeed be difﬁcult to say what occasions
success in such enterprises, if Mr. Stuart’s own brother could attrib-
ute that of The Morning Post to Sir James Mackintosh, “ though with
less reason even than if he had ascribed it to Coleridge.” The long
story told to show that booksellers were not aware of Mr. C.’s hav-
ing produced any effect on the paper, and when they set up a rival
journal, never cared to obtain his services, but eagerly secured those
of Mr. Stuart’s assistant, George Lane, does not quite decide the
question; for booksellers, though, as Mr. Stuart says, “knowing
men” in such matters, are not omniscient even in what concerns their
own business. If the anti-gallican policy of The Morning Post “ in-
creased its circulation,” I can not but think that the inﬂuence of my
Father’s writings, though not numerous, and indirectly of his inter-
course with the Editor,—who rates his conversational powers as
highly as it is usual to rate them—in directing the tone and deter-
mining the principles of the paper, must have served it materially.
I believe him to have been the anti-gallican spirit that governed The
Morning Post, though he may not have performed as much of the
letter as he fancied.

I shall conclude this subject with quoting part of a letter of my
Father’s on the subject of The Courier, to which Mr. Stuart, to whom
it was addressed, declares himself to have replied, that “ as long as
he actively interfered, the Paper was conducted on the independent
principles alluded to by Coleridge, ” but that, for reasons which he
states, he found it best, from the year 1811, to “leave Street entirely
to his own course ;” and “so it gradually slid into a mere ministerial
journal—an instrument of the Treasury :” “acquired a high charac-
ter for being the organ of Government, and obtained a great circula-
tion; but became odious to the mob—excited by the falsehoods of the

weekly journals.”
‘ “ Wednesday, 8th May, 1816.

“James Gillman’s, Esq., Surgeon,
“ MY DEAR STUART, Highgate.

“ Since you left me, I have been reﬂecting a great deal on the
subject of the Catholic question, and somewhat on The Courier in
general. With all my weight of faults (and no one is less likely to
underrate them than myself), a tendency to be inﬂuenced by selﬁsh
motives in my friendships, or even in the cultivation of my acquaint-
ance, will not, I am sure, be by you placed among them. When we
ﬁrst knew each other, it was perhaps the most interesting period of
both our lives, at the very turn of the ﬂood; and I can never cease
to reﬂect with affectionate delight on the steadiness and independence
of your conduct and principles, and how, for so many years, with

668 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

little assistance from others, and with one main guide, a sympathizing
tact for the real sense, feeling, and impulses of the respectable part of
the English nation, you went on so auspiciously, and likewise so ef-
fectively. It is far, very far, from being an hyperbole to afﬁrm, that
you did more against the French scheme of Continental domination
than the Duke of Wellington has done 3 3r rather, Wellington could
neither have been supplied by the Ministers, nor the Ministers sup-
ported by the nation, but for the tone ﬁrst given, and then constantly
kept up by the plain, nil-ministerial, anti-opposition, anti-Jacobin,
anti-Gallican, anti-Napoleon spirit of your writings, aided by a col-
loquial style and evident good sense, in which, as acting on an im-
mense mass of knowledge of existing men and existing circumstances,
you are superior to any man I ever met with in my life-time. In-
deed you are the only human being, of whom I can say with severe
truth, that I never conversed with you for an hour without remem-
berable instruction; and with the same simplicity I dare afﬁrm my
belief, that my greater knowledge of man has been useful to you,
though, from the nature of things, not so useful as your knowledge
of men has been to me.”

“ Now, with such convictions, my dear Stuart, how is it possible
that I can look back on the conduct of The Courier, from the period
of the Duke of York’s restoration, without some pain? You can not
be seriously offended or aﬁ'ronted with me, if, in this deep conﬁdence
and in a letter, which, or its contents, can meet no eye but your
own, I venture to declare, that though since then much has been
done, very much of high utility to the country, by and under Mr.
Street, yet 7716 Courier itself has gradually lost that sanctifying
spirit which was the life of its life, and without which, even the best
and soundest principles lose half their effect on the human mind; I
mean, the faith in the faith of the person and paper which brings
them forward. They are attributed to the accident of their happen-
ing to be for such a side, or for such a party. In short, there is no
longer any root in the paper, out of which all the various branches
and fruits, and even ﬂuttering leaves, are seen or believed to grow.
But it is the old tree, barked round above the root, though the cir-
cular decortication is so small and so neatly ﬁlled up and colored as
to be scarcely visible but in its effects, excellent fruit still hanging on
the boughs, but they are tied on by threads and hairs.”

“In all this I am well aware, that you are no otherwise to be blamed
than in permitting that which, without disturbance to your heart and
tranquillity, you could not, perhaps, have prevented or effectively
modiﬁed. But the whole plan of Street seems to me to have been
motiveless from the beginning, or at least affected by the grossost
miscalculations, in respect even of pecuniary interests. For, had the
paper maintained and asserted not only its independence, but its ap-

BIOGRAPHICAL SU PPLEMEN T. 669

pearance of it ;-—it is true that Mr. Street might not have had Mr. A.
to dine with him, or received as many nods and shakes of the hand
from Lord this or that; but at least equally true, that the ministry
would have been far more effectively served, and that (I speak from
facts) both the paper and its conductor would have been held by the
adherents of ministers in far higher respect; and after all, ministers
do nut love-newspapers in their hearts, not even those that support
them. indeed it seems epidemic among Parliament men in general to
affect no look down upon and despise newspapers, to which they owe
1795?? 01' their inﬂuence and character, and at least gths of their knowl—
edge and phraseology. Enough! burn the letter, and forgive the wri-
ter, for the purity and affectionateness of his motive.”—Quoted from
the Gentleman’s Magazine of June, 1838.

One other point connected with Mr. C.’s writing for public journals
I must advert to before concluding this chapter. Mr. Cottle ﬁnds want
of memory in some part of the narrative, contained in this work, re-
specting the publication of The Watchman; it is as well to let him
tell the story in his own way, which he does as follows :—“ The plain
fact is, I purchased the whole of the paper for The Watchman, allow—
ing Mr. C. to have it at prime cost, and receiving small sums from Mr.
C. occasionally, in liquidation. I became responsible, also, with Mr.
B. for printing the work, by which means, I reduced the price per
sheet, as a bookseller, (1000) from ﬁfty shillings to thirty—ﬁve shillings.
Mr. C. paid me for the paper in fractions, as he found it convenient,
but from the imperfection of Mr. Coleridge’s own receipts, I never
received the Whole. It was a losing concern altogether, and I was
willing, and did hear, uncomplaining, my portion of the loss. There
is some difference between this statement, and that of Coleridge, in
his Biographia, Literaria. A defect of memory must have existed,
arising out of the lapse of twenty-two years; but my notices, made
at the time, did not admit of mistake. There were but twenty sheets
in the Whole ten numbers of The Watchman, which, at thirty-ﬁve
shillings per sheet, came to only thirty-ﬁve pounds. The paper
amounted to much more than the printing.

“I can not refrain from observing farther, that my loss was aug-
mented from another cause. Mr. 0. states in the above work, that
his London publisher never paid him ‘one farthing,’ but ‘set him at
deﬁance.’ I also was more than his equal companion in this misfor-v
tune. The thirty COpies of Mr. (1’s poems, and the six ‘Joans of
Are’ (referred to in the preceding letter) found a ready sale, by this
said ‘indefatigable London publisher,’ and large and fresh orders were
received, so that Mr. Coleridge and myself successively participated
in two very opposite sets of feeling; the one of exultation that our
publications had found so good a sale; and the other of depression,
that the time of payment never arrived!”

e70 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

I take this opportunity of expressing my sense of many kind acts
and much friendly conduct of Mr. Cottle towards my Father, often
spoken of to me by my dear departed Mother, into whose heart all
beneﬁts sunk deep, and by whom he was ever remembered with re-
spect and affection. If I still regard with any disapproval his publi-
cation of letters exposing his friend’s unhappy bondage to opium and
consequent embarrassments and deep distress of mind, it is not that I
would have wished a broad inﬂuencive fact in the history of one,
whose peculiar gifts had made him in some degree an object of public
interest, to be ﬁnally concealed, supposing it to be attested, as this
has been, by clear unambiguous documents. I agree with Mr. Cottle
in thinking that he would himself have desired, even to the last, that
whatever beneﬁt the world might obtain by the knowledge of his suf-
ferings from opium,—the calamity which the unregulated use of this
drug had been to him—into which he ﬁrst fell ignorantly and inno-
cently—(not as Mr. Dequincey has said, to restore the “riot of his an—
imal spirits,” when “ youthful blood no longer sustained it,” but as a
relief from bodily pain and nervous irritation)—that others might
avoid the rock, on which so great a part of his happiness for so long
a time was wrecked ; and this from the same benevolent feeling, which
prompted him earnestly to desire that his body should be opened
after his death, in the hope that some cause of his life-long pains in
the region of the bowels might be discovered, and that the knowl-
edge thus obtained might lead to the invention of a remedy for like
afﬂictions. Such a wish indeed, on the former point, as well as after-
wards on the latter, he once strongly expressed; but I believe my-
self to be speaking equally in his spirit when I say, that all such con-
siderations of advantage to the public should be subordinated to the
prior claims of private and natural interests. My own opinion is, that
it is the wiser and better plan for persons connected with those, whose
feats of extraordinary strength have drawn the public gaze upon them,
to endure patiently that their frailties should be gazed and wondered
at too; and even if they think, that any reﬂection to them of such
celebrity, on such conditions, is far more to be deprecated than de
sired, still to consider that they are not permitted to determine their
lot, in this respect, but are to take it as it has been determined for
them, independently of their will, with its peculiar pains and privi-
leges annexed to it. I believe that most of them would be like the
sickly queen in the fairy tale of Peronella, who repented when she
had obtained the country maiden’s youth, and health at the loss of
rank and riches. Be this as it may, they have not a choice of evils,
nor can exchange the aches and pains of their portion, or its wrinkles
and blemishes,—for a fair and painless obscurity. These remarks,
however, refer only to the feeling and conduct of parties privately
affected by such exposures. Others are bound to care for. them as

BIOGRAPHICAL SU PPLEMEN T. 671

they are not bound to care for themselves. If a ﬁnished portrait of
one, in Whom they are nearly concerned, is due to the world, they
alone can be the debtors, for the property by inheritance is in them.
Other persons, without their leave, should not undertake to give any
such portrait; their duties move on a different plane; nor can they
rightfully feel themselves “entitled” (to borrow the language of Mr.
Dequincey, while I venture to dissent from his judgment), “to notice
the most striking aspects of his character, of his disposition and his
manners, as so many reﬂex indications of his intellectual constitution,”
if this involves the publication of letters on private subjects, the re-
lation of domestic circumstances and other such personalities affecting
the living. I am sure at least that conscience would prohibit me from
any such course. I should never think the public good a sufﬁcient
apology for publishing the secret history of any man or woman what-
ever, who had connections remaining upon earth; but if I were pos-
sessed of private notices respecting one in whom the world takes an
interest, should think it right to place them in the hands of his nearest
relations, leaving it to them to deal with such documents, as a sense
of what is due to the public, and what belongs to openness and hon-
esty, may demand.

-_.—_

Of all the censors of Mr. Coleridge, Mr. Dequincey is the one Whose

remarks are most worthy of attention; those of the rest in general

.‘K/

are but views taken from a distance, and ﬁlled up by conjecture,
views taken by a medium so thick with opinion, even if not clouded "

with vanity and self-love, that it resembles a horn more than glass or
the transpicuous air ;—The Opium-eater, as he has called himself,
had sufﬁcient inward sympathy with the subject of his criticism to
be capable in some degree of beholding his mind, as it actually ex-
isted, in all the intermingling shades of individual reality ; and in few
minds have these shades been more subtly intermingled than in my
Father’s. ' But Mr. Dequincey’s portrait of Coleridge is not the man
himself ; for besides that his knowledge of what concerned him out-
wardly was imperfect, the inward sympathy of which I have spoken
was far from entire, and he has written as if it were greater than it really
was. I can not but conjecture, from what he has disclosed concerning
himself, that on some points he has seen Mr. Coleridge’s mind too much
in the mirror of his own. His sketches of my Father’s life and char-
acter are, like all that he writes, so ﬁnely written, that the blots on
the narrative are the more to be deplored. One of these blots is the
passage to which I referred at the beginning of the last paragraph '.
“I believe it to be notorious that he ﬁrst began the use of opium, not
as a relief from any bodily pains or nervous irritations—for his con-
stitution was strong and excellent—but as a source of luxurious sen-

678 BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARIA.

sations. It is a great misfortune, at least it is a great pain, to have
tasted the enchanted cup of youthful rapture incident to the poetic
temperament. Coleridge, to speak in the words of Cervantes, wanted
better bread than was made with wheat.” Mr. Dequincey mistook a
constitution that had vigor in it for a vigorous constitution. His
body was originally full of life, but it was full of death also from the
first; there was in him a slow poison, which gradually leavened the
whole lump, and by which his muscular frame was prematurely
slackened and stupeﬁed. Mr. Stuart says that his letters are “one
. continued ﬂow of complaint of ill health and incapacity from ill
health.” This is true of all his letters—(all the sets of them)——which
have come under my eye, even those written before he went to Malta,
where his opium habits were conﬁrmed. Indeed it was in search of
health that he visited the Mediterranean,—for one in his condition
of nerves a most ill-advised measure,—I believe that the climate of
South Italy is poison to most persons who suffer from relaxation and
tendency to low fever. If my Father sought more from opium than
the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious
sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but
that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of
his nervous system, like a strong band grasping the jangled strings
of some shattered lyre,——that he might once more lightly ﬂash along
“Like those trim skin‘s, unknown of yore,

On winding lakes and rivers wide,

That ask no aid of sail or our,

That fear no spite of wind or tide,”—
released, for a time at least, from the tyranny of ailments, which, by
a spell of wretchedness, ﬁx the thoughts upon themselves, perpetual-
ly drawing them inwards, as into a stiﬂing gulf. A letter of his has
been given in this Supplement, which records his ﬁrst experience of
opium : he had recourse to it in that instance for violent pain in the
face, afterwards he sought relief in the same way from the sufferings
of rheumatism.

I shall conclude this chapter with a poetical sketch drawn from my

Father by a friend, who knew him duringthelatter years of his life,
after spending a few days with him at Bath,lin the year 1815.*

“Proud lot is his, whose comprehensive soul
Keen for the parts, capacious for the whole,

 

* The passage belongs to him, as far as “ heart’s deep fervency.” It concluded, when
ﬁrst written, with a reference to the unhappy thraldom of his powers, of which I have
been speaking: for, at that time, says the writer, in a private communication, “ he was
not so well regulated in his habits and labors afterwards.” The verses are from a
Rhymcd Plea for Tolerance: in two dialogues, by John Kenyon. I wish that I had
space to quote the sweet lines that follow, relating to the author‘s own character and feel-
ings, and his childhood passed “in our Carib isle.” They do justice to Mr. Kenyon’s
humility and cheerfulness, i I what they say 0‘.‘ himself, but not to his powers.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 678

Thought’s mingled hues can separate, dark from bright,
Like the ﬁne lens that sifts the solar light;

I‘heh recompose again th’ harmonious rays,
And pour them powerful in collected blaze—
Wakening, where’ er they glance. creations new,
In beauty steeped, nor less to nature true ;

With eloquence that hurls from reason’s throne
A voice of might, or pleads in pity’s tone:

To agitate, to melt, to win, to soothe,

Yet kindling ever on the side of truth ;

Or swerved, by no base interest warped awry,
But erring in his heart’s deep ferveucy:

Genius for him asserts the unthwarted claim,
With these to mate—the sacred Few of lame- -
Explore, like them, new regions for mankind,
And leave, like theirs, a deathless name behind."

 

CHAPTER VI.

‘ By what I have eﬂ'ected, am I to be judged by my fellow-men ; what I could have done
is a question for my own conscience.”-—S. T. C.

As the Biographia Literaria does not mention all Mr. Coleridge’s
writings, it will be proper, in conclusion, to give some account of
them here.

The Poetical Works in three volumes include the Juvenile Poems,
Sibylline Leaves, Ancient Mariner, Ohi’istabel, Remorse, Zapolg/a, and
Wallenstein.

The ﬁrst volume of Juvenile Poems was published in the Spring of
1796. It contains three sonnets by Charles Lamb, and a poetical
Epistle which he called “Sara’s,” but of which my Mother told me
she wrote but little. Indeed it is not very like some simple affecting
verses, which were wholly by herself, on the death of her beautiful
infant, Berkeley, in 1799. In May, 1797, Mr. 0. put forth a collection
of poems, containing all that were in his ﬁrst edition, with the excep-
tion of twenty pieces and the addition of ten new ones and a consid-
erable number by his friends, Lloyd and Lamb. The Ancient Mari-
ner, Love, The Nightingale, The Foster Mother’s Tale ﬁrst appeared
with the Lyrical Ballads of Mr. Wordsworth in the summer of 1798.
There was a third edition of the Juvenile Poems by themselves in
1803, With the original motto from Statius, Felix cararum, &c. Silo.
lib. iv. A spirit of almost child-like sociability seemed to reign
among these young poets—they were fond of joint publications.

.Wallenstein, a Play translated from the German of Schiller, ap-
peared in 1800. Christabel was not published till April, 1816, but
written, the ﬁrst part at Stowey in 1797, the second at Keswick in

VOL. III. 2

. . -. r- , . .534,

. . . . .. ._

‘ .c ﬁb'i @731, “per a - “3x:-
. « _ g. - - o.

_y§“ﬁf‘é ,. , :7,“- ,
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Eli.

674: BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA. K

1800. It went into a third edition in the ﬁrst year. The fragment
called Ifuhla Khan, composed in 1797, and the Pains ofS’leep, which
was annexed to the former by way of contrast, were published with
the ﬁrst edition of Christabel, in 1816.

The Tragedy called Remorse was written in the summer and autumn
of 1797, but not represented on the stage till 1813, when it was per-
formed at Drury Lane—on the authority of an old play-bill of the
Calne Theatre, “with unbounded applause thirty successive night-s.”
On “the success of the Remorse,” Mr. Coleridge wrote thus to his
friend Mr. Poole, on the 14th of February, 1813 :

“The receipt of your heart-engendered lines were sweeter than an
unexpected strain of sweetest music ;—or in humbler phrase, it was
the only pleasurable sensation which the success of the Remorse has
given me. I have read of, or perhaps only imagined, a punishment
in Arabia, in which the culprit was so bricked up as to be unable to
turn his eyes to the right or to the left, while in front was placed a
high heap of barren sand glittering under the vertical sun. Some
slight analogue of this, I have myselfsuﬁ‘ered from the mere unusual- "
ness of having my attention forcibly directed to a subject which per-
mitted neither sequence of imagery, nor series of reasoning. No
grocer’s apprentice, after his ﬁrst month’s permitted riot, was ever
sicker of ﬁgs and raisins than I of hearing about the Remorse. The
endless rat-a-tat-tat at our black-and-blue bruised door, and my three
master ﬁends, proof-sheets, letters (for I have a raging epistolopho-
bia), and worse than these—invitations to large dinners, which I can
not refuse without offence and imputation of pride, nor accept with-
out disturbance of temper the day before, and a sick aching stomach
for two days after—oppress me so that my spirits quite sink under it.

“I have never seen the Play since the ﬁrst night. It has been a
good thing for the Theatre. They will get £8,000 or £10,000 by it,
and I shall get more than all my literary labors put together, nay,
thrice as much, subtracting my heavy .losses in The Watchman and
7726 Friend, including the copyright.”

The manuscript of the Remorse, immediately after it was written,
was shown to Mr. Sheridan, “who,” says my Father, in the Preface
to the ﬁrst Edition, “by a twice conveyed recommendation (in the
year 17 97) had urged me to write a Tragedy for his theatre, who, on
my objection that I was utterly ignorant of all stage tactics, had
promised that he would himself make the necessary alterations, if the
piece should be at all representable.” He, however, neither gavehirn
any answer, nor returned him the manuscript, which he suffered to
wander about the town from his house, and my Father goes on to say,
“not only asserted that the Play was rejected because I would not
submit to the alteration of one ludicrous line, but ﬁnally, in the year
1806, amused and delighted (as who was ever in his society, if I may

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 675
trust the universal report, without being amused and delighted?) a
large company at the house of a highly respectable Member of Par-
liament, with the ridicule of the Tragedy, as a fair specimen of the
whole of which he adduced a line :

‘ Drip! drip ! drip! there's nothing here but dripping."

“In the original copy of the Play, in the ﬁrst scene of the fourth
act, Isidore had commenced his soliloquy in the cavern with the
words:

‘ Drip! drip ! a ceaseless sound of water-drops,’—-

as far as I can at present recollect : for, on the possible ludicrous as-
sociation being pointed out to me, I instantly and thankfully struck
out the line.” I repeat this story as told by Mr. G. himself, because
it has been otherwise told by others. I have little doubt that it was
more pointedly than faithfully told to him, and can never believe that
Mr. S. represented a ludicrous line as a fair specimen of the whole
Play, or his tenacious adherence to it as the reason for its rejection.
I dare say he thought it, as Lord Byron afterwards thought Zapolg/a,
“beautiful but not practicable.” Mr. Coleridge felt that he had some
claim to a friendly spirit of criticism in that quarter, because he had
“devoted the ﬁrstlings of his talents,” as he says in a marginal note,
“to the celebration of Sheridan’s genius,”1’ and after the treatment
described “ not only never spoke unkindly or resentfully of it, but ac-
tually was zealous and frequent in defending and praising his public
principles and conduct in the Morning Post”—of which, perhaps, Mr.
S.knew nothing. However, in lighter moods, my Father laughed at
Sheridan’s joke as much as any of his auditors could have done in
1806, and repeated with great effect and mock solemnity, “Drip !—
Drip l—Drip l—nothing but dripping.” I suppose it was at this time
——the winter of 1806—7—that he made an unsuccessful attempt to
bring out the Tragedy at Drury Lane.

When ﬁrst written this Play had been called Osorio, from the prin
cipal character, whose name my Father afterwards improved into Or-
donio. I believe he in some degree altered, if he did not absolutely

* A certain fair poetess, encore resplmulissante rle bcauté, if she ever casts her eye on
this page, will take no offence at its contents, nor will her ﬁlial feelings quarrel angrily
with mine. The “ dripping,” whatever its unction may once have been, is stale enough
now ; but the story has freshness in it yet. Such neglects as that of Mr. S. in not return
ing the M.S. of Remorse are always excusable in public men of great, and various occupa~
tion; but the lesson to the literary aspirant is just the same as if he had been ever so
blamable. My Father’s whole history is a lesson to the professors of literature, and that
which relates to the Remorse is a small but significant part of it, teaching patience
and hope, while it may serve to repress the expectation, that money and credit can soon
and certainly be obtained, even by writers possessed of genius not wholly unaccompa-
nied with popular ability, and who have been favored with an introduction to some or
the leaders and guides ot‘the public, men of taste and talent and general inﬂuence.

1' See his Sonnet to Sheridan. Poet. Works, VII. p. 60.

676 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

recast, the three last acts after the failure with Mr. Sheridan, who
probably led him to see their unﬁtness for theatrical representation.
But of this point I have not certain knowledge. It was when Drury
Lane was under the management of Lord Byron and Mr. Whitbread,
and through the inﬂuence of the former, that it was produced upon
the stage. Mr. Gillman says, “Although Mr. Whitbread did not give
it the advantage of a single new scene, yet the popularity of the Play
was such, that the principal actor (Mr. Roe), who had performed in
it with great success, made choice of it for his beneﬁt night, and it
brought an overﬂowing house.” This was some time after Mr. Cole-
ridge took up his residence at Highgate, in April, 1816. After all I
am happy to think that this drama is a strain of poetry, and like all,
not only dramatic poems, but highly poetic dramas, not to be fully
appreciated on the stage.

Zapolya came before the public in 1817. The stage fate of this
piece is alluded to in the B. L. Mr. Gillman mentions that it was
Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, then the critic for Drury Lane, who rejected
the Play, and complained of its “ metaphysics”—a term which is not,
upon all occasions, to be strictly construed, but, when used in familiar
talk, seems merely to denote whatever is too ﬁne-spun, in the texture
of thought and speech, for common wear; whatever is not readily
apprehensible and generally acceptable. School-boys call every thing
in books or discourse, which is graver or tenderer than they like,
“metaphysics.” Mr. Kinnaird may have judged quite rightly that the
Play was too metaphysical for our theatres in their present state,
though certainly plays as metaphysical were once well received on the
stage. Zapolya, however, had a favorable audience from the public
as a dramatic poem. Mr. Gillman says this Christmas Tale, which
the author “never sat down to write, but dictated while walking up
and down the room, became so immediately popular that 2,000 00pies
were sold in six weeks.”

The collection of poems. entitled Sibylline Leaees, “in allusion to
the fragmentary and widely scattered state in which they had been
long suffered to remain,” appeared in 1817, about the same time with
Zapolg/a, the Biographia Literaria’, and the ﬁrst Lay Sermon.

The Miscellaneous Poems were composed at different periods of the
author’s life, many of them in his later years. I believe that Youth
and Age was written before he left the North of England in 1810,
when he was about seven or eight-and-thirty,—early indeed, for the
poet to say of himself

“I see these locks in silvery slips,
This drooping gait, this altered size:
But Spring-tide blossoms on thy lips,
And tears take sunshine from thine eyes.”

