ssness and
ostrich oblivion." His literary plans had a ludicrous way of breaking
down. It was characteristic of him that, in 1817, when he projected a
complete edition of his poems, under the title _Sibylline Leaves_, he
omitted to publish Volume I. and published only Volume II. He would
announce a lecture on Milton, and then give his audience "a very eloquent
and popular discourse on the general character of Shakespeare." His two
finest poems he never finished. He wrote not by an act of the will but
according to the wind, and when the wind dropped he came to earth. It was
as though he could soar but was unable to fly. It is this that
differentiates him from other great poets or critics. None of them has
left such a record of unfulfilled purposes. It is not that he did not get
through an enormous amount of work, but that, like the revellers in Mr.
Chesterton's poem, he "went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head," and in
the end he did not get to Birmingham. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gives an
amusing account of the way in which _Biographia Literaria_ came to be
written. Originally, in 1815, it was conceived as a preface--to be "done
in two, or at farthest three days"--to a collection of some "scattered and
manuscript poems." Two months later the plan had changed. Coleridge was
now busy on a preface to an _Autobiographia Literaria, sketches of my
literary Life and Opinions_. This in turn developed into "a full account
(_raisonne_) of the controversy concerning Wordsworth's poems and theory,"
with a "disquisition on the powers of Association ... and on the generic
difference between the Fancy and the Imagination." This ran to such a
length that he decided not to use it as a preface, but to amplify it into
a work in three volumes. He succeeded in writing the first volume, but he
found himself unable to fill the second. "Then, as the volume obstinately
remained too small, he tossed in _Satyrane_, an epistolary account of his
wanderings in Germany, topped up with a critique of a bad play, and gave
the whole painfully to the world in July, 1817." It is one of the ironies
of literary history that Coleridge, the censor of the incongruous in
literature, the vindicator of the formal purpose as opposed to the
haphazard inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the
"shaping imagination," should himself have given us in his greatest book
of criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and shapeless jumble. It is but
another proof o