Perhaps it was not only faults for which he was directly accountable which came between him and his friends. The most painful quarrel in which he ever engaged seems to have been exacerbated by the failure of overtures from him, which were felt as tainted with sentimentality, such at least, in our view, is the letter on the death of the little Thomas Wordsworth, to which it appears that the bereaved father failed to respond with any warmth. Wordsworth never ceased to love and to excuse him; but we should imagine that this particular tendency was more distasteful to him than to most people. A certain haze rests on their estrangement. The poem which is supposed to refer to it - "The Complaint"-if the theory be correct, is made intentionally misleading. Again, we venture to give the well-known lines that the reader may judge : — which produced a bitter correspond- | certain relief in stimulating his powerence between him and Coleridge. We ful imagination, and that some trace of could fancy that this incident is re- what was futile and trivial may be flected not only in the lines to which found in an immortal work of art. we have taken exception, but in the whole poem in which they occur. Coleridge had opened his home to a stranger as had Christabel, he had allowed the halo of his genius to encircle second-rate productions, and thus irrevocably proclaimed his friendship for one from whom he came to withdraw it; he had experienced the malign influence of the object of his hospitable beneficence, and had found it chill a far dearer affection. All this seems to us repeated in the poem with just that unlikeness with which imagination reproduces the outline of experience. Perhaps we may give Lloyd too much importance in associating him with an immortal poem, but we should give him much if we attended to contemporary mention instead of his own works; and the suggestions which a genius adopts and transmutes are generally shadowy. If an incident or a character reappears in labelled portraiture the art will generally be found second-rate, as was indeed the case with this very friendship. A literal transcript of Coleridge's experience in the ranks, when poverty had led him to enlist in a cavalry regiment, is to be found in a novel by Lloyd which owes any reader of our day to this portrait of his illustrious friend. There must have been strong affection between them at first, there was kindly feeling at last, and the poet may have hoped that his unhappy home would have been less desolate after the inclusion of an inmate with common tastes and aspirations. When to the disappointments of these hopes was added the discovery of a power in the alienated friend to alienate others, we can well conceive that Coleridge's sore heart found a 1 Lamb said of him, for instance: "I'll think less meanly of myself That Lloyd will sometimes think on me." And Coleridge, long after their quarrel, affixed some of his marginalia to verses which the reader of our day peruses with effort, but to which the faint pencilling now supplying its main interest ascribes "much merit." There is a change- and I am poor; A well of love-it may be deep, Such change and at the very door The name of Coleridge must occur to every reader who peruses these lines and remembers that they were written by Wordsworth; it is indeed impossible to fix upon another in Wordsworth's happy life associated with the chill and disappointment they convey, but it is not difficult to imagine that any one should suffer from estrange ment of which the world knows noth- | remedy and the poison grow side by ing, and the sentiment of the verses side. An appreciation of his work as a seems to us very unlike that with which thinker is not included in the present Wordsworth must have remembered endeavor, even to the same degree that his quarrel with Coleridge. However, it has undertaken such an appreciais about as probable that an address tion of his work as a poet, but any iu verse to an alienated friend should attempt to illustrate his work from be somewhat misleading as to the ac- his life must needs echo the protest tual facts, as that it should commemo- of his teaching against some part of rate a disappointed affection inspired his example. by one whom nobody knows and felt by one whom everybody knows, for neither contingency is improbable. We may at any rate take it for granted that when Wordsworth wrote some lines in that touching effusion, he could not but remember the brother bard who had been once his daily companion, though mountains intervened. For his prose, not less than his verse though no doubt less impressively because it is so much less impressive — receives light from and flashes it back upon his biography. It is so little familiar to the readers of our day that many would be surprised at discovering that in bulk it largely exceeds his verse. It is difficult to read, for two What had caused their quarrel was reasons. No other English prose, some expression which he could not surely, contains SO many valuable altogether repudiate, however much he thoughts presented in so unfortunate a deplored its exaggerated repetition to form. We have constantly to attend the effect that he (Wordsworth) had no to some one else's opinion before we hope for Coleridge. It is worth recall-learn his own; and to disentangle ing that expression of despondency his view of the perennial from somefrom Coleridge's poetic brother, to enhance the lesson of encouragement taught by his life. He became the teacher and guide he was felt by our fathers, after one who knew him best and loved him best had confessed to feeling no hope for him. We cannot cite another fact from the biography of great men equally pregnant with exhortation to hopeful thoughts on the destinies of all. The years he spent on Highgate Hill, in the home of the physician who rescued him from his slavery to opium, and set him free to live, succeeded to a neglect of duty that no circumstance can do more than palliate. There is no need to dwell upon this interval, for its general character is known to all who know anything about Coleridge. But neither should it be forgotten, or judged leniently. When genius abjures the responsibilities of manhood it becomes a criminal, not only towards those whose claims are obviously and unquestionably neglected, but to that wider circle for whom its influence slackens the bonds of duty and prepares apologies for wrong-doing. Happily, in the case of Coleridge the thing temporary. And, moreover, it breathes that atmosphere of the obsolete so peculiarly blunting