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 677

The whole of the Poetical Works, with the exception of a few which
must be incorporated in a future edition, are contained in that in three
volumes. The Fall of Robespierre, an Historic drama, of which the
ﬁrst act was written by Mr. Coleridge, and published September 22,
17 94, is printed in the ﬁrst vol. of the Lit. Remains. This ﬁrst act
contains the Song on Domestic Peace. In the blank verse there are
some faint dawnings of his maturer style, as in these lines :

“ The winged hours that scatter’d roses round me,
Languid and sad, drag their slow course along,
And shake big gall—drops ”from their heavy wings”-—-

and in these :—

“ Why, thou hast been the mouth-piece of all horrors,
And, like a blood-hound, crouch’d for murder! Now
Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar,

Or, like a frightened child behind its mother,
Hidest thy pale face in the skirts of—JlIcrcy !”

but it contains scarcely any thing of his peculiar original powers, and
some of the lines are in school-boy taste; for instance,

“ While sorrow sad, like the dank willow near her,
Hangs o’er the troubled fountain of her eye.”

Yet three years after the date of this composition, in 1797, which
has been called his Annas JlIirabilis, he had reached his poetical
zenith. But perhaps it may be said that, from original temperament,
and the excitement of circumstances, my Father lived fast.

He had four poetical epochs, which represented, in some sort, boy-
hood, youthful manhood, middle age, and the decline of life. The
ﬁrst commenced a little on this side childhood, when he wrote Time
real and Imaginary, and ended in 17 96. This period embraces the
Juvenile Poems, concluding with Religious drawings, written on the
Christmas Eve of 17 94, a few months after The Fall of Robespierre:
The Destiny of Nations was composed a little earlier. Lewti, written
in 1795, The Eolian Harp, and Reflection on having left a place of
Retirement, written soon after, are more ﬁnished poems, and exhibit
more of his peculiar vein than any which he wrote before them;
though one poet, Mr. Bowles, has said that he never surpassed the
Religious Musings! Fire, Famine, and Slaughter belongs to 1796.
The Lines to a Friend (Charles Lamb) who had declared his intention
of writing no more poetry, and those To a Young Friend (Charles
Lloyd), were composed in the same year. These poems of 17 94-5—6
may be considered intermediate in power as in time, and so forming
' a link between the ﬁrst epoch and the next.

678 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Then came his poetic prime, which commenced with the Ode to the
Departing Year, composed at the end of December, 1796. The year
following, the ﬁve-and-twentieth of his life, produced The Ancient
ilfariner, Love, and The Dark Ladie, the ﬁrst part of Christabel, Kubla
Khan, Remorse, in its original cast, France, and This Lime-tree bower.
Tears in Solitude, The JVightingale, and The Wanderings of Cain were
written in 1798. Frost at Midnight, The Picture, the Lines to the
Rev. G. Coleridge, and those To TV. Wordsworth, are all of this same
Stowey period. It was in June, 1797, that my Father began to be in-
timate with Mr. Wordsworth, and this doubtless gave an impulse to
his mind. The Hymn before Sunrise, and other strains produced it.
Germany, link this period to the next. The IIea'ameters written during
a temporary blindness, and the Oatullian Hendecosyllables (which are
freely translated from Matthisson’s Milesisches Mahrchen), Mr. Cottle
seems to place in 1797, but the Author has marked the former as pro-
duced in 1799, and I believe that the latter are of the same date. The
.Night Scene, Myrtle leaf that ill besped, Maiden that with sullen brow,
are of this period, and so I believe are Lines composed in a concert-
room, and some others.

The poems which succeed are distinguished from those of my
Father’s Stowey life by a less buoyant spirit. Poetic ﬁre they have,
but not the clear, bright mountain ﬂame of his earlier poetry. Their
meditative vein is graver, and they seem tinged with the sombre hues
of middle age ; though some of them were written before the Author
was thirty-ﬁve years old. A characteristic poem of this period is
Deiection, an Ode: composed at Keswick, April 4-, 1802. Walle-nstein
had been written in London in 1800. The Three Graces was composed
in 1805 or 6; the second part of 0hristabel* soon after the Author’s
settling in the Lake country (in 1801); Youth and Age not long be-
fore he quitted it as a residence forever (in 1810). Recollections of
Love must have been written on his return to Keswick from Malta in
1806 : The Happy Husband at that time, or earlier. The small frag-
ment called The Knight’s Tomb probably belongs to the North. The
Devil’s Thoughts appeared in The Morning Post in 1800. This pro-
duction certainly has in it more of youthful sprightliness than of mid-
dle-aged soberness; still it is less fantastic, and has more of world-
wisdom in its satire than the War Eclogue of 1796. The Complaint

* Christabel was condemned by the Edinburgh Review in good company, that of The
White Doe. The two poems might be compared to Salm’s two Leonoras, which seem the
peautit‘ul personiﬁcation of sunshine and of pensive shadow. None of my Uncle (Mr.
Southey’s) Laureate Odes, not even that beautiful one on the death of the PrinCess
Charlotte, shall form a third with these, but let Thalaba come to join the lovely pair,
and then we shall have the three Graces.

It is curious to look at critical articles, full of furious ridicule and buﬂ‘oonery. in any
old reviewingjournal ; they remind one so of fossil porcupines, with quills ﬁxed in rigid-

ity, or harlequin snakes in bottles—NB. Most of these snakes are of the blind worm
species.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 679

and Reply ﬁrst appeared in 1802. The Ode to Tranquillity was pub-
lished in The Friend, March, 1809.

The poems of his after-years, even when sad, are calmer in their
melancholy than those produced while he was ceasing to be young.
We are less heavy-hearted when youth is out of sight than when it
is taking its leave. Duty surviving Self-Love, The Pang more sharp
than all, Love’s Apparition and Evanishment, The Blossoming of the
solitary Date-tree, and some other poems of his latter years, have this
character of resigned and subdued sadness. Work without Hope was
written at ﬁfty-six. The Visionary Hope and The Pains of Sleep,
which express more agitation and severer suffering, are of earlier date.
These and all in the Sibylline Leaves were written before the end of
1817, when he had completed his forty-ﬁfth year. The productions
of the fourth epoch, looked at as works of imagination, are tender,
graceful, exquisitely ﬁnished, but less bold and animated than those
of his earlier day. This may be said of Zapolya, Alice du 6708, The
Garden of Boccaccio, The two Founts, Lines suggested by the last
Words of Berengarius, Sancti Dominici Pallium, and other poems
written, I believe, when the poet was past forty, the four last named
after he was ﬁfty years old. Love, Hope, and Patience in Education

~was, I think, one of his latest poetical efforts, if not the very last.

The following prose compositions are included in the poetical vol-
umes, and the Apologetic Preface to Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,
containing a comparison between Milton and Jeremy Taylor, is placed
at p. 206: An Allegorical Vision, ﬁrst published in The Courier in
181], and New Thoughts on Old Subjects, which ﬁrst appeared in The
Keepsake, are inserted at p.

The whole of the Poetical Works, except a few which have been
reprinted in the Literary Remains, are contained in the stereotyped
edition in three volumes. The Poems without the Dramas have been
collected in a single volume, from which some of the Juvenile Poems,
and two or three of later date are excluded, and which includes a few
not contained in the three vol. edition.

I now proceed to Mr. Coleridge’s compositions in Prose. Conciones
ad Populum, are two addresses to the People, delivered at the latter
end of February, and then thrown into a small pamphlet. “After
this,” says Mr. Cottle, “be consolidated two other of his lectures,
and published them under the title of The Plot Discovered.” A moral
and political Lecture delivered at Bristol by Mr. C. was published in
the same year. I do not know whether he printed any of his other
Bristol orations of the year ninety-ﬁve. The Watchman was carried
on in 1796. The ﬁrst number appeared March 1 ; the tenth and last,
May 13. These were youthful immature productions. Whatever
was valuable and of a permanent nature in them was transferred into
his later productions, or included in later publications.

680 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

The Friend, a Literary, Moral, and Political Weekly Paper, ex
eluding personal and party politics and the events of the day, wal
written and published at Grasmere. The ﬁrst number appeared on
Thursday, June lst, 1809, the 27th and last of that edition, March 15,
1810. The Friend next appeared before the public in 3 vols. in 1818.
This was “rather a rifacimento,” as the Author said, “than a new‘
edition, the additions forming so large a proportion of the whole.
work, and the arrangement being altogether new.” (Essays V—XIII.
pp. 98-151, treat of the Duty of communicating truth, and the condi-
tions under which it may be safely communicated ; Essay V. is on the
vineapediencg/ of pious frauds, cﬁc.) The third edition of 1837 gave
the Author’s last corrections, an appendix containing the parts thrown
out in the recast, with some other miscellanea, and a syn0ptica1 table
of the contents by the Editor. There is now a fourth edition.

The two Lay Sermons were published, the one in 1816, the other
in 1817. The ﬁrst is entitled The Statesman’s Manual, or The Bible
the best Guide to Political skill and foresight: a Lay Sermon ad-
dressed to the higher classes of society, with an Appendix, containing
comments and essays connected with the study of the inspired writ-
ings :—the second A Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher and Mid-
dle Classes, on the existing distresses and discontents. Mr. Gillman '
says he “had the intention of addressinga third to the lower classes."

The Biographia Literaria was published in 1817, but parts of the
ﬁrst volume must have been composed some years earlier. The Ed-
inburgh Review in its August number of that year was as favorable
to the book as could be erpected.* '

The Aids to Reﬂection ﬁrst appeared in 1825. The original title
was Aids to Reﬂection in the formation of a manly character on the
several grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion; illustrated by
select passages from our elder divines, especially from Archbishop
Leighton. In an advertisement to the ﬁrst edition, the author men-
tions that the work was proposed and begun as a mere selection from
the writings of Leighton, with a few notes and a biographical preface
by the selector, but underwent a revolution of plan and object. “It
would, indeed,” he adds, “be more correct to say, that the present

* The remarks in that article upon my Father’s remarks on poetic diction I have vainly
tried to understand :—“ A paste of rich and honeyed words, like the candied coat of the
auricula, a glittering tissue of quaint conceits and sparkling metaphors, crusting over the
rough stalk of homely thoughts, &c. ; such is the style of Pope and Gray; such very often
is that of Shakspeare and Milton: and, notwithstanding Mr. Coleridge‘s decision to the
contrary, of Spenser’s Fae'ry Queen.” Homcly thoughts clothed in a glittering tissue of
poetic diction are but pseudo-poetry ; and the powder on the auricula would be nothing
if the coat itself were not of velvet. Mr. C.’s decision respecting the Faé'ry Queen is
equally misrepresented, for he maintains that Spenser‘s language is distinct from that of
prose, such language being required by his thoughts and in harmox.y with them. To say
that he decided ‘- the contrary,” as if he had denied poetic diction to Spenser, is not like
the unricula’s coat, candid.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 681

volume owed its accidental origin to the intention of compiling one
of a different description than to speak of it as the same work."
“ Still, however, the selections from Leighton, which will be found in
the fundamental and moral sections of this work, and which I could
retain consistently with its present form and matter, will, both from
the intrinsic excellence and from the characteristic beauty of the pas-
sages, sufﬁce to answer two prominent purposes of the original plan;
that of placing in a clear light the principle which pervades all Leigh-
ton’s writings—his sublime view, I mean, of Religion and Morality as
the means of reforming the human soul in the Divine Image (Idea);
and that of exciting an interest in the works, and an affectionate rev—
erence for the name and memory of this severely tried and truly
primitive Churchman.”

Neither Hume nor Clarendon, I believe, mentions the persecution
of Archbishop Leighton’s father by the Prelatieal party of his day;
and yet it was one of their worst acts, and that which most excited
wrath and indignation against the Primate—so faithful is their por-
trait of those times! Never can I read Mr. Wordsworth’s sublime
sonnet to Laud, especially the lines,

Prejudged by foes determined not to spare, '
An old weak man for vengeance laid aside,

without thinking of another “old weak man for vengeance laid aside”
—of Land in the day of his power pulling off his hat and thanking
God for the inhuman sentence that had been passed upon the already
wasted victim*——of the miserable den to which the mangled man
was committed for life after that sentence had been executed in all
its multiplication and precision of barbarity—then calling to mind
the words of our Saviour, They that take the sword shall perish with
the sword, and Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.
It was not mercy alone that was violated by these acts—but law and
justice; and if he who instigated and rejoiced in them received nei-
ther justice nor mercy in his turn, is he worthy of the sacred name of
Martyr? May we not say that the renyearzce which fell upon this
persecutor was the Lord’s vengeance, even if it came to pass by evil
instruments, and fell upon a head already bowed down, and in some
respects a noble one? Can the glory and honor of meeting death
with ﬁrmness—nay, even with sublime piety, cast its beams backward
and bathe in one pure luminous ﬂood a life darkened with such deep

* The particulars of this instance of Star Chamber tyranny I read in Aikman’s Life of
Archbishop Laud, preﬁxed to his works. It is said that when he was taken out of the
wretched cell in Newgate in which he was conﬁned before his sentence, “the skin and
nazr had almost wholly come of his body.” This was for writing against Prelacy, not
against Christianity. Any man may do the like now, and nota hair of his head can be
touched; yet moral offences, public or private, have far less chance of escaping with im-
punity than they had then. ‘

2 11*

682 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

shadows, as those that chequer the sunshine of Land’s career?-——th-a
parts really brightened with the light of heaven? Plainness, sincer-
ity, integrity, learning, muniﬁcence to a cause*—can virtues like these
outweigh or neutralize such faults of head, heart, and temper, as lie
to the charge of this Bishop in the Church of Christ? As well
might we set the cold bright morning dews, that rest on the stony
crown of Vesuvius, against the burning lava that bursts from its
crater, and expect them to quench the ﬁre or reduce it to a moderate
heat. Some abatement must be made from the guilt of his violenees
from consideration of the times; but to subtract the whole on that
account, or even to make light of it, is surely too much to make moral
good and evil dependent on circumstance. What? Have Arundel,
Bonner, Gardiner, little or nothing to answer for? Was there ever
yet a persecutor that persecuted from more speculative inhumanity?
Even through Clarendon’s account we may discern, I think, that
Land’s private passions, in part at least, engaged him in the cause of
Intolerance. He had been exasperated, before he attained power, by
Puritan molestations and oppositions,—he became the persecutor of
Puritans after he attained it; as school-boys that have been tormented
while they were in a low form, torment in their turn when they get
into a high one—not their tormentors, but unfortunates who repre-
sent them to their imagination. An eminently good and wise man is
above his times, if not in all, yet in many things; but Laud was the
very impersonation of his times—the impersonated spirit of his age
and his party. (Compare his over-ceremonious consecration of St.
Catherine’s Church, gloated over by Hume, with Archdeacon Hare’s
remarks on his neglect of his diocese, in The Mission of tke Comfort-
er.) They who are of that party still, who would still swathe reli-
gion by way of supporting it, and dizen by way of dressing it, and
gaze with fond rcgretful admiration upon the giant forms of Spiritual
Despotism and Exaggerated Externalism, as they loom shadowy and
magniﬁcent through the vapory vista of ages, to them no wonder
that he is a giant too. And there are others, far above that or any
other party, who, in their love and zeal for the Church, abstract the
how and the why of Land’s public warfare, and see him abstractedly
as the Champion of the Church of 'England. “God knows my heart,”
says Mr. Coleridge (in a marginal note on Mr. Southey’s article on the
History of Dissenters, in the Quarterly Review of October, 1813),
“how bitterly I abhor allintolerance, how deeply I pity the actors when
there is reason to suppose them deluded; but is it not clear that this
theatrical scene of Land’s death, who was the victim of almost na«
tional indignation, is not to be compared with ‘bloody sentences’ in
the coolness of secure power? As well might you palliate the hor-
rible atrocities of the Inquisition, every one of which might be jus-

‘ Clarendon, passim, especially his summary of Land’s character. .

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 683

tiﬁed on the same grounds that Southey has here defended Laud, by
detailing the vengeance taken on some of the Inquisitors.” I do not
see that here my honored Uncle defends the Primate : he says, “ We
are not the apologists of Laud ; in some things he was erroneous, in
some imprudent, in others culpable. Evil, which upon the great
scale is ever made conducive to good, produces evil to those by whom
it comes.” And how wise and beautiful is this sentiment a little fur-
ther on! “It especially behooves the historian to inculcate charity,
and take part with the oppressed, whoever may have been the op-
pressors.”

As some excuse for my Father’s expression, “theatrical scene,” I
allege that sentence of Laud’s: “Never did man put off mortality
with a better courage, nor look upon his bloody and malicious ene-
mies with more Christian charity.” My Father adds : “I know well
how imprudent and unworldly these my opinions are. The Dissen-
ters will give me no thanks, because I prefer and extol the present
Church of England, and the partisans of the Church will calumniate
me, because I condemn particular members, and regret particular
aeras, of the former Church of England. Would that Southey had
written the whole of his review in the spirit of this beautiful page.”
(Page 102.) In that very interesting collection of meditative Sonnets
by the late Sir Aubrey de Vere, is one upon Laud, against which I
ventured to write, “If any thing done in the name of principle must
needs be righteous, then the tortures and long languishing of Leigh-
ton are no impeachment of Land’s righteousness.” There was a sec-
ond edition of the Aids in 1831, a ﬁfth in 1843.

The little work On the Constitution of the Church and State,* ac-
cording to the Idea of each, ﬁrst appeared in 1830, and went into a
second edition in the same year. It is now joined with the Lay Ser-
mons in one volume. To the Church and State are appended Notes
on Taylor’s History of Enthusiasm, and A Dialogue between Demosius
and Mystes.

After Mr. Coleridge’s death in July, 1834, four volumes of his Lite-
rary Remains were published by his late Editor. Vols. i. and ii. ap-
peared in 1836, Vol. iii. in 1838, Vol. iv. in 1839. Vol. i. contains-
The Fall of Robespiem'e and other poems, and poetical fragments,
Notes of a Course of Lectures delivered in 1818, Marginal Notes on
several books, Fragments of Essays, Mr. C.’s Contributions to the
Omniana of Mr. Southey, published in 1812, and ﬁfty—six other short
articles on various subjects. Vol. ii. contains more Notes of Lectures
on Shakspeare, including criticism on each of his Plays, with Intro-
ductory Matter on Poetry, the Drama, and the Stage, prefaced by ex-
tracts of letters relating to these Lectures : Notes on Ben Jonson, on

. * The inaccurate report of Niebiihr’s Opinion of this work, which appeared in a letter
of Dr. Arnold, published in his Life, has been corrected, I am told, in a new edition. -

684 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

Beaumont and Fletcher, on Fuller, on Sir Thomas Browne, an Essay
on the Prometheus of Eschylus, and other miscellaneous writings.

Vol. iii. contains Formula Fidei do S. Tri'nitate, A Nightly Prayer,
Notes on the Book of Common Prayer, on Hooker, Field, Donne,
Henry More, Heinrichs, Hacket, Jeremy Taylor, The Pilgrim’s Pro-
gress, and John Smith, and a Letter to a Godchild.

Vol. iv. contains Notes on Luther, St. Theresa, Bedell, Baxter,
Leighton, Sherlock, Waterland, Shelton, Andrew Fuller, Whitaker,
Oxlee, A Barrister’s Hints, Davison, Irving, and Noble, and an Essay
on Faith. The present edition of the Literary Remains is nearly ex-
hausted. In a fresh edition new matter will be added from marginal
notes, probably in a ﬁfth volume. Archdeacon Hare speaks of The
Remains in the preface to his Mission of the Comforter in a passage
which may ﬁtly be produced here.

“Of recent English writers, the one with whose sanction I have
chieﬂy desired, v"~r-never I could, to strengthen my opinions, is the
great religious philosopher to whom the mind of our generation in
England owes more than to any other man. My gratitude to him I
have endeavored to express by dedicating the following Sermons to
his memory; and the offering is so far at least appropriate, in that
the main work of his life was to spiritualize, not only our philosophy,
but our theology, to raise them both above the empiricism into which
they had long been dwindling, and to set them free from the techni-
cal trammcls of logical systems. Whether he is as much studied by
the genial young men of the present day, as he was twenty or thirty
years ago, I have no adequate means of judging; but our theological
literature teems with errors, such as could hardly have been commit-
ted by persons whose minds had been disciplined by his pliilOSOphical
method, and had rightly appropriated his principles. So far too as my
observation has extended, the third and fourth volumes of his Re-
mains, though they were hailed with delight by Arnold on their ﬁrst
appearance, have not yet produced their proper effect on the intellect
of the age. It may be that the rich store of profound and beautiful
thought contained in them has been weighed down, from being mixt
with a few Opinions on points of Biblical criticism, likely to be very
offensive to persons who know nothing about the history of the Can-
on. Some of these opinions, to which Coleridge himself ascribed a
good deal of importance, seem to me of little worth ; some, to be de-
cidedly erroneous. Philological criticism, indeed, all matters requir-
ing a laborious and accurate investigation of details, were alien from
the bent and habits of his mind; and his exegetical studies, such as
they were, took place at a period when he had little better than the
meagre Rationalism of Eichhorn and Bertholdt to help him. Of the
opinions which he imbibed from them, some abode with him through
life. These, however, along with every thing else that can justly be

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 685

objected to in the Remains, do not form a twentieth part of the whole,
and may easily be separated from the remainder. Nor do they de-
tract, in any way, from the sterling sense, the clear and far-sighted
discernment, the power of tracing principles in their remotest opera—
tions, and of referring all things to their ﬁrst principles which are
manifested in almost every page, and from which we might learn so
much.”

The last posthumous work of Mr. Coleridge, published September,

1840, is entitled Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, and consists of
seven letters on the Inspiration of the Scriptures. It should be un- ~
derstood that this work is intended not to undermine the beiiq‘thatlh 57
the Bible is the "’0cm of God, or in any degree to lessen the deep/fl I
reverence with which it is regarded by Christians, but to put thatl.
belief on a better foundation than it commonly rests upon. “Let it".
be distinctly understood,” the author says, “that my arguments and
objections apply exclusively to the following Doctrine or Dogma.
To the opinions which individual divines have advanced in lieu of this
doctrine,”—for instance, I suppose, the strange fancy that the words
of the Bible are not divinely dictated, that the language is human and
yet exempt, by divine power, from any possible admixture of human
error,—“ my only objection, as far as I object, is—that I do not un-
derstand them. I said that in the Bible there is more that ﬁnds
me than I have experienced in all other books put together; that the
words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being; and that
whatever ﬁnds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its hav-
ing proceeded from the Holy Spirit. But the Doctrine in question re-
quires me to believe, that not only what ﬁnds me, but that all that.
exists in the sacred volume, which I am bound to ﬁnd therein, was
not alone inspired by, that is, composed by men under the actuating
inﬂuence of the Holy Spirit, but likewise—dictated by an infallible in-
telligence ;——that the writers, each and all, were divinely informed as
well as inSpired. I can conceive no softenings here which
would not nullify the Doctrine, and convert it to a cloud for each
man’s fancy to shape and shift at will. And this doctrine, I confess,
plants the vineyard of the word with thorns for me, and places snares
in its pathways.” He proceeds to show how the doctrine in question
injures the true idea of the spirituality and divinity of the sacred
volume, and directly or indirectly tends to alienate men from the out-
ward Revelation. A second edition of this little work will soon be
prepared.

The book has been denounced in strange style by some who do not
profess to have it. These reasoners assume in the ﬁrst place that
both the tendency and object of it is to overthrow Christianity—-
whereas any one who reads it, and not merely what a hostile spirit
has predetermined to ﬁnd in it, can not fail to perceive that at least

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686 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

the writer’s object is to guard and exalt the religion of Christ. But,

5‘ A fitsecondly, forgetting that the book is intended to overthrow Christi-
'\ '1: / anity, they urge that Christianity has done very well hitherto without
gsuch views as it propounds, and that very great thinkers and good

men have lived and died, in the faith and fear of the Lord, without
the knowledge of them ;—as if the wants of the Church were in all
ages exactly alike; or as if there had not been in all ages clouds over
the sunshine of faith, occasioned by the difﬁculties which the writer
seeks to remove; or as if it were not true that the more light men
obtain on one side of the region of thought the more they need on
other sides; as if greatness and goodness, in their application to men,
were not relative terms, and the best and wisest of mortals, that have
appeared upon earth, had ever been free from error and imperfection!
I should think there is hardly a foolish or evil notion on any subject
which might not be screened from attack by such arguments as these.
And, even were they not such mere weakness, of what force can they
be with those, who take for their motto, as Mr. Coleridge did from
ﬁrst to last: that all men may know the truth and that the truth may
set them free .9 Religious truth and religion are identiﬁed in Scripture,
or at least represented as one and inseparable; and how can a man
obey the truth or minister to it, except by setting forth, what, after
the widest survey of the subject which he is capable of taking, he he-
lieves to be the truth .9

The suggestion that no man should examine such subjects or call
in question prevailing views in religion save one who starts from a
high station of holiness and spiritual light, can be of little value un-
less accompanied by a criterion of holiness, both as to kind and degree,
admitted by all men. Prevailing notions are often utterly erroneous,
and if none might expose what they believe in their hearts to be
wrong and injurious views, till it was proved, even to their adver-
saries’ satisfaction, that they were far advanced in true sanctity,
wrong views would be the prevailing ones till the end of time.
Providence works by ﬁner means than enter into this sort of philoso-
phy, making imperfection minister to the perfecting of what is good
and purifying of what is evil.

