his work altogether, and leave his readers in the lurch." What these glimpses of a stupendous theory" are, and where they are, except "throughout the works of Schelling," the announcer does not inform us: his own imagination may have discovered to him what was never discerned by Coleridge, in all whose notes upon Schelling not a hint is given of this stupendous theory in embryo. In the last part of the Transcendental Idealism, which relates to the philosophy of Art, at p. 473, a passage occurs in which the poetic faculty and the productive intuition are identified, and that which is active in both, that one and the same, declared to be the Imagination: but this appears to be the crown and completion of a system already laid down, not a germ of a system to be evolved in future. The imagination is also characterized in aphorisms 34, 35, of Schelling's Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen; but we must strain our eyes very much to find any indications of a grand philosophical design there.' I suspect that this "stupendous theory" has its habitation in the clouds of the accuser's fancy,clouds without water, though black as if they were big with showers of rain.

The extent of Schelling's teaching on the subject of the Imagination my father well knew before he commenced the Biographia Literaria, and he must also have known how far he was able to “catch and unriddle his shadowy intimations ;" what he did not know or sufficiently consider was the space which such a disquisition ought to occupy in his work, and the relation which it had to his undertaking. But for the failure of his powers, he might have recast what he had already written, and given it such shape and proportions, as would have made it seem suitable to the work in which he was engaged. Of this effort he felt incapable, and the letter was devised in order to enable him to print what he had already written without further trouble. But he still cherished the intention of continuing the subject, thus commenced, in a future work, which was to explain his system of thought at large, and to this object he devoted much time and thought, during the latter years of his life,-with what fruit will,

"I have asked two students of Schelling if they ever met with this theory in traversing his works, but could learn nothing of it from either of them.

it is to be hoped, hereafter appear in a philosophical work by his friend and fellow student Mr. Green.

The second great ground of accusation against my father is his having laid claim to "the main and fundamental ideas" of Schelling's system. "We ourselves," says the critic, "in our day have had some small dealings with 'main and fundamental ideas,' and we know thus much about them, that it is very easy for any man or for every man to have them; the difficulty is in bringing them intelligibly, effectively, and articulately out,in elaborating them into clear and intelligible shapes." He proceeds to illustrate his argument, on the hint of an expression used by Mr. Gillman, in his Life of Coleridge, with a choice simile. "Wasps," says he, "and even" other insects, which I decline naming after him, "are, we suppose, capable of collecting the juice of flowers, and this juice may be called their fundamental ideas;' but the bee alone is a genius among flies, because he alone can put forth his ideas in the shape of honey, and make the breakfast-table glad." True or false, all this has little to do with anything that my father has said in the Biographia Literaria. As for the bare "raw material" (to use the critic's own expression), out of which intellectual systems are formed, it is possessed by every human being, from Adam to his children of the present day, by one just as much as another. Clodpates, who draw no lines save with the plough across the field, have all the geometry folded up in their minds that Euclid unfolded in his book; Kant's doctrine of pure reason is a web woven out of stuff that is in every man's brain; and the simplest Christian is implicitly as great a divine as Thomas Aquinas. But when a man declares that the fundamental ideas of a system are born and matured in his mind, he evidently means, not merely that he possesses the mere material or elements of the system, but that the system itself, as to its leading points and most general positions, has been evolved from the depths of his spirit by his own independent efforts; this has certainly more relation to the wrought honey than to the raw. My father's allegation, that the principal points of Schelling's system were not new to him when he found them uttered in Schelling's words, shall be considered

presently; his own full belief of what he asserted, I, of course, do not make matter of question or debate.

First, however, reverting for a moment to the simile of the "wasps," I beg to observe, that even if such insects might suck the juice of flowers if they would, mechanically might (though their organs are not adapted for the purpose like those of bees), yet it is certain that instinctively they never do. In vain for them not only the "violets blow," but all the breathing spring beside. On the other hand, a habit of searching the nectaries of delicate blossoms, far sought on heights or in hidden glades, has been found by naturalists to be generally connected with honeymaking faculties; and thus, without admitting any proper analogy betwixt flower-juice and fundamental ideas, I will so far avail myself of the illustration as to suggest that, in like manner, he who sought truth far and near, amid the pages of abstruse and neglected metaphysicians of former times, and discovered the merits of new ones, just sprung up in a foreign country, before they were recognised in his own, was probably led to such researches by some special aptitude for studies of this nature and powers of thought in the same line. The wasps and baser flies of literature neither collect juice nor make honey; they only buzz and sting, flitting around the well spread board, to which they have never furnished one wholesome morsel, to the disturbance of those who sit thereat; a meddlesome but not, like certain wasps of old, the manliest race, for they most attack those who have the powers of the world least on their side, or, being gone out of this world altogether, can neither resist nor return their violence. Time was that when a lion died bees deposited their sweets in his carcase; but now, too often, wasps and vulgar flies gather about the dead lion, to shed upon his motionless remains only what is bitter and offensive!"

