Mariner" your "Christabel"-your "Remorse"-your " Zapolya"-your "Wallenstein?" In the ballad epic, and in the romantic drama, he had no superior; and if rivals in the first, to him, as the inventor, must be allowed the mastery. Nor in execution must he be esteemed only as a pupil. By whom has the rhythm and the melody of his verses been equalled? Who but he could have dreamed "Kubla Khan?" Let it be remembered, too, that most of these pieces were the product of his inexperience, and that few indeed belong to his mature judgment; and we shall be justified in concluding, that, if he had not finally devoted himself to prose composition, he might, as a poet, have stood on a still higher point, breathed yet purer air, and put forth yet more ethereal attributes. On the composition of prose, however, he seems to have sometimes looked as an attainment beyond the art of writing in verse. Thus, in the "Remains," we find the following extraordinary article on the "Wonderfulness of Prose."

"It has just struck my feelings that the Pherecydean origin of prose being granted, prose must have struck men with greater admiration than poetry. In the latter, it was the language of passion and emotion: it is what they themselves spoke and heard in moments of exultation, indignation, &c. But to hear an evolving roll, or a succession of leaves, talk continually the language of deliberate reason, in a form of continued preconception, of a Z already possessed when A was being uttered,-this must have appeared godlike. I feel myself in the same state, when, in the perusal of a sober, yet elevated and harmonious, succession of sentences and periods, I abstract my mind from the particular passage, and sympathize with the wonder of the common people, who say of an eloquent man :- He talks like a book!'"

This, indeed, must be confessed to militate somewhat against his previously expressed opinion, in the Biographia Literaria, which seems to assert, that as prose is something more than conversation, so is verse something more than prose. take the passage :

But

"Now, prose itself, at least in all argumentative and consecutive works, differs, and ought to differ, from the language of conversation; even as reading ought to differ from talking. Unless, therefore, the difference denied by Mr. Wordsworth be that of the mere words, as materials common to all styles of writing, and not of the style itself, in the universally admitted 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."

We dwell on this topic more particularly, as it has become a moot point lately, whether the prose fiction were not likely in these days to carry it rightfully against its elder brother, the poetic. Mr. Hayward, the clever translator of Goëthe's Faust

into prose, has made the assertion pretty broadly. "According to Goethe," he says, "the disuse of rhyme in poetry, and the treatment of poetical subjects in prose, introduced a good deal of confusion and absurdity into literature, the mass of writers being wholly ignorant of the true principles of rhythm. A tendency of the same description seems at present to be rapidly gaining ground in England, for almost all our best poets have turned prose writers, and only a few occasional attempts (among which Mr. Henry Taylor's fine dramatic poem of "Philip van Artevelde," and Mr. Heraud's" Judgement of the Flood," deserve particular mention) have recently been made, to reclaim for verse its prescriptive, though hardly rightful superiority." Mr. Hayward then quotes Mr. Bulwer in corroboration; but we confess that we prefer the authority of Goëthe, in this instance at least; more particularly as Mr. Bulwer winds up his argument by this illustration-" Thus, though it would seem at first a paradox, common-place is more the element of poetry than of prose; and, sensible of this, even Schiller wrote the deepest of modern tragedies, his Fiesco, in prose." In penning this sentence, Mr. Bulwer forgot, if he ever knew, the chronology of the case, and committed an anachronism in his argument. It was in opposition to the French school of poetry that such men as Lessing and Schiller wrote tragedies of real life (Bürgerliche Trauerspiele) and others, in prose. This fashion continued in Germany for twenty-five years; and it was Schiller himself who ultimately decided that blank verse was the proper medium for dramatic composition; and all his later tragedies are written in it.

Coleridge came to the composition of prose with the same advantages that Shakspeare came to the drama. He had previously exercised his faculties as a poet. This profound remark occurs at the beginning of Coleridge's Lectures on Shakspeare, which, with others, are in great part recovered, for our instruction, in the "Literary Remains" before us.

"Clothed in radiant armour, and authorized by titles sure and manifold, as a poet, Shakspeare came forward to demand the throne of fame, as the dramatic poet of England. His excellencies compelled even his contemporaries to seat him on that throne, although there were giants in those days contending for the same honour. Hereafter I would fain endeavour to make out the title of the English drama as created by, and existing in, Shakspeare, and its right to the supremacy of dramatic excellence in general. But he had shown himself a poet, previously to his appearance as a dramatic poet; and had no Lear, no Othello, no Henry IV., no Twelfth Night, ever appeared, we must have admitted that Shakspeare possessed the chief, if not every, requisite of a poet,-deep feeling, and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in the combination of form, and to the ear in sweet and appropriate melody; that these feelings were under the command of his own will; that in his very first productions he projected his mind out

of his own particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself, except by force of contemplation, and that sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that on which it meditates."

Qualifications precisely similar to these in kind, if lower in degree, Coleridge brought to his prose compositions. The opening essay of "The Friend" is an allegorical poem in prose; and the general style of argument in all the essays that compose the work is so figurative as to require an apology even from the writer himself. He came to his labour also from the perusal, not only of German authors, but of the elder writers of his own land, Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Jeremy Taylor; and of the ancients, such as Plato and Xenophon. In behalf of his poetic irregularities, he claims the right of making all fair appeals to the feelings, the imagination, and even the fancy. "If," he demands, "these are to be withheld from the service of truth, virtue, and happiness, to what purpose were they given? in whose service are they retained?" Prose, however, written upon this principle, requires greater attention, and more powers on the part of the student, than the ordinary reader is willing or able to give or to employ. No wonder, therefore, fine as is the music of Coleridge's periods, that its beauty was appreciated only by the affectionate disciple and the judicious few. These knew, and these alone, that Coleridge was greater in his prose than in his metrical writings. Even Hazlitt was deluded into the error of depreciating the prose of Coleridge.

