UNIVE Her bosom heav'd-she stepp'd aside, She half inclosed me with her arms, 'Twas partly love, and partly fear, The swelling of her heart. 28 Coleridge's career as a writer of poetry terminated by the time he was thirty. The body of his poetical work is comprised within three to five years. Had he died in 1802, after the composition of the Ode to Dejection, he would have left the world of poetry as rich as when he finally departed. As a thinker he survived, and reigned, for thirty-two years more. Inspiration ceases for most in middle life. Few, once inspired, cease, while they breathe, from versifying. They versify because verse was wont to be their highest mental medium and instrument. Coleridge, when no longer minded to write Ancient Mariners and Christabels, had an alternative. He remained an intellectual autocrat, and proceeded to utilize his other gift, as a suggester of problems, a setter of texts. If literature cannot be said to have benefited by the soliloquies at Highgate, at least it has gained negatively by the escape through that safety-valve for imagination from the danger of a dilution of poetic greatness. Having tasted of Coleridge's best, we should all of us have been grievous sufferers had we been obliged to put up with aught lower. Better nothing if no more of Christabel, or her peers! The Poetical and Dramatic Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Four vols. B. M. Pickering, 1877. 1 Religious Musings, vol. i, pp. 93-4; and Lamb to Coleridge, Dec. 10, 1796. Memorials of Charles Lamb, by Talfourd. Moxon, 1850, p. 59. 2 The Eolian Harp, vol. i, p. 158. 3 The Destiny of Nations, vol. i, pp. 189–90. Ne Plus Ultra (Sibylline Leaves), vol. ii, p. 281. 5 Ode to the Departing Year, vol. i, p. 176. • Fears in Solitude, vol. ii, p. 20. The Picture, vol. ii, pp. 107 and 109-10. 8 Names (Sibylline Leaves), vol. ii, p. 306. • Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, vol. ii, pp. 132-5. 10 To the Author of the Robbers, vol. i, p. 148. 11 Kosciusko, vol. i, p. 136. 12 Frost at Midnight, vol. ii, p. 9. 13 The Knight's Tomb (Sibylline Leaves), vol. ii, pp. 292–3. 14 A Christmas Carol (Sibylline Leaves), st. 3, vol. ii, pp. 228–9. 15 Epitaph on an Infant, vol. i, p. 73. 16 Composed on a journey homeward, the Author having received intelligence of the birth of a son, vol. i, pp. 149–50. 17 The Three Graves (Sibylline Leaves), vol. ii, p. 254. 18 The Garden of Boccaccio, vol. ii, p. 327. 19 Ibid., pp. 329-30. 20 France: an Ode, st. 4, vol. ii, p. 7. 21 Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni (Sibylline Leaves), vol. ii, pp. 197-8. 22 Dejection: an Ode (Sibylline Leaves), vol. ii, pp. 220-1. 23 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part v, vol. ii, pp. 45–6. 24 Christabel, Part I, vol. ii, pp. 66–7. 25 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 75–6. 26 Kubla Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream, vol. ii, pp. 276-7. ROBERT SOUTHEY 1774-1843 I was brought up to regard Southey as the peer of Coleridge, and Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; not necessarily their equal in degree, but wholly worthy to be ranked among them. As a schoolboy, and as an undergraduate, I read him with respect, in some sort with admiration. When I became entitled to choose College prizes, a collection of his poems was in my list. My contemporaries would not have selected him; they did not think me eccentric for my preference. I have survived to find him utterly out of date, scarcely placed on an upper shelf with the Georgian classics. Even I myself had ceased to read him since my University days, unless when I wished to amuse my children with one of his ballads. Ghosts of old associations seemed to rustle down about me, like last year's leaves from a wind-tossed beech-tree in early spring, as more recently I turned over the many pages to try to discover why his verse was current once, and no longer passes The tide of neglect even has reached, if not to the full extent, the area of his verse in which he is indisputably a master. Few English poets are his equals, very few his superiors, in humour. Humour various and singular at once. Never mere fun, born with a laugh, and expiring in a yawn. Poetry also, though with sentiment not unbecomingly obtrusive. Above all, an infinite capacity for inventing occasions for itself, though from subject-matter the most unlikely. To give instances out of many as remarkable, the opportunity may be supplied by a henpecked Cornishman, whose bride had unfairly taken to the church a bottle of the dominion-ensuring water, which he raced from the altar to be first to drink at the Well of St. Keyne.1 It may be the natural anxiety of pious countrymen to secure for their village, by timely preliminaries-such as a deathbed-to Beatification, the relics of a Saint-designate, whom his neighbours might otherwise coax away in life. A mother's frenzy of anguish for her child devoured by a crocodile suggests a scene of revenge in kind, as equitable as it is irresistibly comic.3 A flower of smiling satire springs under the poet's pen from the field of Blenheim, watered with the blood of murdered myriads : 'Why, 'twas a very wicked thing!' 5 Said little Wilhelmine. Nay, nay, my little girl,' quoth he, The theme may be a Pope's untold mortal sin, with a Saint's gallop on Satan's own unwilling back to confess and absolve, or a robber's release from and restoration to his lawful gibbet. Each is made to yield the best of diversion. Half a century ago everybody revelled in the wit of The Devil's Walk!? There were few who had not both shuddered and laughed over Archbishop Hatto and his rats, and the gallant, futile fight with her registered purchaser, the Arch-Fiend, of The Old Woman of Berkeley in her iron-sealed and chained coffin, hymned and hallowed by fifty Choristers and fifty Priests, with, for sentinels, her son a monk, and her daughter a nun : 8 In he came with eyes of flame The Devil to fetch the dead, And all the Church with his presence glow'd, Like a fiery furnace red. He laid his hand on the iron chains, And like flax they moulder'd asunder, And he bade the Old Woman of Berkeley rise, A cold sweat started on that cold corpse, She rose on her feet in her winding-sheet, And a groan like that which the Old Woman gave She follow'd her Master to the church door, There stood a black horse there; His breath was red like furnace smoke, The Devil he flung her on the horse, And he leapt up before, And away like the lightning's speed they went, And she was seen no more. They saw her no more, but her cries For four miles round they could hear, And children at rest at their mother's breast As I now re-read, I do not know which to applaud more, the jester, the story-teller, or the Minstrel. The humour sometimes reminds a little too much of a skull's grin; the art with which it is extracted never fails; we always feel the fine sense of perspective with which the materials are marshalled to yield the desired effect. But the forgetfulness, which in its course has partially visited the Ballads and Metrical Tales, seems to have washed away, like Lethe, all remembrance of the serious poems. The degree of oblivion I cannot but think unjust, |