elled against
him: but whatever Coleridge's personal ego may have been, his creative
ego was assuredly not single in kind or aim. He did some noble things
late in life (instance the passage on "Youth and Age," and that on "Work
without Hope"), but his poetic genius seemed to desert him when Kant
took possession of him as a gigantic windmill to do battle with, and
it is now hard to say which was the deeper thing in him: the poetry to
which he devoted the sunniest years of his young life, or the philosophy
which he firmly believed it to be the main business of his later life
to expound. In any discussion of the relative claims of these two to
the gratitude of the ages that follow, I found Rossetti frankly took one
side, and constantly said that the few unequal poems Coleridge had left
us, were a legacy more stimulating, solacing, and enduring, than his
philosophy could have been, even if he had perfected that attempt of his
to reconcile all learning and revelation, and if, when perfected, the
whole effort had not proved to be a work of supererogation. I doubt if
Rossetti quite knew what was meant by Coleridge's "system," as it was
so frequently called, and I know that he could not be induced by any
eulogiums to do so much as look at the _Biographia Literaria_, though
once he listened whilst I read a chapter from it. He had certainly
little love of the German elements in Coleridge's later intellectual
life, and hence it is small matter for surprise that in his sonnet
he chose for treatment the more poetic side of Coleridge's genius.
Nevertheless, I think it remains an open question whether the philosophy
of the author of _The Ancient Mariner_ was more influenced by his
poetry, or his poetry by his philosophy; for the philosophy is always
tinged by the mysticism of his poetry, and his poetry is always
adumbrated by the disposition, which afterwards become paramount, to
dig beneath the surface for problems of life and character, and for
"suggestions of the final mystery of existence." I have heard Rossetti
say that what came most of all uppermost in Coleridge, was his wonderful
intuitive knowledge and love of the sea, whose billowy roll, and break,
and sibilation, seemed echoed in the very mechanism of his verse. Sleep,
too, Rossetti thought, had given up to Coleridge her utmost secrets; and
perhaps it was partly due to his own sad experience of the dread curse
of insomnia, as well as to keen susceptibility to poetic beauty, t