In an extraordinary essay "On the Prometheus of Eschylus," now published in the "Literary Remains," Coleridge has reduced his whole philosophic system to an algebraic formula-thus: “Law-Idea.” În treating of the generation of this bipolar line, he very happily calls the maze of words in which he had been compelled to involve himself and his reader, "the holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics'; if, indeed," he continues, "the reader's patience shall have had strength and persistency enough to allow me to exclaim

'Ivimus ambo

Per densas umbras: at tenet umbra Deum.'"

In the Mythus of Prometheus, Coleridge considers that Jove is the impersonated representation, or symbol, of the Nomos, or Law; and Prometheus as the impersonated representative of Idea," or of the same power as Jove, but contemplated as independent and not immersed in the product,-as Law, minus the productive energy." As a corollary, he adds, "that Jove's jealous, everquarrelsome spouse represents the political sacerdotal cultus, the Church, in short, of republican paganism, a church by law established for the mere purposes of the particular state, unennobled by the consciousness of instrumentality to higher

purposes; at once unenlightened and unchecked by revelation. Most gratefully ought we to acknowledge that since the completion of our constitution in 1688, we may with unflattering truth elucidate the spirit and character of such a church by the contrast of the institution, to which England owes the larger portion of its superiority in that, in which alone superiority is an unmixed blessing,-the diffused cultivation of its inhabitants. But previously to this period I shall offend no enlightened man, if I say without distinction of parties, intra muros peccatur et extra; that the history of Christendom presents us with too many illustrations of this Junonian jealousy, this factious harassing of the sovereign power as soon as the latter betrayed any symptoms of a disposition to its true policy; namely, to privilege and perpetuate that which is best,-to tolerate the tolerable, and to restrain none but those who would restrain all, and subjugate even the state itself. But while truth extorts this confession, it at the same time requires that it should be accompanied by an avowal of the fact, that the spirit is a relic of paganism; and with a bitter smile would an Eschylus or a Plato in the shades, listen to a Gibbon or a Hume, vaunting the mild and tolerant spirit of the state religions of ancient Greece or Rome. Here we have the sense of Jove's intrigues with Europa, Io, &c. whom the god, in his own nature, a general lover, had successively taken under his protection. And here, too, see the full appropriateness of this part of the Mythus, in which symbol fades away into allegory; but yet, in reference to the working cause, as grounded in humanity, and always existing either actually or potentially, and thus never ceases wholly to be a symbol or tautegory."

This essay is not the only extraordinary thing in the "Literary Remains." The Course of Lectures on Literature and the Fine Arts, delivered in 1818, is exceedingly valuable. The lecturer well discriminates the Gothic and the Greek mind: "When I enter a Greek church," he remarks, "my eye is charmed, and my mind elated; I feel exalted, and proud that I am a man. But the Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and with awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible impression left is, that I am nothing!" A contrast of Shakspeare and Spenser is thus beautifully rendered. "There is this difference, among many others, between Shakspeare and Spenser:-Shakspeare is never coloured by the customs of his age; what appears of contemporary character in him is merely negative; it is just not something else. He has none of the fictitious realities of the classics, none of the grotesquenesses of chivalry, none of the allegory of the middle ages; there is no sectarianism either of politics or religion, no miser, no witch

no common witch-no astrology-nothing impermanent, of however long duration; but he stands like the yew tree in Lorton Vale, which has known so many ages that it belongs to none in particular; a living image of endless self-reproduction, like the immortal tree of Malabar. In Spenser the spirit of chivalry is entirely predominant, although with a much greater infusion of the poet's own individual self into it than is found in any other writer. He has the wit of the southern with the deeper inwardness of the northern genius."

It is needless to show with what tact and superiority, even to such critics as William Gifford, the half-inspired lecturer proceeds to discuss the merits of Ben Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and Cervantes. His remarks on "Don Quixote" are, in particular, characteristic and pregnant. The names of Rabelais, Swift, and Sterne, suggest to him a lecture "on the distinctions of the Witty, the Droll, the Odd, and the Humorous," together with "the Nature and Constituents of Humour." Wit, he contends, " arises out of a habit of detecting the identity in dissimilar things. The connexion may be by thoughts, as in Butler, or by words, as in Voltaire, or by images, as in Shakspeare. The wit of thoughts belongs eminently to the Italians, that of words to the French, that of images to the English. Drollery is where the laughable is its own end, and neither inference nor moral is apparently intended. The Odd proceeds from the unusual juxtaposition, without connexion, of words or images. The occasional use of the grotesque in the minor ornaments of architecture, Coleridge considers to be an interesting problem for a student in the Psychology of the Fine Arts. Humour, according to the origin of the word, implies a growth from within. Humour is congenial with pathos; and we readily sympathize with the man who rides his hobby. The humourist is respected, as being free from all interested motives, save the merely imaginary, and because also that there is always in genuine humour an acknowledgment of the hollowness and farce of the world, and its disproportion to the godlike within us."

Only a few remarks have been rescued on Donne, but we are told that there are numerous annotations on his sermons, which will be printed hereafter. The notice of Dante is profound and subtle. Were Dante to be compared with Milton, the parallel should be instituted on the ground of the last canto of the Inferno, from the first to the 69th line, and from the 106th to the end. Dante's occasional fault of becoming grotesque from being too graphic without imagination, as in his Lucifer compared with Milton's Satan, is noticed as rendering him sometimes horrible rather than terrible. The production of "Paradise Lost" is to be ascribed to the character of the times and of the author. "In his mind itself there were purity and piety absolute; an