in teaching. It included, until his recent resignation to become a candidate for Parliament, Dr. John Massie, who was already favorably known as a theological professor and as a New Testament exegete before Mansfield was founded. There are still on its staff Mr. J. Vernon Bartlet, the leading Nonconformist authority on the history of the early Church; Mr. G. Buchanan Gray, whose book on Old Testament names has given him high rank as a Hebraist; and Mr. G. W. Thatcher, one of the university examiners in the school of Semitic languages. It has to be remembered that a student for the Nonconformist ministry who is in residence at Oxford has also an opportunity of attending the lectures of Dr. W. Sanday, Dr. S. R. Driver, Dr. W. Lock, Dr. D. S. Margoliouth, and other university professors, as well as of receiving instruction from the Mansfield faculty. These advantages are within reach of members of all denominations. The trust deed of Mansfield College requires certain doctrinal subscriptions from its full professors, but imposes no such restriction upon its students. There is no other theological college in England in which students for the ministry are so likely as at Mansfield to be brought into contact with men who are preparing for a similar career in other churches. Mansfield is therefore doing not a little to promote a better understanding between the various Nonconformist Churches, as well as between Nonconformity and Anglicanism.

Herbert W. Howwill

ART. VII.-THE ENIGMATICAL COLERIDGE.

"WHO was Coleridge?" is a conundrum nearly a century old. He was somebody, or the question would not have kept running a single year. There have been plenty of hard nuts to crack in the last hundred years; thinking men have little patience to stop and delve into quizzical characters, unless there be something far-reaching in the mystery. Forgotten, Coleridge is not; his spirit will not down. There are only a few great names one hits upon more frequently. The very persistence of his presence in such great fields of thought challenges investigation. Coleridge was a precocious boy, who never won his college degree; he was an affectionate husband, who did not live with his wife; a loving father, who did not support his family; he was a pioneer in German learning, who held it beneath him to translate Goethe's Faust; he was a Unitarian preacher, whose clearest work was a philosophical defense of the Trinity; he was a liberal in politics in the days of the French Revolution, who spent his last days buttressing the English throne. He planned a colony for renovating the world, a “pantisocracy," to be established upon the banks of the Susquehannabecause the name was so pretty. His preparation for this new paradise was the marrying a handsome girl, and, when unable to borrow four pounds, abandoning the dream. His fame as a man rests on what he was not; his rank as a poet, on what he might have done; his place as a philosopher, on a system he never so much as outlined; his power as political writer, on one pamphlet and some editorials in an embryo magazine read by so few that the printer was never paid. His prestige as a religious thinker depends upon some fragments from a notebook. He never gained independence until he had become a twenty-year guest at the house of a friend. His contemporaries spent much time shaking their heads and uttering severe words about his wasted powers; yet several of them are known only as they cling to the skirts of Coleridge the fact that they stood near him alone rescues them from oblivion. He was the most famous of the brilliant conversers; yet Carlyle, after two hours' listening, wrathfully declared himself

lost in this transcendental moonshine, and defied any mortal to tell what the sage was talking about. Shelley wrote:

He was a mighty poet, and

A subtle-souled psychologist;
All things he seemed to understand

Of old or new, of sea or land,

But his own mind, which was a mist.

The Critic for March, 1901, brings to light a poem by Aubrey De Vere with penciled notes on its margin by Walter Savage Landor, written in 1843:

His eye saw all things in the symmetry

Of true and just proportion,

Yet dim that eye with gazing upon heaven.

[Landor-The greatest liar that ever did gaze upon it.]

No loftler, purer soul than his hath ever
With awe revolved the planetary page
(From infancy to age)

[Landor-Alas, were it but so !]

of Knowledge.

A-down Lethean streams his spirit drifted
Under Elysian shades.

(Landor-Drunk with gin and opium.]

Coleridge farewell!

Through life a goodly vein

Was thine! and time it was thy rest to take.

Soft be the sound ordained thy sleep to break !
When thou art waking, wake me, for thy Master's sake.

[Landor-And let me nap on.]

