2U My. Leslie Stephen [March 9, 



mean ; who frequently changed his mind, and who certainly appears, 

 to thinkers of a different order, to add obscurity even to subjects 

 which are necessarily obscure. Nor is the difficulty diminished when, 

 as in my case, the commentator belongs to what must be called the 

 antagonistic school, and is even most properly to be described as a 

 thorough Philistine who is dull enough to glory in his Philistinism. 

 All that I shall attempt is to select a certain aspect of the Coleridgian 

 impulse, and to say what impression it makes upon a radically prosaic 

 mind. 



The brilliant Coleridge of Nether Stowey, the buoyant young 

 poet-philosopher who had not yet been to Germany, was still a curious 

 compound of imperfectly fused elements. His Liberalism had led 

 him to the Unitarianism of Priestley and the associative philosophy 

 of Hartley. But he had also dipped into Plotinus and into some of 

 the mystical writers who represent the very oj^posite pole of specula- 

 tion. The first doctrine was imposed upon him from without, the 

 other was that which was really congenial to his temperament. For 

 Coleridge was, above all, essentially and intrinsically a poet. The 

 first genuine manifestations of his genius are the poems which he 

 wrote before he was twenty-six. The germ of all Coleridge's utter- 

 ances may be found — by a little ingenuity — in the ' Ancient Mariner.' 

 For what is the secret of the strange charm of that imique achieve- 

 ment ? I do not speak of what may be called its purely literary 

 merits — the melody of versification, the command of language, the 

 vividness of the descriptive passages, and so forth — I leave such 

 points to critics of finer perception and a greater command of super- 

 latives. But part, at least, of the secret is the ease with which 

 Coleridge moves in a world of which the machinery (as the old critics 

 called it) is supplied by the mystic philosopher. Milton, as 

 Penscroso, implores 



The spirit of Plato to unfold, 

 Wiiat ^Yurlds or what vast SNstems liold 

 The spirit of man that hath lursook 

 Her mansion in this fleshy nook, 

 And of those demons that are found 

 In fire, air, flood, and underground, 

 "Whose powers have a true consent 

 "NVith planet and with element. 



If such a man fell asleep in his " high lonely tower," his dreams 

 would present to him in sensuous imagery the very world in which 

 the straijge history of the ' Ancient Mariner ' was transacted. It is a 

 world in which both animated things, and stones, and brooks, and 

 clouds, and | lants are moved by spiritual agency ; in which, as he 

 would put it, the veil of the senses is nothing but a symbolism every- 

 where telling of unseen and suiDcrnatural forces. What we call the 

 solid and the substantial becomes a dream; and the dream is the true 

 underlying reality. The difference between such poetry, and the 



