Of Coleridge's poetical powers the estimate has been each year increasing, and we have never known any instance of a person once admiring his powers, and as in other cases of admiration formed in boyhood, ceasing to love them. There is no one poem which Mr. Coleridge has written, which should not be preserved; but we are convinced that in the late editions Christabel and the Ancient Mariner should have been printed separately from a great deal which the volumes contain; and that while a very few of the very earliest poems should have been given, as proofs of the early development of poetical power, almost every thing written in the interval between the date of these poems and the year 1797 should have been omitted. The others might have been preserved in some one of Mr. Pickering's beautiful editions, but we have no doubt whatever, that the part of the Aldine edition called Juvenile Poems has prevented many from reading the better poems. The manhood of Coleridge's true poetical life was in the year 1797, and all earlier poems are but the exercises by which he was disciplining himself for his vocation. There is no one of them which does not exhibit power; yet were we to advise a reader who had not before been acquainted with his works, there is no one of them on which we should wish him to delay; and it is rather from the recollection that Shelley and Wilson have spoken of the political odes as amongst the very finest in the language, than that we ourselves regard them as wholly worthy of Coleridge's mature powers, that we would allow them to be preserved in such an edition of Coleridge's select poems as we

Aldine Edition, Vol. 1.

suggest to his publisher. Of the political poems the only ones which we would retain in such an edition, are the blank-verse poem, FEARS IN SOLITUDE; and FIRE, FAMINE AND SLAUGHTER. We do not believe that by such omission we would lose any one poem which had become embodied in our literature, or had given to popular language or sentiment any expression or allusion; omissions of the same kind cannot be made in the case of writers of powers far inferior to Mr. Coleridge, when by any accident a poem has had that kind of popularity, which makes its phrases, whether they be genuine gold, or only some glittering imitation of it, pass into circulation and be received without question. The Aldine edition, (Pickering, 1835) is before us, the part of the first volume called Sibylline Leaves, with the exception of some three or four poems, and the second volume, omitting Zapolya, ought, we think, to be printed together, and in this way Mr. Pickering would form one of the most beautiful volumes of poems in the language, and we venture to predict, one of the most popular; in reality what we propose would be nothing more than in future impressions arranging the poems differentlyfor the volumes of the Aldine edition are sold separately; our suggestion would enable the publisher to print a smaller impression of the poems which we assume not only to be less popular,but to impair the popularity of the others. The volume we propose would be the most delightful volume of poetry in the language. It is a sad thing to think that almost its whole contents were produced in a single year of Coleridge's life. Of the history of

Mr. Coleridge's mind, the volumes of his Table-Talk give us no record. When his biography shall be written we will look with great anxiety for some account of the "annus mirabilis" of his life, in which REMORSE, THE ANCIENT MARINER, THE FIRST PART OF CHRISTABEL, KUBLA KHAN and the Pains of Sleep, not to mention numberless smaller poems, were produced. Coleridge was not then more than five and twenty years of age, and assuredly since the days of Milton, with whom we have often in thought associated him, never did the spring-time of a poet's youth blossom so lavishly. We have excluded from this enumeration of the works of the period, the political odes, because we feel, perhaps wrongly, that their power is rather that of eloquence than of poetry, and proudly and gloriously eloquent they are. Still-still-while we would not wish one line of them unwritten they are not a part of the Coleridge of our imagination;-neither have we mentioned any of the prose essays not only because without some books of reference which are not within our immediate reach, we should have more trouble than we choose to take, to fix dates not very important, but, because, really and truly estimating Mr. Coleridge's prose works as highly as any one can, they enter as little into the feeling with which we regard his poetry as our opinion of Milton's Areopagitica, which we have read till we have it by heart, or of his Tetrachordon, of which we have, like true reviewers, formed an opinion which will for ever prevent our reading it-interferes with our enjoyment of Comus. Of the poems which we have mentioned, the work of the same year, all are different, each in its kind, alone in our literature. We have no means whatever of determining whether Christabel was or was not popular on its first publication, but it is quite certain that many of the passages of Byron and Scott, which at once fixed them selves in the public ear, were but the echo of passages in the poem-which often as they have been imitated, are felt still to be wholly unrivalled indeed we think unapproached.

