e after sentence into the great manner, as when he declares:

No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a
profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy
of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions,
language.

How excellently, again, he describes Wordsworth's early aim as being--

to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite
a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's
attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the
loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.

He explains Wordsworth's gift more fully in another passage:

It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought, the fine
balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying
the objects observed, and, above all, the original gift of spreading the
tone, the _atmosphere_, and with it the depth and height of the ideal
world, around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the
common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the
sparkle and the dew-drops.

Coleridge's censures on Wordsworth, on the other hand, such as that on
_The Daffodil_, may not all be endorsed by us to-day. But in the mass they
have the insight of genius, as when he condemns "the approximation to what
might be called _mental_ bombast, as distinguished from verbal." His
quotations of great passages, again, are the very flower of good
criticism.

Mr. George Sampson's editorial selection from _Biographia Literaria_
and his pleasant as well as instructive notes give one a new
pleasure in re-reading this classic of critical literature. The
"quale-quare-quidditive" chapters have been removed, and Wordsworth's
revolutionary prefaces and essays given in their place. In its new form,
_Biographia Literaria_ may not be the best book that could be written, but
there is good reason for believing that it is the best book that has been
written on poetry in the English tongue.

(2) COLERIDGE AS A TALKER

Coleridge's talk resembles the movements of one of the heavenly bodies. It
moves luminously on its way without impediment, without conflict. When Dr.
Johnson talks, half our pleasure is due to our sense of conflict. His
sentences are knobby sticks. We love him as a good man playing the bully
even more than as a wise man talking common sense. He is one of the comic
characters in literature. He belongs, i