imagination to which neither the past nor the present were
interesting, except as far as they called forth and enlivened the
great ideal, in which and for which he lived; a keen love of
truth, which, after many weary pursuits, found a harbour in a
sublime listening to the still voice in his own spirit; and as keen
a love of his country, which, after a disappointment still more
depressive, expanded and soared into a love of man as a pro-
bationer of immortality. These were, these alone could be, the
conditions under which such a work as the "Paradise Lost" could
be conceived and accomplished. By a life-long study Milton
had known-
'What was of use to know,

What best to say could say, to do had done,
His actions to his words agreed, his words

To his large heart gave utterance due, his heart
Contained of good, wise, fair, the perfect shape;'

and he left the imperishable total as a bequest to the ages coming, in the Paradise Lost.'"

"The inferiority of Klopstock's Messiah," he says in another place, "is inexpressible. I admit the prerogative of poetic feeling and poetic faith; but I cannot suspend the judgment even for a moment. A poem may in one sense be a dream, but it must be a waking dream. In Milton you have a religious faith combined with the moral nature; it is an efflux; you go along with it. In Klopstock there is a wilfulness; he makes things so and so. The feigned speeches and events in the 'Messiah' shock us like falsehoods; but nothing of that sort is felt in 'Paradise Lost,' in which no particulars, at least very few indeed, are touched which can come into collision or juxtaposition with recorded matter."

We agree with Coleridge in esteeming the "Paradise Regained" as "the most perfect poem extant," and have been much pleased with his criticism on "Robinson Crusoe." But we now pass on to the celebrated lectures on Shakespeare.

Coleridge's great object in these lectures was to prove, what is now generally admitted, but seemed to many a paradox at the time of their delivery, that Shakspeare's judgment was at least equal to his genius. The intermixture of the comic and the tragic in his dramas is justified by the authority of Plato, who in this, as in other instances, disputed the custom of his country. According to him, it was the business of one and the same genius to excel in tragic and comic poetry; and he gives as a reason that opposites illustrate each other's nature, and, in their struggle, draw forth the strength of the combatants, and display the conqueror as sovereign, even on the territories of the rival power. "Tragedy," says Coleridge, "is poetry in its deepest earnest; comedy is poetry in unlimited jest. Earnestness consists in the direction and convergence of all the powers of the soul to one aim, and in the voluntary restraint of its activity in consequence;

the opposite, therefore, lies in the apparent abandonment of all definite aim or end, and in the removal of all bounds in the exercise of the mind,-attaining its real end, as an entire contrast, most perfectly, the greater the display is of intellectual wealth squandered in the wantonness of sport without an object, and the more abundant the life and vivacity in the creation of the arbitrary will."

No criticism of a poet is genial if not reverential. The man who assumes the barbarism of Shakspeare's genius, disqualifies himself for judging his merits. Coleridge's indignation rises into matchless eloquence, as he reflects on the injustice done to the poet's fame by the current consent of critics. "Make out," he exclaims, "your amplest catalogue of all the human facultiesas reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the coincidence of the two (a feeling sui generis et demonstratio demonstrationum) called the conscience, the understanding or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination, judgment,-and then of the objects on which these are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming caprices of nature, the realities and the capabilities, that is, the actual and the ideal of the human mind, conceived as an individual or as a social being, as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a war-field of temptation; and then compare with Shakspeare under each of these heads, all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever lived; who, that is competent to judge, doubts the result? And ask your own hearts, ask your own common sense to conceive the possibility of this man being-I say not, the drunken savage of that wretched sciolist, whom Frenchmen, to their shame, have honoured before their elder and better worthies,-but the anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our daily criticism! What! are we to have miracles in sport? or-I speak reverentlydoes God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?"

These two volumes of Coleridge's "Literary Remains" give the public an opportunity of judging of his mere literary qualifications, apart from his philosophical, that it never had before. Highly interesting, exceedingly beautiful, and correctly learned, as for the most part the Essays and Fragments are, it is impossible for us to indicate their contents at greater length than we have already ventured. But we feel that we need offer no apology for the splendid specimens that we have quoted. The reader who would learn at full the transcendental principles, whence the author's rules of criticism proceeded, and their application also to religion and politics, must consult The Friend-The Aids to Reflection-The Church and State - The Lay Sermons - The Table Talk. But even then, he who has never heard Coleridge discourse, will miss some helps which would make the task less difficult. His conversation frequently soared beyond any

examples that have as yet been published. Some of the most elevated and daring are given, not in the books before us, but in an oration which was pronounced shortly after his decease, and which too contains exclusively his dying words-the last he ever spoke.

My mind was never clearer,"-he said to a friend,-" and be thou sure, in whatever may be published of my posthumous works, to remember that first of all is the absolute good whose self-affirmation is the 'I AM,' as the eternal reality in itself, and the ground and source of all other reality; and next, that in this idea, nevertheless, a distinctivity is to be carefully preserved, as manifested in the person of the Logos, by whom that reality is communicated to all other being."