Who was Coleridge? Listen to what may be said: Hazlitt"The only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius." Wordsworth-"I have known men who have done wonderful things, but the most wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge." De Quincey-"The largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive that has yet existed among men." Southey wrote to a friend-"I am grieved that you never met Coleridge; all other men whom I have known are mere children compared to him." J. S. Mill-"The great seminal mind of his generation." Dr. Arnold, Julius Hare, F. D. Maurice, and Newman add words in tribute to the stimulating power of his intellect, as shaping the noblest currents of English thought. Horace Bushnell spoke freely of his own great indebtedness to Coleridge. Lamb declared the neighborhood of such a man exciting as fifty ordinary persons.

Who was Coleridge the poet? A member of a group of epochmaking English singers. His contribution, though, is a thin volume seldom seen, less frequently read-"Genevieve," "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," a few noble odes, and "The Ancient Mariner" are all. "Christabel" is only splendid word-juggling. He tossed the sword in air like an oriental juggler, but the trick was never finished. "The Ancient Mariner" is a nightmare, an allegory, an extravaganza. There are songs without words, this is words and music without a song. It is so weird, its rhymes and similes ever haunt the memory. Now some bold, practical thinker reads between the lines, and tells us what it teaches. Bad luck and wantonly cruel to shoot a goose, is about the practical result that can be squeezed out of it. Others tell us that it is so strange and far-away it is only a curio. It has just one inexplicable thing about it-that one thing is enough-its beauty can never be forgotten. This poet, who stands on a pedestal frail as a Venetian vase, still stands among the mighty men of English song.

Who was Coleridge the talker? At his feet gathered the thinking, eager young literary men of England. Pilgrimages to hear his table talk were reverently made by scores, who listened as to one inspired. Wordsworth-"Like a majestic river the sound or sight of whose course you caught at intervals, which was sometimes concealed by forests, sometimes lost in sand, then came flashing out broad and distinct, and, even when it took a turn which your eye could not follow, you always felt and knew that there was a connection in its parts, that it was the same river." Carlyle's view of this same river of speech was not so clear-"Talk flowing anywhither like a river, but spreading anywhither in inextricable currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea, terribly deficient in definite goal or aim, nay, often in logical intelligibility; what were you to believe or do, on any earthly or heavenly thing obstinately refusing to appear from it? So that most times you felt logically lost, swamped, near to drowning, in this tide of ingenious vocables, boundless as if to submerge the world." Happily, as ever with Coleridge, there is weighty evidence upon the other side-no less than the emphatic judgment of De Quincey: "Coleridge, to many people seemed to wander; and he seemed to

them to wander most when, in fact, his resistance to the wandering instinct was the greatest, namely, when the compass and huge circuit by which his illustrations moved traveled far into remote regions before they began to revolve. Long before his coming around commenced most people had lost him, and naturally enough supposed that he had lost himself. I can assert, upon my long intimate knowledge of Coleridge's mind, that logic, the most severe, was as inalienable from his modes of thinking as grammar from his language."

In literary criticism Coleridge was a creative power. His judgments upon Shakespeare were the first adequate and illumining criticisms upon the great poet; their sanity and penetration remain unchallenged. His work in philosophy was to open the doors of English thought and secure a hospitable place at the British fireside for the Practical Reason of Kant. He found a splendid field of action as champion of the practical reason as dominant over the speculative understanding. "There he found an assurance of the ability of man for the immediate contemplation of truth, and that the reasoning powers are not man himself, and that he may rise above their impotence, and have direct faith in unseen realities." Whatever result this contention had in fertilizing the hard and dry field of English philosophy, its most fruitful realm was found in theology. There Coleridge the laggard, the opium-eater, the writer of fragments, the transcendental dreamer, stands the farseeing leader, the prophet of the dispensation of liberal orthodox Christianity. He is the John the Baptist crying in the wilderness of hard theology and mechanical evidences, preparing the way for the doctrine of divine immanence and the evidence of Christian experience. Coleridge came at the time when the battle with deism had been fought and won by the unrivaled logic of Butler and massing of evidence by Paley. If the clumsy and powerful old knights in armor who strove to drive Christianity from the field with lance and mace of deism were routed, a host of weapons of modern warfare was training for the most merciless and insidious and brilliant attacks that religion has ever encountered. The pantheistic movement was ready to advance with its stealthy and subtle methods. It denied the personality of