e would intrude
Reserved and rude,
Gentle at home amid my friends I'd be,
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree.

And should my youth, as youth is apt I know,
Some harshness show,
All vain asperities I day by day
Would wear away,
Till the smooth temper of my age should be
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree.

And as when all the summer trees are seen
So bright and green,
The Holly leaves their fadeless hues display
Less bright than they,
But when the bare and wintry woods we see,
What then so cheerful as the Holly Tree?

So serious should my youth appear among
The thoughtless throng,
So would I seem amid the young and gay
More grave than they,
That in my age as cheerful I might be
As the green winter of the Holly Tree."--
___

It remains that I should say a few words of Mr. Coleridge; and there
is no one who has a better right to say what he thinks of him than I
have. "Is there here any dear friend of Caesar? To him I say, that
Brutus's love to Caesar was no less than his." But no matter.--His
Ancient Mariner is his most remarkable performance, and the only one
that I could point out to any one as giving an adequate idea of his
great natural powers. It is high German, however, and in it he seems to
"conceive of poetry but as a drunken dream, reckless, careless, and
heedless, of past, present, and to come." His tragedies (for he has
written two) are not answerable to it; they are, except a few poetical
passages, drawling sentiment and metaphysical jargon. He has no genuine
dramatic talent. There is one fine passage in his Christobel, that which
contains the description of the quarrel between Sir Leoline and Sir
Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine, who had been friends in youth.

"Alas! they had been friends in youth,
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain:
And thus it chanc'd as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother,
And parted ne'er to meet again!
But neither ever found another
To free the hollow heart from paining--

They sto