makes his appeal to us from the region of human sympathies. The readers of his poetry will be surprised by the grace and suggestiveness of his allusions to Nature when, as in This Lime Tree Bower, he seeks to reproduce with delicate exactitude her subtler appearances of beauty, and will also be astonished to observe his power to evoke her grander attributes, as in the sublime exordium to the Ode to France, and in the passages of The Ancient Mariner which reproduce the free untrammeled aspects of the sea and sky.

It may be confidently said, in conclusion, that Coleridge fills an unique position among English poets. The verbal felicities of his diction, and the strangeness and beauty of his imagination, are his most distinctive claim to greatness. Yet his verse rarely rises from mere melody to the higher regions of poetic harmony. His instrument is a flute of incredible sweetness, but the organ roll of Milton' gives forth a deeper and a richer sound. Again, his imaginative vision is unique, but it is at the same time abnormal and limited in range. He has not the emotional fervor which lyrical poetry demands, and his odes are the outcome rather of intellectual conviction than of passion. The Ode to Dejection, which draws its inspiration from the intensity of his despair, is the only poem in which we hear the genuine lyrical cry. His dramas are not successful, for he lacked constructive ability, and his metaphysical views of life disturbed his vision.

But whatever deductions we may find it necessary to make, nothing can alter the fact that Coleridge was and will remain a force in English literature. After his short creative career it was impossible for English poetry to relapse into the degenerate condition in which Coleridge found it, and from which Coleridge and Wordsworth labored successfully to set it free. To them we owe our

advance from the cramping artificiality of the eighteenth century; and though our poetry may again become over-cultivated and over-refined, the influence of these great poets will remain to point it permanently in its true direction.

COLERIDGE THE PHILOSOPHER

The religious and political philosophy of Coleridge, and his metaphysical theories in general, open up too wide a field for investigation here. A brief statement must therefore suffice. John Stuart Mill, the exponent of a very different philosophy, paid to Coleridge this tribute: 66 No one has contributed more to shape the opinions among younger men, who can be said to have any opinions at all." Although this generous estimate is not confined to his theological influence, it is nevertheless within the domain of religious thought that his philosophical teaching has proved most stimulating.

COLERIDGE AS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER

Coleridge's political views are represented by the Pantisocratic scheme in his revolutionary youth, and in his maturer years by his articles in the Morning Post of 1799-1802, and by the following works of a still later period: Statesman's Manual (1816), Second Lay Sermon (1817), The Friend (1818), and Church and State (1830).

Coleridge approached the French Revolution upon the intellectual rather than the emotional side, attracted by its specious return to first principles. He was never other than repelled by its savage abandonment to passion; and his Ode to France, or The Recantation, expresses the disillusionment which these excesses and this desertion of high ideals engendered in his mind.

The invasion of Switzerland by the revolutionary troops made permanent the alienation of his sympathies. Henceforward his contempt for France was associated with a distrust of all radical measures, and together with Wordsworth and Southey he adopted conservative theories that were almost reactionary in their scope. His conservatism is liberally interpreted by Professor Dowden as a desire "not to attempt to displace the old conceptions in politics and morals," but "to discover the vital center of each conception," and "to deliver this from the incrustations of custom and unilluminated tradition."

COLERIDGE AS A RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHER AND
METAPHYSICIAN

Coleridge in his early years was a follower of Priestley in religion and of Hartley in philosophy. He was therefore a Unitarian, with marked tendencies toward materialism. He had, however, from his youth been strongly attracted by the philosophy of the mystics, and it was a revival of these tendencies which made him waver in his adherence to the materialistic theories of Hartley. He eagerly perused Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Spinoza without finding a secure foundation for his religious or philosophical faith. "I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in, broke upon me from the fountains of the great deep, and fell from the windows of heaven."

It was in this condition of spiritual bewilderment that he sought a refuge in Germany. He there fell under the influence of the German mystics, and vigorously perused the great modern systems of Kant and Schelling.

Coleridge is therefore not a thoroughly original philosopher. His chief originality lies in his fruitful application of these borrowed theories to the conditions of English religious thought.

He found religion in England dominated by the mechanical theories of Paley, and barely emerging from the comfortable deism of the eighteenth century. His life's work was devoted to making religion less purely mechanical, and lifting it to a higher moral and spiritual plane. Revelation resting upon miracles, and the existence of a God established by mechanical devices, had no appeal for him. Rather was his life a protest against this state of things; and in the nature of that protest against artificiality in the sphere of literature, morals, and religion, we find the true unity which binds his scattered work together. "In metaphysical speculation," writes Professor Dowden, "in ethics, in politics, in theology, in biblical criticism, in the criticism of literature, he suggested a new exposition of received formulas. He quickened the sense of religion by reducing or attempting to reduce dogma, imposed from without, to facts of the spiritual consciousness and their inner significance."

Coleridge's religious teaching, we may conclude, is in a large measure responsible alike for the Broad Church and the Tractarian movements of the middle of the nineteenth century. The dominant single influence in the English Church at that period, the Rev. F. D. Maurice, was confessedly a disciple of Coleridge.

COLERIDGE THE CRITIC

Literary criticism, like theology, had been mechanically inspired in the eighteenth century. Dryden had partially laid the foundations for a more generous system which should be at once comparative and historical in its scope. His liberal principles, however, had suffered collapse, and Dr. Johnson, the law-giver of the eighteenth century, was the incarnation of all that is arbitrary, dogmatic, and artificial in the judgment of literary pro

ducts. His was the magisterial-dictatorial method, proceeding from the assumption of certain fixed laws which must imperatively be adhered to, or the literary result was worthless in his eyes. The weakness of the system lay in the arbitrary application to modern conditions of laws derived for the most part from a timid study of the lesser Latin poets. For Johnson therefore Milton's Comus was "a drama in the epic style, inelegantly splendid, and tediously instructive"; in Lycidas "the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing"; and the Sonnets "deserve not any particular criticism. For of the best it can only be said that they are not bad, . . . these little pieces may be dismissed without much anxiety." In Johnson's opin

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ion the summit of poetic excellence had been reached in Pope. It was vain to expect a further development. "New sentiments and new images others may produce; but to attempt any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and diligence have now done their best, and what shall be added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless anxiety."

Professor Herford concisely sums up the value of Coleridge's contribution to criticism as follows: "It was reserved for Coleridge and Carlyle to lay the foundations of the relative or historical method in criticism, with its attribute of catholic and many-sided sympathy. Every true poem was thence by its very nature original; it presented universal truth under an absolutely individual form. It must therefore be judged, not by any external standard, but by the laws of the 'situation' from which it springs; and this can only be done when the critic imaginatively re-creates it in his mind, thinking the poet's thought after him, sympathetically entering into the whole process of its growth. It is the significance of the romantic criticism therefore to have