more effective idea of the work of the great German dramatist. This version was made from a copy which the author himself afterwards revised and altered, and the translator subsequently republished his version in a more correct form, with the additional passages and alterations of Schiller. This translation will long remain as the most effective which has been achieved of the works of the German dramatists in the British tongue.

The censure which has been cast upon our poet for not writing more which is worthy of his reputation, has been met by his enumeration of what he has done in all ways and times; and, in truth, he has written a vast deal which has passed unnoticed, upon fleeting politics, and in newspaper columns, literary as well as political. To the world these last go for nothing, though their author calculates the thought and labour they cost him at full value. He concedes something, however, to this prevailing idea respecting him, when he says, « On my own account, I may perhaps have had sufficient reason to lament my deficiency in self-control, and the neglect of concentrating my powers to the realization of some permanent work. But to verse, rather than to prose, if to either, belongs 'the voice of mourning,' for

Keen pangs of love awakening as a babe
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart,
And fears self-will'd that shunn'd the eye of hope,
And hope that scarce could know itself from fear;
Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
And genius given and knowledge won in vain,
And all which I had cull'd in wood-walks wild,
And all which patient toil had rear'd, and all
Commune with thee had open'd out-but flowers
Strew'd on my corpse, and borne upon my bier,
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!

S. T. C.»

In another part of his works, Coleridge says, speaking of what in poetry he had written, as to myself, I have published so little, and that little of so little importance, as to make it almost ludicrous to mention my name at all. It is evident, therefore, that a sense of what he might have done for fame, and of the little he has done, is felt by the poet; and yet, the little he has produced has among it genus of the purest lustre, the brilliancy of which time will not deaden until the universal voice of nature be heard no longer, and poetry perish beneath the dull load of life's hacknied

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thy of the reader, by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. Further he observes on this thought, that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence to be 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, etc. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life." Thus, it appears, originated the poems of the « Ancient Mariner,» and « Christabel,» by Coleridge, and the « Lyrical Ballads» of Wordsworth.

Perhaps there is no English writer living who understood better than Coleridge the elements of poetry, and the way in which they may be best combined to produce certain impressions. His definitions of the merits and differences in style and poetic genius, between the earliest and latest writers of his country, are superior to those which any one else has it in his power to make; for, in truth, he long and deeply meditated upon them, and no one can be dissatisfied by the reasons he gives, and the examples he furnishes to bear out his theories and opinions. These things he does as well or better in conversation than in writing. His conversational powers are indeed unrivalled, and it is to be feared that, to excel in these, he has sacrificed what are more durable; and that he has resigned, for the pleasure of gratifying an attentive listening circle, and pleasing thereby his self-love by its applause, much that would have delighted the world. His flow of words, delivery, and variety of information are so great, and he finds it so captivating to enchain his auditors to the car of his triumphant eloquence, that he has sacrificed to this gratification what might have sufficed to confer upon him a celebrity a thousand times more to be coveted by a spirit akin to his own.

It is equally creditable to the taste and judgment of Coleridge, that he was one of the first to point out, with temper and sound reasoning, the fallacy of a great portion of Wordsworth's poetic theory, namely, that which relates to low life. The poem of « Christabel,» Coleridge says, Wordsworth contends that a proper poetic diction was composed in consequence of an agreement is a language taken from the mouths of men in with Mr Wordsworth, that they should mutu- general, in their natural conversation under the ally produce specimens of poetry which should influence of natural feelings. Coleridge wisely asthe power of exciting the sympa- serts, that philosophers are the authors of the best

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parts of language, not clowns; and that Milton's language is more that of real life than the language of a cottager. This subject he has most ably treated in chapter 17 of his Biographia Literaria.

