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You must think with him, must sympathize with him, must suffer yourself to be lifted out of your own school of opinion or faith, and fall back upon your own consciousness, an unsophisticated man. If you decline this, non tibi spirat. From his earliest youth to this day, Mr. Coleridge's poetry has been a faithful mirror reflecting the images of his mind. Hence he is so original, so individual.
The strong family affection that existed between all Colonel Coleridge's children, and concentrated itself upon the only sister among them, made marriage with her an adoption into a group that could not fail to exercise a strong influence on all connected with it, and the ties of kindred will be found throughout this memoir to have had peculiar force.
What was the precise date of Coleridge's first experiences of opium, and what the original cause of his taking it? Within what time did its use become habitual? To what extent was the decline of his health the effect of the evil habit, and to what, if any, extent its cause?
This young man, the son of an eminent Birmingham banker, was so struck with Coleridge's genius and eloquence as to conceive an "ardent desire to domesticate himself permanently with a man whose conversation was to him as a revelation from heaven;" and shortly after the decease of the Watchman he obtained his parents' consent to the arrangement.
I studied the language with unflinching perseverance, for this was the opportunity I had dreamed about and longed for in the barren winter evenings at Nantucket when I sat poring over Coleridge's translations of Schiller's plays and Bayard Taylor's version of Goethe's Faust. Should I ever read these intelligently in the original?
For there is no question that the mind takes a supreme satisfaction in such an idealization of reality as Coleridge's picture of the swift tropical sunset, "At one stride comes the dark," or Emerson's picture of the slow New England sunrise, "O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire."
"Where is thy patriotism! Thou art letting some of the most unique British birds become extinct!" "Yes, and thou lettest Christmas cards be made in Germany, and thou deridest Whistler, and refusest to read Dod Grile, and thou lettest books be published with the sheets pinned instead of sewn. And the way thou neglectest Coleridge's grave " "Coleridge's grave?" interrupted a sad-eyed enthusiast.
Coleridge's dictum that the proper antithesis to religion is poetry is open to serious objection, but there is more to be said for it than may be said for the antithesis set up by Prof. Thomson. As a matter of fact, religious geniuses have often pursued their work with as much attention to scientific precision as was possible, and have prided themselves that they made no appeal to mere emotion.
Coleridge's lectures bore but a small resemblance to the polished compositions of Sir James Mackintosh.
During that period Wordsworth's powers rapidly expanded and matured; ideas that had been gathering in his mind for years, and lying there in dim confusion, felt the stir of a new life and ranged themselves in clearer shapes under the fresh, quickening breath of Coleridge's swift and discursive dialect.
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