His last anxiety was thus to avoid the rock on which his early teacher Schelling had split, and, indeed, to nip the possibility of Pantheism in the bud. What effect it may produce on minds unused to such speculations we know not, nor are we called upon to decide whether this mystical statement of the doctrine is the best possible, or one that we should ourselves adopt. We must take it as given by a man, who had not only studied in the transcendental but mystical schools of Germany-who had not only read Immanuel Kant but Jacob Boehme-and who yet, such was the predominance of his genius, emerged from the depths where they had been lost, and still kept his wings radiant in the sunlight, and made his song intelligible and musical, not to the ears of worldlings indeed, but to the thoughtful and devout. What he mainly insisted on was, that we should prefer the à priori mode of argument to the à posteriori, as a more scientific process; and he would not permit a doubt, but that if it were correctly ascertained and used, it would lead by a shorter way, to results which the after examination of nature would corroborate and confirm. Previous to this process, however, he demanded a purification of the will in the student, all the more necessary as, in his apprehension, the faculty of will was higher and more potential than that of reason. It was also ever active-so much so, that he expressly affirmed "a will is none that does not act." But the critic who should object to this, that will is thus made dependent on action for existence, will mistake the matter altogether. For (speaking in order of time) the will, of course, would be prior to the act, and give the conditions of action; but in truth, the position itself has nothing to do with time at all; both the will and the act being correlative and eternal, and therefore interdependent. It is a fact of the moral consciousness, that one never exists apart from the other.

* An Oration on the Death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Esq., delivered at the Russel Institution, on Friday, August 8, 1834. By John A, Heraud, Fourth Edition. Fraser, 1834,

We doubt, however, whether it is not Platonizing too subtly and in excess, to speculate by means of this fact on Divine arcana, and to affirm in relation to the blessed Trinity, that, as "the highest act of a will, which is the highest form of being, is to beget being, there must therefore have ever been the voice that said, 'I AM,' and the response, Ay, Father, thou art, and I in thee!" We repeat, we more than doubt the propriety of this, and it would be highly censurable in a mere vulgar pragmatical retailer of theories, but, on the lips of Coleridge, it was an enthusiastic burst of sublimity, borne up from his soul by the vehemence of genius, that sometimes must be permitted "gloriously to offend.'

999

Doubtless, also, there is much assumption in all this; but Coleridge has answered this objection by anticipation, by declaring that even the postulates of geometry suppose an act of the will, and that without a postulate we cannot enter on the investigation of truth. The logician takes every thing for granted; and no system of argumentation can be invented which shall not begin with an assumption. Coleridge's philosophy is no worse off, at any rate, than every science, even the strictest that the world has ever known. And when it is recollected that his assumption is, after all, a fact of the moral consciousness, or what is so stated by him, the objection should be waived in favour of the inquiry, whether such fact has reality in the being of every man; and let it be affirmed or denied even as each individual finds, or thinks he finds, the case to be in his own spiritual experience. As to the inquiry, whether Coleridge's showing favours the dogma of the eternity of matter or not; that entirely depends on the manner in which the word is defined. Coleridge's definition of matter would exclude the possibility of its eternity altogether, and would condemn the inquiry itself as simply absurd, and not worth debating.

On the opposition between God and nature, (as being, and an appetence to be,) Coleridge was wont to be remarkably eloquent; as likewise he was on a subject closely connected with the same theme,—the relative imperfection of each class of being in the scale of creation, in reference to that next above it. On this argument he has left an immortal passage in the "Aids to Reflection," which, however, is now too well known to be quoted.

As to original sin, he was disinclined to consider this doctrine as merely affirming an hereditary taint; but preferred to think of it as an eternal originality common to every man-an à priori condition in every human being; existing, for instance, like original genius in some, and therefore not simply acquired, but only excited into action by the circumstances of each individual's destiny. It would be quite beside our purpose to enter into an inquiry of so grave a character here-but hereafter, probably, it

will become a point of view, to which some of our contributors may turn their serious attention, as undoubtedly it deserves much.*

For his "Real Realities" and his "Real Appearances," Coleridge was evidently indebted to Plato; and they served him well to maintain mortal combat with the Königsberg professor, whose scheme predicates reality of sensible objects only-being of too modest a character to affirm the reality of the human soul, or the being of its author, although the ideas of both are confessedly connate with the rational intelligence. By insisting, as he ultimately did, for intuitions equally belonging to the conscience as to the sense of man, and in both as correlative with actual subjectivities, Coleridge fully established, in his own opinion at least, the dominion of reality throughout the universe of being created and uncreated.

Whatever may be thought of his system, so far as it is completed, it must be confessed that the author laboured hard to make it a scientific instrument for the discovery of truth-a logic not merely syllogistic but inductive and originative. The production of this "novum organon" was not the growth of a day, but was gradually evolved. He advanced by steps, and by retrogradations-by turnings and by windings-now catching a glimpse of light and now baffled-now pressing forward boldly, and now assailed by fears from within and from without. Above all, he was solicitous not to offend the church he loved, by his statement of her theological doctrines. Cautious, however, as he was in his expressions on these topics, it must be confessed that Coleridge's interpretations necessarily give new readings to the sentiments of our elder divines, and often point at meanings which, according to him, they ought to have meant, rather than such as it is probable they actually did mean, or were capable of meaning. At the same time, it must be equally granted, that sometimes he contrived to elicit glorious truths out of the dead letter of neglected authors, which, by any other mode, it is likely would not have smitten even his highly imaginative mind.

That a writer, thus occupying himself in a course of his own, and at such a distance from the ordinary train of endeavour,

It seems, however, proper to subjoin in a note the following article from Coleridge's Confessio Fidei, as given in the first volume (p. 392,) of the "Literary Remains," on this interesting topic.

"I believe and hold it as the fundamental article of Christianity, that I am a fallen creature; that I am of myself capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable of moral good; and that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any given act, or assignable moment of time in my consciousness. I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it, but I know that it is so. My conscience, the sole fountain of certainty, commands me to believe it, and would itself be a contradiction, were it not so—and what is real must be possible."