Two years after he had abandoned the Morning Post, he set off for Malta, where he most unexpectedly arrived on a visit to his friend Dr Stodart, then king's advocate in that island, and was introduced by him to the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball, who appointed him his secretary. He remained in the island fulfilling the duties of his situation, for

ing this public avowal of his entire ignorance of the language, Mr C. is said to have been, in the habit, while conversing with his friends, of expressing the utmost contempt for the literature of that country!

Whelmed in the wild mazes of metaphysics, and for ever mingling its speculations with all he does or says, Coleridge has of late produced nothing equal to the power of his pen. A few verses in an annual, or a sonnet in a magazine, are the utmost of his efforts. He resides at Hampstead,

which he seems to have been but indifferently in the house of a friend having a good gar

qualified, a very short period. One advantage, however, he derived from his official employ: that of the pension granted by Government to those who have served in similar situations. On his way home he visited Italy; entered Rome, and examined its host of ancient and modern curiosities, and added fresh matter for thought to his rapidly accumulating store of ideas. Of this visit he gives several anecdotes; among them one respecting the horns of Moses on Michael Angelo's celebrated statue of that lawgiver, intended to elucidate the character of Frenchmen. Coleridge has been all his life a hater of France and Frenchmen, arising from his belief in their being completely destitute of moral or poetical feeling. A Prussian, who was with him while looking upon the statue, observed that a Frenchman was the only animal, « in the human shape, that by no possibility can lift itself up to religion or poetry.» A foolish and untrue remark on the countrymen of Fenelon and Pascal, of Massillon and Corneille. Just then, however, two French officers of rank happened to enter the church, and the Goth from the Elbe remarked that, the first things they would notice would be the horns and beard (upon which the Prussian and Coleridge had just been rearing theories and quoting history), and that the associations the Frenchmen would connect with them « would be those of a he-goat and a cuckold.» It happened that the Prus-Goth was right: the officers did pass some such joke upon the figure. Hence, by inference, would the poet have his readers deduce the character of a people, whose literature, science, and civilization are perhaps only not the very first in the world.

Another instance of his fixed and absurd dislike of every thing French, occurred during the delivery of a course of Lectures on Poetry, at the Royal Institution, in the spring of 1808; in one of which he astonished his auditory by thanking his Maker, in the most serious manner, for so ordering events, that he was totally ignorant of a single word of that frightful jargon, the French language!» And yet, notwithstand

den, where he walks for hours together enwrapped in visions of new theories of theology, or upon the most abstruse of meditations. He goes into the world at times, to the social dinnerparty, where he gratifies his self-love by pouring out the stores of his mind in conversation to admiring listeners. Were he not apt to be too profound, he would make an excellent talker, or rather un grand causeur for a second Madame de Sévigné, if such an accomplished female is to be found in the nineteenth century, either in England or France. The fluency of Coleridge's language, the light he throws upon his subjects, and the pleasure he feels in communicating his ideas, and his knowledge, inuate or acquired, are equally remarkable to the stranger. He has been accused of indolence, not perhaps with reason: the misdirection of his distinguished talents would be a better explanation of that for which he has been blameable. He attempts to justify himself on the score of quantity, by asserting that some of his best things were published in newspapers. The world differs with him upon this question, and always will do so, when it is recollected what he has had the power to effect. It will not forgive him for writing upon party, and in support of principles that even now are pretty nearly exploded, what was meant for mankind.» Coleridge mistook his walk when he set up for a politician, and it is to be feared the public have a great deal to regret on account of it. He will not be known hereafter by his Morning Post articles, but by his verses. Whatever pains his political papers may have cost him, and from his own account they were laboriously composed, they will avail him nothing with posterity. verses of Coleridge give him his claim to lasting celebrity, and it is in vain that he would have the world think otherwise. He says, «Would that the criterion of a scholar's utility were the number and moral value of the truths which he has been the means of throwing into the general circulation, or the number and value of the minds whom, by his conversation or letters, he has excited into activity, and supplied with the germs of

The

THE

POETICAL WORKS

OF

SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE.

Juvenile Poems.