Whether or no the views of St. Jerome and other ancient Fathers
concerning Inspiration are, as has been aﬂirmed, something far
deeper and higher than we, in our inferior state of spirituality, can
conceive, I do not presume to decide; but yet I would suggest, that
high and spiritual views in general are capable of being set forth in
words, and of gradually raising men up to some apprehension of them.
They do not remain a light to lighten the possessor and mere dark-
ness, or a light that closely resembles a shade, to the rest of the
world. Things that pertain to reason and the spirit appeal to the
rational and spiritual in mankind at large; they tend to elicit the

BIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT. 687

reason and expand the understandings of men; deep calleth unto
deep; and if the teaching of Paul and John is now in a wonderful
manner apprehended by peasants and children, who hear the Gospel
habitually, St. Jerome’s notions of Inspiration, if truly divine and
evangelical, would by this time be generally apprehended by Chris-
tians in the same way, and by the wise and learned would be com-
prehended more intellectually and systematically. Whereas, can it
be denied, that no consistent scheme of Inspiration has ever been
gathered from the teaching of those ancient Fathers? They who be-
lieve that such a scheme is contained in their writings, explicitly or
implicitly, will do well to unfold it. Merely to talk about such a
thing in a style of indeﬁnite grandeur is but to conjure up a mist, by
the spell of solemn sounding words, to mock the eyes of men with a
cloud castle for a season—a very little season it is during which any
such piece of mist-magniﬁcence can remain undispersed in times like
the present, except for those who had rather gaze on painted vapors
than on realities of a hue to which their eyes are unaccustomed.

Ihave not been able to obtain any exact account of all my Father’s
courses of lectures, given after his visit to Germany, but ﬁnd, from
letters and other sources of information, that he lectured in London,
before going to Malta, in 1804:; on his return from Malta, in 1807;
again in 1808; in 1811; in 1814, in which year he also lectured at
Bristol; in 1817; and, for the last time, I believe, in 1819. His early
lectures at Bristol are mentioned in the biographical sketch.

The poetic or imitative art, an ancient critic has observed, must
needs describe persons either better than they are, at the present time,
or worse, or as they are exactly. The fact is, however, that in literary
ﬁction individuals can seldom be exhibited exactly such as they are,
the subtle interminglings of good and evil, the ﬁnely 'balanced quali-
ties that exist in the actual characters of men, even those in whom
the colors are deepest and the lines most strongly traced, being too
ﬁne and subtle for dramatic effect. Indeed it is scarcely possible to
present a man as he truly is except in plain narrative; his mind can
not be properly manifested save in and through the very events and
circumstances which give utterance to his individual being and which
his peculiar character helped to mould and produce. When taken
out of these. and placed in the alien framework of the novelist or
dramatist it becomes another thing; the representation may convey
truth of human nature in a broad way, and seem drawn to the life, if
the writer have a lively wit, but as a portrait of a particular person
it is often the more a falsehood the more natural it appears.

To poetic descriptions these remarks do not apply. They are, for

688 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

the most part, mere .views of a character in its elevated and poetic
aspects—tributes of admiration to its beautiful qualities. Such are
the ﬁne stanzas, already quoted, in which the poet Coleridge is de-
scribed by the great Poet, his Friend: and such are some less known,
composed by a poet of a later generation, who never saw my Father
face to face. Of these the last four will serve for a conclusion to this
sketch. I give them here for the sake of their poetic truth and the
earnest sympathy they manifest with the studious poet—

Philosopher contemning wealth and death,
Yet docile, childlike full of life and love,—

though they are not among the very ﬁnest parts of their author’s
thoughtful and beautiful poetry.

No lof tier, purer soul than his hath ever
With awe revolved the planetary page
(From infancy to age)
Of knowledge: sedulous and proud to give her
The whole of his great heart for her own sake;
For what she is; not what she does, or what can make.”

And mighty wines from afar came to him ;
Converse of trumpets held by cloudy forms,
And speech of choral storms.
Spirits of night and noontide bent to woo him—
He stood the while, lonely and desolate
As Adam when he ruled a world, yet found no mate.

Ilis loftiest Thoughts were but like palms uplifted;
Aspiring, yet in supplicating guise— ,
Ilis sweetest songs were sighs.
Adown Lethean streams his spirit drifted,
Under Elysian shades from poppied hank
With Amaranths massed in dark luxuriance dank.

‘ Coleridge, farewell! The great and grave transition
\Vhich may not Priest or King or Conqueror spare,
And yet a Babe can bear,
Has come to thee. Through life a goodly vision
“his thine; and time it was thy rest to take.
Soft be the sound ordained thy sleep to break—
W'hen thou art waking, wake me, for thy Master's sakelf

 

' Herc seems an allusion to an anti-utilitarian maxim of Bacon’s, which is very expres-
sive of my Father’s turn of mind :—Et tamen quemadmodum luci magnum habemus gra-
tiam, quod per eam vias inire, artes exercere, legere, nos invicem dignoscere possimus, et
nihilominus ipsa visio [act's res prwstantior est et pulchrior, quam multiplex (jus usus; ita
certe I'psa contemplati: rerum,pr0ut sunt, sine superstitions aut impostura, errnre aut confu:
sione, in se ipsa magis digna est, quam universus inventorumfructus. Novum Organum,
Part of Aph. cxxix.

+ From a volume containing The Search after Proserpine. ReCol.'ections of Greece and
other Poems by Aubrey de Vere, author of The Fall of Rora.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX.

THE following marginal/27a of Mr. Coleridge’s, which were spoken
of in a note to chap. ix. were transcribed for a new edition of the
Biographia by Mr. C.’s late editor, with the passages referred to in
the original German. These passages are here given upon the whole
a little more at large, and in English, but with a clear understanding
that entire justice can not in this way be done to the notions of-
Schelling, which, to be perfectly estimated, must be considered in the
disquisitions to which they belong, as plants and flowers must be
viewed in their native situations in order to be fully understood and
admired.*—S. 0.

MS. note on Schelling’s Philosoph. Untersuchtmgcn ﬁber das Wes-en
der menschlichen Freyhez't and die damit Zusanmwnhimgenden Gegen-
stdnde. Phil. Schrift. p. 397.

There are indeed many just and excellent observations in this work
of Schelling’s, and yet even more than usual over-meaning or un-
meaning quid pro guos—thing-phrases, such as “Licht,” “ Finsterm'ss,”
“Fetter,” “centre,” “circumference,” “ground,” and the like—which
seem to involve the dilemma, that either they are mere similes, where
that which they are meant to illustrate has never been stated, or that
they are degrees of a kind, which kind has not been deﬁned. Hence
Schelling seems to be looking objectively at one thing, and imagining
himself thinking of another; and after all this mysticism, what is the
result? Still the old questions return, and I ﬁnd none but the old an-
swers. This ground to God’s existence either lessens, or does not les-
sen, his power. In the ﬁrst case it is, in effect, a co—existent God,—
evil, because the ground of all evil ;——in the second it leaves us as be-
fore. With that “before” my understanding is perfectly satisﬁed;

’ I wish the reader to know before perusing these notes, on the authority of Archdeacon
Hare, that“ for the last twelve years Schelling has been strongly contending against Hegel,
and has made, or at all events professes to make, the idea of personality and of a personal
God the central principle of his system.” Quoted from the Archdeacon’s admirable defence
of Luther, Mission of the Comforter. Vol. ii. note 10, p. 800.

692 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

and, vehemently as Schelling condemns that theory of freedom, which
makes it consist in the paramountcy of the Reason over the Will,
wherein does his own solution differ from this, except in expressing
with uncouth mysticism the very same notion? For what can he
meant by the “individuality, or Icltheit, becoming eccentric, and usurp—
ing the circumference,” if not this? He himself plainly says that
moral evil arises not from privation—much less negation,—but from
the same constituents losing their proper ordination, that is, becoming
C. B. A. instead of A. B. 0. But wherein does this differ from the
assertion, that the freedom of man consists in all the selﬁshness of
his nature being subordinated to, and used as the instrument and ma-
teria of, his Reason, that is, his sense of the universal Will?

In short nothing seems gained. To creation— Werden—he him-
self admits that we must resort; he himself admits it, in even amuch
higher sense, in the Logos, or the alter Deus et idem. Other creations
were still possible, from the will of God, and not from His essence,
and yet partaking of His goodness. A mere machine could be made
happy, but not deserving of happiness; but if God created a Being
with a power of choosing good, that Being must have been created
With a power of choosing evil ; otherwise there is no meaning in the
word Choice. And thus we come round again to the necessity aris—
ing out of ﬁniteness, with Leibnitz and Plato. For it is evident that
by Matter Plato and Plotinus meant Finiteness ;—or how else could
they call it 76,:17‘762), without any qualities, and yet capable of all?
The whole question of the origin of Evil resolves itself into one. Is
the Holy Will good in and of itself, or only relative, that is, as a mean
to pleasure, joy, happiness and the like? If the latter be the truth, no
solution can be given 0f the origin of Evil compatible with the at-
tributes of God; but (as in the problem of the squaring of the circle),
we can demonstrate that it is impossible to be solved. If the former
be true, as I more than believe, the solution is easy, and almost self-
evident. Man can not be a moral being without having had the
choice of good and evil, and he can not choose good without having
been able to choose evil. God, as inﬁnite and self-existing, is the
alone One, in whom Freedom and Necessity can be one and the same
from the beginning: in all ﬁnite beings it must have been arrived at
by a primary act, as in Angels, or by a succession of acts as in Man.

In addition it seems to me that Schelling unfairly represents Kant’s
system as the mere subjecting of the appetites to the Reason. Where-
as Kant makes the enjoyment of freedom, not freedom itself, consist
in the subjection of the particular to the universal Will, in order to
their identiﬁcation: and does not Schelling use Freedom often when
he means no more than others mean by Life—that is, the power of
originating motion—S. T. C.

APPENDIX. 693

7 Ibid. p. 403. “Through Freedom, a power is asserted, in principle
unconditioned, without and by the side of the divine power, which
according to those conceptions is inconceivable. As the sun in the
Firmament extinguishes all heavenly lights, even so, and far more
does the Inﬁnite Might (extinguish) every ﬁnite, absolute Causality in
one Being leaves to all others unconditioned Passibility as their only
portion.”

Note. But is not this still a carrying of the physical Dynamic into
the moral? Even admitting the incongruous predicate, Time, in the
Deity, I can not see any absolute incompossibility of Foresight with
Freedom—S. T. 0.

Ibid. p. 413. “It is not absurd, says Leibnitz, that he who is God,
should nevertheless be produced, or conversely: no more than it is
contradictory that he who is the son of a Man should himself be
Man.”

Note. I do not see the propriety of the instance; unless “God” is
here assumed as an E723 genericum even as “Man.” If this be a
mere nominalism it proves nothing ;—if it be meant as a realism, it
is a petitio principiz‘ sub lite; just as the following instance of the
eye; but this is a far better illustration—S. T. O.

I bid. p. 421. “But it will ever be remarkable, that Kant, when he
had at ﬁrst distinguished things in themselves from pie/(momma only
negatively, through independence of Time, and subsequently, in the
metaphysical investigation of his Critique of the Practical Reason,
had treated independence of Time and Freedom as really correlative
conceptions, did not proceed to the thought of extending to the
things also this only possible positive conception of the in themseh‘es,
whereby he would have raised himself immediately to ahigher stand-
ing-point of contemplation, and above the negativity, which is the
character of his theoretic philosophy.”—Sehell.

Note. But would not this have been opposite to Kant’s aim? His
purpose was a Ka0ap7'mbv 777g div/c779. In order to effect this thoroughly,
within this he, by an act of choice, conﬁned himselﬁ—S. T. C.

I bid. p. 422. “ For whether there are single things conceived in
an Absolute Substance, or just so many single wills, conceived in one
Arch Will (or original will Urwz'lle), for Pantheism, as such, is all
one.” .

Note. The question is, do not these single wills, so included in the
one “ Urwz'lle” become “ Things ?”———S. T. 0.

Ibid. p. 424. “ For, if Freedom is a power unto evil (Vermiigen zum
Risen), it must have a root independent of God.”

694 BIOGRAPHIA LITER ARIA.

Note. But God will not do impossibilities, and how can a Vermo-
gen for moral good exist in a creature, which does not imply a Ver-
mogcn zum 36.36% ?—S. T. C.

I bid. pp. 437—8. “Man has, by reason of his arising out of the
Ground (being creaturely), an independent principle in himself relav
tively to God; but by reason that even this principle—Without on
this account ceasing to be dark in respect of the Ground,—is illu-
mined in Light, there arises in him at the same time a higher one,
that is the Spirit—Now, inasmuch as the soul is the living identity
of both principles, it is Spirit, and Spirit is in God. Were the iden-
tity of both principles as indissoluble as in God, there would be no
distinction, that is to say, God would not be revealed as Spirit. That-
unity which in God is inseparable, must therefore in man be sep-
arable,—and this is the possibility of good and evil.”

Note. But the problem was—how to prove this distinction, Un-
terschz'ecl ; and here it is assumed as a ground of proof! How ex-
actly does this seem to resemble Schelling’s own objection to Fichte?
“It must be so.”—“Why ?”—“Because else my Theory would be
false.”—-—-“ Well! and what if it were 9” In truth from p. 429 I ﬁnd
little but Behmenisms, which a reader must have previously under-
stood in order to understand. And in the name of candor and com-
mon sense, where does this Zertrennlz’ohket‘t differ from the rejected
Vermogen zum Boson, involved in dam freyen 'VermOgen zum Guten .9—
S. T. C.

I bid. p. 438. “The Principle raised up out of the ground of Na-
ture, through which man is separate from God, is the selfness in
him, but which, through its unity with the ideal principle, becomes
Spirit.”

Note. We will grant for a while, that the principle evolved or lifted
up from this mysterious Ground of existence, which is and yet does
not exist, is separate (geschiedon) from God; yet how is it separate
from the Ground itself? How is it individualized? Already the
material phenomenon of partibility seems to have stolen in. And at
last I can not see what advantage in reason this representation,
this form of symbol, has over the old more reverential distinction of
the Divine Will, relatively to the End, from the same Will, relatively
to the Means; the latter of which we term his Wisdom, and to the
former appropriate the name of the Divine Will Kai" Epgbaow.

Schelling has more than once spoken of the necessity of a thorough
study of Logic; and he has admitted that a logical work suited to
the present state and necessities of scientiﬁc discipline does not exist.
Would that he had preﬁxed to this work a canon of his own Logic,
and, if he could, had taught us wherein his forms of thinking diﬂ‘er

APPENDIX. - 695

from the trans-realization of not Ideas alone, but more often—Ab-
stractions and arbitrary gene1al te11ns in Proclus !—S. T. C.

Edd. pp. 439—40. Note. It IS difﬁcult to conjectme what advantage
.Schelling proposed to himself 1n thus allego1izing ,and yet so iinpei-
fectly. Whatever he might dream as to the hidden identity of dark-
ness with the natural yearning, yet no one can avoid distinguishing
daylight from the mere sense of daylight. In short, Light here means
something: why not substitute that meaning 2—8. T. 0.

17nd. p. 442. Note. How can I explain Schelling’s strange silence
respecting Jacob Boehme? The identity of his system was exulted
in by the Tiecks at Rome in 1805, to me ; and these were Schelling’s
intimate friends. The coincidence in the expressions, illustrations,
and even the mystical obscurities, is too glaring to be solved by
mere independent coincidence in thought and intention. Probably
prudential motives restrain Schelling for a while ; for I will not think
that pride or a dishonest lurking desire to appear not only an ori-
ginal, but the original can have inﬂuenced a man of genius like Schell-
ing.——-S. T. O.

I bid. quotation in a note. “ An instructive illustration is here given
by Fire (as wild, consuming, painful, glowing heat) in opposition to
the so-named organic beneﬁcent life-glow, since here Fire and Water
enter into a Ground (of growth), 01 a conjunction, whilst there they
go out of one another 1n disco1d.”

Note. Water 1s the great Nulse and Mediat1ix of all g1owth; an
instrument of union—a mar1iage—of the combuIent and combustible
principles, oxygen and hydrogen. Fire, 011 the contrary, is the ﬁerce
combat of the two. This is better, as more accurate, than Fencr
and IVasser in Einem Grenada—S. T. C.

I bid. p. 445. “ Leibnitz tries in every way to make it conceivable,
how evil may arise out of a natural want or deﬁciency. The Will,
says he, strives after the Good in general, and must desire Perfec-
tion, the highest measure of which is in God; but when it abides
ensnared in the delights of the senses, with loss of higher goods, this
very want of the counter-striving is the Privation, in which evil con-
sists.”

Note. The modern English Unitarians contemplate the Deity as
mere Mercy, or rather Good-nature, without reference to his Justice
and Holiness; and to this Idol, the deiﬁcation of a human passion, is
their whole system conﬁned. The Calvinists do the same with the
Omnipotence of God, with as little reference to his Wisdom and his
Love—S. T. 0.

Ibid. p. 449. “For the weakness or non-efﬁciency of the intelligent

696 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Principle may certainly be a ground of the want of good and vir-
tuous actions, but not a ground of actions positively bad and contrary
to virtue.”

JVote. Why not, if the inertia be voluntary? Suppose Heat to be
a moral agent and voluntarily to withdraw itself; would not the split-
ting of the vessel by the frozen water be a positive act? I ﬁnd a
confusion in Schelling of the visible with the conceivable. As well
might I say, that when I tossed a child into the air, and wilfully did
not catch it again—this, being a mere negation of motion, was no
moral act—S. T. 0.

Ibid. p. 452. Note. Schclling puzzles me forever by his man made
up of two separable principles; and yet he (as a tertium aliguid),
whose and not who these principles are, has the free power of sepa-
rating them.——-S. T. 0.

Ibid. pp. 455-6. “ But there are in Nature accidental determinations,
. which are explicable only by an excitement of the irrational or dark
principle of the creature that has taken place directly in the ﬁrst crea-
tion—only by a selfness made active (aktivirter Selbstheit). Whence
in Nature, beside the performed moral relationships, there are un-
mistakable foretokens of Evil, although the power thereof has ﬁrst
been excited through man; whence phanomena, which, irrespectively
of their being dangerous to man, excite a general natural abhorrence
(Absehen). .Note. Thus the close connection, in which the imagina-
tion of all people, especially all fables and religions of the East, place
the serpent with evil, is certainly not gratuitous ‘ or unmeaning.”—
Transl.

Note. But some have supposed this to be the ape. The ape is the
very opposite of the serpent. The eel, the trout, the salmon, these
excite no Absehen.

PS. I doubt the truth of my own remark as to the eel and earth-
w0rm.—S. T. C.

I bid. p. 459. .Note. Why not have quoted all this from Boehme, as
an extract misonné .9 But does the hypothesis, or hypopoiesis rather,
explain the problem of evil? A nature—the ground, the substratum,
of God, which is not Er Selbst God himselffbut out of which God
risen exists, and which yet is begotten by the self-existent, and yet is
evil, morally evil—and yet the cause and parent, yea, the very es-
sence of Freedom, without which, as antecedent, das Biise can not be
-——what is all this? . .

PS. The bookbinder has docked my former notes; but I under-
stand enough to ﬁnd that my ﬁrst impressions were the same as my
present are, after repeated perusal, and too strong a prepossession.
‘It is a mere day-dream, somnium philosophans.’—S. T. 0.

Ibid. p. 462 Note. But where after all, is the Evil as contra-dis-

APPENDIX. 697

:inguished from calamity and imperfection ? How does this solve the
iiversity, the essential difference between regret and remorse? How
does it concur even with the idea of Freedom? I own I am disap-
pointed, and that, with respect to the system, I remain in the same
state, With the same hurrying dimly and partially light-shotten mists
before my eyes, as when I read the same things for the ﬁrst time in
Jacob Boehme.—S. T. C.

Ibid. p. 463. “Thence the universal necessity of sin and death, as
the real destruction of all particularity (Eigenlzeit), through which
every human will must pass, as through ﬁre, in order to be puriﬁed.”
-—Tmnsl.

Note. But is death to the wicked as to the better mortal? Shall
we say that the redeemed die to the ﬂesh, and therefore from it; but
that the reprobate die in the ﬂesh and therefore with it ?—S. T. 0.

Ibid. p. 467. “ For that is free which acts conformably to the laws
of its own proper being, and is determined by nothing else, either
within it or without it.”—Tra7zsl.

Note. And is not this a conﬁrmation of the old remark, that he who
would understand Freedom, instead of knowing it by an act of Free-
dom (the mystery in the mystery), must either ﬂee to Determinism d
prior-23 or ab emtm,-—or to Fat-alism, or the necessity ex essentia, propria.
In either case how can we explain Remorse and Self-accusation other
than as delusions, the necessity of which does not prove the necessity
of knowing them to be delusions, and, consequently, renews the civil
war between the Reason and the uneonquerable Feeling, which it is
the whole duty and promise of philosophy to reconcile ?—S. T. 0.

Ibid. p. 468. “Man is in the original creation, as has been shown,
an undivided being (which may be mythically represented as a state
of innocence and original blessedness anterior to this life): himself
alone can divide himself. But this severance can not take place in
Time; it takes place out of all Time, and thence together with the
ﬁrst creation, although, as I ﬁnd, distinct from it.”—- Transl.

Note. But this makes it fall in time.”—S. T. 0.

17nd. p. 469. Note. “ So Luther in the Treatise De Sarto Arbitm'o;
with justice, although he had not rightly conceived the union of such
an unfailing necessity with the Freedom of actions.”—Tmn3l.

Note. Far better to have proved the possibility of Freedom, and to
have left the mode untouched. The reality is suﬂiciently preved by
the fact. . . .

‘ Ibid. ibid. Note. I still feel myself dissatisﬁed with the argument
against Freedom derived from the inﬂuence of motives, Vorstellungon,

VOL. 111. 2 G

698 BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

&c. For are these things—and not rather mere general terms, signify-
ing the mind determining itself? For what is a motive but a determin-
ing thought? and what is a thought but the mind acting on itself in
some one direction? All that we want is to prove the possibility of
F ree-Will, or, what is really the same, a Will. N ow this Kant had
unanswerably proved by showing the distinction between phmwmem
and noumena, and by demonstrating that Time and Space are laws of
the former only (al 015V19£0£l§ ai wpdrac 777g alaﬁﬁoewy' é xpévog‘ ,uEv, 7';
«pain; Ka0’ 610v oévﬁeotg‘ 77/; aloﬁﬁaewg 7-279 éaw’ 6 as xcﬁpog, 1779 £350.) and
irrelative to the latter, to which class the Will must belong. In all
cases of Sense the Reality proves the Possibility; but in this instance
(which must be unique if it be at all), the proof of the Possibility only
is wanting to effect the establishment of the Reality. Therefore I
can not but object to p. 468—3iefdllt ausser aller Zeit, and daher mit
der erster Schopfung zusammen. (It takes place out of all Time and
thence together with the first creation.) This has at least the ap-
pearance of a contradiction.—S. T. 0.

Mid. pp. 469-70. “In the consciousness, so far as it is mere self-
comprehension and ideal only, doubtless that free deed which comes
to pass of necessity, can not take place; since it precedes it as exist-
ence (the deed precedes consciousness as actually existent)——ﬁrst
makes it; yet is it not therefore no deed of which the human being
can ever take cognizance; since he who in some way to excuse an un-
righteous action, says, ‘ Thus I am unalterably,’ is yet very well aware
that he is thus through his own fault, however true it may be that it
has been impossible for him to do otl1er1vise."+—Tra7¢ol.

Note. I have long believed this; but surely it is no explanation be-
yond the simple idea of Free Will itself—«S. T. C. (The remainder
of this note is unfortunately lost.)

I bid. p. 47 2. “And it is worthy of notice how Kant, who had not
raised himself in theory to a transcendental fact determinant of all
human existence, was led, in his later inquiries, through mere true
observation of the phenomena of the moral judgment, to a recognition
of a subjective, as he expresses it, ground of human actions, preceding
every deed that occurs to the senses, which yet itself again must be
an act of f’r.eedon1’—T7ansl.

Note. But why this asserted superiority over Kant? Where 18 the
proof, —where the p1 obabihty, that by mere faithful observation he
could arrive—(he alone of all other philosophers)—at this awful con-
clusion? Lastly, what has Schelling added to Kant’s notion ?—S. T. C.

I bed p. 47 S He1e also is a note of Mr. C.s " partly obliterated, in
which he exclaims, “How unfair is this, to attribute to Kant a slow-
motive making process, separate by intervals of time. Most true,

'APPENDIX.. ' ‘ 699

most reverently true is it that a Being imperfect does feel an awe as
in the presence of a holier Self—alter et idem, where the I distin-
guishable through imperfection, &c.”—S. T. C.

These remarks seem to be made in reference to those of Schelling
aimed against unsre Empﬁndungsphilosophen, “ our sensation-philoso-
phers.” “ To be conscientious,” he afﬁrms, “is for a man to act ac-
cording as he knows, and not contradict in his deeds the light of
knowledge. He is not conscientious, who, in any case that occurs,
must ﬁrst hold up to himself the law of duty, in order to decide upon
right doing through respect to the same. ’wligiosity, according to
the meaning of the word, leaves no choice between things opposed—-
no equilibrium arbitrii, the bane of all morality, but only the highest
decidedness for that which is right, to the utter exclusion of choice.”

Ibid. p. 493. “Still the question recurs, does Evil end and how?
——has Creation in general a ﬁnal aim, and if this be so, why is this
not reached immediately,———why is not Perfection even from the be-
ginning? To this there is no answer but what is already given: be-
cause God is a Life, not merely a Being. But all Life has a destiny,
and is subject to suffering and becoming. Even to this then has God,
of his own free will, subjected Himself, when even at ﬁrst, in order
to become personal, He divided the Light world and the world of
Darkness.”—-Traml.

Note. These are hard sayings. Is not the Father from all eternity
the Living one? and freywillig sick unterwerfen um persimlieh zu
werden! (The rest is lost.)—S. T. C.

. Ibid. p. 495. “Its state therefore is a state of not-being, a state of

the continual becoming-consumed of the activity—( Verzehrtwerdem
der Aktivitc’it) or of that in it which strives to become active.”—
Transl.

Note. Then will not the darkness become again what it was before
its union with the light, and of course the object of the same process
repeated? Surely this has too much the appearance of subjecting
the supersensual to the intuitions of the senses, and really looks like
pushing in a thing merely to take it out again. And still the question
returns—Why not this in the ﬁrst place? What can the process have
effected ?