to attention. We have heard it said by a man of science that nothing was more unreadable to his fraternity than the scientific writings which lay just beyond the limits of the special study of each. It is on the same principle, we suppose, that the thought that lies just beyond our own scope of reminiscence - using the word in a broad sense, and taking in more than the memory of a generationis less interesting than what is either older or newer. The works of a thinker, in their relation to public appreciation, go through three stages. At first, whatever is new in them strikes the public ear, and receives an eager welcome. After a time there is a reaction. All that startled an elder generation stirs a certain impatience in those on whom that teaching has been impressed as a kind of orthodoxy; they are apt to turn away with the feeling "we know all that well enough," ever if they do not go on to the further decision "and we see the mistakes in it." The final stage, when what is new or old has lost other than a historic sig- |ality, and to drink in his thoughts benificance, and men ask only what is fore their own echoes had made them true, comes much more tardily, and seem commonplace. has not yet arrived in the case of Cole- We have large material, in the meridge. moirs of his contemporaries, for an With a warning sense of the mis-appreciation of that fascination which leadingness of all labels attached to a has been hardly paralleled since Socthinker, we would venture to describe rates drank his cup of hemlock; and it him as the father of the Broad Church. does but bear out the comparison that His death almost coincided with the the chorus of his admirers is interstart of the High Church movement. rupted by the laughter of an AristophCarlyle seems to take him as the anes. It is the last, we fear, which prophet of that movement, and there is comes most distinctly to the ear of our a loose sense in which all who recog- generation. Almost all attempts to nize a common foe may be grouped follow some record of the spoken words together; but it seems to us that his which have most stirred the hearts of power lay exactly in his divergence their hearers are like listening to those from the High Church party. He words through a closed door- we follooked beyond the rising wave of pub- low the main purport of the discourse, lic thought; he saw clearly, not only we catch a sentence here and there, what men were beginning to see dimly, but just when our attention is most but what they were not for some time roused the words become indistinct, to see at all. It is the very fact of his and the sequence is broken. Yet if, in having seen clearly truths of special the wordless records of memory, the interest to a day that is but just past reader find nothing that renders easy of which makes him in this point of view belief a spell which no intellectual encomparatively uninteresting to ours. deavor can reproduce, he has lacked If he had stood a very little ahead of much of what is most precious in life. his own, the stage of reaction would by How many a conversation, conveying this time have been almost past. As it nothing to one who hears it at secondis, we stand in its full shadow. Forty hand, recurs to the hearer's recollecyears ago, that school of liberal theol- tion with a vividness which brings back ogy which accepts both the tradition of the modulations of tone to the ear, the antiquity and also the alliance of mod- furniture of the room or the details of ern speculation, had the effervescence the landscape to the eye, and in which resulting from any combination of pre- the words are lost only because they so viously hostile elements of thought. flooded the soul with large ideas or inTo-day it has the flatness which must distinct emotions that the mere vehicle needs succeed to such effervescence. was submerged. The thoughts have Whatever is true in it is as true now as passed into our memory like music or it was then. But whatever was new fragrance, and the endeavor to restore in it then has now that association of them to language is like that of the triteness which clings even to impor- fisherman in the Arabian tale to reimtant truth if it has been emphasized prison the genius in the vessel from for more than a generation. At no which he had escaped and soared to stage of thought, it will be found, is the clouds. Such memories are a clue truth so difficult to appreciate. Cole- to what is deepest in the meaning of ridge supplies the animating principle human intercourse, although the ento what we may call the new orthodoxy deavor to transfer them to another of our time, and orthodoxy is always mind is vain. uninspiring. We shall understand him, It is a striking and significant fact in this point of view, best through the that we may quote two accounts of interest he awakened in those who Coleridge's conversation, each from a stood near enough to him to catch mau of genius, and written from persome waft from his magnetic person-sonal experience, which flatly contra dict each other. The conversation of | duced by the lapse of time in the Coleridge was [says Wordsworth, Knight's "Life," i. 129] like a majestic river, the sound or sight of whose course you caught at intervals, which was sometimes concealed by forests, sometimes lost in sand, then came flashing out broad and distinct, and even when it took a turn which your eye could not follow, yet you always felt and knew that there was a connection in its parts, and that it was the same river. Carlyle, without apparently being aware that he is contradicting Wordsworth, says that it was talk not flowing anywhither like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea, terribly deficient in definite goal or aim, nay, often in logical intelligibility; what you were to believe or do, on any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear from it. So that, most times, you felt logically lost, swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables, spreading out boundless as if to sub merge the world. relative vitality of satire and eulogy. To a contemporary ear the former is generally more interesting. After a certain date it is the satire which falls flat and the reverence which is felt to be full of life. To our mind the chapter in which the young disciple endeavors to retain the echoes of teaching which seemed to him precious is more interesting than that in which his brilliant biographer seems to prick the bladder of that enthusiasm. We gain more even from a meagre and unfruitful inventory which gives the