Song: "A sunny shaft did I behold"

The Knight's Tomb

Time, Real and Imaginary

OME "back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee, the dark pillar not yet named-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, metaphysician, logician, bard." So, on his imagination recurring to the past, cried Charles Lamb, who, of all the men of his age, best knew and appreciated the great bard who sang for us and for all time the "Ancient Marinere," "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," and twenty other of the sweetest, finest, and most marvellous songs that ever flowed from the soul of a bard. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born at Ottery, St. Mary, in Devonshire, on the 21st October 1772, and was the youngest child of ten

by the same mother, and of thirteen by the same father, who had been twice married. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, was vicar of Ottery, and bead master of a free grammar school, a scholar, a good, simple-minded man, and a day-dreamer; and in all these respects, and more especially the last, was in verity the image of the son-only the son dreamt such dreams, and gave expression thereunto in such music! England, by-the-way, has often been denied the honour of being essentially a musical nation, and so far as mere tone or sense-music is concerned, this may to some extent be true; but then, how do we stand if the question be one purely of word or soul-music? and if we have not produced such masters in tone melody as Handel, and Haydn, and Mozart, and Beethoven, what nation. can boast of so many masters in word melody ?— nay, can the whole of Europe name four to be compared with our Shakespeare, and Milton, and Shelley, and Tennyson? not to name, perhaps, the chief of all these-even Coleridge. Then, in Coleridge's best pieces we never have sense sacrificed to sound-each word being as essential to the expression of the idea as it is to the requirement of the metre, or the melody itself. Some of his early verses have this character, as those entitled

TIME-REAL AND IMAGINARY.

AN ALLEGORY.

"On the wide level of a mountain's head

(I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place),
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread,
Two lovely children ran an endless race;
A sister and a brother!

That far outstripped the other:

Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
And looks and listens for the boy behind;

For he, alas! is blind!

O'er rough and smooth, with even step he pass'd,
And knows not whether he be first or last."

This poem was written in our poet's sixteenth year, and when he was a student at Christ's Hospital, to which he had been sent shortly after his father's death, through the kindness of Judge Buller, and when he was about ten years of age. At Christ's Hospital he formed a friendship more precious than rubies, and which was ordained to last through life—and, let us say, through death, for we can never imagine a period will arrive when the souls of Coleridge and Lamb will cease to have the truest and deepest sympathy for each other. Other friendships were added in after years— that of Wordsworth and Southey in particular, and these also were to be long-lived. Shortly after their introduction to each other, Coleridge