I bid. p. 502. Note. It seems to me that this whole work pre-sup-
poses Des Cartes’ “ quad eta/re coneepimus, verum est.”

Philosophisefze Briefe ﬁber Dogmatismus imd Oritieimnus Philosoph.
Schrift.

P. 119. Note: I have made repeated efforts, and all in vain, to un-
derstand this ﬁrst Letter on Doamatism. and Criticism. Substitute

700 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

the World, die Welt, for a moral God, what do I gain in der reinde-
thetischen Seite more than in any other point of view? How can ]
combat or ﬁght up against that which I myself am? Is not the very
impulse to contend or to resist one of the links in the chain of neces-
sary causes, which I am supposed to struggle against? If we are told
that God is in us both to will and to do, that is, as the sole actual
agent, how much more must this apply to the World,'or Fate, or
whatever other phantom we substitute. I say how much more, be-
cause upon the admission of a supersensual being, this may possibly
be, and we therefore, from other reasons, do not doubt that it is re-
ally compatible with Free Will; but with a World-God this were a
blank absurdity. .Der Gedanke mick der Welt entgegenzustellen,* not
only hat nichts grosses fur mickjr but seems more pot-valiant nonsense,
without the idea of a moral Power extrinsic to and above the World,

——-as much inconceivable by a sane mind, as that a single drop of the
Falls of Niagara should ﬁght up against the whole of the Cataract,
of which itself 1s a minim!

How much more sublime, and in other points of view, how inﬁ-
nitely more beautiful, even in respect of Taste or aesthetic judgment, is
the Scriptural representation of the World as inenmity with GOd, and
of the continual warfare, which calls forth every energy, both of act
and of endurance, from the necessary vividness of worldly impres-
sions, and the sensuous dimness of Faith, in the ﬁrst struggles! Were
the impulses and impresses from the faith in God equally vivid, as
the sensuous stimuli, then indeed all combat must cease—and we
should have Hallelujahs for Tragedies and Statues—S. T. C.

Hid. p. 122. Note. I can not see the force of any of these argu-
ments. By theoretic, as opposed to practical Reason, Kant never
meant two Persons or Beings ; but only that what we could not prone
by one train of argument, we might by another, in proportion to the
purposes of knowledge. I can not theoretically demonstrate the ex-
istence of God, as a moral Creator and Governor, but I can theoreti
cally adduce a multitude of inducements so strong as to be all but ab-
solute demonstration; and I can demonstrate that not a word of
sense ever was, or ever can be, brought against it. In this stage of
the argument my conscience, with its categorical command, comes in
and proves it to be my duty to choose to believe in a God—there
being no obstacle to my power so to choose. With what consistency
then can Schelling contend, that the same mind, having on these
grounds ﬁxed its belief in a God, can then make its former speculative
inﬁrmities, as applied to the idea of God, a pretext for turning back
to disbelieve it? i

* The thought of opposing myself to the world.
1 Has nothing great for me.

APPENDIX. 70}

‘ Ibid. pp. 123-4. “With What law would you reach unto that
Will ?' With the moral law itself? This is just what we ask, how
you arrive at the persuasion that the Will of that Being is agreeable
to this law? It would be the shortest way to declare that Being him-
self the author of the Moral Law. But this is contrary to the spirit
and letter of your philosophy. Or must the Moral Law exist inde-
pendently of all Will? Then we are in the domain of Fatalism ; for
a law, which is not to be explained by any Being that exists inde-
pendently of it, which rules over the highest power as well as over
the least, has no sanction, save that of necessity.”— Transl.

Note. Just as well might Schelling have asked concerning the Wis-
dom or any other attribute of God—and if we answered, they were
essential—that is God himself—then object, that this was Fatalism.
The proper answer is, that God is the originator of the Moral Law;
but not per arbitrium (Willk’ilh’l'), but because he is essentially wise
and holy and good—rather, Wisdom, Holiness, and Love—S. T. 0.

Ibid. p. 142. “It is indeed no such uncommon case in human life,
that one takes the prospect of a future possession itself’.”-—-Traml.

Note. Is there not some omission of the press here—that is far den
Besitz after Benita—that we take the look out on a future possession
for the possession itself ?—S. T. 0.

Ibid. p. 152. (In a note.) “It is remarkable enough that language
has distinguished so precisely between the Real—dam Wirkl’ichcn (that
which is present in the sensation or perception, which acts on me and
whereon I react), the actually Existing, dam Daseycnden (which, in
general, is there present in Space and Time), and Being, Clem Beg/en-
den, which is, through itself, quite independently of all conditions of
Time.”-—-T7'ansl.

Note. But how can we know that any thing is, except so far as it
works on or in us; and what is that but Existence? Answer :--—the
means, by which we arrive at the consciousness of an idea, are not
the idea itself.--—S. T. 0.

Ibid. p. 175. Note. It is clear to me that both Schelling and Fichte
impose upon themselves the scheme of an expanding surface, and call
it Freedom. I should say—where absolute Freedom is, there must
be'absolute Power, and therefore the Freedom and the Power are
mutually intuitive. Strange that Fichte and Schelling both hold that
the‘very object, which is the condition of Self-consciousness, is noth~
ing but the Self itself by an act of Free Self-limitation.

P.S.—The above I wrote a year ago: but the more I reﬂect, the
more convinced am I of the gross materialism, which lies under the
whole system. It all arises from the duplicity of human nature, or

702 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

rather perhaps the triplicity. Homo animal triplex. The facts stated
are mere sensations, the corpus mortuum of the volatilized memory.—-'
S. T. 0.

Ibid. pp. 177. “Perhaps I should remind them of Lessing’s confes»
sion, that with the idea of an inﬁnite Existence be connected a repre-
sentation of an inﬁnitely tedious duration of Time, which was to him
torment and misery; or even of that blasphemous exclamation: ‘I
would not for all the world be (eternally) blessed.’ ”—Transl.

Note. Surely this is childish—a mere confusion of Space with In-
tensity, of Time with Eternity. I can not think that by the word
“adequate” Spinoza meant “commensurate,” but simply “imme-
diate.”

Abhandlungen zur Erlaz'zteru-ng deg Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre.
Philosoph. Schrift.

P. 219. “I have sometimes heard the question asked, how it was
possible, that so absurd a system, as that of the so-named Critical
Philosopher should—not merely enter any human being’s head—but
take up its abode there.”—-Transl.

Note. I can not see the mystery. The man who is persuaded of
the being of himself, seines 10713, as a thing in itself, and that the bod-
ily symbols of it are pkamomena, Ersckeinungen, by which it manifests
its being to itself and others, easily, however unreasonably, conceives
all other phamomena as manifestations of other consciousnesses—as
unseen, yet actually separate, powers, or [071.9, or monads.—S. T. C.

I bid. p. 221. “It is evident, that not only the possibility of a repre
sentation of outward things in us, but the necessity of the same must
be explained. Further, not only, how we become conscious of a rep-
resentation, but also why on this very account we are under the ne—
cessity of referring it to an outward object.”—Transl.

Note. I can not comprehend how it should be more difﬁcult to as-
sume a faculty of perception than of sensation, that is of self-per-
ception.

I bid. p. 224. “Now that which is an object (originally) is, as such,
necessarily ﬁnite. As then the spirit is not originally an object, it
can not according to its nature be originally ﬁnite.”———Transl.

Note. That the Spirit is, in the modiﬁed sense here stated, inﬁnite,
may be proved by other reasons; but this is surely a strange twist of
logic. If all Finites were necessarily objects, then indeed the Spirit,
as far as it is no object, might be inﬁnite. But that it 2'8 therefore in-
ﬁnite, by no means follows. The ﬁnite may be the common predicate
of both—of the one essentially, of the other by the will of the Cre-
ator.—S. T. C.

APPENDIX. 703

Ibid. pp. 228—9. “We can not abstract from the product of the in-
tuition without acting freely, that is, without freely repeating the
original mode of action (of the Spirit) in the intuition, &c. &c. Now
ﬁrst through our abstracting the product of our action becomes an
object.”—Tmnsl. '

Note. In spite of Schelling’s contempt of psychology, the fact of
outness is more clearly stated in psychology, as dependent on vivid-
ness. In a fever, yet retaining our understanding, we see objects as
outward, yet well know that they are not real.-—-S. -T. 0.

Ibid. p. 237. “In the ﬁrst place, the whole hypothesis (for more it
is not), will explain nothing, for this reason, that, putting it at the
highest, it does but make an impression on our receptivity conceiv-
able, but not that we behold a real object. But no man will deny,
that we. not merely perceive (have a feeling of—empﬁnden), the out-
ward object, but that we have an intuition of it. According to this
hypothesis, we should never get further than the impression: for,
though it be said that the impression is ﬁrst referred to the outward
object (as its cause), and that thereby arises the representation of the
latter, it is not recollected that on occasion of the intuition, we are
conscious of no such act, no such going forth from ourselves, no such
opposition and relationship; also that the certainty of the presence
of an object (which yet must be something distinct from the impres-
sion), can not rest on so uncertain a conclusion. In any case, there-
fore, the intuition must at least be considered as a free act, even
though one that is occasioned by the impression.”——-Transl.

Note. This is, methinks, all very weak. The Realist may surely
aﬁirm that an impression of a given force is what we call an object,
as Schelling afﬁrms, that the mere self-excitation of our own self-
directed operations are what we mean by objects.

I always thought one of the difﬁculties attending the notion of cause
was its co-instanteity with the effect. The heat and the ﬁre for in-
stance. In all things, the effect is the presence of some other thing
than the cause—S. T. C.

Ibid. p. 239. “In ﬁne between the cause and its effect, continuity
holds good, not only according to Time, but according to Space
also.”——T7'ansl.

Kant, justifying the logical possibility of attraction, as a cause acting
at a distance, has shown the sophistry of this assertion in his Ver-
mz'schte Schrq'ftcn, and Schelling himself adopts and conﬁrms the argu-
ment of Kant in his System des Tm'nsscendentalen Idealismus.——

S. T. 0.

Notes written in Schelling’s System des Tramsc. 1d. on or before the
title page.

704 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Berkeley’s scheme is merely an evolution of the positions-—A11per~
ception is reducible to sensation, and All sensation is exclusively sub-
jective (He who feels, feels himself).——Ergo, all Perception is merely
subjective (“ Perceptum ==percipi .' or Dum percipitur, est. The
principium cognoscendi is raisedinto the principium essendi.) Now I
should commence my reply to Berkeley by denying both positions—
or (what is tantamount), the second. Sensation, I would say, is never
merely subjective, but ought to be classed as a minimum or lower de-
gree of Perception. Sensation, I assert, is not exclusively subjective,
but of all the known syntheses of Subject + Object it is the least ob—
jective; but for that reason still objective—or (to express my posi-
tion in a somewhat more popular form), Sensation is Perception
within the narrowest sphere. But, this admitted, Berkeleyanism
falls at once. Now the facts of zoology are all in favor of my position,
and the whole class of Protozoa so many instances of its Truth. Nay,
as Extremes meet, Sensation, in its ﬁrst manifestation, is eminently
objective. The light, warmth, and surrounding ﬂuid are the brain and
nerves of the polyp: even as the true Objective (the corporeal world
as it is) exists only subjectively, that is, in the mind of the philosopher,
while the true Subjective (that is, the appearances resulting from the
position and mechanism of the Percipient) exists for our common
consciousness only as independent and pure Object.—S. T. C.

II). pp. 15, 16. “But with these two problems we see ourselves
entangled in a contradiction. According to B. there is demanded a
dominion of Thought (of the Ideal) over the world of sense: but how
is such a dominion conceivable, when (according to A.) the represen-
tation, in its origin, is the mere slave of the Objective? Conversely,
if the real world is something quite independent of us, according to
which, as its archetype, our Representation (according to A.) must
regulate itself, then it is inconceivable, how on the other hand the
real world can regulate itself according to Representations in us. In
a word, the practical certainty is lost to us by reason of the theoreti-
cal, the theoretical through the practical; it is impossible that there
should be at the same time Truth in our Knowledge, and Reality in
our will.”—Transl.

Note. Written at the end of the volume.

Ye Gods, annihilate both Space and Time, and then this paragraph
may become cogent logic. But as it is, one might with equal plausi-
bility from the fact of one man’s lying on his back deduce the incom-
possibility of another man’s standing on his feet; or from the incom-
possibility of both positions in the same man at the same time infer
the impossibility of both positions successively. Besides the antitheta ~
are not adequate opposites, much less contraries. A wheel presented
.to me generates, without apparent materials, the image of the whee.

APPENDIX. 705

in my mind. Now if the preconception of a wheel in the artist’s
mind generated in like manner a corporeal wheel in outward space,
or even in a mass of timber, then indeed (though even so I can see
no contradiction in the two hypotheses) a problem would arise of
which the equality or sameness of kind in the two generators might
be the most natural solution. Yet even here there is a ﬂaw in the
antithesis : for, to make it perfectly correspondent, the mass of wood
ought to generate the image, wheel. Where is the inconsistency be-
tween the reality (i. e. actual realizing power) of the Will in respect
of the relative position of objects, and the reality of the objects them-
selves independent of the position? Is the marble of a statue less
really marble than the marble in the quarry ? What after all does the
problem amount to more than the fact, that the Will is a ris matrix,
and the mind a directiee power at one moment and in relation to the
Will, and a Re or Per-cipient in relation to objects moving or at rest?
Schelling seems at once to deny and yet suppose the objectivity—and
on no other grounds than that he commences by giving objectivity to
abstractions. A acting he calls Will; the same A acted on he calls
Truth; and then, because acting and being acted on, are Antitheses
or opposite States, he ﬁrst turns them into contrary things, and then
transfers this contrariety to the subject A. That A acts on B, and is
itself acted on by O, is a fact, to the How? respecting which I may
have no other answer than Nescio .° but that my ignorance as to the
How ? makes any contradiction in the Fact, Ican by no means admit,
any more than that a mail coach moving ten miles an hour upon the
road contradicts the fact of the same standing in a coach house the
night following—S. T. O.

TVritten at the beginning of the rolume.

Pp. 15, 16. § O. The remarks on the blank leaves at the end of
this volume are, I still think, valid : so far that all Schelling’s “ con-
tradictions” are reducible to the one diﬁiculty of comprehending the
co-existence of the Attributes, Agere et J’ati, in the same subject, and
that the difﬁculty is diminished rather than increased by the Facts of
human Art, in which the Pati, and the Agere take place in different
relations and at different moments. Likewise that Schelling’s posi-
tion of Opposites, viz. Nature and Intelligence as the same with .Ob-
ject and Subject, already supposes Plurality, and this being supposed,
the whole hypothesis becomes arbitrary, for the conception of Plué
rality once admitted, Object and Subject become mere relative terms,
and no reason can be assigned why each existent should not be both
Object and Subject. But if he begins at the beginning, then the ob-
jection applies—viz. that Schelling arbitrarily substantiates attributes.
For, in the very act of opposing A to B, he supposes an X common
to both, viz. Being, otm’a : but this given, there is no necessary reason,

2 0*

706 BIOGRAPHIA LITERA RIA.

why Objectivity and Subjectivity should not both be pledicable 01
both—so namely that the Subject B is an Object to the Subject A,
and the Subject A an Object to the Subject B; as in the instance of a
lover and his mistress gazing at each other. Finally it is a suspicious
Logic when no answer can be given to the question, “ What do you
mean? Give me an instance.” The fact is, that every instance,
Schelling would have brought, would simply give an object as the
base of the Subject; and his bewusste Thtitigheit ohne Bewusstseyn I
do not understand. At least if he mean the Will, it is a strange way
of expressing himself; and at all events he should have previously
explained the distinction between primary consciousness, ceasing on
the coincidence of O. with S.—-and the secondary, or consciousness of
having been conscious, which is memory. It would be well to show,
how much better Schelling’s meaning might have been given in simple
common-life words—S. T. 0.

Ibid. p. 17. This argument grounds itself on the assertion “es ist
allerdings eine productive Thdtigheit, welche im Wollen sich dussert,”
in the very same sense of the word “productive,” in which Nature
“ im produciren der Welt productio seg/ :” only that the one is “ mit”
the other “ ohne Bewusstseyn productio.” Now this is merely asserted.
I deny it, and for the reasons above stated—S. T. C.—i. e. at this mo-
ment. A book I value, I reason and quarrel with as with myself when
I am reasoning—S. T. C.

P.S.—Add to this, one scruple which always attacks my mind
when I read Schelling or Pichte. Does Perception imply a greater
mystery, or less justify a postulate, than the act of Self-consciousness,
that is, Self-perception? Let Perception he demanded as an Act
Speciﬁc of the mind, and how many of the grounds of Idealism be-
come 0= 0!

No! I am wrong. For grant this mysterious Perception, yet ask

yourself whatyou perceive and a contradiction ensues. (Therest lost.—
S. C.)—S. T. C.

Transsc. Id. last paragraph of p. 40—1. “ How we, in respect of those
positions, in which a wholly heterogeneous Objective falls in with a
Subjective—(and this takes place in every synthetical judgment
A —- B ; the Predicate, the conception here always represents the Subjec-
tive, the Subject the Objective) can arrive at certainty, is inconceiva-
ble.”-—Transl.

Note—It seems to me that the Logician proceeds from the princi-
ples of Identity, Alterity and Multéity or Plurality, as already known :
—that the Logical I attributes its own Subjectivity to Whatever really
is, and takes for granted that a Not-he really is—and that it is a
Subject; and this he proceeds to make objective for himself by the

 

APPENDIX. 707

predicate. N. B.—-It does not follow, that the Logical I attributes its
Egoity, as well as its Subjectivity, to the not-itself, as far as it is.

In other words, the Logical I seems to me to represent the individ-
ual I, which must indeed be this or that or some other, but without
determining which it is—individuality, or singularity, in genere, as
when we say, every man is an individual.

In the position, “Greeks are handsome,” Schelling says, the Sub-
ject “Greeks” represents the Object,—the Predicate “handsome,” the
Subjective. Now I would say “Greeks” is a Subject assumed by ap-
position with myself as a Subject. Now this Subject I render objec-
tive for myself by the Predicate. By becoming objective it does not
cease to be a Subject.

It follows of course that I look on Logic as essentially empirical in
its pre—conditions and postulates, and posterior to Metaphysics; un-
less you would name these the higher Logic.

N.B. The following remarks apply merely to the Logical form, not
to the Substance of Schelling’s Philosophy.

Schelling ﬁnds the necessity of splitting, not alone Philosophy, but
the Philosopher, twy-personal, at two several gates.

This system may be represented by a straight road from B a to B b.

 

 

A
Ba j[ '3'!)
.A.

with a gate at A, the massive door of which is barred on both sides:
so that when he arrives at A from B a, he must return back, and go
round by C to B b, in order to reach the same point from that di-
rection.

Now I appear to myself to obviate this inconvenience by simply
reversing the assumption that Perception is a species, of which Sen-
sation is the genus, or that Perception is only a more ﬁnely organized
Sensation. With me, Perception is the essentia prime», and Sensation
percept'io undue ; while Perception so called is peroeptto plurium s-z'm~
ultanea. Or thus: single Intuition is Sensation, comparative and
complex Intuition, Perception. The consequences of this position are
wide and endless.——S. T. C.

' The whole difﬁculty lies in the co-existence of Agere et Pate? as
Predicates of the same subject—S. T. 0.

(Written on a blank page before the title page of the Transsc. Id.—
S. C. '

P. >54, and then pp. 59-62. The Spinozz'sm of Schelling’s system

708 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

ﬁrst betrays itself; though the very comparison des reinen Iehs m
geometrisehen Raume ought, by its inadequacy and only partial ﬁtness,
to have rescued him. Im Razz-me the materia and the limiting power
are diverse—S. T. C.

I bid. p. 118. (As I fear that these notes on the Transs. Id. will
scarcely interest or be intelligible to any but readers of that work, I
do not give the long passage to which the following refers—S. 0.)

But why, if there are many Iehheiten, should not No. 1 I act, on
N o. 2 I? If I act on itself, it is acted on, therefore actible on by an
I. But to assert that it can be acted on by this and no other incom-
prehensibly-determined-in-its—comprehensible-determinateness-I, is to
assert, and no more. In short, the Attributes of the Absolute Syn-
thesis, the I AM in that I AM, are falsely transferred to the I AM in
that God is.

Aye, replies Schelling, this would be seoundum principium essendi ;
but I speak only secundum principium seiendi.

True, I rejoin, but you assert that the two Principles are one;
p. 18. 1. 17—18.* What is this but to admit that the I itself, even in
its absolute synthesis, supposes an already perfected Intelligence, as
the ground of the possibility of its existing as it does exist? And
what is Sohelling’s Beg'riinztheit izberhaupt but the allgemeinerte ab-
straction from the bestimmten Begrc'mztheiten—a mere ens logieum,
like motion, form, color, &c.?—S. T. C.

Note written in Schelling’s 83/3. des Transs. Id. p. 121, above the
section headed—Problem : to erplain how the I beholds itser as per-
ceptire.——Transl.

I more and more see the arbitrariness and inconveniences of using
the same term, Anschaaen, for the productive and the contemplative
Acts of the Intelligential Will, which Schelling calls das Ich. If this?
were true, the I could never become self-conscious : for the same im-
possibility for the same reason will recur in the second act—and so in
fact it is. We can no more pass without a saltus from mere Sensa-
tion to Perception, than from marble to Sensation.

Whether it is better to assume Sensation as a minimum of Percep-
tion, or to take them as originally diverse, and to contend, that in all
Sensation a minor grade of Perception is comprised, deserves consid-
eration.-—-S. T. C.

Transsc. Id. pp. 259—60. “Since then Intelligence beholds the evo-

' The two things taken together, that the deﬁned Limitation can not be deﬁned through
the Limitation in general. and yet that it arises at the same time with this, and through
one ﬂat, makes that it is the Incomprehensible and Inerplicable of Philosophy.—7‘ransl.

f This Intuition (ﬂnschauen) is an Activity, but the I can not at once behold. and be
bold itself, as beholding (ansrhauen, und sich anschauen, als anschauend). lb. p. 121
—'l'ransl.

APPENDIX. 709 -

lution of the Universe, so far as it falls within its view (Anschauung),
in an organization, it must consequently behold the same as identical
with itself.”

Whether from acquired habit or no, I do not, and seem to myself
never to have, regarded my body as identical with myself, my brain
any more than my nails or hair, or my eyes than a pair of spectacles.
——S. T. C.

A few other notes of Mr. G. on Schelling have become partly illegi
ble, or are too much interwoven with the text to be given here—S. C

On a treatise in the Jahrbi‘wher der Mediein als Il’issensehaft, enti
tled Grundsc’itze 2a einer hilnftigen Seelenlehre, Ground~positions for
a future Doctrine of the Soul,—Mr. Coleridge writes thus :

Never surely was work written so utterly unsatisfactory for both
head and heart. What we are or are to be; what the I is, is not even
spoken of. But we are gravely told in the last paragraph, that, if we
act virtuously, the soul will remember a something of which we,
while there was a We, had been likewise conscious : while our brother
N othings, who had not been virtuous, would be forgotten by this
Soul! I—though how this unconscious Soul can be said to forget
what, according to this hypothesis, she never knew any thing at all
about, I can not even conjecture. And what is the basis of the whole
system ?——mere [pee dixits grounded on the mere assumptions of the
scheme of dead mechanical emanation—S. T. C.

At the end of Sehelling’s Denkmal der Sehrift von den gottlichen
Dingen, &c. des Herrn Friedr. Heinr. Jacobi, Jilin Coleridge has written:

Spite of all the superior airs of the Natnr-Philosophen, I confess
that, in the perusal of Kant, I breathe the free air of Good Sense and
Logical Understanding with the light of Reason shining in it and
through it; while in the Physics of Schelling I am amused with hap-
py conjectures, and in his Theology ain bewildered by positions,
which, in their ﬁrst sense are transcendental (ilberﬂiegend), in their
literal sense scandalous—S. T. C.

In the blank page at the beginning Mr. Coleridge, after speaking of
Sehelling’s great genius and intellectual rvigor, objects to his “exalte-
tion of the Understanding over the Reason.” “What understand-
ing ?” he says, “That of which Jacobi had spoken? No such thing!
but an Understanding enlightened ;—in other words, the whole Man
spiritually regenerated. There is doubtless much true and acute ob-'
servation on the indeﬁniteness, the golden mists of J acobi’s scheme;
but it is so steeped in gall as to repel one from it. And then the
Fancy is unlithesome and wooden, jointed in the wilful open-eyed
dream—and the Wit, the would-be smile, sardonic throughout. Dry
humor with avengeance.”——S. T. C.

710 ' BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

On a margin. of Schelling’s Philosophie and Religion, in which the
author contends with a work of Eschenmeyer’s, the aim of which is
to reintegrate Philosophy with Faith, at p. 7, Mr. O. writes:

Whatever St. Paul (the Apostle to and through the Understanding)
may have done, yet Christ and John use the word Faith not as Es-
chenmeyer, 850. but as a total energy of the moral and intellectual be-
ing, destitute of all antithesis—S. T. C.

On p. 5 Mr. Coleridge writes .°

Here we have strikingly exempliﬁed the ill effects of ambiguous
(i. e. double meaning) words even on highest minds. The whole dis-
pute between Schelling and Eschenmeyer arises out of this, that
what Eschenmeyer asserts of Faith (the fealty of the partial faculty,
even of Reason itself, as merely speculative, to the focal energy, i. 6.
Reason + Will + Understanding = Spirit) Schelling understands of
Belief, i. e. the substitution of the Will + Imagination + Sensibility
for the Reason—S. T. 0.

