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Nature always breaks her mould. "I could not help muttering to myself," says Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, "when the good pastor this morning told me that Klopstock was the German Milton, 'a very German Milton, indeed!!!" and Coleridge's italics and three exclamation points may answer for all parallelisms.
With a little trouble, the zealous reader of the "Biographia Literaria" may trace in these volumes the whole course of mental struggle and self-evolvement narrated in that odd but interesting work; but he will see the track marked in light; the notions become images, the images glorified, and not unfrequently the abstruse position stamped clearer by the poet than by the psychologist.
Without going quite so far in point of expression, Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, affirms as an “evident truth,” that “the law of causality holds only between homogeneous things, i.e., things having some common property,” and therefore “can not extend from one world into another, its opposite;” hence, as mind and matter have no common property, mind can not act upon matter, nor matter upon mind.
Christabel, with Kubla Khan, appeared in 1816, and the Biographia Literaria next year; Zapolya and the rewritten Friend the year after, when also Coleridge gave a new course of lectures, and yet another, the last. Aids to Reflection, in 1825, was the latest important work he issued himself, though in 1828 he superintended a collection of his poems.
At the same time it is interesting to notice the more assertive standpoint lately adopted by the charming Mexican poet, Luis G. Urbina, in his recent "La Vida Literaria de México," where, without undue national pride he claims the right to use the adjective Mexican in qualifying the letters of his remarkable country.
It is more innocent than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. In beginning an autobiographia literaria, an account of how, and in what order, books have appealed to a mind, which books have ever above all things delighted, the author must pray to be pardoned for the sin of egotism.
The tree was cut down, but its roots remained, and it is springing up again. The tyrant was removed, but the tyranny is with us still. Let us therefore return to the "Tusculan Disputations" which you often quote, with their reasons why death is not to be feared. Biographia Literaria Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born at Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devon, on October 21, 1772.
This picture is "The Resurrection of Lazarus," by Fra Sebastiano del Piombo, with the assistance, it is conjectured, of Michael Angelo. Angerstein's art treasures were to be seen until his death in his house in Pall Mall, where the Reform Club now stands. The Frenchmen, of whom Coleridge's friend. See the Biographia Literaria, 1847 ed., Vol. II., pp. 126-127. "Guzman de Alfarache."
One says, of the beginning of one of his Unitarian sermons: "His voice rose like a stream of rich, distilled perfumes;" another, "He talks like an angel, and does nothing!" The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, The Biographia Literaria: those books came from one whose vocation was in the world of the imagination, the theory and practice of poetry.
A more interesting society was that for 'bettering the condition of the poor, started by Sir Thomas Bernard and Wilberforce in 1796. Biographia Literaria , ii. 327. I have thus noticed the most conspicuous of the contemporary problems which, as we shall see, provided the main tasks of Bentham and his followers.
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