to Mr. De Quincey and to his nephew. According to the more perfect knowledge which he had ultimately attained on this interesting topic, he was of opinion, "that the act of praying was the highest energy of which the human heart was capablepraying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties;and that the great mass of worldly men, and of learned men, were absolutely incapable of praying." That, however, to a late period in life, he still encouraged some mystical notion of silent prayer, is evident from his poem called "The Pains of Sleep,' which thus commences "Ere on my bed my limbs I lay, It hath not been my use to pray In humble trust mine eyelids close, No wish conceived, no thought expressed, But yesternight I prayed aloud," &c. 99 It would nevertheless be doing injustice to his memory not to record that, within two years of his death, he very solemnly declared to his nephew his conviction upon the subject. "I was sitting," says the Editor of the "Table Talk," "by his bedside one afternoon, and he fell-an unusual thing for him-into a long account of many passages of his past life, lamenting some things, condemning others; but complaining withal, though very gently, of the way in which many of his most innocent acts had been cruelly misrepresented. But I have no difficulty,' said he, 'in forgiveness; indeed, I know not how to say with sincerity the clause in the Lord's Prayer, which asks forgiveness as we forgive. I feel nothing answering to it in my heart. Neither do I find, or reckon, the most solemn faith in God, as a real object, the most arduous act of the reason and will;-O no! my dear, it is to pray, to pray as God would have us; this is what at times makes me turn cold to my soul. Believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that God will listen to your voice through Christ, and verily do the thing he pleaseth thereupon-this is the last, the greatest achievement of the Christian's warfare on earth. Teach us to pray, O Lord!' And then he burst into a flood of tears, and begged me to pray for him. O what a sight was there!" Such was the growth of Coleridge's mind-by such degrees was his moral and intellectual stature attained. In this process we find him surrendering many opinions, but still holding fast to the same principles. We thus find that, as to Godwin, he right early asserted the priority and superior validity of the moral relatively to the intellectual; for doing which he earned from his opponent the title of "an enthusiast, supporting his arguments by lofty metaphors and high-toned declamation." At this he could well afford to smile, coming as it did from a writer who, in the same sentence, described Godwin as "a cool reasoner, supporting his doctrine with propriety, and waiting for the human mind to be more enlightened to prepare it for his theory." The march of intellect has proceeded, and is yet proceeding-but the theory of political justice is already dead! Neither need we suppose (and indeed we know to the contrary) that the mind of Coleridge was stationary; yet in his latest as well as in his earliest works we find him still giving the moral the supremacy over the intellectual. "All speculative truths," he writes in "The Friend," "begin with a postulate; even the truths of geometry, they all suppose an act of the will; for in the moral being lies the source of the intellectual. The first step to knowledge, or rather the previous condition of all insight into truth, is to dare commune with our very and permanent self."..." If this," he adds, " be regarded as the fancies of an enthusiast, by such as 'Deem themselves most free When they within this gross and visible sphere by such as pronounce every man out of his senses who has not lost his reason,-even such men may find some weight in the historical fact, that from persons, who had previously strengthened their intellects and feelings by the contemplation of PRINCIPLES -(principles, the actions correspondent to which involve one-half of their consequences, by their ennobling influence on the agent's own soul, and have Omnipotence as the pledge for the remainder) —we have derived the surest and most general maxims of prudence. Of high value are they all. Yet there is one among them worth all the rest, which in the fullest and primary sense of the word is, indeed, the maxim (i. e. maximum) of human prudence; and of which history itself, in all that makes it most worth studying, is one continued comment and exemplification. It is this: that there is a wisdom higher than prudence, to which prudence stands in the same relation as the mason and carpenter to the genial and scientific architect; and from the habits of thinking and feeling, that in this wisdom had their first formation, our Nelsons and Wellingtons inherit that glorious hardihood, which completes the undertaking, ere the contemptuous calculator (who has left nothing omitted in his scheme of probabilities, except the might of the human mind) has finished his pretended proof of its impossibility." In reading the poetical works of Coleridge, we must especially bear in mind the fact of his progressiveness, as but few of them were composed in the maturity of his genius. What he might ultimately have done as a poet we can only guess from some pregnant and harmonious, but too brief, specimens written during the last few years of his life. We remember his saying, that nothing would be less difficult for him than to finish "Christabel," or write such another poem, had he not wedded himself to theology and philosophy for the remainder of his time; for, he added, "I throw away as much fancy every day of my existence in the way of conversation, as would go to the making up of a score of poems!" And this was true; but of his manner of discoursing we shall want room to speak, except very briefly. The two following pieces are given in the "Remains," as having been composed in 1829 and 1830: WHAT IS LIFE? "Resembles life what once was deemed of light, Is very life by consciousness unbounded? And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath, INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE. "Now! it is gone.