| Those stars, that glide behind them or between, |
| Now sparkling, now bedimmned, but always seen; |
| Yon crescent moon, as fixed as if it grew |
| In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; |
| I see them all, so excellently fair, |
| I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! |
| My genial spirits fail, |
| And what can these avail |
| To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? |
| It were a vain endeavour, |
| Though I should gaze for ever |
| On that green light that lingers in the West, |
| I may not hope from outward forms to win |
| The passion and the life whose fountains are within.” |
Give Coleridge a canvass, and he will paint a single mood as if his colors were made of the mind’s own atoms. Here he is very unlike Southey. There is nothing of the spectator about Coleridge; he is all life; not impassioned, not vehement, but searching, intellectual life, which seems “listening through the frame” to its own pulses.
I have little more to say at present except to express a great, though not fanatical veneration for Coleridge, and a conviction that the benefits conferred by him on this and future ages are as yet incalculable. Every mind will praise him for what it can best receive from him. He can suggest to an infinite degree; he can inform, but he cannot reform and renovate. To the unprepared he is nothing, to the prepared, every thing. Of him may be said what he said of Nature,
“We receive but what we give,
In kind though not in measure.”
I was once requested, by a very sensible and excellent personage to explain what is meant by “Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner.” I declined the task. I had not then seen Coleridge’s answer to a question of similar tenor from Mrs. Barbauld,
