(some of which
were never before published) contained in our volumes, will be ready to
express the gratitude of their hearts through the medium of the
following beautiful sonnet:--

"SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE TO WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES.

"My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains,
Whose sadness soothes me like the murmuring
Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring!
For hence, not callous to the mourner's pains,
Through youth's gay prime and thornless paths I went:
And when the mightier throes of mind began,
And drove me forth a thought-bewildered man,
Their mild and manliest melancholy lent
A mingled charm, such as the pang consigned
To slumber, though the big tear it renewed;
Bidding a strange mysterious pleasure brood
Over the wavy and tumultuous mind,
As the Great Spirit erst with plastic sweep
Moved on the darkness of the unformed deep."

His larger poems are perhaps more distinguished by the ambition of their
themes than by the success of their treatment. His particular theory
about the superiority of the works of nature as poetical subjects
perhaps led him to a too uniform selection of its grander features,
while undoubtedly his genius fitted him better for depicting its softer
and smaller objects. He excels far more in interpreting the language of
the bells, now of Ostend, and now of Oxford--in describing the dingles
of Coombe Ellen--in echoing the fall of the river Avon, heard in his
sick-chamber at Bath--or in catching on his mind-mirror the "Distant
View of England from the Sea"--than in coping with the dark recesses of
the American forest, following the daring Gama round his Cape of Storms,
standing with Noah on the brow of the tremendous mountain Caff, the hill
of demons and griffins, and seeing the globe at his feet, or in walking
beside the Seer of all time, in that "isle which is called Patmos,"

"Placed far amid the melancholy main."

He is more at home in the beautiful than in the sublime--more a Warton
than a Milton--and may be rather likened to a bee murmuring her dim
music in the bells of flowers, than to an eagle dallying with the
tempest, and binding distant oceans and chains of mountains together by
the living link of his swift and strong pinion. Yet his "Spirit of
Discovery" contains some bold fancy. Take this, for instance:--

"Andes, sweeping the horizon's tract,
Mightiest of mountains! whose eternal snows
Feel