-Our brief hours travel post, To dwell within thee-an eternal Now!"-1830. It is a great defect in the arrangement of Coleridge's poetical works, that the date of the composition of each piece, as far as possible, is not assigned. Such pieces, however, as "Love's Apparition and Evanishment, an allegorical romance;" "Youth and Age;""Phantom or Fact;""Lines suggested by the Last Words of Berengarius;" "Sancti Dominici Pallium;"The Two Founts;""New Thoughts on Old Subjects;"" The Garden of Boccaccio;"we know to be of late date; and from the style and rhythm suspect the beautiful ballad of "Alice Du Clos, or the Forked Tongue," to be so likewise. The following lines also, attesting his final abstraction from the self-philosophy in which, doubtless, he was for a time "secluded, but not buried," are evidently the product of his last years: 66 E cœlo descendit yvõlɩ σeavтóv."-JUVENAL. “Γνῶθι σεαυτόν!—and is this the prime What hast thou, man, that thou dar'st call thine own? A phantom dim of past and future wrought, Such divine result to the philosophical contemplations of Coleridge, strongly demonstrates the sincerity of the purpose with which he always professed to pursue the study of metaphysics. Not to perplex our clearest notions and living moral instinctsnot to deaden the feelings of will and free power, to extinguish the light of love and of conscience, and to make himself and others worthless, soulless, godless! "No!" he exclaims, "to expose the folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed machine of language; to support all old and venerable truths, and by them to support, to kindle, to project the spirit; to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to make our feelings, with their vital warmth, actualize our reason: -these are my objects, these are my subjects." The presence of this purpose throughout his long career, and the summit to which it thus attained, consecrates him also as a fitting example of his own great criterion of true genius. "To find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the ANCIENT OF DAYS with feelings as fresh as if they then sprang forth at his own fiat, this characterizes the minds that feel the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it! To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day, for perhaps forty years, had rendered familiar, With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talents."* Our limits will only permit us to make a general summary of Coleridge's poetical career and merits; and fortunately, from the ultimate circulation of his poems, which is now such as to make piracy profitable, extracts and specimens are unnecessary. Coleridge's juvenile poems are marked with profusion of poetic diction: even at later periods he never affected to avoid it; and, indeed, makes good its defence in his chapters on Wordsworth's poems. Wordsworth himself found the abandonment of it less difficult in theory than in practice; and, indeed, seems regardless of its presence in all his poems, save in the lyrical ballads, the style of which The Friend, Vol. I. pp. 181-183. The XIVth, XVth, and XVIth Essays of this volume deserve very careful perusal by those who would appreciate the spirit of Coleridge's investigations. his too-celebrated preface was written to support. It would have been well for some critics on Wordsworth's principles of composition, to have discriminated how far they had been worked out in actual examples, and whether the writer himself might not, on after consideration, have abandoned what was objectionable in them, before they had perpetrated their inanities on the greatest poet of the day. We know, from Wordworth's own letters to ourselves, that he regrets having written any thing in the manner of criticism at all; and, without such private assurance, we have the evidence of his later works that he rejected not poetical diction where it was rightly admissible. But to return to Coleridge's juvenile poems. They neglect no ornament that would give dignity to style-no association that would assist the poet's mind-no imitation that would supply his inexperience. These are, in fact, the marks, and only marks, of their juvenility: In other respects, they are works of a man-compared with Byron's "Hours of Idleness," the works of a man indeed. They are not occupied only with the interesting adjuncts of the poet's own personality; but, though in some degree egotistic, have farreaching outlooks on nature and providence, which, except where accidentally biassed by acquired opinions, are of the right sort. We should look in vain among the "Hours" for an allegory, like "Time, real and imaginary." As it is brief, we quote it. "On the wide level of a mountain's head, (I knew not where, but 'twas some fairy place,) That far outstripped the other; Yet ever runs she with averted face, And looks and listens for the boy behind; O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed, "The Monody on the Death of Chatterton ;" "The Songs of the Pixies ;" and "The Rayen," are all good poems, and the last an extraordinary one. "Life" contains an anticipation of his future course in wisdom; the " Sonnet to the Author of 'The Robbers,' is really trumpet-toned : "Schiller! that hour I would have wished to die, If through the shuddering midnight I had sent, |