Philosophy and Religion, pp. 21—2.
If I do not deceive myself,'the truth, which Schelling here toils in.
and after, like the moon in the scud and cloudage of a breezy Novem-
ber night, is more intelligibly and adequately presented in my scheme
or T etraxy.
1. Absolute Prothesis.
WILL absolutely and essentially causative of Reality. Therefore
2. Absolute Thesis
of its own reality. Mons-Pater. But the absolute Will self-realized
is still absolutely creative of Reality. It has all Reality in itself; but
it must likewise have all Reality in another. That is, all eternal rela-
tions are included in all Reality, and here there can be no difference
but of relation, but this must be a real relation.
3. Absolute Antithesis.

But the absolute of Mans is Idea, absoluta adwguata, Deus Filius.

But where Alterity exists without difference of Attribute, the
Father beholdeth himself in the only-begotten Son, and the Son ac-
knowledgeth the Father in himself, an Act of absolute Unity is given,
proceeding from the Father into the Son, from the Son into the
Father—weprxépnmg, processio intereireularis.

4. Absolute Synthesis, Love, Deus Spiritus.

From the beginning I avoid the false Opposition of Real and Ideal,
which embarrasses Schelling. Idea with me is contra-distinguished
only from conception, notion, construction, impression, sensation.—
S. T. C.

The Jahrbucher cler Medicin als Wiseensehaft and the Zeitsehrift do)

APPENDIX. 71]

Spebulative Pkg/silo, edited by Schelling, contain writings by a disci-
ple of his, Dr. Steﬁ‘ens. On pp. 21—2 of a Review by Steﬁ'ens of the
later natural-philosophical writings of the Editor in the latter, Mr.
Coleridge says :

Tne clear-headed perspicuous Steﬁ‘ens, whom I love and honor with
heart and head, could not but feel the obscurity and limping of Schel-
ling’s theory of warmth, or the ground-work at least of the promised
theory, as given in his Einlez'tung .' and nothing but his reverential sense
of Schelling’s genius, would, I am persuaded, have inﬂuenced him to
adopt so implicitly his great master’s dynamico-atomistie assumption
of Simple Actions. As to Warmth, far more beautiful is Steﬁ‘en’s
own doctrine, who regards it as the Indifference between Light and
Gravity. And yet there must be a lower form of Light and Warmth,
in which they stand in antagonism. Why not thus? Let the highest
product of Light (N .B. not as the universal Antithesis to Gravity, in-
cluding the power of sound, &e., but) as Luw phamomenon or Light
commonly so called, be the outward pole or correspondent Excitant
of Organization. A lower will be a chemical, or chemico-meehanical
stuff, embodying the chemical powers of contraction, as Oxygen,—
While the Warmth will appear as the dilation in Hydrogen, the sub-
stance or magnetic product with which the one is combined and made
latent being the metal 3/, the stuff representative of —-Magnetism, and
the other the metal at, the stuff representative of +Magnetism, not
improbably Nitrogen itself. The order would be thus :

Luca phaenomenon. Caloric.
— Electricity. + Electricity.
Oxygen. Hydrogen.
Functions. Functions.

1. Distinction. 1. Diffusion.

2. Contraction. 2. Dilation.

3. Fixation.* 3. Vis ﬂuidiﬁead’

* 73.6. When it acts on a Fluid,—for a Fluid is that which has no
distinguishable parts: the oxygen acts therefore on the whole as at-
all and one. But for the same reason when it acts on a Solid (=7'eco
tins, Rigid) it exerts the same ﬁxive power by causing a retraction of
each particle 1n Upon itself, as it we1 e, and thus produces the phas-
nomenon of pulverization or multéity, and the quality of positive
hardness. The power exelted is the same in both, and diﬁ'erenced
only by the subjects.

1 Hydrogen. Fluidumﬂuidissz‘mum aéa eum quidem propter levita-
ojm relatioam, hem/Z rem aer. An Air.

712 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Jahrbilchei' der Med. Dritt. Band, zweyt Heft. Ueber die Vegeta-
tion von H. Steﬁ'ens. P. 197. _

Thou askest how we presume to say any thing about vegetation,
without having spoken on the nature of light. Hast thou seen it, or
is it not seeing itself? Steﬁ'. Transl.

There is a quackery in passages like these, very unpleasant to my
feelings. This ,uerdfa’ao'tg eZg (227.0 yévog‘ Without notice ! Dufn'igst :—
What do I ask ?——or concerning what? Light as an object—that
somewhat, in the absence of which vegetables blanch, &c. And
Steffens answers me as if we had been conversing of subjective Light
—-and asks me, is it not the same as Light! Is not its esse in the
vide‘re .9 I see a herring,—I see milk,—I slice the fresh herring length-
ways, and suspend the slips in a clear phial of milk,—all this is seeing.
But in an hour or two I see the phial shining, I see a luminous appa-
rition, and, if I darkenthe room, I can see other things by it within
the sphere of a foot. Now it is this, we were talking of z and what
sense is there in saying: [9t es nieht das Sehen selbst ?—S. T. C.

At the end of some remarks on a treatise by Franz Baader Ueber
Starres und Fliessendes, immediately following that'of Steﬁ'ens on
Vegetation, Mr. Coleridge says :

The word matter, materia, 132.77, is among the most obscure and un-
ﬁxed in the whole nomenclature of metaphysics, and I am afraid that
the knot must be out, i. e. a ﬁxed meaning must be arbitrarily im-
posed on the word, as I have done in deﬁning.

Matter as mere videri x (opposed to) spirit as guod agit et non up;
paret, the synthesis being body. At all events I would have prefer-
red the terms Quantity and Quality ; thus :

Materia + Spiritus 2 Corpus. Ergo Materiel est in corpore : spiritus
agit per Corpus. Matter and Spirit are Body: then Spirit (2) re-
emerges in moments, as a property or function of Body, but in omni
te-mpore and as the whole per totalitatem imma/mentem—it is Quality—
Spirituspotentialis. Again Materia em in corpore: Quantity.+S. T. C.

NOTE A. A. p. 163.

It has been thought that this epigram was suggested by one in a
book called Term-Filius, or The Secret History of the University of
Oxford, London, 1726. I give the older epigram, though I think its
paternal relationship to the later one by no means clear on internal
evidence, and know not that my father ever saw the volume which

contains it.
Upon some verses of Father William.

“Thy verses are immortal, O! my friend,
For he who reads them, reads them to no end.”
No. xxvi. Yul. i. p. 142.

APPENDIX. 713

NOTE A. B. p. 186.

“ Preﬁxed to the works of Cowley is an Account of his Life and
Writings by T. Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. Mr. Coleridge
alludes to his suppression of Cowley’s letters, on which subject Sprat
says: “The truth is, the letters that pass between particular friends,
if they are written as they ought to be, can scarce ever be ﬁt to see
the light. They should not consist of fulsome compliments, or tedious
polities, or elaborate elegancies, or general fancies, but they should
have a native clearness and shortness, a domestical plainness, and a
peculiar kind of familiarity, which can only affect the humor of those
to whom they were intended. The very same passages, which make
writings of this nature delightful amongst friends, will lose all manner
of taste, when they come to be read by those that are indiﬁ’erent. In
such letters the souls of men should appear undressed: and in that.
negligent habit, they may be ﬁt to be seen by one or two in a cham—
ber, but not to go abroad into the streets.”

There are many very delightful domestic letters, which are quite
unﬁt for publication; and on the other hand, many letters ﬁt for the
public eye have been written to friends; as those of COWper. In
general it may be said that men of genius, especially if their intellec-
tual powers have been cultivated, are apt to rise above mere home-
wit and wisdom even when they are speaking of home-matters; they
seldom treat details and particulars merely as such, but quickly bring
them into the light of principles and general truths, and even in their
chamber are ﬁt to go abroad into the streets,-—nay, ﬁtter sometimes
than if they had dressed themselves for a public entertainment. Few
will agree with Sprat that “ nothing of this nature should be pub-
lished,” though care should be taken to publish nothing which really
answers to his description in suiting only “the humor of those for ,
whom it was intended.” “ Fulsome compliments and tedious polities”
are ﬁt neither for private nor public perusal.—-—S. 0.

NOTE A. C. p. 187.

The illustration of St. Nepomuc occurs in Riehter’s Blumen-Frucht
und-Dornen—Stizcke (Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces) chap. v. The
author says, “ Since the tasters” (critics or reviewers), “seldom write
books themselves, they have the more leisure for looking over and
valuing those of others; occasionally indeed they write bad ones, and
therefore know immediately the look of a bad book when one comes
in their way.” (Noel’s Trans]. p. 135.) They know the look of it
certainly; they recognize in it the old familiar features, and conceive
an affection for it at ﬁrst sight. But they are far from knowing or
declaring it to be bad. The same delusion that led them to write bad

714 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

books under the impression that they were writing good ones, attends
them when they enter upon the ofﬁce of critic, and. then they mis-
take bad for good and good for bad; but doubtless the remembrance
that they themselves have been condemned as writers makes them
eager to ﬁnd writers whom they may condemn in their turn; as boys
at school, though they can not retaliate upon their tormentors, yet
feel it a compensation to inﬂict upon others what has been inﬂicted
on them. But, as Mr. Carlyle says, “ all ﬂesh, and reviewer-ﬂesh too,
is fallible and pardonable;” and they who have suffered from re-
viewers, though their depositions may be heard in evidence, are not
to pronounce the ﬁnal judgment on their merits and demerits—S. C.

NOTE A. D. p. 213.

Since this was printed, being assured by a friend that the story con-
tained in the author’s note at p. 213, is told in one of Jeremy Taylor’s
Sermons, I sought again and found it in Sermon xii. of the Twenty-
seven preached at Golden Grove, entitled The Mercy of the Divine
Judgments; or, God’s method in caring sinners. But either Mr.
Coleridge has added to the passage given by him as a quotation, as
well as slightly altered it, or he must have found the story with a
different comment in some other place. The words of Taylor are
these: “St. Lewis the king having sent Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, on
an embassy, the bishop met a woman on the way, grave, sad, fantas-
tic, and melancholic, with ﬁre in one hand, and water in the other.
He asked what those symbols meant. She answered, My purpose is
with ﬁre to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the ﬂames
of hell, that men may serve God without the incentives of hope and
fear, and purely for the love of God.” He then proceeds, “But this
woman began at the wrong end,” &c.—S. C.

NOTE A. p. 222.

After the chapters which treat of Association of Ideas in this
volume were printed, I met with the following remarks in The Life
and Correspondence of David Hume, a new publication by J. H. Bur-
ton, Esq., Advocate. The author quotes the passage in the B. L.
concerning Hume’s probable obligations to Aquinas,——then Sir J. M38
explanation, which disposes of the external evidence undoubtedly:
then proceeds to say: '

“With regard to the internal evidence, the passage of Aquinas
particularly referred to, which will be found below,* refers to memory,

‘ “ Quandoque reminiscitur aliquis incipiens ab aliqua re, cujus memoratur, a qua
procedit ad aliam triplici ratione. Quandoque quidcm ralione similitudinis, sicut quando

APPENDIX. 715.

not imagination, to the recall of images in the relation to each other
in which they have once had a place in the mind, not to the forma~
tion of new associations, or aggregates of ideas there; nor will it
bring the theories to an identity, that, according to Hume’s doctrine,
nothing can be recalled in the mind unless its elements have already
been deposited there in the form of ideas, because the observations
of Aquinas apply altogether to the reminiscence of aggregate objects.”

Neither Maasz nor Coleridge could have been unaware, that both
text and commentary relate to Memory and Recollection. But what
is Memory? Stewart, so distinguished for psychological analysis, tells
us, that the word “ always expresses some modiﬁcation of that faculty
which enables us to treasure up, and preserve for future use, the
knowledge we acquire.”* Locke says, “This laying up of our ideas
in the repository of the Memory, signiﬁes no more but this, that the
mind has a power in many cases to revive perceptions which it has
once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has
had them hefore.”1'

Memory, then, as commonly understood, is the faculty of preserving
and recalling mental representations, together with the consciousness
that they have been presented to the mind before: and in this sense
it is obviously a mode of the Imagination, which is in general “the
faculty of representing an object without the presence of it in the
intuition ;” although likewise a modiﬁcation of the Judgment, inas-
much as it judges of present thoughts and images that they are the
same as past ones. Maasz observes indeed that, strictly taken, Mem-
ory is simply the power of perceiving this identity of present with
past representations, which Hobbes calls a “ mixt sense, but internal ;”
but that, since this presupposes the recalling of former ones, and we
may add, the retaining them to be recalled, the common use of speech
makes a quid pro quo and ascribes the latter also to Memory}
Now it is certainly the broad popular sense of Memory which Aris’
totle and Aquinas treat of ; in which sense it belongs in part to Ima-
gination; and surely the principle whereby we recall ideas and pre-
serve them in a certain order is the same as the general principle of
the association of ideas, though Aristotle does not expressly say this
because his object did not require it. “ The observations of Aquinas
apply to the reminiscence of aggregate objects.”——True—but do they
aliquis memoraturde Socrate, et per hoc-nccurrit ei Plato, qui est similis ei in sapien-
tin; quandoque vero ratione contrarietatis, sicut si aliquis memoretur Hectoris, et per
hoe occurrit ei Achilles. Quandoque vero ratione propinquitatis cujuscumque, sicut
cum aliquis memor est patris, et per hoc occurrit el ﬂlius. Et eadem ratio est de
quacumque alia prOpinquitate, vel societatis, vel loci,vel temporis, et propter hoc ﬂt
reminiscentia, quia motus horum se invicem consequuntur.”—Commentary Lectio v. 5.
p. 26. Antw. Edit. 1612. '

* Elements of the PhiIOSOphy of the Human Mind, chap. vi. 8. 1, p. 306.

T Hum. Understand. b. 11, cap. x. s. 2.
t Var-such der Einbildung'skraft, pp. 16—17.

716 BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARIA.

mt at the same time show how the objects came to be aggregated!
Cause autem rem'im'scend'i, says Aquinas, est ordo motuum gut relin-
guuntur in anima e1: prima impressione ejus, quad prime apprehendi~
mus.* The process of recollection depends on the order of the mo-
tions left in the mind from the ﬁrst impression; and Aquinas, after
Aristotle, states the law of that order, though only, as Sir J. Mackin-
tosh observes, for the sake of explaining recollection. The objects
are strung together, like beads, upon the string of propinquity or re-
lationship; in reminiscence we lay hold of the string, and follow it
with the hand, till we arrive at the particular head which we wish to
bring close to the eye. Mr. Burton says that “ the scope of Aquinas’s
remarks has more reference to mnemonics or artiﬁcial memory than
to association.” But since artiﬁcial memory depends wholly upon
association, and association itself also depends on memory—(for we
could not connect any one mental presentation with another if we
could not preserve those we have once had and distinguish them from
such as are immediately present)——Aquinas could not well refer to the
principles of the one without indicating the law of the other. Mem-
ory comes into act only in conjunction with other powers of the
mind; its relation to phantasy or imagination is implied by Hobbes
in his Human Nature, chap. iii. and it is plainly stated by Aristotle
De Memorial, cap. i. Ti ,uév 015v son lumi/uy [cal 75 ,uvnluoveziew siprrrat,
6n oavrdaparog, (by elxovog‘ 01') odvraolua, é‘SLg. “ \Vhat then memory
and to remember is, hath been said, namely, that it is the habit of
the phantasm, as the image of that which the phantasm represents :”
that is, says Aquinas, a certain habitual conservation of the phan-
tasm, not indeed according to itself, for that belongs to the imagi-
native virtue, but inasmuch as the phantasm is the image alicujus
p'rz'us sensati, of something previously perceived by sense. In this ﬁrst
chapter Aristotle shows that Memory has its seat in the same power
of the soul as phantasy. Tivog ,uév 06v 11312 Tim my]; e’arw 7'; ,uwim,
(pavepov, 6n Olin-8,0 Ital 7'] oavraoia. It is true that Memory is concerned
with intellectual representations as well as sensible ones, and there-
fore, as Maasz observes, does not belong to Imagination alone; but.
neither does association of ideas belong to Imagination alone; all our
“ideas of reﬂection” are associable in the same way and by the same
inﬂuences as those of sensation, though the former are not imaged.
Mr. Coleridge did not think it necessary to state the connection be-
tween memory and other cognitive powers of the soul when he
passed at once, at the end of chap. vii. from “Association of Ideas”
to “Acts of Memory.”

Insisting upon the merits of Hume’s classiﬁcation, Mr. Burton ob-
serves, that it embodies cause and effect but not contrariety; that

‘ Commentary, Lactic v. a. p. 26.

APPENDIX. 717

of Aquinas contrariety* but not cause and effect; and that “in a di-
vision into three elements this discrepancy is material.” Hume re-
ﬁned upon the older classiﬁcation no doubt; he was not likely to
overlook cause and effect, on which subject he wrote his most re-
markable essay; but I doubt whether this division into three ele-
ments is so very material. Nearness in time and nearness in space,
though they may form one clause of a sentence, are different kinds
of nearness, and on the other hand cause and effect must in part be
subordinated to them when viewed in reference to association ;—like«
ness and contrast are not quite reducible to one principle, if the last
may “ be considered as a mixture of causation and resemblance.” It
is perhaps better to say, as Mr. Coleridge does, that there are five
occasioning causes of recollections, or ﬁve sorts of connections of
ideas more or less distinguished from each other, all containing the
idea of nearness,‘|' but each, I should suppose, exerting an inﬂuence
on the association, in its own individual right.

Mr. Burton’s assumption that “Coleridge failed to keep in View, in
his zeal to discover some curious thing, &c. that the classiﬁcation is
not that of Aquinas, but of Aristotle,” is puzzling. Mr. Coleridge’s
aim all along is to show the classiﬁcation to have been originally
Aristotle’s, and Aristotle’s commentator is only called into court by
him to depose on this point. Those who imagine that Mr. Coleridge
had no other object, than to detect Hume or any one else in plagiar
ism, are judging him not by himself but by others very unlike him.

NOTE B. p. 225.

The elder Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, was a learned philologer of
the eighteenth century, the author of several works, but best known
by his writings on the instinct of animals, and since his death by the
attribution to him of the famous Wolfenbiittel Fragments, published
by Lessing in 1774 and 1777, his authorship of which was in the end
put beyond doubt.

* By contrariety Aquinas does not seem to have meant contrast in being and charh
actor, but opposition or antagonism in position, at least in his first mention of it. His
example of Achilles and Hector shows this, for they were signal adversaries, but not
directly‘opposed to each other in qualities of mind or body. Aristotle’s expression
évavrfov might signify any opposedncss; and in a subsequent paragraph (e. p. 26)
Aquinas explains contrariety as contrast, when he is concerned with Aristotle‘s own
illustration of proceeding from the moisture of the atmosphere to Autumn, adry soasor.

’r Speaking of Dr. Brown, Sir James Mackintosh says: “He falls into another and
more unaccountable error, in representing his own reduction of Mr. Hume’s principles
of association (resemblance, contrariety. causation, contiguity in time or place) to the
one principle of contiguity, as a discovery of his own, by which his theory is distinguished
Item “the universal opinion of philos0phers.” Nothing but too exclusive a considera-
tion of the doctrines of the Scottish school could have led him to speak thus of what
Was hinted by Aristotle, distinctly laid down by Hobbes, and fully unfolded both by Hat?
by and Condlllnc. ”—Ethical Philosophy, p. 164.

718 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

His son, J oh. Alb. Heinrich,was born at Hamburg in 1729, attained
to eminence as a physician in his native city, became Professor of the
Natural Sciences at the Gymnasium in 1796, died at Ranzau in 1814.
Archdeacon Hare believes him to have been “a rationalizing moralist
of the same class as Franklin, one of those who imagined that the
world might be regenerated by philosophy ;” and mentions that his
writings were chieﬂy on electricity, conductors, &c., which led him
into a kind of controversy with Kant. J. A. H. Reimarus, though of
his Father’s mind in regard to revelation, appears to have belonged '
to the higher order of those who profess to hold what is commonly
called (by a misnomer as Mr. Coleridge has affirmed) natural reli-
gion. He maintained the existence of a Supreme Being, not as a
mere abstraction—which he insisted that on Spinoza’s system He is
made to appear, however the author of that system may have pro-
tested against such a consequence—but as the living God, the source
of all being, from our relations to whom, prayer, thanksgiving, and
adoration'naturally arise, but whose nature and ways are not properly
apprehensible by us—in whom to know, to will, and to work are one
thing. His language on this subject is very similar to that used after-
wards by F ichte in his Bestimmung (lee Menschen. But Reimarus de-
clared that the proof of all which men ought to know and believe for
their soul’s good in religion can never be derived from appearances,
occurrences, tradition, history, or sayings of Fathers, nor through in‘
ward illumination or feeling or immediate inspiration, but—mistaken
man i—certainly through development, comparison and examination
of the complex and connection of truths, or by the labor of the under-
standing set forth in due order through the connection of thought.
These views he unfolds in a treatise Ueber die Gri‘mde (leer menschli-
chew Erkenntniss and cler naturlichen Religion, and I suppose it is to
a brief passing refutation of materialism, given in sections 3—7,- at the
beginning of this work, that Mr. Coleridge refers in the second sen-
tence of chap. vi. of this volume—S. C.

NOTE D. p. 301.

“About the close of the fourth century, and probably during the
lifetime of Odin, Ulphilas, an Arian of Mcesia, undertook the conver-
sion of the Goths. He translated from the Greek many portions of
Scripture into the Mceso-gothic language (see Michaelis’s Introduction
to the New Testament, § 82—87), went as a missionary among the in-
habitants of Dacia, and succeeded in drawing their attention to the
contents of the Sacred Books. So many Dacians had-served in the
army at Constantinople, or had visited that city from motives of com-
merce or curiosity, that the foundation of Christian places of worship
among them had become a public wish. Ulphilas obtained from the

APPENDIX. - 719

Emperor Valeus, at Constantinople, the requisite patronage, and was
honored with a sort of episcopal jurisdiction over the Churches which
he had founded, and the tribes which he had undertaken to instruct,
and he deserved by his virtues the conﬁdence and allegiance of his
extensive ﬂock.

“ Of his translations from Scripture, but a small portion of the Gos-
pel has been preserved, which was edited at Oxford in 1750, by Lye,
and in divers. cities of the Continent by J unius, by Ihre, and lately by
Zahn, at Weissenfels, 1805. This version disputes with the poems of
Odin thehonor of being the oldest monument of German literature.‘
From Taylor’s Historic Survey of German Poetry. Vol. i. p. 93.

NOTE E. p. 303.

Otfride or Ottfride was a pious and learned monk, who spent the
greater part of his life in the Monastery of Weissemburg in Lower
Alsace. Taylor, in the Historic Survey, says that he studied at
Fulda, and wrote before the year 876 ; that his rhymed Pater Noster,
rhymed Eucharistic Hymn, metrical version of various portions of
Scripture, and rhymeless poem on the Nativity are to be found in
Hickes. He also wrote a grammar for the sake of purifying the
German language, or rather completed that which Charlemagne had
begun.—S. 0.

NOTE F. p. 303.

Hans Sachs, Whose proper name was Loutzdorffer, was born at
Niirnberg in 1494, became a Protestant, edited his poems in 1558, and
died in 1576. In early youth he wandered from city to city, joining
the Meistersa'nger, who composed godly poems and hymns, and sang
them in the Churches, wherever he went. He has been described as
a pattern of virtue, who withdrew others from the ways of vice to
good and holy living. Taylor says that his poems ﬁlled three
folio volumes, that they were received with noisy approbation, be-
cause they had a very popular turn and favored the new doctrine;
and compares the author to one Pierce the Plowman, who, in like
manner, by his satirical verses, lent an efﬁcacious assistance to
Wickliﬁ'e.

The collection of the poems of Hans Sachs, edited by Biisching at
N iirnberg, 1816, contains Tragedies, Plays, Farces, Dialogues, Son-
nets, Fables, Merry Tales, and Dr'olleries, the style of which is simple
in thought and expression, but easy and ﬂowing; the metre short and
ballad-like, generally the height or nine syllale iambic with rhyme.
A tragic drama on the Creation and Fall of Adam and his Expulsion
from Paradise, is placed ﬁrst in- the collection. This ﬁrst volume

720 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

(erst. Buck.) contains the grotesque Play on the story of Cain and Abel;
which Mr. 0. describes in the Lectures on Shakspeare, IV. p. 238; trans‘
lated by Sachs from the Latin of Mclancthon. It is at p. 143. The ﬁrst
and last parts of this piece are not very congruous with each other.
In the last act we have the awful adult Gain of the Old Testament;
in the earlier ones, a naughty good-for-nothing boy, who runs away
from his tasks to ﬁght with dirty rough lads in the street, and longs
to give that mammy-cbild, Abel, a good knock on the head. The
dialogues between this sweet youth and his brother and parents, when
he refuses to come and be washed and made smart to appear before
the heavenly Examiners the next day, are amusingly natural, and
show that Melancthon did not always abide in his study or the assem-
blies of the learned, but was acquainted with sin in its every day ju-
venile forms. This drama, which is entitled The unlike Children of
Eve, and how God spake to them, is the prince of all naughty and
good child stories : and if these are to be reckoned among the fruit"
of the Reformation, they are not among its best. But the tendency to
bring the grotesque and the trivial into connection with serious and
sacred subjects has been called “the disease of the age,” and was by
no means conﬁned to the Reforming party. Archdeacon Hare thinks
that the poem entitled—The Devil seeks him an abode upon earth
(Z'weit. Buck. p. 52), may have suggested the general plan of the
Devil’s Walk. It describes the Devil roaming about upon earth and ,
observing the various ways of wickedness therein; but the details of
the two poems are perfectly different. The drift of the older piece
was puritanical ; to warn youth against the ungodliness of the dance.
The most marked piece of Hans Sachs about the Reformation is that
called The Wittemberg Nightingale (die Wittembergisch’ Nachtigall),
which describes the mummeries and corruptions of Popery, the Scrip-
tural doctrine of Martin Luther, and the persecution undergone by
his followers. This is a longish piece, consisting of 701 lines. In re-
gard to what Mr. C. says in Section 2, I have learned by the kind-
ness of the Chevalier Bunsen, that there is a hymn by Hans Sachs,
but one that does not at all answer to Mr. C.’s description—that he
could not indeed have known of its existence, and that he must have
been thinking of Luther’s own Hymn of the Reformation; that he
was also mistaken in ascribing the Morning Star (der Morgenste-rn),
to the Niirnberg poet. Both these devotional poems are contained
in his Excellency’s Andachtbuch (Hymn and Prayer Book), the ﬁrst
at p. 263, the second at p. 203, with the name of the author, Phil
Nicolai.-—S. 0.

