f the picturesque, who,
by a felicity inborn, view and present everything in the completeness of
actual objectivity--and who have a class derived from and congenial
with them, presenting few pictures indeed, but always full of
picturesque matter; of which secondary class Spenser and Southey may be
mentioned as eminent instances. To neither of these does Mr. Coleridge
belong; in his "Christabel," there certainly are several _distinct
pictures_ of great beauty; but he, as a poet, clearly comes within the
other division which answers to music and the musician, in which you
have a magnificent mirage of words with the subjective associations of
the poet curling, and twisting, and creeping round, and through, and
above every part of it. This is the class to which Milton belongs, in
whose poems we have heard Mr. Coleridge say that he remembered but two
proper pictures--Adam bending over the sleeping Eve at the beginning of
the fifth book of the "Paradise Lost," and Delilah approaching Samson
towards the end of the "Agonistes." But when we point out the intense
personal feeling, the self-projection, as it were, which characterizes
Mr. Coleridge's poems, we mean that such feeling is the soul and spirit,
not the whole body and form, of his poetry. For surely no one has ever
more earnestly and constantly borne in mind the maxim of Milton, that
poetry ought to be _simple, sensuous, and impassioned_. The poems in
these volumes are no authority for that dreamy, half-swooning style of
verse which was criticized by Lord Byron (in language too strong for
print) as the fatal sin of Mr. John Keats, and which, unless abjured
betimes, must prove fatal to several younger aspirants--male and female--
who for the moment enjoy some popularity. The poetry before us is
distinct and clear, and accurate in its imagery; but the imagery is
rarely or never exhibited for description's sake alone; it is rarely or
never exclusively objective; that is to say, put forward as a spectacle,
a picture on which the mind's eye is to rest and terminate. You may if
your sight is short, or your imagination cold, regard the imagery in
itself and go no farther; but the poet's intention is that you should
feel and imagine a great deal more than you see. His aim is to awaken in
the reader the same mood of mind, the same cast of imagination and fancy
whence issued the associations which animate and enlighten his pictures.
You must think with him, must sympathize with him,