One wonders how it came there.

The suspicions which this volume helps to confirm, the melancholy
guesses it answers, are that Miss Coleridge, with all her imagination,
had not the constructive imagination of an artist, and that, in spite of
her gaiety and spirits, fundamentally she was feeble. The imagination of
an artist, if we may be allowed a seeming paradox, works logically. Not
fortuitously, but by some mysterious necessity, does one vision follow
another. There is a rational, if unconscious, order in the pageantry of
images; there is an inevitableness in their succession closely allied to
the logical necessity by which one idea follows another in a
well-reasoned argument. In Miss Coleridge's mind images arranged
themselves in no progressive order; one bears no particular relationship
to another; they are disconnected, sporadic. Great imagination is
architectural; it sets fancy upon fancy until it has composed a splendid
and intelligible whole--a valid castle in the air. Miss Coleridge could
not build; ideas broke in her mind in showers of whims, and lay where
they fell at haphazard; she has bequeathed no castles, but a garden
strewn with quaint figures, where every thought is tagged with gay
conceits. Her short poems are often successful because she could pick at
choice a thought or fancy and twist it into a stanza; but when she
attempted a tale or an essay she gathered a handful of incongruous
oddments and made of them a patchwork.

This first defect was, we conjecture, a consequence of that other and
more fundamental flaw to which we have already drawn attention. If Miss
Coleridge's artificers played truant, it was because she lacked strength
to keep them at their task. For an indolent and lawless imagination
force of character is the only whip, force of intellect the only guide.
Miss Coleridge was deficient in both respects, and so her fancy sat
playing with chips and pebbles, making mud-pies when it should have been
making palaces.

Miss Coleridge never created a real work of art because she could not
grasp emotions, or, if she grasped, failed to hold them. Perhaps she was
too much of a Victorian lady to do more than express the culture of an
imperfect age imperfectly. At any rate, it is clear that a shrinking
fastidiousness excluded from her world much of the raw material from
which great art is made. Stray reflections on Greek life and thought,
though in themselves trivial, are interesting for what