ssion may not be justified. There are few writers
who would not prefer the magnificent failure of a Coleridge to their own
little mole-hill of success. Coleridge was a failure in comparison not
with ordinary men, but only with the immense shadow of his own genius. His
imperfection is the imperfection of a demi-god. Charles Lamb summed up the
truth about his genius as well as about his character in that final
phrase, "an archangel a little damaged." This was said at a time when the
archangel was much more than a little damaged by the habit of laudanum;
but even then Lamb wrote: "His face, when he repeats his verses, hath its
ancient glory." Most of Coleridge's great contemporaries were aware of
that glory. Even those who were afterwards to be counted among his
revilers, such as Hazlitt and De Quincey, had known what it was to be
disciples at the feet of this inspired ruin. They spoke not only of his
mind, but even of his physical characteristics--his voice and his hair--as
though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia.
Even as a boy at Christ's Hospital, according to Lamb, he used to make the
"casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with
admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the _speech_ and
the _garb_ of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and
sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus ... or
reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar--while the walls of the old Grey
Friars re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity-boy!_"

It is exceedingly important that, as we read Coleridge, we should
constantly remember what an archangel he was in the eyes of his
contemporaries. _Christabel_ and _Kubla Kahn_ we could read, no doubt, in
perfect enjoyment even if we did not know the author's name. For the rest,
there is so much flagging of wing both in his verse and in his prose that,
if we did not remind ourselves what flights he was born to take, we might
persuade ourselves at times that there was little in his work but the dull
flappings and slitherings of a penguin. His genius is intermittent and
comes arbitrarily to an end. He is inspired only in fragments and
aphorisms. He was all but incapable of writing a complete book or a
complete poem at a high level. His irresponsibility as an author is
described in that sentence in which he says: "I have laid too many eggs in
the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carele