except to some degree in Lewti, he does not touch the notes by which his greatest successes were to be attained. His favourite style is that of Religious Musings, Lines composed on various occasions, trivial poems addressed to friends, and occasionally humorous verses. His true note was not struck until the composition of The Ancient Mariner, and then he reaches perfection all at once. This is the baffling feature about Coleridge's poetry, that his best work is different from his inferior, not in degree only, but in kind. All his life he was meditating, reflecting, philosophizing, and most of his verse is written in this frame of mind; yet on a few isolated occasions, all comprised within the limits of five years, he produces a handful of poems of a wholly different genus, in which he reaches an eminence of unchallenged success. There is nothing quite like it in all the history of literature.

The manner in which Coleridge's success is so marked is narrative tinged with mystery. In both The Ancient Mariner and Christabel this is plainly the case. The poems are mainly narrative, but in both the interest of the narrative arises from the mysterious and supernatural influences which surround it. Even in the short fragment of Kubla Khan there is a sense of something unnatural and weird, both in the scene described and in the ancestral voices prophesying war.' But the mystery is not all. In these poems Coleridge achieves a mastery of language and rhythm which is nowhere else conspicuously evident in him. He is not one of those laborious cultivators of a poetic style whose manner remains characteristic and evident even when their matter or their inspiration fails them. In Spenser, in Milton, in Tennyson, there are many passages in which the style successfully carries off a weak or commonplace thought, and their style is constant under all circumstances. But with Coleridge it is not so. There is no trace of the music of Kubla Khan in the Lines to a Young Ass; nor in general does he appear to have cultivated the exact diction of his poems with that laborious care which is generally the essential condition of a perfect style. Yet in these three poems the language is modulated to the meaning with a perfection which has perhaps never been equalled. Kubla Khan in particular is the most perfect piece of word-painting in English literature, and the 'person on business' who interrupted its transcription and thereby destroyed the recollection of the dream in which it had been composed, has much to answer for to posterity. There the perfection is, and we cannot account for it. At times one is tempted to refer the inspiration (as in the case of Kubla Khan

one is authorized to refer it) to the stimulus of opium; and it may be the case that the use of the drug, in these early years before its harmful effects began to work themselves out, fired the imagination with which the poet was naturally gifted. But at most this can only have been the stimulus, not the cause. If opium would make second-rate poets write poems like The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, one would be tempted to form a Pro-Opium Society for the administration of it to a selection of our living poets.

་

The

The poems just named, together with Christabel, are the three supreme works on which the general reputation of Coleridge rests, and with them may fitly be joined the less known but extremely beautiful piece entitled Love. This is in the same manner as the three greater poems, save that there is less of narrative and less of mystery, with more of personal emotion; and the charm of language is the same. That Coleridge himself thought highly of it appears from his own words to his friend Allsop. The Ancient Mariner cannot be imitated, nor the poem Love; they may be excelled, they are not imitable.' The criticism is a true one, and might be extended to Kubla Khan and Christabel, despite the hardihood which has led sundry persons, otherwise believed to be sane, to write conclusions to the latter poem. But these four poems sum the whole achievement of Coleridge in this supreme vein. Ballad of the Dark Ladie is a fragment in the same style which might have been successful; The Three Graves, also fragmentary, is a failure, perhaps because Coleridge's imagination was hampered by adherence to the actual facts on which the poem was based. The two great odes, To France and Dejection, form a separate class by themselves, and owe their greatness to a combination of personal emotion and fine rhetorical language. They are works of which any poet might be proud, but they are less peculiarly characteristic of Coleridge than the poems previously named. Beyond these it is needless to look. Coleridge wrote several other poems which one would be sorry to lose, but nothing which would of itself have entitled him to a place among the greatest poets; and in some instances their interest is more as having been written by him than for their own intrinsic merits.

The tendency to arrange poets, at least in one's own mind, in classes and orders of merit is almost irresistible; but the critic who tries this task with Coleridge must find it more than usually baffling. Coleridge's poetic achievement is mixed of gold and clay; and the clay preponderates so greatly, the gold is so scanty, that he doubts whether the

latter can be allowed its full value, without deduction for the mass of the former. It is all very well to say that a poet must be judged by his best work, but in practice we do not reckon so. Blanco White is not classed among the great poets on account of his one fine sonnet, nor Dr. Wolfe for his poem on The Burial of Sir John Moore. Volumes of selections bring together (and have their chief justification when they do so) isolated pieces by minor authors which in themselves are fit to rank with the work of the dii majores. Yet in these cases the fact that the general achievement of their authors was so much less is allowed to exclude them from the roll of the great poets. With Coleridge, however, it is universally recognized that his best work is of such supreme merit as to compel his admission to that roll; and it is also contained in a sufficient number of compositions to show that it was not merely a single accidental flash. By virtue of this handful of poems Coleridge is among the immortals, and he occupies among them a place apart. cannot be classified either with the poets of meditation or with the poets of rhetoric, with the poets whom we read mainly for their matter, or with those whom we read mainly for their style. We read him for both. We do not find in him the luxuriance of Keats, or the wild music of Shelley, or the rhetoric of Byron, or the sublime insight and meditative charm of Wordsworth; but we find imaginative narrative combined with delicate harmonies of language and rhythm which are unique in our language. His own judgment was right. They may be excelled, they are not imitable.'

