slow and continuous enunciation, the everlasting music of his tone-all went to make up the image, and to constitute the living presence of the man. Coleridge's fame will principally rest upon his powers as a critic; his review of Wordsworth's poetry, in the second volume of Biographia Literaria, "which is (Penny Cyclopædia), perhaps, the most philosophical piece of criticism extant in the language." Some of his Titanic fragments are valuable-particularly his Shakspearian criticism. They attest his profound thought and curious erudition, and display his fine critical taste and discernment. In penetrating into and embracing the whole meaning of a favourite author-unfolding the nice shades and distinctions of thought, character, feeling, or melody-darting on it the light of his own creative mind and suggestive fancy -and perhaps linking the whole to some glorious original conception or image, Coleridge stands unrivalled. He does not appear as a critic, but as an eloquent and gifted expounder of kindred excellence and genius. He meditated a great theological and philosophical work, his magnum opus, on "Christianity as the only revelation of permanent and universal validity," which was to "reduce all knowledge into harmony" to "unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror." He planned also an epic poem on the destruction of Jerusalem, which he considered the only subject now remaining for an epic poem; a subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy interested all Greece. 66 Here," said he, "there would be the completion of the prophecies; the termination of the first revealed national religion under the violent assault of Paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion; and then you would have the character of the Roman and the Jew; and the awfulness, the completeness, the justice. I schemed it at twenty-five, but, alas! venturum expectat." This ambition to execute some great work, and his constitutional infirmity of purpose, which made him defer or recoil from such an effort, he has portrayed with great beauty and pathos in an address to Wordsworth, composed after the latter had recited to him a poem 66 on the growth of an individual mind :" "Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn, The pulses of my being beat anew; And even as life returns upon the drowned, And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope; The odes of Coleridge are highly passionate and elevated in conception. That on France was considered by Shelley to be the finest English ode of modern times. The hymn on Chamouni is equally lofty and brilliant. His Généviève is a pure and exquisite love-poem, without that gorgeous diffuseness which characterises the odes, yet more chastely and carefully finished, and abounding in the delicate and subtle traits of his imagination. THE "ANCIENT MARINER." The Ancient Mariner is a successful effort of fancy in a region which had not before been tried. According to De Quincey the germ of this story is contained in a passage of Shelvocke, one of the classical circumnavigators of the earth, who states that his second captain, being a melancholy man, was possessed by a fancy that some long season of foul weather was owing to an albatross which had steadily pursued the ship, upon which he shot the bird, but without mending their condition. Coleridge makes the Ancient Mariner relate the circumstances attending his act of inhumanity to one of three wedding guests whom he meets and detains on his way to the marriage feast. "He holds him with his glittering eye," and invests his narration with a deep preternatural character and interest, and with touches of exquisite tenderness and energetic description. The versification is irregular, in the style of the old ballads, and most of the action of the piece is unnatural; yet the poem is full of vivid and original imagination. "There is nothing else like it," says one of his critics; "it is a poem by itself; between it and other compositions, in pari materia, there is a chasm which you cannot overpass. The sensitive reader feels himself insulated, and a sea of wonder and mystery flows round him as round the spellstricken ship itself." Coleridge further illustrates his theory of the connection between the material and the spiritual world in his unfinished poem of Christabel, a romantic, supernatural tale, filled with wild imagery and the most remarkable modulation of verse. The versification is founded on what the poet calls a new principle (though it was evidently practised by Chaucer and Shakspeare), namely, that of counting in each line the number of accentuated words, not the number of syllables. "Though the latter," he says, "may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four." This irregular harmony delighted both Scott and Byron, by whom it was imitated. COLERIDGE PREACHING. The two or three