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Tully wept over his dead daughter, but when he chanced to think of the excellent things he could say on the subject, he considered it, on the whole, a happy circumstance. But, for my own part, I cannot say with the Mariner in Coleridge's ballad, that "'At an uncertain hour My agony returns; And, till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns."
But Coleridge's utterances rest consistently upon the philosophy of religion and theory of dogma which have been above implied. They are more significant than are mere flashes of generous insight, like those of the men named. The notion of verbal inspiration or infallible dictation of the Holy Scriptures could not possibly survive after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had made itself felt.
This sort of fascination The Ancient Mariner brings to its highest degree: it is the delicacy, the dreamy grace, in his presentation of the marvellous, which makes Coleridge's work so remarkable. The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of crudity or coarseness.
IV.; and his "John Woodvil," Vol. "I saw the skirts of the departing Year." From Coleridge's "Ode to the Departing Year," as printed in 1796 and 1797. Lamb was greatly taken by this line. The idea of the 'skirts of the departing year, seen far onwards, waving in the wind, is one of those noble Hints at which the Reader's imagination is apt to kindle into grand conceptions."
A goney, he replied. Goney! never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman's name for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck.
She showed us a winding stair, hardly better than a ladder, which led from the lower to the upper rooms. There was no view, no garden. But in Coleridge's day there was a small plot of ground belonging to the house and running back to the large and pleasant place of his friend Poole.
Coleridge's theories of the Church were his own, and were very wide of theories recognised by any of those who had to deal practically with the question, and who were influenced, in one way or another, by the traditional doctrines of theologians. But Coleridge had lifted the subject to a very high level.
They may profitably read, in connection with it, Professor Winchester's chapter on "Imagination" in his Literary Criticism, Neilson's discussion of "Imagination" in his Essentials of Poetry, the first four chapters of Fairchild, chapters 4, 13, 14, and 15 of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and Wordsworth's Preface to his volume of Poems of 1815.
Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; but he had one singular intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for transcendental philosophy, he lived just at the time when that philosophy took an immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with an impressive literary movement. He had the good luck to light upon it in its freshness, and introduce it to his countrymen.
Wyllys's steps, and the widow coming out to receive him, with a degree of elegance in her dress, and graciousness in her manner, quite perceptible across the garden: the fair lady admired the vegetables, ordered them carried into the cellar, and received Coleridge's Ancient Mariner from Uncle Dozie's hands, while they were still standing beneath the rose-covered porch, looking sufficiently lover-like to remove any lingering doubts of Uncle Josie.
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