he did in himself. His poetry is, even more than Wordsworth's,
unequal; he is capable of large tracts of dreariness and flatness; he
seldom finished what he began. The _Ancient Mariner_, indeed, which was
the fruit of his close companionship with Wordsworth, is the only
completed thing of the highest quality in the whole of his work.
_Christabel_ is a splendid fragment; for years the first part lay
uncompleted and when the odd accident of an evening's intoxication led
him to commence the second, the inspiration had fled. For the second
part, by giving to the fairy atmosphere of the first a local habitation
and a name, robbed it of its most precious quality; what it gave in
exchange was something the public could get better from Scott. _Kubla
Khan_ went unfinished because the call of a friend broke the thread of
the reverie in which it was composed. In the end came opium and oceans
of talk at Highgate and fouled the springs of poetry. Coleridge never
fulfilled the promise of his early days with Wordsworth. "He never spoke
out." But it is on the lines laid down by his share in the pioneer work
rather than on the lines of Wordsworth's that the second generation of
Romantic poets--that of Shelley and Keats--developed.

The work of Wordsworth was conditioned by the French Revolution but it
hardly embodied the revolutionary spirit. What he conceived to be its
excesses revolted him, and though he sought and sang freedom, he found
it rather in the later revolt of the nationalities against the
Revolution as manifested in Napoleon himself. The spirit of the
revolution, as it was understood in France and in Europe, had to wait
for Shelley for its complete expression. Freedom is the breath of his
work--freedom not only from the tyranny of earthly powers, but from the
tyranny of religion, expressing itself in republicanism, in atheism, and
in complete emancipation from the current moral code both in conduct and
in writing. The reaction which had followed the overthrow of Napoleon at
Waterloo, sent a wave of absolutism and repression all over Europe,
Italy returned under the heel of Austria; the Bourbons were restored in
France; in England came the days of Castlereagh and Peterloo. The poetry
of Shelley is the expression of what the children of the revolution--men
and women who were brought up in and believed the revolutionary
gospel--thought about these things.

But it is more than that. Of no poet in English, nor perhaps in any
o