ABSTRACT
We are rejoiced to see these volumes, the collected fruits of one of the most original minds in our time. Scattered, unappropriated, neglected, and out of print, as many of these poems have been, yet what an influence have they exercised! How many veins of fine gold has Coleridge, with all the profusion of genius, laid open for others to work! In these pages how many lines start up old familiar friends, met with in quotations we knew not whence! and how completely do they bear the impress of the true poet!—thoughts whose truth is written in our own hearts; feelings that make us lay down the book to exclaim, ‘How often have I felt this myself!’—touches of description so exquisite, that henceforth we never see a green leaf or sunny spot, like 522to what they picture, without their springing to our lips; tenderness which, both in poet and reader, gushes forth in tears; and imagination whose world is built of the honey extracted even from the weeds of this. Out on those who would melt down the golden strings of the poet’s harp to be coined at the mint, and would cut up the ivory frame into toothbrushes! Out on those who would banish Homer from their republic, declaiming against poetry as a vain and useless art! Is it nothing, in this harsh and jarring sphere of ours, to have our noblest impulses and kindliest feelings called forth like fountains by the prophet? Is it nothing to have our selfishness counteracted by sympathy with others? We appeal to these compositions; and if the reader does not rise from them, like their own marriage-guest, ‘a wiser and a sadder man’, he is, indeed, what such theories would make him—a machine, whose thoughts go by clock-work, and his actions by steam; and Coleridge is not so sure of his immortality as we had believed.
