fearlessly assert that it is impossible for any sane man to set any value on-say the 'Religious Musings' -an absurd attempt to versify an abstract theory, or the essay on the Pixies, who had more fun in them than the reader of it could suspect-it still is indisputable that scattered here and there through these poems, there are lines about himself (lines, as he said in later life, in which the subjective object views itself subjectivo-objectively') which rank high in that form of art. Of this kind are the 'Tombless Epitaph,' for example, or the lines,

'To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assign'd
Energic Reason and a shaping mind,

The daring ken of Truth, the Patriot's part,
And Pity's sigh, that breathes the gentle heart-
Sloth-jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand.
Drop Friendship's priceless1 pearls, like hour-glass sand.
I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows,
A dreamy pang in Morning's fev'rish doze;

2

and so on. In fact, it would appear that the tendency to, and the faculty for, self-delineation are very closely connected with the dreaminess of disposition and impotence of character which we spoke of just now. Persons very subject to these can grasp no external object, comprehend no external being; they can do no external thing, and therefore they are left to themselves. Their own character is the only one which they can view as a whole, or depict as a reality; of every other they may have glimpses, and acute glimpses, like the vivid truthfulness of particular dreams; but no settled appreciation, no connected development, no regular sequence whereby they may be exhibited on paper or conceived in the imagination. If other qualities are supposed to be identical, those

1' Precious.'

2' Lines on a Friend who died of a Frenzy Fever.'

will be most egotistical who only know themselves; the people who talk most of themselves will be those who talk best.

In the execution of minor verses, we think we could show that Hartley should have the praise of surpassing his father; but nevertheless it would be absurd, on a general view, to compare the two men. Samuel Taylor was so much bigger; what there was in his son was equally good, perhaps, but then there was not much of it; outwardly and inwardly he was essentially little. In poetry, for example, the father has produced two longish poems, which have worked themselves right down to the extreme depths of the popular memory, and stay there very firmly, in part from their strangeness, but in part from their power. Of Hartley, nothing of this kind is to be found he could not write connectedly; he wanted steadiness of purpose, or efficiency of will, to write so voluntarily; and his genius did not, involuntarily, and out of its unseen workings, present him with continuous creations; on the contrary, his mind teemed with little fancies, and a new one came before the first had attained any enormous magnitude. As his brother observed, he wanted' back thought.' 'On what plan, Mr. Coleridge, are you arranging your books?' inquired a lady. Plan, madam ? I have no plan at first I had a principle; but then I had another, and now I do not know.' The same contrast between the shaping mind' of the father, and the gentle and minute genius of the son, is said to have been very plain in their conversation. That of Samuel Taylor was continuous, diffused, comprehensive.

'Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless motion, Nothing before and nothing behind, but the sky and the

ocean.'

'Great talker, certainly,' said Hazlitt, if you will let him start from no data, and come to no conclusion.' The talk of Hartley, on the contrary, though continuous in time, was detached in meaning; stating hints and observations on particular subjects; glancing lightly from side to side, but throwing no intense light on any, and exhausting none. It flowed gently over small doubts and pleasant difficulties, rippling for a minute sometimes into bombast, but lightly recovering and falling quietly in 'melody back.'

By way, it is likely, of compensation to Hartley for this great deficiency in what his father imagined to be his own forte-the power of conceiving a wholeHartley possessed, in a considerable degree, a species of sensibility to which the former was nearly a stranger. The mind of S. T. Coleridge,' says one who had every means of knowing and observing, ' was not in the least under the influence of external objects.' Except in the writings written during daily and confidential intimacy with Wordsworth (an exception that may be obviously accounted for), no trace can perhaps be found of any new image or metaphor from natural scenery. There is some story too of his going for the first time to York, and by the Minster, and never looking up at it. But Hartley's poems evince a great sensibility to a certain aspect of exterior nature, and great fanciful power of presenting that aspect in the most charming and attractive forms.

It is likely that the London boyhood of the elder Coleridge was added to a strong abstractedness which was born with him-a powerful cause in bringing about the curious mental fact, that a great poet, so susceptible to every other species of refining and delightful feeling, should have been utterly VOL. I.-3

destitute of any perception of beauty in landscape or nature. We must not forget that S. T. C[oleridge] was a bluecoat boy,-what do any of them know about fields? And similarly, we require in Hartley's case, before we can quite estimate his appreciation of nature, to consider his position, his circumstances, and especially his time.

Now it came to pass in those days that William Wordsworth went up into the hills. It has been attempted in recent years to establish that the object of his life was to teach Anglicanism. A whole life of him has been written by an official gentleman, with the apparent view of establishing that the great poet was a believer in rood-lofts, an idolater of piscina. But this is not capable of rational demonstration. Wordsworth, like Coleridge, began life as a heretic, and as the shrewd Pope unfallaciously said, 'Once a heretic, always a heretic.' Sound men are sound from the first; safe men are safe from the beginning, and Wordsworth began wrong. His real reason for going to live in the mountains was certainly in part sacred, but it was not in the least Tractarian :

'He, with many feelings, many thoughts,
Made up a meditative joy, and found

Religious meanings in the forms of nature ! ' 1

His whole soul was absorbed in the one idea, the one feeling, the one thought, of the sacredness of hills.

Early had he learned

To reverence the volume that displays
The mystery, the life which cannot die;
But in the mountains did he feel his faith.
All things, responsive to the writing, there
Breathed immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving; infinite:
There littleness was not.'

'[-In the after-day

Of boyhood, many an hour in caves forlorn,
And 'mid the hollow depths of naked crags]
He sate, and e'en in their fixed lineaments,
Or from the power of a peculiar eye,
Or by creative feeling overborne,

Or by predominance of thought oppressed,
E'en in their fixed [and steady] lineaments
He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind,
Expression ever varying!' 1

'A sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ;
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.' 2

The defect of this religion is that it is too abstract for the practical, and too bare for the musing. What active men require is personality, the meditative require beauty. But Wordsworth gives us neither. The worship of sensuous beauty-the southern religion-is of all sentiments the 'one most deficient in his writings. His poetry hardly even gives the charm, the entire charm, of the scenery in which he lived. The lighter parts are little noticed the rugged parts protrude. The bare waste, the folding hill, the rough lake, Helvellyn with a brooding mist, Ulswater in a grey day these are his subjects. He took a personal interest in the corners of the universe. There is a print of Rembrandt said to represent a piece of the Campagna, a mere waste, with a stump and a man, and under is written' Tacet et loquitur '; and thousands will pass the old printshop where it hangs, and yet have a taste for paintings, and colours, and oils but some fanciful students, some lonely

1 Wordsworth's Excursion,' book 1.

2 Tintern Abbey.'