etter, to make us all the phlegmatic
servants of routine. The relative spirit, by its constant dwelling on
the more fugitive conditions or circumstances of things, breaking
through a thousand rough and brutal classifications, and giving
elasticity to inflexible principles, begets an intellectual finesse of
which the ethical result is a delicate and tender justice in the
criticism of human life. Who would gain more than Coleridge by
criticism in such a spirit? We know how his life has appeared when
judged by absolute standards. We see him trying to apprehend the
"absolute," to stereotype forms of faith and philosophy, to attain, as
he says, "fixed principles" in politics, morals, and religion, to fix
one mode of life as the essence of life, refusing to see the parts as
parts only; and all the time his own pathetic history pleads for a more
[104] elastic moral philosophy than his, and cries out against every
formula less living and flexible than life itself.

"From his childhood he hungered for eternity." There, after all, is
the incontestable claim of Coleridge. The perfect flower of any
elementary type of life must always be precious to humanity, and
Coleridge is a true flower of the ennuye, of the type of Rene. More
than Childe Harold, more than Werther, more than Rene himself,
Coleridge, by what he did, what he was, and what he failed to do,
represents that inexhaustible discontent, languor, and homesickness,
that endless regret, the chords of which ring all through our modern
literature. It is to the romantic element in literature that those
qualities belong. One day, perhaps, we may come to forget the distant
horizon, with full knowledge of the situation, to be content with "what
is here and now"; and herein is the essence of classical feeling. But
by us of the present moment, certainly--by us for whom the Greek
spirit, with its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened, debonair,
tryphes, habrotetos, khlides, khariton, himerou, pothou pater+, is
itself the Sangrail of an endless pilgrimage, Coleridge, with his
passion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, his
faintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet, may still be
ranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent elements of our
life.

1865, 1880.

NOTES

65. *The latter part of this paper, like that on Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, was contributed to Mr. T. H. Ward's English Poets.

68. +Transliteration: ousia akhr