Of the Ancient Mariner, we must seek other opportunities of speaking. We only mention it now as a work so

absolutely distinct from any thing that had been before heard of in our literature, that there is no one writer of whose style it in any respect whatever reminds us, or with which it can, for a moment, be compared. We mention this because the preface to the TableTalk, very needlessly, discusses some silly attacks on Mr. Coleridge's reputation, as an original writer. They talk of the "plagiarisms" of Coleridge. Of all the nonsense which has been written about him, this is the most nonsensical. The origin of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is traced to an old account of a voyage-which says, that" one of the sailors being a melancholy man, was possessed by a fancy, that some long season of foul weather was due to an albatross which had threateningly pursued the ship: upon which he shot the bird, but without mending their condition." Till the OpiumEater made the charge of plagiarism, and till the editor of the Table-Talk gave us the passage from Shelvocke's Voyage, we heard nothing of this. There can be no doubt in any mind, that whether Mr. Coleridge remembered or forgot the passage in question, it must have been the ground-work of the Ancient Mariner. But is there one person in the world, who, admitting this to be the case, can think for a moment less of the powers of invention displayed in that wonderful poem? We will ask our readers to look back to the account of the origin of the Lyrical Ballads, given from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, in our review of Wordsworth's late poems. In that we are told, that, in the original plan of the Lyrical Ballads, were contemplated two classes of poems. With the portion which Mr. Wordsworth undertook to supply, we are not now concerned. In the other, Mr. Coleridge's portion of the work "the incidents and agents were to be in part at least supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And such they have been to every human being, who, from whatever source of delusion, has, at any time, believed himself under supernatural agency." Is it possible that any human being

could have been given, a mere statement of actual and unquestionable fact, one which it seems absolutely impossible should not be insist ed upon by any one having to answer, according to his folly, a critic of the class we have been imagining. The inventor of the kaleidoscope might,as reasonably,have been accused of pirating the principle of that beautiful toy from the manufacturer of coloured glass, which he has to make use of; and gentle, and communicative, and singularly free from any thing of personal vanity to interfere with him as Coleridge was, we can imagine him, in the case which we have supposed, exhibiting the same impatience which he would undoubtedly have felt had the question been not of himself but of Shakspeare. Had the passage in any way originated the poem-had it been more than a subject which accidentally served his purpose as well and no better than a thousand others, it is impossible that he should not have referred to it, when in conversation naturally called to the subject, although we can easily conceive strong reasons why he should have in some sort feared to destroy the illusion of his romance by a formal quotation from an actual narrative. It should be remembered, that when the Ancient Mariner was first published, the custom had not yet arisen of the poet's seeking to justify every page he had written by some prose authority;-and entertaining as the notes to the poems of Southey and Scott are, and in all respects of value to the student of poetry, we remember, on our first reading Thalaba, we were any thing but pleased at the perpetual references to books of travels in support of the imagery. A part of the poet's power is lost when he forces the reader to know that he is not an improvisatore-and the marginal notes given in the new edition of the Ancient Mariner-quaintly written as they are, and in perfect imitation of our elder writers, and now necessarily printed in every republication of the poem, are far from an improvement. If the story be difficult they do not lessen the difficulties. The poem was first published without any note of any kind, and we think a reference to Shelvocke could then have been as little expected from a writer who had to make his Ancient Mariner wear the

mask of reality as a reference to any thing but his own log books, from such a voyager as Captain Lemuel Gulliver. In any future editions, however, three or four lines from Shelvocke might be printed as a note, and when the works of Coleridge are printed, as one day or other they no doubt will--illustrated as Milton's poems have been by Warton, and Warton's by Mant, we have no doubt that the more perfect such an edition is, the more entirely the writer is enabled to exhibit the whole mind of the writer-often expressed in single words-often shewing itself in images just touched with light, or faintly shadowed aud left quietly and by themselves to produce their magic effect, the more entire will be the conviction of the absolute originality of Coleridge's poetry in the only sense in which that word can be used in speaking of poetry at all? The Edinburgh Review ought to have chosen a less offensive word than it has, when it speaks of " Coleridge's plagiarisms from himself and others." Coleridge reprints, in his essay on Church and State, a few sentences from the BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA or the FRIEND-Works that had been long out of print, and which, by one unfortunate accident or other-the fault of his publisher, or perhaps his own fault-were never fairly brought before the public. In another book he reprints from some old newspaper an essay of his own, which he feels ought to have a place among his works, and this is what the conscientious journalist does not hesitate to call plagiarisms. The distinct statement of the fact is, of course, the only answer it can receive. The accusation with respect to others, the only important one, has been well answered by Mr. H. N. Coleridge. We really grudge the page we are obliged to give to this matter. The "Opium-Eater," with great solemnity, tells us that Coleridge, in conversation, explained the injunction of Pythagoras to his disciples, to abstain from beans, to mean that they should avoid any interference with po litical affairs, public elections being conducted by beans. Mr. De Quincy's assertion is, that Mr. Coleridge explained the matter in this way, in conversation, without making any reference to some German who gave the same account of the matter. Mr. H. N. Coleridge says