The whole of the poem from which those lines are taken, 'composed on the night after Wordsworth's recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual mind,' is, in its strain of impassioned contemplation, and in the combined justness and elevation of its philosophical expression—

'high and passionate thoughts

To their own music chanted; '

entirely sympathetic with The Prelude which it celebrates, and of which the subject is, in effect, the generation of the spirit of the Lake poetry.' The Lines to Joseph Cottle have the same philosophically imaginative character; the Ode to Dejection being Coleridge's most sustained effort of this sort.

It is in a highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of external nature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of the main tendencies of the 'Lake School;' a tendency instinctive, and no mere matter of theory, in him as in Wordsworth. That record of the

and again, of

'green light

Which lingers in the west,'

'the western sky

And its peculiar tint of yellow green,'

which Byron found ludicrously untrue, but which surely needs no defence, is a characteristic example of a singular watchfulness for the minute fact and expression of natural scenery, pervading all he writes-a closeness to the exact physiognomy of nature, having something to do with that idealistic philosophy, which sees in the external world no mere concurrence of mechanical agencies, but an animated body, informed and made expressive, like the body of man, by an indwelling intelligence. It was a tendency, doubtless, in the air, for Shelley too is affected by it, and Turner, with the school of landscape which followed him. 'I had found,' Coleridge tells us,

'That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the world within;
Fair ciphers of vague import, where the eye
Traces no spot, in which the heart may read
History and prophecy . . . .

and this induces in him no indifference to actual colour and form and process, but such minute realism as this

The thin grey cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.

The moon is behind and at the full;

And yet she looks both small and dull;'

or this, which has a touch of 'romantic' weirdness

or this

'Nought was green upon the oak
But moss and rarest misletoe ;'

'There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,

On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky;' —

or this, with a weirdness again, like that of some wild French etcher

'Lo! the new-moon winter-bright!

And over-spread with phantom light,
(With swimming phantom light o'erspread,
But rimmed and circled with a silver thread,)
I see the old moon in her lap, foretelling
The coming on of rain and squally blast.'

He has the same imaginative apprehension of the silent and unseen processes of nature, its 'ministries' of dew and frost, for instance; as when he writes in April

'A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,

Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.'

Of such imaginative treatment of landscape there is no better instance than in the description of the Dell, in Fears in Solitude

'A green and silent spot amid the hills,

A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place
No singing sky-lark ever poised himself-
'But the dell,

Bathed by the mist is fresh and delicate
As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax
When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve,
The level sunshine glimmers with green light—

The whole of the poem from which those lines are taken, 'composed on the night after Wordsworth's recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual mind,' is, in its strain of impassioned contemplation, and in the combined justness and elevation of its philosophical expression

'high and passionate thoughts

To their own music chanted;'

entirely sympathetic with The Prelude which it celebrates, and of which the subject is, in effect, the generation of the spirit of the 'Lake poetry.' The Lines to Joseph Cottle have the same philosophically imaginative character; the Ode to Dejection being Coleridge's most sustained effort of this sort.

It is in a highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of external nature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of the main tendencies of the 'Lake School;' a tendency instinctive, and no mere matter of theory, in him as in Wordsworth. record of the

and again, of

'green light

Which lingers in the west,'

'the western sky

And its peculiar tint of yellow green,'

That

which Byron found ludicrously untrue, but which surely needs no defence, is a characteristic example of a singular watchfulness for the minute fact and expression of natural scenery, pervading all he writes a closeness to the exact physiognomy of nature, having something to do with that idealistic philosophy, which sees in the external world no mere concurrence of mechanical agencies, but an animated body, informed and made expressive, like the body of man, by an indwelling intelligence. It was a tendency, doubtless, in the air, for Shelley too is affected by it, and Turner, with the school of landscape which followed him. 'I had found,' Coleridge tells us,

That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the world within;
Fair ciphers of vague import, where the eye
Traces no spot, in which the heart may read
History and prophecy . . . .

and this induces in him no indifference to actual colour and form and process, but such minute realism as this

זייד

The gust that roared and died away

To the distant tree'

'heard and only heard

In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass.'

This curious dwelling of the mind on one particular spot, till it seems to attain real expression and a sort of soul in it—a mood so characteristic of the 'Lake School'-occurs in an earnest political poem, 'written in April, 1798, during the alarm of an invasion;' and that silent dell is the background against which the tumultuous fears of the poet are in strong relief, while the quiet sense of it, maintained all through them, gives a real poetic unity to the piece. Good political poetry-political poetry that shall be permanently moving-can, perhaps, only be written on motives which, for those whom they concern, have ceased to be open questions and are really beyond argument; and Coleridge's political poems are for the most part on open questions. For although it was a great part of his intellectual ambition to subject political questions to the action of the fundamental ideas of his philosophy, he was still an ardent partisan, first on one side, then on the other, of the actual politics of the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, where there is still room for much difference of opinion. Yet The Destiny of Nations, though formless as a whole, and unfinished, has many traces of his most elevated speculation, cast into that sort of imaginative philosophical expression, in which, in effect, the language itself is inseparable from, or a part of the thought. France, an Ode, begins with the famous apostrophe to Liberty :

Ye Clouds! that far above me float and pause,

Whose pathless march no mortal may control!
Ye Ocean-Waves! that wheresoe'er ye roll,
Yield homage only to eternal laws!
Ye Woods! that listen to the night-bird's singing,
Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined,
Save when your own imperious branches swinging,
Have made a solemn music of the wind!
Where like a man beloved of God,
Through glooms which never woodman trod,
How oft, pursuing fancies holy,

My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound,
Inspired, beyond the guess of folly,

By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound!