Christabel and the Lyrical and Imaginative Poems of S. T. Coleridge Book

1869. - CHRIStABEL AND THE LYRICAL AND IMAGINATIVE POEMS OF S. T. COLERIDGE. -- ESSAY ON COLBRIDGE -- THE great man of whom I am about to speak seems to me a figure more utterly companionless, more incomparable with others, than any of his kind. Receptive at once and communicative of many influences, he has received from none and to none did he communicate any of those which mark him as a man memorable to all students of men. What he learnt and what he taught are not the precious things in him. He has founded no school of poetry, as Wordsworth has, or Byron, or Tennyson happy in this, that he has escaped the plague of pupils and parodists. Has he founded a school of philosophy He has helped men to think he has touched their thought with passing colours of his own thought but has he moved and moulded it into new and durable. shapes Others may judge better of this than I, but to me, set beside the deep direct work of those thinkers who have actual power to break down and build up thought, t, o construct faith or destroy it, his work seems not as theirs is. And yet how very few are even the great names we could not better afford to spare, would not glsdlier miss from the roll of famous men and our fathers that were before us Of his best verses I venture to affirm that the world has nothing like them, and can never have that they are of the highest kind, and of their own. They are jewels of the diamonds price, flowers of the roses rank, but unlike any rose or diamond known. In all times there have been gods that alighted and giants that appeared on earth the ranks ofgreat men are properly divisible, not into thinkers and workers, but into Titans and Olympians. Sometimes a supreme paet is both at once such above all men is Bschylus so also Dante, Miehel Angelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, IIugo, are gods at once and giants they have the lightning as well as the light of the world, and in hell they have command as in heaven they can see in the night as by day. As godlike as these, even as the divinest of them, a poet such as Coleridge needs not the thews and organs of any Titan to make him greater. Judged by the justice of other men, be is assailable and condemnable on several sides his good work is the scantiest in quantity ever done by a man so famous in so long a life and rnuch of his work is bad. His gcniuu is Auctuant and moonstruck as tlie sea is, and yet his mind is not, what he described Shakespeares to be, an oceanic mind. His plea against all accusers must be that of Shakespeare, a plea unanswerable I an1 that I am and they that level At my abuses reckon up their own. I am that I am it is the only solid and durable reply to any impertinence of praise or blame. We hear too nnch and too often of circuinstances or accidents that extenuate this thing or qualify that there always may be but usually-at least it seems so to me-we get out of each man what he has in him to give. Probably at no other time, under no other conditions, would Coleridge for example have done better work or more. His flaws and failures are as much ingrained in him as his powers slid achievements. For from the very first the two sides of his mind are visible and palpable. Anlong all verses of boys who were to grow up geat, I remember none so perfect, so sweet and deep in sense and sound, as those which he is said to have written at school, headed Time, Real and Imaginary. And following hard on these come a score or two of poems, each more feeble and more flatulent than the last...Read More