NOTE G. p. 304.

“ Martin Opitz was born at Breslau in 1595, and wrote Latin and
German poems; which last are remarkable for a terseness hitherto

APPENDIX. , » _ 721

unknown. Suspected of Socinianism, he was protected by Bethlem
Gabor, Prince of Transylvania, who made him rector of a free school
at ‘Weissenburg. His poems were printed at Frankfort, in 1623; and
have since frequently been re-edited. He died of a contagious fever
in 1639. ”

The reputation of Opitz,pe1haps, sulpassed his me11ts, as it reposed
rather on polish of diction than on strength of thought, his style
however found many imitatms. ” Ilist01ic Survey, 1.172,173

J. G. Eichhorn’ s Geschichte der Literatm', after stating that Wekhr-

lin and Opitz arose, the one in 1618, in the South, the other in 1620,
in the North of Germany, that both took very much the same course
in attempting to introduce a better taste and style in poetry, both
sought to ennoble and dignify the romantic material, by models se-
lected from the ancients and the Italians, but that Wekhrlin with his
inferior power and cultivation remained without imitators, proceeds
to say: “ Opitz on the contrary founded a poetical school in Silesia,
which maintained and propagated the good taste he had awakened
for more than half a century. Such a model as Opitz deserved suc-
cess. From how many irregular excrescences has he not cleared the
German tongue! with 110w many new words, expressions, and appli-
cations, has he enriched it! For this purpose be availed himself with
a very pure taste of the old German poets and later writers of bal-
lads, through whom he obtained, as by inheritance, the romantic ma-
terials which he improved; along with these German sources he
studied the Greeks and Romans, as the fathers of a sound taste, and
the works of the genius of our western and southern neighbors, es-
,pecially the Italians. From the last he borrowed the sonnet, and the
melo-drama; the ancients he imitated in didactic and lyric poetry;
.successful in the former but far from happy in the latter, when he
sought to rise above the light song; for the loftier ode, either as re-
gards its matter or spirit, he had not the remotest conception.”
Translation. ( Viertcr Band. ii. Abth. pp. 7 7‘0, 771.)—S. 0.

NOTE II. p. 304.

Interesting accounts of the writers here mentioned are contained
in the ﬁrst volume of Taylor’s llistoric Survey. Christian Furchte-
gott Gellert was born July 4, 1715, at IIaynichen in Saxony, where
his father, who had twelve other children, was Pastor. He died,
Dec. 5, 1769, longing for his release; for, like our own dehgntful
COWper, while he produced strains apt to inspire genial feelings in
others, mi1th and a love of natu1 e, and even in hearts no longer young
and gladsome for a while to 1enew

Vernal delight and joy able to diive
~ All sadness but despair, -

VOL. 111. 2 H

722 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

he was himself saddened by miserable hypochondria, which, after
shadowing his early life with passing clouds, at length, instead of
dispersing itself, gathered round him and darkened his whole sky.
In 1758, he became Professor of Moral Philosophy at Leipzig, and
was very popular as a Lecturer. In 1746 he collected his Fables in
Verse, which had “astonishing success; and form, perhaps, the ﬁrst
native poetic work of the modern Germans, which became decidedly
and nationally popular.” The complete edition of his works, in ﬁve
octavo volumes, appeared but a few months before his decease. _

Friedric Gottlieb Klopstock was born in the Abbey at Quedlinburg
July 2, 1724; was the son of the land-steward of the domain, and
eldest of ten children. He died in 1803, and was buried with great
solemnity on the 22d of March. The Danish Minister Bernstorﬁ‘,
struck with his poetical talents, invited him to Copenhagen, and ob-
tained for him a pension of four hundred dollars for his support, while
he completed his great work The Messiah, the first three cantos of
which, already published, had made a great sensation in Germany.
The Danish capital was his home till 1771. In 1798 he began to
superintend a new and complete edition of his works, the ﬁrst ten
volumes of which contain his poetry, consisting of Odes, Epigrams,
Dramas, and The Messiah (with which vol. iii. commences), an Epic
Poem of twenty books in Hexameter verse. Mr. Coleridge compares
it with Paradise Lost in Lectures on Shakspeare,IV. p. 302. Ac-
cording to Mr. Taylor, Klopstock was far from rivalling Milton in the
“habitual demeanor” becoming a great sacred poet;—set no such ex-
ample of Christian strictness, even after gaining fame by The Messiah,
as that sublimest of Puritans, the author of Paradise Lost. Mr. Cole-
ridge has protested against profaning “the awful name of Milton, by
associating it with the epithet Puritan.” Yet he would not have
wholly dissented from the opinion of a well-known writer, now
amongst us, who calls “this Puritanism of ours,”-that is, the thing
itself, in its pure rather than puritanical form, “among the noblest
Heroisms that ever transacted itself on this earth.”

Charles William Ramler was born in 1725 at Colberg in Pomerania,
of needy parents, and received his ea 1y education at the orphan school
of Stettin. He became Professor of Logic and Fine Literature in the
Berlin Academy for cadets, which ofﬁce and his various literary exer-
tions maintained him comfortably till 1787, when he obtained a pen-
sion, a seat in the academy, and a share in the direction of the N a-
tional Theatre. He died in 1798 of pulmonary consumption, after
having withdrawn from his employments for some time before from
ill health. - His poems, consisting chieﬂy of odes, in the manner of
Horace, obtained great popularity. They were ﬁrst collected apart in
1772. Taylor observes that, though the lyric works of Ramler might
be objected to by a severe critic, as having too much the character of

 

APPENDIX. . 723

1mitati0ns, yet While Lessing passed for an Aristotle, Mendelsohn for a
Plato, and Gleim for an Anacreon, and all of those were friends of
his,——to him the epithet of the German Horace was applied with less
hyperbole.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born at Kamenz in Pomerania, in
January, 1729; was the son of a clergyman (himself a voluminous
writer), and the eldest of twelve children. He died at Hamburg, Feb.
15, 1781, after a life of many changes and various literary employ-
ments, having received the appointment of Librarian at Wolfenbiittel
in 17 69 from the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick. His poetry con-
sists of Epigrams, Minor poems, Fables and Plays, of which Nathan
the Wise, an argumentative drama, has been most celebrated, and, as
curtailed by Schiller, became a favorite acting play throughout Ger-
many. He appears however to have been far greater as a critic and
polemic than as a poet, and wrote in an admirably clear style, and
with considerable power of thought and erudition, on religion, phi~
IOSOphy, literature and art. A writer in the Gent’s. Mag. of May,
1846, contrasting him with Voltaire, after speaking of his close rigid
logic, and eminently philosophical mind, afﬁrms that “the love of
truth, not the love of fame, was the active spring, the vital principle,
of his intellectual activity.”

’ Lessing is an author admired and extolled by men who have evi
dently no taste for German literature in its peculiar character, although
it has lately been said, in an able article on Lessing in the Edinboro’
Review (No.166) that he “ ﬁ1st gav e to German liteiatme its national

tendencies and physiognomy, "’ that while Klopstock made it English,
Wieland French Lessing made it Ger man. This 1 emark 1 ests, I think,
upon no very solid grounds, at least as to Lessing’ s p1io1ity , for was
.not Klopstock, in all his attempts at rivalling the great English Epic,
_—with his cumulated ornaments and multitudinous imagery “fes-
toons of angels singing at every soar of the interminable ascension”
—thoroughly Teutonic—and Wieland’s Muse, even according to his
own account, Germanized Italian rather than French? That some
French poets endeavored like him to turn their strains on Classic and
on Italian models is but a limited ground of resemblance. The Wal-
lenstein of Schiller and the ﬁnest parts of Goethe’s Faust are perhaps
more like English poetry of the ﬁrst order, and have less unlikeness
to it, than any other products of the G01 man Muse , and for this 1eason
that they are the best German poetry; and that, as the most beautiful
forms and faces of all nations are alike in theii predominant cha1 ac-
teristics, so the ﬁnest and rm est poet1y of ever nation has more in
it which Is common to all nations and less of mere national feature
than the inferior kinds. But perhaps a national cast of thought is
more to be discerned in prose writers than in poets. The style of
‘Lessing is too good and pure to be eminently national.

 

 

724 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

The “ compeers” of the four writers above mentioned were Ha
dorn, Schlegel, Ebert, Kramer, Gleim, Kleist and others. Wiela
Herder and Biirger, more celebrated than those last named, ca
upon the ﬁeld before they all had retired from it. —S. 0.

NOTE I. p. 304.

The characteristics of German intellect Mr. Coleridge has given
The Friend (Il.pp.386-7). “If I take the three great countries
Europe,” he says, “in respect of intellectual character,—I sho
characterize them in the following way :—-—premising only that in t
ﬁrst line of the ﬁrst two tables I mean to imply that genius, rare
all countries, is equal in both of these, the instances equally num
ous; not, therefore, contra-distinguishing either from the other,
both from the third country.

GERMANY. ENGLAND. FRANCE.
Genius Genius Cleverness
Talent Sense Talent
Fancy Humor Wit.

So again with regard to the forms and effects, in which the qua
ties manifest themselves intellectually.

GERMANY. ENGLAND. FRANCE.
Idea or Law Anticipated Law discovered Theory invented
Totality Selection , Particularity
Distinctness Clearness Palpability.

Of “idea or law anticipated” he remarks that “this, as co-ordina
with genius, applies likewise to the few only, and, conjoined with t
two following qualities, includes or supposes, as its consequences a
accompaniments, speculations, system, method, &c.” He represe
the mind of the three countries as bearing the following relations
time.

I
GERMANY. ENGLAND. FRANCE.
Past and Future Past and Present The Present.

“The parent vice of German Literature,” says the article on Le
sing referred to in the last note, “is want of distinct purpose; an
as consequences of this, want of masculine character and chasten
style.” Hence, according to the reviewer, its “manifest inferiority
to our own. Others, on the contrary, consider it a special merit
German literature that it does not attempt, or at least ho d it nece
sary, to comprehend its whole purpose beforehand; that it has for i

APPENDIX. 725

object to enlarge the domain of revealed truth and knowledge. the
entire fruits of the discovery in these particulars being left for time
to disclose. It is a besetting evil of English literature that scarcely
any thing is produced here, the want of which is not felt and declared,
before it makes its appearance. The vice of the English mind, in the
present age, as many feel, is its pseudo-practicality; every thing
treated of must issue in something to be done forthwith and out-
wardly, to be enjoyed sensuously or sentimentally. The Germans
Write'on a different principle or from a different impulse; they are
not such slaves to the comforts of life as we are, and consequently
care more for pure intellectual activity; can better afford to say with
Bacon: opera, 73pm pluris j'aoienda aunt, quatemzs aunt rwriter/152's pig-
nora, quam propter m’tw commode. They write far more than we do,
in a free spirit of enterprise, that takes no bond beforehand, but car-
ries on the adventurer with hopes the larger because undefined, and
very slight fears of censure or contempt. They go exploring in all
directions; and though doubtless in many directions nothing is to be
found but barrenness,——though many of the travellers are not fur-
nished with the powers and means necessary for drawing any advan-
tage from such expeditions, though most of them are too little re-
strained by spiritual habits of awe and reverence; yet, can it be
doubted that, acting in this spirit, they have made discoveries in
fruitful regions, while the English have been making none; have been
marching with a pompous measured gait along beaten tracks, and,
what is more to be contemned, maintaining that by the old roads
men may reach new places, the need of arriving at which they can not
but feel, even while they declaim against the presumption of travel-
ling otherwise than as our fathers travelled before us; for instance,
that by the old doctrine of Inspiration (the verbal doctrine) we can
harmonize the new views of Holy Writ which present themselves to
advancing thought and a development of mind as necessary and natu-
ral as that roses should blow in the summer season. The divinity of
Scripture is a truth which no intellectual error can throw into total
darkness, because it shines with light reﬂected from the very heart
and moral being; but men obscure and dishonor it by persisting in
presenting it under the form which it seemed to wear in the twilight
Of reﬂection, even While a stronger day is revealing its true linea-
ments more clearly.

Let us judge the “worthy Teutones” as thinkers and writers not
by the quantity of their chaff but by the quantity of their grain; the
good grain which already enters into our own loaf. Much that is
German may be found in the thoughts of our most marked writers,
even those that are ﬁghting against what they call Goo’manism. But
no sooner do we' abstract the solid matter from the mass of the un-
sound that ﬂoats around it, than we forget whence it came. When.

726 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

it is found to be Catholic it is no longer admitted to be Teutonic, and
unless it is hollow and visionary it is not recognized as German.

Who can wonder that one who sees a “manifest inferiority” in
German literature to English literature of the sameiperiod—(if our
literature of past ages is meant to be included the comparison is hardly
fair)—should ascribe this inferiority to a “want of culture” in the
producers ‘? I however conjecture, that a systematic education of the
intellect is more general in Germany than here. Germans are taught
to think—Englishmen to read and write; there are very ﬁne speci—
mens of style in German literature; and if German authors, as a
body, write worse than the English I believe it is because they think
more, and have a greater number of new thoughts to provide with
new apparel. The streams of language run less smoothly when they
are ﬂowing through freshly opened channels. I will conclude this
note with referring the reader to an interesting little essay in the form
of comments upon a saying of Mr. Coleridge, on the advantages which
the Germans owe to their philosophical education, to their “being
better trained and disciplined” than ourselves “in the principles and
method of knowledge.” It is in the Guesses at Truth, pp. 244-9, 2d
edit—S. C.

NOTE J. p. 308.
Tait’s Magazine, Jan. 1835, p. 9.

“These are things too unnatural to be easily believed; or, in a land
where the force of partisanship is less, to be easily understood.
Being true, however, they ought not to be forgotten: and at present
it is almost necessary that they should be stated, for the justiﬁcation
of Coleridge. Too much has been written upon this part of his life,
and too many reproaches thrown out upon his levity or his want of
principle in his supposed sacriﬁce of his early political connections, to
make it possible for any reverencer of Coleridge’s memory to pass
over the case without a full explanation. That explanation is in-
volved in the strange and scandalous conduct of the Parliamentary
Whigs. Coleridge passed over to the Tories only in that sense in
which all patriots did so at that time, and in relation to our great
foreign interest—viz. by refusing to accompany the Whigs in their
almost perﬁdieus demeanor towards Napoleon Bonaparte. Anti-min-
isterial they affect to style their policy, but in the most eminent sense,
it was anti-national. It was thus far—viz. exclusively, or almost ex-
clusively, in relation to our great feud with Napoleon—that Coleridge
adhered to the Tories. But because this feud was so capital and so
earth-shaking a quarrel, that it occupied all hearts, and all the coun-
cils of Christendom, suffering no other question almost to live in its
neighborhood, hence it happened that he, who acceded to the Tories

APPENDIX. 727

in this one chapter of their policy, was regarded as an ally in the
most general sense. Domestic politics were then, in fact, forgotten:
no question, in any proper Sense, a Tory one, ever arose in that aara;
or, if it had, the public attention would not have settled upon it, and
it would speedily have been dismissed.”

I I). October, 1834, pp. 593-4.

“From Malta, on his return homewards, he went to Rome and
Naples. One of the Cardinals, he tells us, warned him, by the Pope’s
wish, of some plot, set on foot by Bonaparte, for seizing him as an
anti-Gallican writer. This statement was ridiculed by the anonymous
assailant in Blackwood, as the very consummation of moon-struck
vanity; and it is there compared to John Dennis’s frenzy in retreating
from the sea-coast, under the belief that Louis XIV. had commis-
sioned emissaries to land on the English shore and make a dash at
his person. But, after all, the thing is not so entirely improbable.
For it is certain that some orator of the Opposition (Charles F OK, as
Coleridge asserts) had pointed out all the principal writers in the
Morning Post, to Napoleon’s vengeance, by describing the war as a
war ‘of that journal’s creation.’ And as to the insinuation that Na-
poleon was above throwing his regards upon a simple writer of po-
litical essays, that is not only abundantly confuted by many scores of
analogous cases, but also is specially put down by a case circumstan-
tially recorded in the second tour to Paris, by the celebrated John
Scott. It there appears, that on no other ground whatever, than that
of his connection with the London newspaper press, some friend of
Mr. Scott’s had been courted most assiduously by Napoleon'during
the hundred days. Assuredly, Coleridge deserved beyond all other
men that ever were connected with the daily press, to be regarded
with distinction. Worlds of ﬁne thinking lie buried in that vast
abyss, never to be disentombed, or restored to human admiration.
Like the sea, it has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving
bell will bring up again. But nowhere throughout its shoreless mag-
azines of wealth does there lie such a bed of pearls confounded with
the rubbish and ,‘purgamenta’ of ages, as in the political'papers of
Coleridge. No more appreciable monument could be raised to the
memory of Coleridge than a republication of his essays in the Mama
ing Post, but still more, of those afterwards published in the Courier.
And here, by the way, it may be mentioned, that the sagacity of
Coleridge, as applied to the. signs of the times, is illustrated by the
fact that distinctly and solemnly he foretold the restoration of the
Bourbons, at a period when most people viewed such an event as
the most romantic of visions, and not less chimerical than that
‘march upon Paris,’ of Lord Hawkesbury’s, which for so many years
supplied a theme of laughter to the Whigs.”—S. C.

728 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.
NOTE K. p. 314.

William Whitehead was born at Cambridge in 1714-45. He was
the author of several successful plays—The Roman Father, Creiisa.
and The School for Lovers; and of miscellaneous poems, that have
scarce any individualizing characteristics, but are in the manner of
writers of the time of Queen Anne. On his return from travelling
with noble pupils, he published an Ode to the Tiber and six Elegiac
Epistles, which were applauded at ﬁrst, and in course of time neg-
lected ; the usual fate of poems produced by Talent apart from
Genius : the J unonian offspring of a female parent alone. This Ode
to the Tiber is an excellent specimen of such poetry as may be writ-
ten by a clever man, on command, having every thing that is to be
desired, except a soul of its own .' it reads like a ﬁrst-rate school ex-
ercise, or such an exercise as might be produced in an adult School
of Poetry. Whitehead succeeded to the laureateship on the death
of Cibber, and died suddenly, April, 1785, after a life unusually calm
and comfortable for a votary of the Muses, and for one who had ori-
ginally to live by his wits, though very substantial patronage together
with singlehood, exempted him from actually depending upon them;
and in the opinion of those who agree with the “ misogyne,” Boccac-
cio, on the su‘nject of marriage, will partly account for his ease and
tranquillity. He published two volumes of his works in 1774; to
these Mason added a third, with a Memoir of his Life and Writings
preﬁxed to it.

His highest ambition as a poet, it is said, was to resemble Pope,
whose notice he gained, when at Winchester School, by his talent in
verse writing. It is remarkable that another imitator of Pope, named
Whitehead, lived at the same time with the former: was born 1710,
died 1774. In his satire entitled Manners, this Paul Whitehead com-
plains, that he Was not allowed, like Pope, to “lash the sins of men”
without being himself lashed by scornful censure in return: and
speaks of it as a hardship, that little satirists are punished while great
ones are applauded. How little he was he probably never knew, nor
do they appear to have felt it, who have given him a place in the
tenth volume of the British Poets—S. 0.

NOTE L. p. 314.

A Charge to the Poets. This poem, ﬁrst printed in 1741. may be
considered as a sequel to The danger of writing verse, an Epistle by
the same Author, in which he observes shrewdly enough:

One fatal rock on which good authors split
ls thinking all mankind must like their wit;

APPENDIX. 729."-

And the great business of the world stand still
To listen to the dictates of their quill.

Hurt if they fail, and yet how few succeed!
What’s born in leisure men of leisure read ;
And half of those have some peculiar whim
Their test of sense, and read but to condemn.

In the latter he says,

If nature prompts you, or if friends persuade,
Why write, but ne'er pursue it as a trade.

After giving his reasons, and displaying the evils of a 27,76 of writing,
he thus proceeds :

, What refuge then remains ?—with gracious grin
Some practised bookseller invites you in:
Where Iuckless bards, condemn’d to court the town,
(Not for their parents’ vices, but their own !)
Write gay conundrums with an aching head,
Or earn by defamation, daily bread,
Or, friendless, shirtless, penniless complain,
Not of the world’s, but “ Cwlia’s cold disdain.”

A pendant to this picture might be obtained from Mrs. Charlotte
Smith’s poetical description of strolling actors.

While shivering Edgar in his blanket roll’d
Exclaims with too mueh reason, “ 'l‘om’s a-cold 2”
And vainly tries his sorrows to divert

While Goneril or Regan—wash his shirt !

' The author of this work observes that though “praises of the un«
worthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving,” yet
in “promiscuous company no prudent man will oppugn the merits
of a contemporary.” On the same subject Whitehead, after advising
the guardians of the sacred font to “keep the peace,” writes thus :

What is’t to you, that half the town admire

False sense, false strength, false softness, or false ﬁre 2'
Through heaven’s wide concave let the meteors blaze;
He hurts his own, who wounds another’s bays.

What is’t to you, that numbers place your name

First, ﬁfth, or twentieth in the lists offame?

Old Time will settle all your claims at once,

Record the genius and forget the dunce—

but sometimes not till “the genius” has settled his accounts with
time altogether, and forgotten a world which once forgot him l—S. 0.

NOTE M. p. 320.

Boccaccio does not appear a “Misogyne” when he is describing

Dant'es’ adored Beatrice at eight years old—“asset legg'iad'retta a
*

730 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

bella, secondo la suafancz'ullezza,” with features “piene, alt/re alla bel-
lezza, (ll tanta onesta vaghezza, ehe quasi un’ angioletta em reputata dd
molti”——unless he thought that, as certain fruits are not good till they
are past maturity, ladies, on the contrary, are only in perfection be-
fore they have attained it. His account of woman as wife, if it he
meant for that of the genus and not merely of some rare species, may
be pronounced not almost, but altogether slanderous. Well might
he exelaim of such a creature as he describes—who compels her hus-
band to render an account, not only of weightier matters, but even
of every little sigh; what caused it, whence it came, and whither it
is going; who, when he is glad, ascribes it to love of some one else,
and when he is sorry sets it down to hatred of herself—“ oh fatica,
'ivzest'imabz'le (were con cost sospettoso am'male a where, a comersare, ed
ultimamento ad insecclziare e mom're.” The last is all he could be
supposed likely to do with satisfaction in such company. “ Who does
not know,” says he, “that all other things are tried, before they are
taken for better for worse, whether they please or not; but every
one who takes a wife must have her, not such as he could wish, but
such as Fortune grants her?” One might suppose that wives inva-
riably turned out as ill as those of Socrates, of Dante, and of Hooker,
as the ﬁrst espoused of Milton, and the jealous partner of John Wes-
ley. That he spoke generally is too plain by his concluding words:
Lascino iﬁlosoﬁmti l0 sposarsi a” ’rz'cchi stoltz', a’ signori e a’ lavoratori ;
ed essi calla ﬁlosophia si dilettino, molto miglz'ore sposw che alcuna
allra.

All the wives above-mentioned would have sown thorns in any
bosom closely connected with them, unless they have been grievously
belied. If men of letters and philosophers fare worse in marriage
than other men, the last words of the sentence above quoted will
suggest to the mind why this may be. It may be because too often
at least, they not only wed philosophy and literature as no man weds
an ordinary profession, but are apt to both think her the best of
wives and to treat her as such; to make a Sarah of her, and to sink
the poor mortal spouse into the place of Hagar; in consequence of
which the children of the latter have to fight their way through life,
like Ishmael, in a sort of wilderness. Kindly as well as wisely does
Mr. C. advise that no man should permit the interests of an intel-
lectual pursuit thus to over-ride those of the affections, but that the
two sh mid be made to bear equally upon the moral being and to sus-
tain it. Philosophy has often sufﬁced so to ﬁll a man’s mind that
it has stood him in stead of marriage: he who unites it with mart
riage must not suffer it to be thus engrossing, nor expect heart ser-
vice from one to whom he has not given his heart, -—in reality, though
she may have no rival breathing.

_ ,Any reader who wishes to pursue Boccaccio’s wicked but amusing

APPENDIX. , 731

remarks on this subject, which are written in very racy Italian, may
ﬁnd them in the Opere Volgari (123 G. Boccaee’io, Firenza, 1833, vol. xv.
(which contains Lu, vita, di Dante Alighz’eri) pp. 17—27.

. On behalf of Dante’s wife I must add that marks of a harsh tem-
per in the author of the Inferno seem to me plainly discernible in the
Poem itself. His behavior to Alberigo in the third sphere of the
last circle was worthy of the place and unworthy of a gentlenian.*
Milton would not have suffered one of his Fallen Angels to behave
so unhandsomely in the “heart of hell,” or so to forget the “ impe-
rial palace whence they came.” If it were true that brutality to one
in bale was good manners—costesz'a fu lui esser aillano—(which ‘I
deny, in such a case as this, where no ideal child of perdition, or ab-
straction of wickedness was exhibited, but a certain sinful suffering
fellow-creature)—by what alchemy was false-swearing and deceit ree-
tiﬁed into righteous dealing? “May I go to the bottom of the ice
myself,” said he, “if I don’t free thine eyes 1” Yet after hearing his
story went and left them cased in crystal! Here was the spirit that
christens falsehood and ferocity by the name of religious zeal and
strictness. A little farther on he ﬁnds Brutus in the lowest depths
of the descending circles—the patriot Brutus! and he so great a
patriot himself ! It seems as if the Infernal journey had turned his
brain, or touched his heart with madness.