8 ἀνδρικώτατον γένος. Ranæ, v. 1077.

9"No sooner is the lion dead than these hungry flesh-flies swarm about him, verifying a part only of Samson's riddle, they find meat, but they produce no sweetness." Omniana, I., p. 234. I certainly did not recollect this sentence when I wrote the sentence above. My father did not recollect Samson Agonistes, 1. 136.

"When insupportably his foot advanced-"

To insects of this class too much countenance is given by the tone and spirit in which Mr. Coleridge's censor conducts his argument. In order to find full matter of accusation against him, he puts into his words a great deal which they do not of themselves contain. According to him my Father's language intimates, that what he was about to teach of the transcendental system in the Biographia Literaria was not only his own by some degree of anticipation, but his own and no one's else-that "he was prepared to pour from the lamp of an original, though congenial, thinker a flood of new light upon the dark doctrines in which he so genially coincided." Now, so far from pretending to pour a flood of new light upon the doctrines of Schelling, he not only speaks of him as "the founder of the Philosophy of Nature and most successful improver of the Dynamic system,' 10 but declares that to him "we owe the completion, and the most important victories of this revolution in philosophy.' He calls Schelling his predecessor though contemporary. Predecessor in what? Surely in those same doctrines which he was about to unfold. That he had not originally learned the general conceptions of this philosophy from Schelling he does indeed affirm, but he expressly ascribes them to Schelling as their discoverer and first teacher, nor does he claim to be considered the author of the system in any sense or in any degree. All he lays claim to, and that only by anticipation, as what he hoped to achieve, is "the honor of rendering it intelligible to his countrymen," and of applying it to

at the time of his writing in the France,

9911

"When insupportably advancing

Her arm made mockery of the warrior's tramp."

Mr. Dequincey represented him as denying the debt to Milton. Now 1 verily think that I had never read the passage in the Omniana, when the lion illustration occurred to me; I never yet have read the book through, though I have had it within reach all my life. It is not worth acknowledging like the other; but this and a thousand similar facts make me feel how much of co-incidence in such matters is possible. If my father had read Samson Agonistes, still he may have thought that he should have written the line even if he had not.

10 Biog. Lit., vol. 1, chap. ix.

11 Ib.

"the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes: and certainly in the application of philosophical principles to the explanation, and, as he believed, support of the Catholic faith, by which means the soundness of the principles themselves is tested, he had a walk of his own in which "no German that ever breathed" has preceded or outstripped him."

Plainly enough it was the sum of his future labors in the furtherance of truth, not his metaphysical doctrines alone, but his entire system of thought that he had in contemplation, when he intimated a confident belief, that the work he should produce would "appear to be the offspring of his own spirit by better tests than the mere reference to dates:" and although his actual performance fell very far short of what he was ever expecting to perform, yet surely 'his writings at large contain an amount of original thought sufficient to render this anticipatory pretension at least not ridiculous. That his meaning was thus general, more clearly appears from the circumstance that, just before this appeal concerning his originality of authorship, he refers to his design of applying philosophy to religion; and without doubt his religious philosophy differed materially from that of the great German. In connexion too with the same subject he mentions "this or any future work of his ;" so that to suppose him, when he thus expressed himself, to have had in his mind's eye just that portion of his teaching in the B. L. which he had borrowed or was to borrow from Schelling, is gratuitous indeed." Is it conceivable that Mr. Coleridge would have appealed to tests of originality, which his future writings were to furnish, had he not believed in his heart that they would furnish those tests?-that he would have

12 Mr. Dequincey said of him, with reference to another application of his thoughts, that "he spun daily, from the loom of his own magical brain, theories more gorgeous by far, and supported by a pomp and luxury of images, such as no German that ever breathed could have emulated in his dreams."

13 His good friend in the Ed. Review of Aug., 1817, sees this matter in a truer light, for he says Mr. C. "proceeds to defend himself against the charge of plagiarism, of which he suspects that he may be suspected by the readers of Schlegel and Schelling, when he comes to unfold, in fulness of time, the mysterious laws of the drama and the human mind." Fas est et ab hoste juvari.