heads of a discourse awakening enthusiastic devotion, than from the laugh which substitutes the impression of a tedious preacher and a besotted audience. No doubt there is such a thing as enthusiasm given to an unworthy object. But it is not nearly so common as ridicule directed against an object more worthy of enthusiasm than of ridicule. The eulogy of Wordsworth, the satire of Carlyle, the attempted record of John Sterling, bear witness to the imThe caricature from which this is an pression left on all hearers by that extract, and by which, probably, Cole-inspired utterance which in the third ridge is best known to the readers of and fourth decades of our century was our day, will amuse all readers, and a magnet to the many pilgrims to Dr. perhaps most instruct those who turn Gilman's house on Highgate Hill. For to it for instruction rather as to the a tribute to the same influence in which artist than the subject of the sketch. all strictly personal influence is filtered "The account Carlyle has given of away, the reader should turn to the Coleridge's conversation would do very article written by John Mill fifty-four well for his own," was the comment years ago for the Westminster Review, made on it when his "Life of Ster- which holds in some respects an excepling" first appeared by one whom Car- tional position in the world of critilyle loved well. Perhaps the remark cism. We at least cannot recall another explains the want of sympathy in the account given by one great man of andelineation which called it forth. It is other (unless Carlyle's essay on Vola brilliant picture of whatever was taire be worthy of the description) feeble or odd in Coleridge's premature where principles which the writer spent old age, and it has touches here and his life in opposing are the object of there full of illuminating characteriza- candid and sympathetic appreciation, tion; but it misleads more than it en- and a character weak where his own lightens the student of a pregnant was strong is touched on with reverthinker and eloquent teacher. We may ence and modesty. This rare harmony turn to a portrait, as much more sym- of sympathy and antagonism is a tribute pathetic, as the painting is feebler, both to the critic and to the thinker from the hand of Sterling himself, pre- criticised, but in our opinion mainly served in that first biography of him to the latter. The critic, indeed, must which provoked Carlyle's. It is in- have brought to his task a rare capacity structive to note the inversion pro- for intellectual justice; but when we remember some aspects of his later of letters, it becomes to one who discareer we shall be inclined to doubt covers that there is within a man some whether the philosophical Radical could have judged the philosophic Conservative so truly unless he had found in him something that lay at the root of his own creed as well as of that which was the object of his antagonism. The influence which supplied their link was deeper than a divergence going down to the very roots of all that language can undertake adequately to represent to the mind, and must when rightly received supply a link to all human thought and aspiration. -- faculty which takes hold of that which is, a matter of life and death. His distinction between the will and all that sequence of cause and effect which we gather up under the name of Nature, is at once the core of his philosophy and the clue to his inmost history. He must have pondered over it more earnestly than almost any other man that ever lived, for it is hardly possible to conceive of one in whom the faculty of will was subject to so strange a paralysis. We read his biography with a sense of bewilderment at the discovery that duties clearly discerned by one keenly alive to the meaning of duty should be as absolutely neglected as by a man without heart and conscience. Probably our bewilderment does not equal his own. He was driven to ask more earnestly, we should think, than any of his generation, the questions which centre in the very idea of human choice. What happens when a man does wrong? What happens when he turns from darkness to light? Something of which the world of nature presents no type or likeness; which is original in a sense in which there is nothing original in the whole world of The poetry of Coleridge owes its peculiar beauty to the fact of its embodying, in a deeper sense than we could use the words of almost any other poet, the revelation of a character. His philosophy owes to the same cause all that we can recognize as its perennial truth. One much indebted to him Frederick Maurice says of him that he was a penitent as well as a philosopher. The words, though we should express their meaning rather differently, give the clue to what is most valuable in his thought. Whatever he has to say to the seeker after truth depends on its relation to that experience of struggle with evil which teaches the meaning of reality physical being. Something which—it as in this world nothing else does. In is but the same statement in other his youth he had given himself to the study of German philosophy unknown at that time to English students, and at all times inaccessible to any but students; in his age he discovered that the highest triumph of philosophy is to bring its illuminating influence to beliefs that lie hid in the heart of the ignorant and the poor. His aim was to transform the dogmas that most men had learnt to the truths that all might believe. He saw that distinctions which seem idle pedantry from without, from within are recognized as directions corresponding to the deepest needs of the human soul. This we may say of the distinction between the understanding and the reason, recurrent throughout all his prose writings; erroneous for the man of science of our day, meaningless for the mere man words—must to the understanding be forever invisible, which the reason alone can discern. This we conceive was the truth which Coleridge learnt through bitter experience. He had felt the bondage of nature, the absolute character of that law of necessity to which a man may surrender himself if he live under the sequence of the physical. He also came to realize the deliverance which proceeds from that which is above and beyond Nature, to learn that things which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, are in the teaching of life revealed by God. And what he thus learnt, though taught in a faltering voice and with the mingled hurry and diffuseness with which we always fulfil the morning's task in the late after |