We may well believe that such a man would act as the “Misogyne”
boasts of his having acted, cast off the mother of his children utterly
and forever; unlike our humane as well as “divine Milton,” who took
back his wife after her most disloyal and disobedient conduct,—after
a desertion which left him “nothing belonging to matrimony but its
chain,” and even extended his protection to her mean and insolent
relations—S. C. '

RS. Since writing these bold remarks on the “great philosophic
poet” (as some consider him) of Italy, I have read Mr. Landor’s de-
lightful Pentameron, which contains a remarkable critique on Dante,
and will just add that the passage concerning Alberigo, slight as it
seems, spoke to my mind of Dante’s temper more unequivocally than
the striking instances of ﬁerce and malignant sentiment which Mr.
Landor' adduces from the Poem; because it is possible to look upon
them as the mere results of theory and opinion. Many a speculative
atrocity may be found in the works of writers who would have been
incapable of conceiving and coolly describing such conduct on their
own part toward an individual, as Dante’s imaginary treatment of
the ice-bound Alberigo.—S. G.

 

' Canto xxxiii. I. 115-150.

782 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.
NOTE 'N. p. 321.

1 have not yet been able to light upon the passage here quoted, in
the labyrinth of Herder’s prose writings. An account of this author
is given in Vol. iii. of Taylor’s Historic Survey. He was born in
1744, and was the son of a village schoolmaster, who taught at Moh-
rnngen, in Prussia. . He seems to have been one of those whom Na-
ture and Fortune conspire to favor; till he fell under the dominion
of that foe to genius, nervous derangement. He had a ﬁne face,'a
tine ﬁgure, a ﬁne voice, a ﬁne ﬂow of words; he was thought by
many to have a ﬁne talent both for prose and poetry, and ﬁrst brought
himself into notice in boyhood by writing a remarkably ﬁne hand.
He took holy orders at the usual age, and “obtained the situation of
Lutheran minister at Riga, as well as that of rector over the high
school attached to the Cathedral there.” After obtaining many hon-
ors, he died on the l‘lth of December, 1803 ; Taylor adds, “occupied
in composing a hymn to Deity which breaks off where he laid down
at once his pen and his life.”* The biographer seems to have caught
at this story, for the sake of one of his silent sneers at earnestness in
religion: Herder’s wife, however, declares that “ he slept the whole
day; nor in this world ever woke again; but at half-past eleven at
night, gently and without a. groan, slumbered away into the arms of
God,”——a very common mode of departure for those who are worn out
by slow disease. It appears from the account of this “angelic wife,”
as Mr, Dequincey calls her, that Herder, with all his piety, was very
loth to die and leave his literary designs unexecnted—he seems to
have clung to this world with little less tenacity than the poor un-
principled son of Genius, Hoﬁ’inann. How often it is found that they
who do their work well upon earth, even if it be work for the king-
dom of heaven, are too unwilling to depart when summoned hence;
while those who mismanage all affairs intrusted to them here below,
sometimes gain great credit by the passive graces which they exhibit
in the near prospect of death?

Herder’s works were edited after his decease by Heyne, who un-
dertook the antiquarian, and Muller, who undertook the theologiu
part; they “issued from the Gotta press, at Tubingen, in 1805, and
exterd to thirty volumes.” His poetry consists of popular songs,
ﬂowers from the Greek Anthology, which are translations of the
more remarkable epigrams and minute poems in that collection, and
miscellaneous productions of the minor kind. His prose too was
poetical in its character. Taylor calls him the Plato of the Christian
world. I see some general resemblance ianerder to Bishop Berke-
ley,—that beautiful soul in an amiable tabernacle,-——and he too has
been compared to Plato; indeed I should be surprised to ﬁnd that

 

’* From an article on Herder in the London Magazine of April, 1823.

APPENDIX. , 733

any thing of Herder’s so well bore out such a comparison as the dia-
logue of the admirable Bishop of Cloyne. Herder has been accused
of obscurity and vagueness; but the orb of Berkeley’s intellect was
clear in its b1illiance as that of the full moon 011 a frosty winte1’ 9
night; while his heat and mm .11 being glowed like the noon- -day
sun, ﬁlled and expanded by a steady religious enthusiasm, which se-
eluded him from an unspi1itual wor'ld in feeling and practice, even as
his metaphysical theory conﬁned him to a world of spirits.

Mr. Dequincey declares it “difﬁcult to form any judgment of an
autho1 so ‘-1nany -sided’—so poly 11101 phous as IIe1de1 ” but adds, “the
best notion that I can give of him to the English 1eader, is to say
that he is the German Coleridge; having the same all-g1asping e111-
dition, the same spi1it of universal resear,ch the same occasional su-
,pe1ﬁciality and maceuracy, thes same 1ndete1n11nateness of object, the
same obscure and fanciful mysticism (schwdrmerey), the same pletho-
Iric fulness of thought, the same ﬁne sense of the beautiful—and (I
think) the same incapacity for dealing with simple and austere gran-
deur.” (This judgment I quote not as assenting entirely to every
part of it. Mr. Coleridge had one object in general—namely, truth,
especially truth of religion, morals, 111etaphysics, and poetry; this he
pursued in a desultorymanner; but every disquisition which he en-
tered into, whether it formed an essay or a brief marginal note, had
a determinate object, and referred to a regular system of thought.
I think he was seldom superﬁcial, except sometimes in a survey of
facts. His incapacity for dealing with austere grandeur is a truism ;
'why should a writer be characterized by a negative; what boots it
to say that Milton is not Shakspeare, or that a refreshing pomegran-
ate has not the ﬁne acid and sharp-edged crown of the pine-apple ?)
“I must add however that in ﬁneness and compass of understanding,
our English philosopher appears to me to have greatly the advantage.
In another point they agree,——both are men of inﬁnite title-pages.
'I have heard Mr. Coleridge acknowledge that his title-pages alone
'(titles, that is, of works meditated but unexecuted) would ﬁll a large
volume; and it is clear that, if Herder’s pawer had been commensu-
rate with his will, all other authors must have been put down z”—
and yet Mr. Dequincey can regret, as will be seen in the next note,
that he was not permitted to produce more than “many generations
would have been able to read ;” instead of wishng that he had com-
pv sed less and allowed his spirit more time to refresh itself and take
in fresh stock i—S. C.

784 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

NOTE 0. p. 321.

Miseri quibus
Intentata nilet !—-

As I have availed myself of Mr. Dequincey’s able pen when it has
been used in doing honor to Mr. Coleridge, I feel prompted to notice
his remarks when they express dissent or disapprobation of his opin-
ions; and shall therefore point out to the reader his strictures upon
the xith chapter of this work, contained in the London Magazine of
January 18, 1823, in the ﬁrst of a series of “Letters to a young man
whose education has been neglected.” These observations are worth
reading, and so far as they bear on the abstract question, apart from
personality, I do not attempt to set myself in direct opposition to
their drift; though I confess, they leave my judgment and feelings,
on one branch of that question at least, quite unaltered; what they
are I can best express by saying, that even to a young man who
should display all the powers of mind which Mr. Coleridge possessed,
with all the bodily strength and mental resolution which he wanted,
I should still, if my counsel were asked, address Mr. Coleridge’s ad-
vice, ]Vererpursue literature as the sole business of life or the means
on which you rely for obtaining its comforts. I am looking at the
subject as it concerns the welfare of the literary man—(for so it is
principally considered in the B. L.)—rather than as it bears on the
interests of literature; looking at the whole subject, however, Mr.
Coleridge states two main objections to professional authorship: ﬁrst,
that literature, in this country at least, if a man depends upon it for
bread, is apt either to starve him or be starved itself——starved in one
way, and debased and corrupted in another: in the second place,
that it is unfavorable to domestic ease and comfort. The ﬁrst objec-
tion Mr. Dequincey does not consider at all; he never adverts to the
mass of writing, exhaustive yet unsatisfactory, which men of high
aims and capabilities are obliged to produce, if they live by their
pen ; nor of the low and pernicious sort of writing which men of less
ﬁrm principle and elevated feelng are tempted to produce under the
like circumstances. No one can estimate the works bequeathed to
posterity by Walter Scott and Robert Southey—(speaking of them
thus, as mere z‘oiccafrom the (lead to the tiring, I omit the social pre-
ﬁxes to their honored names)—more highly than I do: no one can
tulre them more, though many may appreciate them better; yet a
thousand times have I reﬂected with pain how still more valuable
their writings might have been, if it had not been the duty of them
both to consider the immediate sale of some part at least of what
they gave to the public. Had it been otherwise their productions
might have been less in quantity, weightier, as to the whole mass, in

"‘v : we might have had the History of the Monastic Orders, in-

APPENDIX. 735-

stead of some less important works from the historian of Brazil;
and from the Wizard of the North fewer volumes of romance but
more perfect romances, compositions more careful in structure, if not
of higher excellence in particular parts, than those which he has be-
queathed to posterity; and I believe that I am but reporting the
Opinion of the former, at least, of these gifted men when I venture
to speak thus.

The ﬁrst part of Mr. D.’s disquisition considers literature exclusively
as the means of sufﬁciently exercising the intellect, which Mr. Cole‘
ridgehad considered in conjunction with literature as the means of
gaining a livelihood. His opponent charges him with “perplexing
these arguments together, though they are incapable of blending into
any real coalition.” This perplexity I do not perceive ; a complexity
there certainly is in his mode of presenting the subject, and I think a.
justiﬁable one, because his aim was directly practical, and in actual
life these two parts of the question,—the interests of the mind per se,
and the interests of the man as dependent on the external conditions
of inward well-being—do usually present themselves in a concrete
form. If the young man whose education has been neglected is born
to a good fortune and moreover has no desire to marry, he may turn
a deaf ear to Mr. Coleridge’s counsel and attend only to that of Mr.
Dequincey; but this is by no means a common case with neglected
young men ; the majority of them are poor, and yet rather more anx-
ious to be married than the richest ; since poor men snatch at marriage
as the one comfort which lies within their reach—careful comfort as
they too often ﬁnd it. In regard to the difﬁculty itself, Mr. Dequincey
adopts and confirms Mr. Coleridge’s opinion; and if, on foreseeing
that literature would not sufﬁce for his mind with his purposes, he
chose not to provide for the want of a stcadying occupation in the
way recommended by Mr. C. but according to a plan of his own, this
does not prove the recommendation a bad one, or that it would not
conduce to the student’s happiness more than a plan quite barren of
worldly proﬁt, unless he have pecuniary resources independent of his
own exertions. Herder says “ with the greatest solicitude avoid an-
thorship.” That authorship should be employed “too early and im-
moderately” is scarcely avoidable where it is a man’s only profession,
and Mr. Dequincey limits this experienced man’s advice in a manner
which the wording of the passage quoted by Mr. C. does not appear
to warrant.

In illustration of his views Mr. D. institutes a comparison betwixt
a certain eminent English scholar and the great German Leibnitz.
There is much in his account of the former which would lead me to
suppose that the description was meant for Mr. Coleridge; he com-
mences it with saying, “This Englishman set out in life, as I conjec-
ture, with a plan of study modelled upon that of Leibnitz: that is to

736 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

say, he designed to make himself, as Leibnitz most truly was, a Poly-
histor or Catholic student.” But when I come to the sentence
wherein it is afﬁrmed, that “in general, as both had minds not merely
powerful, but distinguished for variety and compass of power, so in
both were these ﬁne endowments completed and accomplished for
work of Herculean endurance and continuity, by the alliance of a
bodily constitution resembling that of h0rses,”—that they were “ Uen‘
taurs ; heroic intellects, with brutal capacities of b0cly—” .’ I am com-
pletely at fault. I know of no literary man of the present age to
whom the brutal part of this description would properly apply. Sir
Walter Scott had a vigorous frame, and gigantic powers of literary
execution; a man to have success in literature on a large scale must
have considerable physical energy, and a strong and lively imagina-
tion presupposes, as its condition, a lifesome and active body, that
moves fast while it moves at all,——-before it wears itself out or falls
undermined by some malignant of its own household. But I know
of no literary genius of the present age, who had great toughness of
ﬁbre, or resisting power of constitution, as well as this sort of vitality,
unless we may ascribe it to Goethe ; and there are few to whom it is
more inapplicable than the author of Christabel and The Friend.
Yet the ﬂings which come afterwards, about “hydrophobia of re-
viewers and critics,” with a reference to the spray of the waterfall of
criticism “mentioned in the B. L.” lead me to suppose that, after all,
Mr. 0. must be the Centaur of this truly monstrouﬁ description. He
was indeed too sensitive to censure, and noticed reﬂections on him-
self more than for his own sale was worth while; yet it should be
recollected that his “indignation at literary wrongs,” was at one and
the same time a desire to ward off personal injuries, and this very
fact strengthens his argument against professional authorship, because
literary wrongs would not have been injuries affecting his peace of
mind, if he had not depended on his literary reputation for what, in
his circumstances, was much more important than itself. I can not
ﬁnd, however, that he almost believed himself the “object of con-
spiracies and organized persecution,” except as he believed himself ob

noxious to party men, who conspire against those that think it right
to “follow and speak the truth ;” neither can I admit that, in these
contests, though “naturally no less amiable than Leibnitz,” he be-
trayed “uncharitable feelings ;” would that all who enter into such
contests conﬁned themselves, as he did, to describing the literary

' Mr. Deqnincey is fond of the monstrous—in some of his sketches of character, desim't
in piscem mulz’er formosa supernc. To quote the words of a celebrated writer used in con-
versation with me—“ He says there was a man of the largest and most. Spacious in-
tellect—of a regal and magniﬁcent mind—and then he tells us. that the man was not com-
monly veracious !—Such a man as this never existed—no such man ever appeared upon
tho face of the earth.” .

APPENDIX. 737

offences themselves, instead of descanting on the affairs, motives,
feelings and personal character of those that have committed them 1——
then salving over their uncharitableness in the end, with some piece
of pseudo-benignity and humility—as if this last and smoothest ser-
pent could swallow up all the snakes that had gone before—or as if a
chaplet of lilies, stuck upon the snaky head of Alecto, could make her
look innocent and amiable.*

Mr. Dequincey next proceeds to discuss Mr. Coleridge’s advice in
its reference to the interests of literature, and declares his belief that
thelist of celebrated men adduced by him in proof of its practicability
might be cut down to one, namely, Bacon. He makes no attempt to
show the “various grounds” on which it might be thus reduced, “as
a list any way favorable for Mr. Coleridge‘s purpose ;” and my own
mind does not suggest them. On this point, as before professed, I do
not hold myself competent directly to contend with Mr. Dequincey;
but I can not help saying, that his judgment surprises me, and that,
having looked lately into a good many biographies of literary men, I
have been left with a very different impression. “ Weighty perfor-
mances in literature” may be diﬁ‘erently understood: very extensive
and systematical ones are out of the scope of Mr. C.’s remarks: be-
cause they must be carried on with mechanical regularity and with a
certain pecuniary provision; but surely the great mass of the more
exquisite and the more valuable works of the pen have been pro-
duced by men, who did not depend upon literary performances for
their livelihood a large proportion of them by writers who, during
a considerable part of their time, had regular employment in another
way. Are not the works of Jeremy Taylor and all our great divines
of this kind? Have not most of our eminent philosophers, as Locke
Newton, Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, and many more, either had pro-
fessions or held posts and places, which would have prevented them
from being idle if they had never written a line of original composi-
tion? Would not Milton have starved long before Paradise Lost was
ﬁnished had be relied on his writings for bread? Leibnitz himself,
whom Mr. D. considers the model of a scholar, not only was “ busied.
during a great part of his time,” as a recent account of him notices,
“with the conduct of civil and ecclesiastical negotiations,” but also
held “a succession of legal and literary ofﬁces at Hanover-3’? In all

 

' There is often agreat deal of personality where no name is mentioned, and indi-
viduals are satirized and caricatnred under the guise of abstract description; and so too
religious bodies are often injured and del‘amed by their opponents’ Connecting a certain
character of heart and intellect with the creed they maintain. Party Spirit warmly an
proves these metLeds. ’l‘ruth hates and disdains them, knowing that to her they are in-
jurious as well as superﬂuous.

T Lord Campbell’s Lives of the Chancellors, to judge from report, may be cited as a
recent proof, that an important theme in literature may be well handled by one who
“ stands in the ﬁrst rank of an emulous and laborious profession.”

738 BIOGRAPHIA. LITERARIA.

these instances and hundreds of others that might be adduced, there
was either the “faithful discharge of an established profession,” or
regular employment, independent of literary adventure, during great
part of life; in all of them an‘ entire exemption from dependence on
mere literature, as distinguished from a literary oﬁice, for the means
of living. Genius and native power will ﬁnd time and place to mani-
fest itself, and break forth with the more concentred force from hav-
ing met with some resistance : I doubt whether the power of compo--
sing every day and all day is not more apt to foster a literary growth
of inferior value, than necessary to evolve and cherish the products
of genuine power.

One of the most successful literary adventurers, of those who are
not mere blowers of “soap—bubbles for their fellow-creatures,”* was
David Hume. But Hume did not make his thousand a-year by mere
literary means. At different times of his life he had lucrative ap-
pointments, which helped him on ; these he may have owed in part
to his literary success; but no young man, on setting out in life, can
reckon on such success ; and though literature has its side-advantages
as well as other professions, yet this can not remedy or compensate
the evil of the main wheel itself, on which others depend, being un-
certain in its working, at least for the production of pecuniary effects.
It is still more important to observe that Hume, till he was forty
years old, had a paternal or fraternal home open to receive him,
where he would probably have been kept alive? even if his literary
productions had been unpopular; and again, that Hume did not con-
sider a better half among “the indispensable requisites of life”—per-
haps partly from a sense that such a complement to his being might
not leave him wholly undisturbed in his tranquil atheism. Indispen-
sable or not, however, a helpmate is included in Mr. Dequincey’s plan
for the votary of literature, as well as in Mr. Coleridge’s: “and the
more so, because if we do not allow him a wife, he will perhaps take
one without our permission.” Such as this, then, is not the case con-
templated by Mr. Coleridge—that of dependence on the sale of liter-
ary works “for the necessaries and comforts of life,” where there is,
or may be, a family to provide for.

On the domestic part of the subject Mr. Dequincey expresses opin-
ions rather different from those which my experience has led me to
form ; I pity the man who can not enter into the pleasure of “social

' Carlyle’s Miscellanies. Vol. ii. p. 199..

T “ For a man of Johnson’s stamp,” says Mr. Carlyle, in his very interesting review of
Boswell’s Johnson, “ the problem was two-fold : First, not only as the humble but indis-
pensable condition of all else, to keep himself, if so might be, alive; but secondly, to keep
himself alive by speaking forth the Truth that was in him, and speaking it truly, let the
Earth say to this what she liked. Of which two-fold problem if it be hard to solve
either member separately, how incalcnlably more so to solve it, when both are conjoined,
and work with endless complication it to one another !"-—Miscellanies, Vol iv. 1). 69

APPENDIX. ~ 739

silence,” and ﬁnds nothing in Mr. Coleridge’s description of a literary
man’s evening but a theme for sarcasm. Mr. Dequincey, “when he
sits with a young woman makes a point of talking to her and hearing
her talk, even though she should chance to be his own wife, &c.”
Mr. Coleridge was by no means deﬁcient in the power of addressing
young women, to judge by specimens of his discourse in that kind
which he has left behind him, as well as from other documents: but
awife is a young woman only for a time; it was in his manner of
addressing the middle-aged, so full of kindly and judicious courtesy,
and in his tenderness for the old of our sex, that the peculiar aspect
of his character towards women was most clearly shown. Some-
where else Mr. Dequincey eloquently declares, that “every man, who
has once dwelt with passionate love on the fair face of some female
companion through life, must have commended and adjured all-con-
quering Time, there at least, and upon that one tablet of his ado-
ration, .
To write no wrinkle with his antique hand)”

There is tenderness of feeling in this, but a still better feeling is dis-
played in strains like those of Mr. Wordsworth, which, not content
with drily exposing the emptiness of any such “rebellion against the
laws that season all things for the inexorable grave,” supply reﬂec-
tions whereby, even in this life, Time may be set at defiance—grace
and loveliness may be discerned in every age, as long as the body
_ continues to be a translucent tenement of the mind. But without
contending any longer on behalf of those whose charms of youth are
departed or transmuted, I do maintain that a wife, whether young or
old, may pass her evenings most happily in the presence of her hus-
band, occupied herself, and conscious that he is still better occupied,
though he may but speak with her and cast his eyes upon her from
time to time: that such evenings may be looked forward to with
great desire, and deeply regretted when they are passed away for-
ever.

Wieland, whose conjugal felicity has been almost as celebrated as
himself, says in a letter written after his wife’s death, that if he but
knew 'she was in the room, or if at times she stepped in and said a
word or two, that was enough to gladden him. Some of the happiest
and most loving couples are those who, like Wieland and his wife,
are both too fully employed to spend the whole of every evening in
conversation. But Mr. Dequincey objects to Mr. Coleridge’s evening
plan that it introduces a sister into the circle, and excludes the “noisy
boy or noisier girl, or, what is noisier than either, both.” “Did a
very little babby make a very great noise ?” is the ﬁrst line of a nur-
sery song, in which Mr. Coleridge recorded some of his experience on

"‘ This pleasure is feelingly alluded to by Mrs. Joanna Baillie in her interesting Line:
to ﬁrms Baillie on her Birthday .-—Fugitive Verses, pp. 222-3.

(4.0 BIOGRAPHIA LITE RARIA.

this recondite subject; but he probably considered that children,
however noisy by day, are usually in the silent domains of Morpheus
in the evening. The suggestion of banishing them to the nursery
seems brought in ad ’lncidiam; and very unfairly as against Mr. Cole-
ridge, who was not only fond of his own babes and prattlers, but what
IS uncommon, especially in a grave musing man, fond even of other
people’s, if tolerably attractive. But he knew that there is a time
and‘a place for all things, and that in the evening, after they are
“tired of boisterous play” in doors, or of trotting about after the
daisies and buttercups, this “lively part of the creation” ought to
shut up their ﬂower-bright eyes and fold themselves to sleep—several
hours at least before grown persons need retire from their employ-
ments. When they are no longer thus disposable a new state of
things has taken place: the boys are at school: the girls form a
party by themselves with the “sister” or governess, and the wife can
join them or the good man in his study—unless a studious daughter
takes her place—as suits all parties best; and this is no mere fancy-
piece, but a picture from life. If the picture now-a-days can seldom
be realized by the professional man, it is not for the reasons alleged
by Mr. Dequincey, as far as my observation extends, but because the
profession itself, or the demands of society, engross the whole of his
time. Busy men can see their little children only by snatches, as the
traveller views refreshing waters on his way—except in the deeply-
enjoyed holiday or vacation : there are not many, who even desire to
spend hours in juvenile or infantine company, unless occupied in
teaching.

It is true, as Mr. Dequincey observes, that professors of literature
are not absolutely obliged to quarrel with their wives; yet I fear there
is some truth also in Mr. Coleridge’s hint, that their wives often quar-
rel with them, unless the catastrOphe be averted either by heavenly
patience on their part, or what sometimes answers the same purpose,
but brings its own evil along with it—a stupid placidity. Love is
strong as death; stronger than all the trials of life; that is, Love in
ideal perfection; but in ordinary cases, it at least makes toward the
window, when Pecuniary Embarrassment comes in at the door; and,
even if it does not ﬂy away forever, yet sadly bruises its light wings,
and dulls their plumage, by ﬂuttering in and out of the embrasure.
I‘he morbid sensitiveness consequent on too continuous literary
efforts, combined with anxiety about moneymatters, exposes it to
imminent danger, even if the husband be less eccentric and irritable
than Richter’s Advocate of the Poor, and the wife not quite so com-
mon-place and irritating as his pretty, but too womanish, Lenette:
though even she could have loved her Sicbenkiise, if he had had any
thing to “crumble and to bite.” Jean Paul himself saw his “sun«
beams weighed on hay-scales, and the hay-balan 3e give no symptoms

APPENDIX. ‘ 741

of moving,” and “his heart moved as little as the balance ;”—-—for he
was alone. Would his heart have lain as still, had the comfort of
wife and children depended on the power of his sunbeams to weigh
down a hay-scale? In drawing the parallel betwixt Leibnitz and
Coleridge Mr. Dequincey leaves out of sight that the German scholar
was born into good circumstances, obtained immediate success in his
career in life—partly by means of that effective patronage, which is
so much oftener afforded to the philosophic student in Germany than
in England—and moreover was exempt from matrimony. These ad-
vantages probably did more to keep the philosopher in a serene state
of mind than even his regular mathematical studies. There is a story,
indeed, that the disturbance and vexation caused by his dispute with
Newton concerning the invention of the diferential calculus hastened
his end; and we need not this story to prove, that if men do not form
personal attachments of the nearest kind, the art or science, to which
they wed themselves, may grow too close to their heart, and make
them as uneasy as a wife and children could do.