There remains one side of Coleridge's greatness to which passing reference has already been made, but which no edition and no biography of him fully brings out. We know Coleridge's poems, we know the details of his life; we do not fully know him as he was known by his friends. We read the story of his wasted life with some impatience, and we are apt to forget that those whose knowledge of him was the most intimate looked upon him as a man of unequalled powers, and combined their admiration of him with love. Throughout his life his pecuniary wants were relieved by gifts from men who, not always too well off themselves, were ready to contribute what they could to keep one, whose supreme gifts they recognized, free to devote himself to the pursuit of literature. Cottle, Poole, Estlin, Lloyd, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and, above all, the Wedgwoods, all at different times provided funds tc meet his necessities; and these are not by any means all who testified their belief in him in this practical way. And their

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admiration went with their money. dedicated The Prelude, as to the friend who had, more than any other, shared his thoughts and aspirations in all things literary and intellectual; and of him he wrote the loving and pathetic description contained in his Stanzas written in the Castle of Indolence. Lamb's testimony is well known, but cannot be too often repeated, for the honour that it does to both friends:

'Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee-the dark pillar not yet turned-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration . . . while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy !' 1 So Lamb wrote in 1820; and the story is well known, too, how during the few months by which he outlived his friend the words Coleridge is dead' were continually on his lips. 'His great and dear spirit still haunts me; never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again.' This is not the place for collecting all the testimonies paid to Coleridge's character by his friends. Probably the testimony of Lambsuch a testimony from such a man-will be felt to outweigh them all. Yet these friendships were not without their vicissitudes, due generally, it must be confessed, to Coleridge himself. He had quarrels with nearly all his friends-with Wordsworth, with Southey, with Lamb, with Lloyd; but the quarrels were part of the general decay of moral power and self-control which wrecked his whole life. One would rather dwell on the pleasanter side of these friendships, and recover, if it be possible, some trace of the power with which he influenced all with whom he was brought into contact. It is to be hoped that the forthcoming biography by Mr. E. H. Coleridge will deal fully and satisfactorily with this aspect of Coleridge's life. It is here, if anywhere, that his greatness as a thinker is displayed. With his pen he effected little, but with his tongue much. His residence in Germany had imbued him with a taste for German metaphysics, and he did much to introduce the Kantian philosophy into England. But the great works on metaphysics which he was always hatching never came to the birth, and the only concrete shape which his thoughts on this subject took was in letters to and conversations with his friends. The biographer of Coleridge would do well to devote himself mainly to the illustration of

1 Essays of Elia, p. 30. London, 1892.

the intellectual gifts of his subject as poet and thinker, and to pass as lightly as may be over his moral qualities and the details of his life. From the former there is much to be learnt by every lover of literature and every earnest man; from the latter little but warning and painful reflection on what might have been. We wish to think of him, not as the man of transcendent powers and brilliant promise wrecked by self-indulgence, losing will-power, and conscience, and selfrestraint in the slavery of opium, dependent on other men's charity, and always promising work which never was performed, but as the author of The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, as the inspirer of high intellectual thoughts in many minds of those who walked with him in his youth or sat at his feet in his old age, as the friend of Wordsworth and the friend of Lamb.

ART. X.-FOREGLEAMS OF CHRISTIANITY.

The Foregleams of Christianity: an Essay on the Religious History of Antiquity. By CHARLES NEWTON SCOTT. New and Revised Edition. (London, 1893.)

ON the first page of his book Mr. Scott speaks of the Science of Religions as a 'recently created department of history,' but this statement cannot be accepted without reservations. He himself shows that there are suggestions tending towards such a science in St. Paul (we would add, St. John), and that they were recognized and pursued by St. Justin Martyr and St. Clement of Alexandria, to whom he might have added Origen and St. Augustine. It could not be otherwise. Converts, whether from Judaism or from heathenism, could not fail to consider how much they had retained of the creed in which they had been reared; the full Christian light explained as well as rectified the dim perceptions and aspirations of their earlier thoughts. They had not cast off the faith of their childhood as an old garment; if part of it had to be discarded, part was retained and glorified. Every appeal on the part of Christian apologists to the consciences of the heathen was, in some sense, a declaration that the heathen knew already in some degree the truth, and could be judged by it; and to know the truth is, in the eyes of the Christian, to know 'Him that is true.'.

Yet, it cannot be denied that a less sympathetic view of heathen religions has often prevailed. From an original re