years spent at Stowey seem to have been at once the most felicitous and the most illustrious of Cole ridge's literary life. He had established his name for ever, though it was long in struggling to distinction. During his residence at Stowey, Coleridge officiated as Unitarian preacher at Taunton, and afterwards at Shrewsbury. Mr. Hazlitt has described his walking ten miles in a winter day to hear Coleridge preach. "When I got there," he says, "the organ was playing the 100th 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 launched 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 opposed 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 shepherdboy driving his team a-field, 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 cue 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." COLERIDGE'S IRRESOLUTION. Coleridge, who delighted in dwelling upon the importance of method in the business of life, was a better preacher than practitioner of what he strongly recommended. When, in his younger days, he was offered a share in the London Journal, by which he could have made two thousand pounds a-year, provided he would devote his time seriously to the interest of the work, he declined, making the reply so often praised for its disinterestedness: "I will not give up the country, and the lazy reading of old folios, for two thousand times two thousand pounds; in short, beyond three hundred and fifty pounds a year I consider money a real evil." "The lazy reading of old folios" led to laziness, the indulgent gratification of mind and sense. Degenerating into an opium-eater, and a mere purposeless theorizer, Coleridge wasted time, talents, and health, came to depend in old age on the charity of others, and died at last with every one regretting, even his friends, that he had done nothing worthy of his genius. The world is full of men having Coleridge's thoughts without Coleridge's abilities; men who cannot or will not see beyond the present-who are too lazy to work for more than a temperory subsistence, and who squander, in pleasure or idleness, energy and health which ought to lay up a capital for old age. THE COTTLE CHURCH, "For more than twenty years," says Mr. de Morgan, in his "Budget of Paradoxes "* in the Athenæum, 1865, "printed papers have been sent about in the name of Elizabeth Cottle. It is not so remarkable that such papers should be concocted, as that they should circulate for such a length of time without attracting public attention. Eighty years ago, Mrs. Cottle might have rivalled Lieutenant Brothers or Joanna Southcote. Long hence, when the now current volumes of our journals are well-ransacked works of reference, those who look into them will be glad to see this feature of our time: I therefore make a few extracts, faithfully copied as to type. The italic is from the New Testament; the Roman is the requisite interpretation "Robert Cottle' was numbered (5196) with the transgressors' at the back of the Church in Norwood Cemetery, May 12, 1858— Isa. liii. 12. The Rev. J. G. Collinson, Minister of St. James's Church, Clapham, the then district church, before All Saints was built, read the funeral service over the Sepulchre wherein never before man was laid. "Hewn on the stone, at the mouth of the sepulchre,' is his name-Robert Cottle, born at Bristol, June 2, 1774; died at Kirkstall Lodge, Clapham Park, May 6, 1858. And that day (May 12, 1858) was the preparation (day and year for the PREPARED place for you'-Cottleites-by the widowed mother of the Father's house, at Kirkstall Lodge-John xiv. 2,3. And the Sabbath (Christmas Day, Dec. 29, 1859) drew on (for the resurrection of the Christian body on the third [Protestant Sun]-day -1 Cor. xv. 35). Why seek ye the living (God of the New Jerusalem-Heb. xii. 22; Rev. iii. 12) among the dead (men): he (the God of Jesus) is not here (in the grave), but is risen (in the person of the Holy Ghost, from the supper of the dead in the second death' of Paganism). Remember how he spake unto you (in the Church of the Rev. George Clayton, April 14, 1839). I will not drink henceforth (at this last Cottle supper) of the fruit of this (Trinity) vine, until that day (Christmas Day, 1859), when I(Elizabeth Cottle) drank it new with you (Cottleites) in my Father's kingdom-John xv. If this (Trinitarian) cup may not pass away from me (Elizabeth Cottle, April 14, 1839), except I drink it (new with you Cottleites, in my Father's kingdom'), thy will be done-Matt. xxvi. 29, 42, 64. "Our Father which art (God) in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy (Cottle) kingdom come, thy will be done in earth, as it is (done) in (the new) Heaven' (and new earth of the new name of Cottle-Rev. xxi. 1; iii. 12.) (Queen Elizabeth, from A.D. 1558 to 1566). And *These interesting accounts of real "curiosities of literature" have been reprinted in a separate volume. |