Mr. Dequincey concludes his discussion by declaring it clear to his
judgment, “that literature must decay, unless we have a class wholly
dedicated to that service, not pursuing it as an amusement only, with
.wearied and pre-occupied minds.” Literature, pursued only as an
amusement, can never ﬂourish in any high and worthy sense; that it
must decay unless carried on by a class wholly dedicated to that ser-
vice, seems to me very questionable: since the best part of the litera—
ture we already possess was not produced in that way. Mr. De-
quincey thinks that he suﬂiciently corrects the “misrepresentation”
of Mr. C. in regard to Herder, by giving a list of the works which
this author vainly desired to write, and also by repeating his lamen-
tations about want of “time, time, time !” and his longing to be “shut
~up for Some years in a fortress, with permission to pursue his labors
and to procure the books he might want.” All this appears to me a
very doubtful proof, that Mr. C. sought to convey “ delusive impres-
sions” respecting unprofessional literature in the B. L. “His thesis
was,” says Mr. D. “that the performance of this ordinary business
might be so managed, as not only to subtract nothing from the higher
employments but even greatly to assist them; and Herder’s case was
alleged as a proof and an illustration.” Now I think Mr. C.’s thesis
may be more fairly stated thus: ﬁrst, that to pursue literature as the
sole business of life and the sole means of support, is unfavorable to
the welfare of the literary man himself, consequently unfavorable to
literature; in the second place, that weighty performances in litera-
ture may be, as they have been, produced in addition to regular em-
ployment of another kind. That Herder might not have written more,
if his whole time had been at his disposal, who ever doubted? The
question is, would he have written bet-(er, upon the whole, even if he

742 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

had been fortunate enough to be “thrown into a dungeon,” or “shut
up in a fortress with books at command :” did he not write much and
well even as it was; would he not probably have written worse, had
he composed under pain of starvation if his writing did not succeed
and that immediately? For blink it who will, such is the alternative
in the case of the persons whom Mr. Coleridge meant to address:
such must have been the case with Herder himself,* if he had had no
regular calling. Mr. Dequincey informs us that this gifted man lived
uneasily and died before reaching a good old age, by reason of a
“most exquisite and morbid delicacy of nervous temperament :” and
this he would have had him counteract by uninterrupted composi-
tion! Doubtless his hypochondria was brought on, as the malady
has been brought on in numberless other cases, by excessive mental
exertion; he was overwrought by his two kinds of work, that of his
profession and literature, pursued as he pursued them: but to have
withdrawn the one and doubled the other, with a large infusion of
anxiety over and above, would not have made him easier as a man,
or more effective as an author.

Are not men apt to deceive themselves, when they fancy how
much more they should have done but for some external hindrance?
Surely original power and composing energy are no perennial foun-
tain that will ﬂow on as long as ever a vent is given to it; else why
do so many authors cease to write well before they cease to write?
This is of the highest importance, that men should be able to write
genially while their intellect is in its prime; should then be free to
choose the worthiest vehicle for their peculiar powers,

—-and ﬁnally array
Their temple with the Muses’ diadem.

Literature draws its life from all that enlivens and invigorates the
man; and whatever the wearied Herder may have said, in his play-
ful mood, “to be shut up in a fortress,” or conﬁned to a study, is not
the best preparation for writing well; they who enter on the arena
of public labor become in some respects better qualiﬁed. Little in-
tellectual beneﬁt indeed is to be gained from work, which “any stout
man might do for a guinea a day.” Must we account Herder’s work
in the ministry, with its collateral business, as of that sort? The
“ wearied and pre-occupied mint ” is indeed an objection to Mr. C.’s
plan, without being a recommendation of that which has been set up
against it. The state of our social economy renders every man’s
trade or business so exigent an i engrossing as to leave him very little

* Of “a certain indifference to mo: ey matters,” speciﬁed by my father as one of the
tokens of a gentleman, Mr. Carlyle says “ which certain indiﬂ'erence must be wise or mad,
you would think, exactly as one possesses much money, or possesses little!” Mr. Dec
quincey’s “ indiﬂ‘erence to money matters" in his treatment of the present question lifts
him far out of sight of Mr. Coleridge's practical view—quite into the clouds I fancy.

APPEN DIX. 743

time or energy for any other pursuit; and thus over-civilization ope-
rates against cultivation.* Literature—any extensive pursuit of it—
whether carried on as a profession or in addition to another—must
be a struggle in England at the present time, and except where there
is a strong mind in an almost Herculean body,-—a constitution like that
ofa Oentwu.r,—it is apt to wear out both before their time.

One word more. To some spirits perhaps, in their superﬁuity of
strength and gladness, the risk of starvation may act as a stimulant;
but was Mr. Coleridge in error when he intimated, that to the greater
number of sensitive men—and men of genius are generally such—it
acts as a narcotic? Mr. Carlyle’s account of Jean Paul Richter’s
struggles with poverty is highly affecting and interesting. He almost
puts a new spirit into the feeble mind, while he describes how this
strong man of letters had “looked desperation full in the face, and
found that for him she was not desperate ;” how “his strength both
of thought and resolve did but increase,” while he was “sorely pressed
on from without,” and “establish itself on a surer and surer founda-
tion ;” how he “stood like a rock amid the beating of continual tem-
pests; nay, a rock crowned with foliage; and, in its clefts, nourishing
ﬂowers of sweetest perfume.” Very effective is his contrast of such
a character, whose “ better soul, from the depths of sorrow and abase-
ment, rose puriﬁed and invincible, like Hercules from his long labors,”
with those who have “passed through as hard a probation,” and
“borne permanent traces of its good and evil inﬂuences; some, with
their modesty and quiet endurance, combining a sickly dispiritment,
others a hardened dulness or deadness of heart; others again whom
misery itself can not teach, but only exasperate; who far from parting
with the mirror of their vanity, when it is trodden in pieces, rather
collect the hundred fragments of it, and with more fondness and more
bitterness than ever, behold not one but a hundred images of self
therein.”

But after dwelling upon this representation, I conclude upon two
things; ﬁrstthat if Jean Paul in Germany sixty years ago was “often
in danger of starving,” in England at this present time, a man of his
genius, who had to live entirely by his wits, would starve outright,
or live very miserably. He says himself concerning authors, “the
sprig of laurel, like the lemon in the mouth of the wild boar, is not
put into ours until we are shot and dished up.” He would have been
dished up in this country, “the ﬁnest in the world if a man could
only live in it!”—long before he had written sixty volumes in a vein
so peculiar as those by which he ﬁnally attained :ndependence in his
own land,-—--and perhaps have missed the laurel too. Compare his
writings with those of any one of our popular novelists; if thought

* Mr. Coleridge says in the Church and State, VI. p. 55, that “ a nation can never be a
too cultivated, but may easily become an over—civilizedrace.” .

744. BIOGRAPHI-A LITERARIA.

of the deeper sort, abundant fancy, and various learning go for
weight in the scale, would not any of them kick the beam instantly
if weighed against his?* Secondly, I imagine that the “massive
portly cynic” had no small force of body to under-prop and sustain
this “giant force within ;” more at least than the majority of “ myr-
iad-minded men,” whose corporeal energies are seldom to be com-
puted by the same arithmetic as their mental ones. I imagine that;
he was at least a far better Centaur than S. T. Cfr Such a man
.night sport for a while, in the heyday of life, with “poverty, pain
and all evil, as with bright-spotted wild beasts which he had tamed
and harnessed ;” but weaker-bodied men would perish by their fangs
in the midst of the process ; he might travel through “a parched Sa-
hara,” “without losing heart or even good-humor;” but to one of
more delicate frame “the stern sandy solitude” would soon have
yielded only a gravel Men of letters and literary genius are too
often what is styled, in trivial irony, “ﬁne gentlemen spoilt in the
making.” They care not for show and grandeur in what surrounds
them, having enough within, beside “the pomp of groves and garni-
ture of ﬁelds,” and super-regal array of likes at their feet, when they
go forth into outward nature; but they are fine gentlemen in all that
concerns ease and pleasurable, or at least comfortable, sensation.
How can they live hard and sparingly who are relaxed and languid
from muscular inaction; exhausted by incessant activity of brain;
rendered sensitive, and therefore, in some sort, luxurious, by refine-
ment of thought and vividness of imagination? “Indifference to
money matters” in men of genius is for the most part more gentle-
manly than wise; say rather downright incoherency and madness.
It is a noble doctrine that teaches how slight a thing is Poverty;
what riches, nay treasures untold, a man may possess in the midst of
it, it" he does but seek them aright; how much of the ﬁend’s appa
rent bulk is but a fog-vapor of the sickly and sophisticated mind. It
is a noble endeavor that would bring men to tread the fear of this
phantom under their ﬁrm feet, and “dare to be poor!’.’§ Herein]
see an analogy between the teaching of amighty Poet,—him who
wrote of “ the Leech Gatherer on the lonely moor,”—-and the writings

’ This is not meant as a comparison of merits, but Only of the more rcconditc merits
with those which it requires less intellectual reﬁnement to appreciate. I conjecture, that
the German public are more cultivated, intellectually at least, than the English; I do not
say upon the whole, better educated, or as highly polished and civilized.

1‘ Both however died at about the same age, a few months before completing their 63d
year. Richter was born March ‘21, 1763, died November 1-1. 1825. My Father was be-
tween nine and ten years younger, and lived about six weeks longer.

3; “And mighty Poets in theirmisery dead.” Resolution and Independence. St. 17.1.4.

5 At. least in the sense of being unable to “ kerp a gig.” I am glad that .the last Quar-
terly notices with approbation “ a manly, cheerful tone in some remarks on the improved
condition of literary laborers” in Mr. Burton’s Memoirs of David Hume, and is able to
add: “ the fact, of the general improvement on which he dwells can not be doubted."

APPENDIX. 745

of Thomas Carlyle. I see a similarity of spirit between them, inas-
much as both show how great a thing is man in his own original
greatness, such as God made him and enabled him to become by his
own energies, independently of all aid except from above; how noble
he is in his plain native dignity, the net-work veil of social ﬁctions
and formalities, which “ the dreary intercourse of daily life” spins out,
being taken from before his face. And this theme the one has illu-
mined with the glories of poetic imagination, the other with the lam-
bent many-colored ﬂame of wit and humor, and a playful yet power-
ful eloquence, teeming with bright fancies, like a river which foams
and ﬂashes, and sparkles in the sunshine, while it flows onward with
a strong and steady current. Nevertheless, when we have blown
into thin air and transparency whatever is unsubstantial in this object
of Dread, still Poverty, or an insuﬂiciency of the external means of
ease and enjoyment according to our actual condition, must ever re-
main one of life’s great evils; if it be not the greatest of all those
which we do not create by acts of our own will, yet surely none is
greater, seeing that it too often brings in its train all the rest,—“ cold,
pain, and labor,” with unrelieved or unprevented sickness, and want
or loss of lively, joyous, warm affection, that scatters ﬂowers and sun--
shine on the path of life. It presses hard upon the body, and both
directly and indirectly it presses hard upon the mind. Richter, with
all his super-abundant energy, got rid of it. as soon as possible, and
no man who had not keenly felt how it can embittcr and impo-verish
even a brave man’s life could have written as he has done in his his-1
tory of Siebenkiise, the Advocate of the Poor. Indeed the thorns of
this piece may be felt .'-—the fruit andﬂowers we can see and admire,
hut scarcely seem to taste them or inhale their living odors—S. 0.

NOTE P. p. 332.

Trois Lettres a Mr. Remond de Mont-Mort. 1741. (opp. ed Erd-
mann Berol. 1840. P. ii. pp. 701-2.) “ Outre que j’ai eu soin de
tout diriger a l’édiﬁcation, j’ai taché do déterrer et de réunir la vérité
ensévelie et dissipée sous les opinions des diﬂ‘érentes Sectes des Phi-
losophes; et je crois y avoir ajouté quelque chose du mien pour faire
quelques pas en avant.”

I suppose that most philosophers attempt to traverse the ground
of all foregoing philosophies, and ﬂatter themselves that they make
quelques pas en aoant, while the unphilosophic insist upon it, that
they do but move in a circle—that there is among them oertigo qua»;-
dam ct agitatio perpetua, ct ci7*culzzs,—aud the anti-philosophic poet is

of opinion, that

——— never yet did philosophic lube

That brings the planms home into the eye
2 l

VOL. 111.

74B BIOGRAPH IA LITERARIA.

0f observation, and discovers. else
Not visible, his family of worlds,
Discover Him that rules them.

After the sentence quoted verbatim by Mr. C. the letter proceeds
thus :—

“Les Formalistes comme les Platoniciens et les Aristotéliciens ont
raison de chereher la source des choses dans les causes ﬁnales et for-
Inelles. Mais ils ont tort de négliger les efﬁcientes et les matérielles,
et (l’en inférer, comme faisoit Mr. Henri Morus en Angleterre, et quel-
ques autres Platonieiens, qu’il y a des Phénomenes qui ne peuvent étre
expliqués mécaniquemeut. Mais de l’autre cute les Matérialistes, ou
ceux qui s’attachent uniquement a la Philosophie mécanique, ont tort
de rejeter les considerations métaphysiques, et de vouloir tout expli-
quer par ce qui depend de l’imagination.”

“Je me ﬂatte d’avoir pénétré l’IIarmonie des diﬂ‘érens regnes, et
d’avoir vu que les deux partis ont raison, pourvu qu’ils ne se choquent
point; que tout ce fait inécaniquement et métaphysiquement en méme
tems dans les phénoménes de la nature, mais que la source de la mé-
canique est dans la métaphysique. ll n’étoit pas aisé de déeouvrir ce
mystere, par ce qu’il y a pen de gens qui se donnent la peine de
joindre ccs deux sortes d’études.” I have often thought that proba-
bly there is much one-sided reasoning and halving of truth amongst
us at this day, because the men who are mathematical are not deeply
and systematically metaphysical, and eice zetrsa ; those who are given
to philosophical studies are not minutely acquainted with the history
and present state of the Christian religion ; while the great patrieians
and theologians have not been regularly trained and disciplined in
metaphysical science,—do not appear to have patiently examined
what a large portion of the studious world hold undoubtedly to be
discoveries in that direction. They hear persons who have travelled
in Germany, but never set foot in the region of German metaphysics,
or inhaled one breath of its thin atmosphere, maintain that this
science makes no real permanent advances,—that what one man
builds up another pulls down, to erect his own equally unstable edi-
fice in its place. Judging of the matter from without, and hearing
only censure and contention instead of consent and approbation, they
are not aware how large a part of his immediate predecessor’s opinions
the successor quietly assumes. It is strange, however, that they
should be ignorant of the general fact, that a philosopher argues more
against that teacher of philosophy from whom. he has derived the
main body of his opinions, whose system contains great part of that
which his own consists of, than he does with the whole world beside.
Could all that belongs to Leibnitz he abstracted from Kant, and all
that belongs to Kant be abstracted from Fiehte and Sehelling, I should
imagine that the metaphysical system of each would straightway fall

APPENDIX. 747

into a shapeless, baseless wreck. There is perhaps no fallacy so com-
mon and so deluding as the imagination that we can understand an-
other man’s system of thought and feeling by looking at it from the
outside, without having entered into it and abode in it, and learned
experimentally its true nature and character. When a man is decry-
ing German philosophy without having studied it, or perhaps read a
word of what any German philosopher has written in his own books,
his speech is sure to betray him: “so dangerous is it for the ablcst
man to attempt speaking of what he does not understand.”*—S. 0.

NOTE Q. p. 353.

See his treatise concerning the Search after Truth—De la Recherche
de la Vé'rité, book iii., especially chap. 6.

Father Malebranchc was born at Paris, 1638, died in the same city,
Oct. 13, 1715. Cousin speaks as follows of this pious philosopher :—

“ Nicolas Malebranche, l’un des Peres de l’Oratoire, génie profond,
caché sous un cxtérieur peu avantageux, et incontestablement le plus
grand métaphysicicn que la France ait produit, développa les idées de
Descartes avec originalité, en les reproduisant sous (les formes plus
claires ct plus animées; mais son tour d’esprit éminemment religieux
lui ﬁt donner a sa philosophic un caractere mystique qui lui est par-
ticulier. La théorie de la connoissance, celle de l’origine des erreurs,
surtout (les erreurs qui tiennent aux illusions de l’imagination, enﬁn
la méthode pour bien condnire notre pensée, telles sent les parties dont
il a traité avec le plus dc succés. Malebranche admit la théorie de la
passivité de l’entendement et de l’activité libre de la volonté; 11 con-
sidéra l’étendue comme l’essence des corps, l’ame comme une sub-
stance essentiellement simple, et Dieu comme le fond commun de toute
existence et de toute pensée: ces doctrines l’amenerent a combattre
les idées innées par des objections pleines de force, et a soutenir que
nous voyons tout en Dieu: Dieu, suivant lui, comprend en soi toutes
choses de la maniere dont elles s’oﬁ'rent a notre intelligence; il est
l’inﬁni de l’espace et de la penséc, le monde intelligible et le lieu (les
esprits.”—-d[anuel, vol. ii. pp. 113—14.

It has been thought that there is a resemblance between the pecu-
liar tenets of this philosopher and the doctrines of George Fox con-
ccrning divine illumination. They certainly prepared the way for the
Idealism of Berkeley.

Among the posthumous works of Locke is An Examination of P.
Malebranche’s opinion of Seeing all things in God. (Works, fol. 1751,
vol. iii. p. 410) which examination is examined again by Leibnitz in
his Remarques sur le sentiment du P. Malebranche, &c., 1708 (Opp. ed.

' Spoken by Mr. Dequincey in reference to a Celebrated German writer.

748 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

Erdmann ii. p. 456). To compare these two discourses is highly in-
structive and interesting. There are other critiques by eminent men
of the Father’s doctrine. The following account of the last days of
Malebranche is given in the Life of Berkeley preﬁxed to his Works,
the materials of which were chieﬂy furnished by his brother. “At
Paris, Mr. Berkeley took care to pay his respects to the illustrious
Pére Malebranche. He found this ingenious father in his cell, cooking
in a small pipkin a medicine for a, disorder with which he was then
troubled, an inﬂammation on the lungs. The conversation naturally
turned on our author’s system, of which the other had received some
knowledge from a translation just published. But the issue of this
debate proved tragical to poor Malebranche. In the heat of disputa-
tion he raised his voice so high, and gave way so freely to the natu—
ral impetuosity of a man of parts and a Frenchman, that he brought
on himself a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off
a few days after.”

Thus did the illustrious Father Malebranche melt away, as it were,
like a man of snow, before the vigorous sun of Berkeley, who was
then about one-and-thirty, splendid in mind, and person, and potent
with his tongue, while the Father had entered his seventy-eighth
year; his great metaphysical mind,—the greatest perhaps that France
ever produced,—joined with an eager spirit, proving at last too
much for the decaying ten'ement of his body, which appeared from
the ﬁrst so weakly put together that the wonder was how it kept the
metaphysician within the bounds of Time and Space so long. Yet
his term of earthly existence exceeded by eight years that of his robust
rival, who expired Jan. 14, 1753, “as he was sitting in the midst of
his family listening to a sermon,”——an end very suitable to the tenor
of his gentle and pious yet strenuous life—S. 0.

NOTE Q 2, p. 353.

Etienne Bonnot de Condillac was born in 1715 at Grenoble, died in
1780. Cousin says that he labored to perfect the empirical system of
Locke, and attempted to trace up all the active faculties of the soul
to sensibility by means of the transformation of sensations. Others,
as La Mettrie, carried forward this system, till they pushed it by its
consequences, or what they deemed such, into Atheism, Materialism,
and a rigorous Determinism. Condillac has remained to the present
time the representative of French philosophy and its avowed chief.
(Manuel, pp. 208—210.) Des Cartes and Malebranche, though F rench-
men, were philosophers of so different a character, that they had no
more to do toward the founding of this French school than metaphy-
sicians of other nations—S. C.

APPENDIX. 749

NOTE R. p. 353.

Dr. Reid, who is considered by many to have been, as the Biogra-
phie Universelle describes him, the founder of a new am in the history
of liloderrn Philosophy, was born in 1710, at Strachan in Kincardine—
shire. In 1763 he succeeded Adam Smith in the chair of Moral Phi-
losophy in Glasgow University; died in October, 1796. He produced
many works, the principal of which is Essays on the powers of the
human mind: Lond. 1803, three vols. in 8vo.; and perhaps the most
popular, Inquiry into the human mind on the principle of common
sense, 8vo. which appeared in 1763 : it came into a sixth edit. in 1804.
He also wrote Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man: Edinb.
1786, .in 4t0.

Sir James Mackintosh, with his usual anxiety to give all men as
well as all arguments their due, and to put down hasty and unjust de-
preciation, defends Dr. Reid from the charge of shallowness and pop-
ularity, and maintains his right to “a commendation more. descriptive
of a philosopher than that bestowed by Professor Cousin of having
made a vigorous protest against skepticism on behalf of common sense.”
He alleges that this philosopher’s “observations on suggestion, on
natural signs, on the connection between what he calls sensation and
perception, though perhaps occasioned by Berkeley, whose idealism
{eid had once adopted, are marked by the genuine spirit of original
observation.” Sir James, however, admits that “Dr. Brown very
justly considered the claims of Reid to the merit of detecting the uni-
versal delusion which had betrayed philosophers into the belief that
ideas, which were the sole objects of knowledge, had a separate ex-
istence, as a proof of his having mistaken their illustrative language
for a metaphysical Opinionmak Whether a man who utterly misun-
derstands the language of preceding philosophers on a cardinal point
can himself he a “deep thinker,” is a question which I do not pretend
to solve; I only think it is a question, and without offering aphilo-
sophical opinion I must say that Dr. Reid’s literal way of understand-
ing his predecessors in the matter of ideas, and his representing them
accordingly as a set of cloud-weavers and phantasts, has always re-
minded me of certain amusing remarks in Lamb’s Essay entitled
“Imperfect Sympathies.” His bantering style too is more popular
than philosophic, and scarcely evinces that patience and modesty for
which Sir James, I doubt not on sufﬁcient grounds, upon a review of
his whole works, gives him credit. I should say, if it were worth
while to record my impression—(I do not call it a juclgment)——that
Cousin’s summary of his merits is as clear-sighted and clever as his
summaries usually are, and that a certain vigor in commanding and

* In this misapprehensi‘u Professor Stewart has followed him, as is evident from E10
moms, chap. iv. section '11.

1 50 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.

presenting a limited view of the subjeCt of external perception, is the
best characteristic of Dr. Reid’s Inquiry. And was it not this mista-
ken part of his teaching more than his intelligent remarks in exten-
sion of that of Berkeley, which installed him in his high reputation
of “the founder of a new aera?” Dr. Reid’s great merit, even ac-
cording to Stewart, consisted in his having “had courage to lay aside
all the hypothetical language of his predecessors concerning percep-
tion, and to exhibit the difﬁculty in all its magnitude by a plain state-
ment of the fact.”* But if he misunderstood that language, and
combated, as Sir James aﬂirms (p. 164) “imaginary antagonists,” where
was his victory? Was not this combat and seeming triumph the very
pith and marrow of his book, and that which gave it great part of its
savor to the public? Did he really advance the science of metaphysics
materially beyond the point at which it had arrived in the days of
Berkeley? The answer to Berkeley from the ﬁrst had been: “Nev-
ertheless we do perceive an external world, and what presents itself
within us, which we instinctively refer to things without us, does re—
ally tell us that there are things without us, and what they are in
reference to us; and that we feel as sure of this as of our existence,
and are incapable, by the constitution of our minds, from thinking
otherwise, is a sufﬁcient proof that it is true. Does Reid’s explana-
tion amount to more than what has just been expressed! But so
much as this Berkeley himself anticipated. He stated the objection
to his theory contained in the fact of universal original belief of the
contrary, and tried to push it aside—it was the only obstacle that did
not yield to his victorious hand}

That Dr. Reid’s philosophy was received with applause in Paris,
when taught there by M. Boyer Collard, favors the supposition that it
was clear rather than deep; smart, rather than characterized by the
grave energy, which slowly and laboriously grasps asom-ething more of
truth,—a real and substantial something. Hume’s compliment to Dr.
{eid’s profundity may have been mere gentlemanly courtesy to a gen-
tlemanly antagonist. He would perhaps have been as polite to Dr.
Beattie, if he had not “indulged himself in the personalities and in-
vectives of a popular pamphleteer,” and so departed from fairness
and, what he undertook to defend, “common sense.”

Dugald Stewart. the accomplished disciple of Reid, and improver
of his philosophy, was born in the College of Edinborough in 1753,
became Professor of Moral PliilOSOphy there in 1785, died in June,
1828. He published Elements of the PhiloSOphy of the Human
Mind in 1792, Philosophical Essays in 1810, Outlines of Moral Phi
losophy, Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, and

* Elements, p. 69.
1 Principles of Human Knowltdge, so. 54-5—6-7.

APPENDIX. ' 751

other works. Sir James Mackintoshhas given his character, as a
man and an author, in his interesting Dissertation, p. 145, edit. 1830.
—S. C. '

NOTE S. p. 357

I take this opportunity of mentioning that the solution of the para-
dox of Achilles and the Tortoise brought forward in The Friend (II.
p. 399), and in Tait’s Mag. of 1834, is distinctly given by Leibnitz in
his Letters to Mr. Foucher, Sm' quelques apiomes philosophiques, in
which he says, “Ne emig'nez point, Monsieur, la tortué que les Pir-
rhoniensfaisoient a-ller aussi cite qu’Achille. * * * Un ewace di-
visible sansﬁn 8e passe clans mi tems aizssi divisible sansﬁn. Je ne con-
gois point d’indiiisibles physiques sans miracle, elje erois que la, nature
peut 'réduire les corps (i. la petitesse que la Geometric peat considérer.”
In his rejoinder to Foucher’s reply he says that P. Gregoire de St.
Vincent has shown, by means of geometry, the exact place where
Achilles must have caught the tortoise. Opp. ecl. E’rdmann, i. pp.
115—118.

Aristotle, in his brief way, had given the solution long before, when
he said that Time does not consist of indivisible 720208 or now-existent.
——éic 7731) 122712 6vrm' (Idiaape’mv—any more than any other magnitude.

See the editor’s note upon the passage of The Friend referred to
above—S. 0.

END ON VOL. 111.