Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/163

COLERIDGE 137 home at Highgate. During his residence there, Christabel, written many years before, and known to a favoured 1 ew, was first published. He read widely and wisely, in poetry, philosophy, and divinity. In 1816 and the following year, he gave hte Lay Sermons to the world. The Biographia Literaria and a revised edition of The Friend soon followed. Seven years afterwards his maturest and best prose work The Aids to Reflection first appeared. His last publication, in 1830, was the work on Church and State. In 1833 he appeared at the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge, and in the following year he passed away, and was buried in the churchyard close to the house of Air Gillman, where he had enjoyed every con solation which friendship and love could render. Coleridge died in the communion of the Church of England, of whose polity and teaching he had been for many years a loving admirer. An interesting letter to his god-child, written twelve days before his death, sums up his spiritual experience in a most touching form. Of the extraordinary influence which he exercised in conversation it is impossible to speak fully here. Many of the most remarkable among the younger men of that period resorted to Highgate as to the shrine of an oracle, and although one or two disparaging judgments, such as that of Mr Carlyle, have been recorded, there can be no doubt that since Samuel Johnson there had been no such power in England. His nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge, gathered together some specimens of the Table Talk of the few last years. Tut remarkable as these are for the breadth of sympathy and extent of reading disclosed, they will hardly convey the impressions furnished in a dramatic form, as in Boswell s great work. Four volumes of Literary Remains lately reprinted and rearranged were publL-Jied after his death, and these, along with the chapters on the poetry of Wordsworth in the Biographia Literaria, may be said to exhibit the full range of Coleridge s power as a critic of poetry. In this region he stands supreme. With regard to the preface, which contains Wordsworth s theory, Coleridge has honestly expressed his dissent : " 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 contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the author s own practice in the greater number of the poems themselves." This disclaimer of perfect agreement renders the remaining portion of what he says more valuable. Whoever desires to trace the real essential characteristics of poetry must turn to these pages, where the provinces of imagination and fancy are rightly discriminated. "Here," as Principal Shairp has well said, " are canons of judgment, not mechanical but living." Coleridge was in England the creator of that higher criticism which had already in Germany accomplished so much in the hands of Lessing and Goethe. It is enough to refer here to the fragmentary series of his Shakespearian criticisms, containing evidence of the truest insight, and a marvellous appreciation of the judicial " sanity " which raises the greatest name in literature far above even the highest of the poets who approached him. As a poet Coleridge s own place is safe. His niche in the great gallery of English poets is secure. Of no one can it be more emphatically said that he was " of imagination all compact." His peculiar touch of melancholy tenderness may prevent his attaining a high place in popular estima tion. He does not possess the fiery pulse and humaneness of Burns, but the exquisite perfection of his metre and the subtle alliance of his thought and expression must always secure for him the warmest admiration of tru-3 lovers of poetic art. In his early poems mey be found traces of the fierce struggle of his youth, The most remarkable is the Monody on the Death of Chattcrton and the Religious Musings. In what may be called his second period, the ode entitled France, considered by Shelley the finest in the language, is most memorable. The whole soul of the poet is reflected in the Ode to Dejection. The well-known lines " Lady ! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live ; Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud," with the passage which follows, contain more vividly, perhaps, than anything which Coleridge has written, the expression of the shaping and colouring function which he assigns, in the Biographia Literaria, to imagination. Christabel and the Ancient Mariner have so completely taken possession of the highest place, that it is needless to do more than allude to them. The supernatural has never received such treatment as in these two wonderful produc tions of his genius, and though the first of them remains a torso, it is the noblest torso in the gallery of English literature. Although Coleridge had, for many years before his death, almost entirely forsaken poetry, the few frag ments of work which remain, written in later years, show little trace of weakness, although they are wanting in the unearthly melody which imparts such a charm to Kubla Khan, iove, and Youth and Age. In one of the most remarkable of his republished essays, Mr Mill has contrasted Coleridge with Benthara, and called especial attention to his position as a political theorist. Few will bo tempted to dispute the justice of Mr Mill s exposition of Coleridge s views. He regards him as having in his Lay Sermons done his best to establish prin ciples inrolved in English opinions and institutions: He admits, moreover, that in bringing into prominence the trust inherent in landed property Coleridge has done service to those who desire to conserve much of the existing system. The fifth chapter of the work on Church and State contains the exposition of Coleridge s idea of a church establishment. The clerisy of the nation is with him the body of true leaders in all that concerns national life. Theology is only a part of the great province within national control " it is no essential part of the being of the national church, however conducive, or even indispens able, it may be to its well-being." This doctrine, however novel it may have been on its first appearance, has long been adopted by those who desire to preserve the endow ments of establishments. In all his political writings Coleridge is at war with what has been called the laissez- faire doctrine, and no one has more emphatically declared what the real objects of a state are. In everything which Coleridge wrote, there are traces of the philosophy which had become to him a second nature. After having abandoned the teaching of Hartley, he directed his attention for a time to Leibnitz and Spinoza. But the systems of these two great men never really captivated him. It was to Kant that he owed his initiation into the higher sphere of philosophy, and it is to Kant that he repeatedly refers as to a master who had moulded his thought. It is impossible to enter here upon the question as to whether Coleridge has represented Kant s system completely. De Quincey, in one of his Letters to a Young Man, has referred to the modification and alteration which all things received in passing through Coleridge s thoughts, and has declared that this " indocility of mind " has led Coleridge to make various misrepresentations of Kant. A similar accusation has been preferred by Dean Mansil ; but to these charges it may be answered that Coleridge nowhere professes to interpret or describe Kant s teaching. He was content to adopt the distinction between the understanding and the reason, but it was to the doctrine of the practical reason dominating and controlling specula-

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