ABSTRACT
Gifted as, in our judgment, Mr. Coleridge is with much the strongest and most original powers of all the WATER-POETS 1 of the day, why has he fallen short even of the confined praise, and comparative popularity, which have attended his brethren of the Lakes? Is the answer to this question to be found in any caprice or corruption of national taste, or in the abuse of those gifts of nature and (we may add) of those acquirements of art, which this author so eminently possesses? The solution of the problem depends on a reference to both these causes. With a more 400vigorous and distinguishing imagination, with a more condensed and vivid phraseology, and lastly with deeper learning, than most of his poetical rivals and contemporaries, why, we say, is Mr. C. surpassed by almost all of them in literary reputation? Perhaps the exertion of thought which it requires to enter into all his higher qualities as a poet, or perhaps the purely moral and (as we think) often soundly political cast of his sentiments, may have obstructed his favour with a light and frivolous generation of readers. On the other hand, he has frequently dealt in those wonders and horrors, and in that mysterious delineation of bad passions, which seem to characterize the exclusively favourite style of the present moment in Great Britain. How, then, has he missed the aim of all, that golden celebrity which several inferior writers of the same kind have attained? In the first place, it must be allowed, and here perhaps is the principal cause of the phænomenon, that Mr. Coleridge, in these Germanized productions of the hyperbolically tremendous school, has even out-horrorized the usual quantum suff. of the horrible; and he has, with equal injudiciousness, contrived to blend even with such matters as would have pleased the unhealthy palate of the public, certain Platonic reveries or metaphysic mysticisms of his favourite modern philosopher Kant; which even the love for the unintelligible, now so prevalent among us, cannot entirely pretend to relish.
