And, from the numbing spell to win relief, Emerging from a mist; or like a stream But casts in happier moulds the slumberer's dream, Gazed by an idle eye with silent might The picture stole upon my inward sight. A tremulous warmth crept gradual o'er my chest, As though an infant's finger touch'd my breast. Of wonder, and in its own fancies lost; Of manhood, musing what and whence is man! Prattled and play'd with bird and flower, and stone, Sit on the ground-sward, and the banquet share. And gaze upon the maid who gazing sings: Or pause and listen to the tinkling bells From the high tower, and think that there she dwells. And breathe an air like life, that swells my chest. The brightness of the world, O thou once free, O Florence! with the Tuscan fields and hills, But from his mantle's fold, and near the heart, O all-enjoying and all-bending sage, Long be it mine to con thy mazy page, Fauns, nymphs, and winged saints, all gracious to thy muse! Still in thy garden let me watch their pranks, Poetical Works, Aldine Edition, Vol. 2. LIMBO. 'Tis a strange place, this Limbo!—not a Place, Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands As moonlight on the dial of the day! But that is lovely--looks like human Time; Yet having moonward turn'd his face by chance, With scant white hairs, with foretop bald and high, As 'twere an organ full of silent sight, He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him! Hell knows a tear far worse, A fear-a future state; 'tis positive Negation! 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 editious 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 absolutely distinct from any thing that his Table-Talk give us no record. had been before heard of in our literaWhen his biography shall be written ture, that there is no one writer of we will look with great anxiety for whose style it in any respect whatever some account of the “annus mirabilis" reminds us, or with which it can, for a of his life, in which REMORSE, THE moment, be compared. We mention ANCIENT MARINER, THE FIRST PART this because the preface to the TableOF CHRISTABEL, KUBLA KHAN and the Talk, very needlessly, discusses some Pains of Sleep, not to mention num- silly attacks on Mr. Coleridge's repuberless smaller poems, were produced. tation, as an original writer. They Coleridge was not then more than talk of the "plagiarisms" of Coleridge. five and twenty years of age, and as- Of all the nonsense which has been suredly since the days of Milton, with written about him, this is the most whom we have often in thought asso- nonsensical. The origin of the Rime ciated him, never did the spring-time of the Ancient Mariner is traced to an of a poet's youth blossom so lavishly. old account of a voyage-which says, We have excluded from this enume- that 46 one of the sailors being a melanration of the works of the period, the choly man, was possessed by a funcy, political odes, because we feel, per- that some long season of foul weather haps wrongly, that their power is was due to an albatross which had rather that of eloquence than of poetry, threateningly pursued the ship: upon and proudly and gloriously eloquent which he shot the bird, but without mendthey are. Still-still-while we ing their condition." Till the Opiumwould not wish one line of them Eater made the charge of plagiarism, unwritten they are not a part of the and till the editor of the Table-Taik Coleridge of our imagination;--neither gave us the passage from Shelvocke's have we mentioned any of the prose Voyage, we heard nothing of this. There essays not only because without can be no doubt in any mind, that some books of reference which are whether Mr. Coleridge remembered not within our immediate reach, we or forgot the passage in question, it should have more trouble than we must have been the ground-work of choose to take, to fix dates not very the Ancient Mariner. But is there important, but, because, really and truly one person in the world, who, adestimating Mr. Coleridge's prose works mitting this to be the case, can think as highly as any one can, they enter for a moment less of the powers of as little into the feeling with which invention displayed in that wonderful we regard his poetry as our opinion poem? We will ask our readers to of Milton's Areopagitica, which we look back to the account of the origin have read till we have it by heart, or of the Lyrical Ballads, given from of his Tetrachordon, of which we have, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, in our like true reviewers, formed an opinion review of Wordsworth's late poems. which will for ever prevent our reading In that we are told, that, in the it-interferes with our enjoyment of original plan of the Lyrical Ballads, Comus. Of the poems which we have were contemplated two classes of mentioned, the work of the same year, poems. With the portion which Mr. all are different, each in its kind, alone Wordsworth undertook to supply, we in our literature. We have no means are not now concerned. In the other, whatever of determining whether Chris- Mr. Coleridge's