ABSTRACT
Our curiosity was raised by the announcement of Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, by S.T. Coleridge, esq. We knew Mr. C. when his zeal in a good cause entitled him to general esteem; we heard with regret that he had enlisted among the mercenaries of abused power; and he now imposes on us the pain of seeing him exhibit the decrepitude of genius! He complains, in the true spirit of misanthropy, of the malignity of enemies, and the force of criticism; but it is clear that he has far more reason to complain of the falsehood of friendship, which flatters him into the publication of 324volumes of which the following is the CONCLUDING, and by rhetorical rule, the most PERSPICUOUS, passage:
It is within the experience of many medical practitioners, that a patient, with strange and unusual symptoms of disease, has been more distressed in mind, more wretched, from the fact of being unintelligible to himself and others, than from the pain or danger of the disease: nay, that the patient has received the most solid comfort, and resumed a genial and enduring chearfulness, from some new symptom or product, that had at once determined the name and nature of his complaint, and rendered it an intelligible effect of an intelligible cause: even though the discovery did at the same moment preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the mystic theologians, whose delusions we may more confidently hope to separate from their actual intuitions, when we condescend to read their works without the presumption that whatever our fancy (always the ape, and too often the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory) has not made or cannot make a picture of, must be nonsense,—hence, I say, the mystics have joined in representing the state of the reprobate spirits as a dreadful dream in which there is no sense of reality, not even of the pangs they are enduring—an eternity without time, and as it were below it—God present without manifestation of his presence. But these are depths, which we dare not linger over. Let us turn to an instance more on a level with the ordinary sympathies of mankind. Here then, and in this same healing influence of light and distinct beholding, we may detect the final cause of that instinct which in the great majority of instances leads and almost compels the afflicted to communicate their sorrows. Hence too flows the alleviation that results from ‘opening out our griefs’: which are thus presented in distinguishable forms instead of the mist, through which whatever is shapeless becomes magnified and (literally) enormous.
