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Coleridge drops the subject of Poetry for the present, and proceeds to other important matters. We regret that Mr. Coleridge has passed over without notice all the years which he spent "in the happy quiet of ever-honoured Jesus College, Cambridge."
He was himself a sort of Coleridge without the piety, with the same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the same lovely opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with something of the same reputation as a deadbeat.
The justice of this verdict of acquittal is fully accepted by Coleridge. "Bunyan," he says, "was never in our received sense of the word 'wicked. He was chaste, sober, and honest."
Again, the conditions of a thing are sometimes spoken of even as though they were the thing itself. Cousin says: 'Tout ce qui est vrai de l'effet est vrai de la cause, though, the reverse might be true; and Coleridge affirms, as an evident truth, that mind and matter, as having no common property, cannot act on each other.
The tale was sad, and the opinion given unprofessional and cruel, sufficient to have deterred most men so afflicted from making the attempt Coleridge was contemplating, and in which his whole soul was so deeply and so earnestly engaged.
I read all the reviews and magazines of the past month against the dreadful meeting, and I hope by these means to cut a tolerable second-rate figure. Pray let us have no more complaints about shadows. We are in a fair way, through you, to surfeit sick upon them. Our loves and respects to your host and hostess. Our dearest love to Coleridge.
It is in virtue of the poet latent in him, that the plain man has the power to become a critic. Starting then from the question as just stated: Is it within the mind of the individual poet, or without it, that the standard of judgment should be sought? neither Coleridge nor Hazlitt could have any doubt as to the answer.
At the same time, that century, by its lighter practice on the one hand in the octosyllable, on the other in the four-footed anapæstic, was making the way easier for those who dared a little: and Coleridge first, then Scott, did the rest.
To read the "Voices of the Night," in particular those early pieces is to be back at school again, on a Sunday, reading all alone on a summer's day, high in some tree, with a wide prospect of gardens and fields. There is that mysterious note in the tone and measure which one first found in Longfellow, which has since reached our ears more richly and fully in Keats, in Coleridge, in Tennyson.
If we could only get used to the idea that ghosts are perfectly harmless creatures, who are powerless to affect our well-being unless we assist them by giving way to our fears, we should enjoy the supernatural exceedingly, it seems to me. Coleridge, I think it was, was once asked by a lady if he believed in ghosts, and he replied, "No, madame; I have seen too many of them."
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