portion of the work tabel was or was not popular on its "the incidents and agents were to be first publication, but it is quite certain in part at least supernatural, and the that many of the passages of Byron excellence aimed at was to consist and Scott, which at once fixed them in the interesting of the affections by selves in the public ear, were but the the dramatic truth of such emotions echo of passages in the poem-which as would naturally accompany such often as they have been imitated, are situations, supposing them real. And felt still to be wholly unrivalled such they have been to every human indeed we think unapproached. being, who, from whatever source of delusion, has, at any time, believed himself under supernatural agency." Is it possible that any human being Of the Ancient Mariner, we must seek other opportunities of speaking. We only mention it now as a work so can conceive the originality which the poet ever aims at, can be that of inventing the very incidents themselves? Plagiarism!-the statuary may as well be spoken of stealing his conception from the quarryfromwhich his marble is taken. For ourselves, we are inclined to think that in future editions the effect of the poem would be encreased by printing the sentence describing Hatley's melancholy as a motto to the work; and if anything could increase our admiration of the inspired powers of the poet, it would be his editor's exhibiting-what he could not have himself done without the imputation of unbecoming vanity-the cloud no larger at first than a man's hand, which has assumed the form of this magnificent pageant: "At first it seemed a little speck, It moved and moved, and took at last A certain shape I wist." Suppose it were found in some old medical book, that a Spanish gentleman had gone mad from reading books of knight-errantry-suppose it could be shown with entire certainty, that Cervantes had read the story, is there any man would think Don Quixote a less original conception? Suppose the Spanish poet--for less than a poet we must not call him--had to repel a charge of plagiarism in this way sought to be established against him, and said, long before I heard of the story I had conceived the plan of describing a mind partially insane, and whether I had seen the story or not could make no difference whatever in any part of my plan. I looked into the old book you mention, thinking it not impossible that it might supply me with an illustration of my subject; my work would, in every thing that constitutes it a poem, have been the same, though such incident had never occurred. Would he have said anything which would not have commanded our fullest assent? Let us suppose Mr. Coleridge not speaking of one of his own poems, but engaged in explaining the character of Hamlet. Let us suppose him using the very words which we find in the volume before us. "Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who, all through the play, seems reason itself should be impelled at last by mere aecident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself if I may say so." Suppose our poet having thus explained his notion of the character insisted not alone on the truth but the absolute originality of the conception; and suppose some bystander to quote in reply to him a sentence from Saxo Grammaticus or the " Historie of Hamblet,” that for instance, as giving most support to this argument, in which the counsellor enters secretly into the Queen's chamber, and there hides himself behind the arras. Suppose him to continue his quotation, and repeat from one of these old poems, "that the wariness of Hamblet was not inferior to the craft of his enemies : entering the chamber with his customary airs of flying, he began to crow like a cock, beating his arm against the hangings in imitation of that bird's action with his wings. Feeling something stir behind the arras, he cried, a rat, a rat! and drawing his sword, thrust it through the concealed spy, whose body he cut in pieces, and cast into a vault." Is there in all this any thing that, in the slightest degree, affects the assertion of the poet's absolute originality. Is not the use of such materials as these, in subservience to the power of imagination, that, in which the poet's originality consists? If any thing could increase our opinions of Shakspeare's powers, it has been increased by our looking over the piles of rubbish which have been heaped together from forgotten chronicles and novels, and which were his materials. What is there in any The or in all of them ?-and there is not a single scene which the critics have not been busy in tracing to its source-to lessen our estimate of the miraculous power which is shewn in thus creating its own worlds for these ruins? Ancient Mariner of Coleridge is as much the creature of Shelvocke's voyage as Shakspeare's Hamlet is the work of Saxo Grammaticus, and a denial the most absolute in terms-supposing such to have been given by Coleridge—of his being under any obligation whatever to Shelvocke, would have been, in the only meaning in which such denial |