Art. 5.-COLERIDGE'S CONVERSATION POEMS.

A YOUNG poet whom I love has just left my house and driven away in the soft darkness of a spring night, to the remote cottage in the Delaware valley where he meditates a not thankless Muse. Before he came I was in despair, sitting bewildered with my heaps of The notes on Coleridge spread before me, having much to say, but not knowing how to begin. Now it should be easier, for one fire kindleth another, and our talk was of friendship and poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to those who know him well, exists in three modes, as Philosopher, Poet, Friend. If the truth were told, we should all be obliged to admit that the Philosopher escapes us. We hear his voice and enter the room where he is speaking, only to see his retreating figure down some dim corridor. 'Aids to Reflection,' Table Talk,' and other echoes of his speech yield merely a confused murmur, baffling, and the more exasperating because the tones are in themselves melodious. It was an unprofitable heritage that Coleridge left to his disciple, Joseph Henry Green, and to his daughter Sara and her husband, the task of arranging and publishing his philosophical writings and the records of his innumerable monologues. In Green's case the labour lasted twentyeight years. The sum of all this toil is neither a rounded system nor a clear view of anything in particular. They tried earnestly to catch the vanishing metaphysician, but in vain.

It is the opinion of many that Coleridge as Poet is almost equally an evanescent shadow; and though the many are in this quite mistaken, they have some excuse for thinking thus, because his fulfilment falls far short of his promise. But they fail to appreciate how very great, after all, the fulfilment is. The causes of this injustice to Coleridge the Poet are the splendour of the three poems of his which everybody knows and admires, and also the habit of regarding him as a mere satellite of Wordsworth, or at least as Wordsworth's weaker brother. Those who are so dazzled by The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,'' Kubla Khan,' and 'Christabel,' that all the rest of Coleridge's poetry seems to them colourless, are

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invited to reopen his book, but first to read J. Dykes Campbell's Life of him or the collection of his wonderful letters edited by the late Ernest Hartley Coleridge, his grandson; and I wish to direct the attention of those from whom he is obscured by the greater glory of Wordsworth to a group of poems which can be compared only to the 'Lines written above Tintern Abbey.'

These are his poems of friendship. They cannot be even vaguely understood unless the reader knows what persons Coleridge has in mind. They are, for the most part, poems in which reference is made with fine d particularity to certain places. They were composed as the expression of feelings which were occasioned by quite definite events. Between the lines, when we know their meaning, we catch glimpses of those delightful people who formed the golden inner circle of his friends in the days of his young manhood: Charles Lamb, his oldest and dearest, Mary Lamb, practical Tom Poole, William and Dorothy Wordsworth in their days of clearest vision and warmest enthusiasm, and in the later pieces Mrs Wordsworth and Sarah Hutchinson her young sister. They may all be termed, as Coleridge himself names one or two of them, Conversation Poems, for even when they are soliloquies the sociable man who wrote them could not even think without supposing a listener. They require and reward considerable knowledge of his life and especially the life of his heart.

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This is not so certainly the case with his three famous Mystery Poems, in which the spellbound reader sees visions and hears music which float in from a magic realm and float out again into unfathomable space. Their perfection is not of this world nor founded on history or circumstance. No knowledge of their origin or mechanism can increase their beauty or enrich their charm. To attempt to account for them, to write footnotes about them, if it were hoped thereby to make them more powerful in their effect upon the imagination, would be ridiculous and pedantic.

While the Philosopher has wandered away into a vague limbo of unfinished projects and the Poet of 'Christabel' and its companion stars can only gaze in mute wonder upon the constellation he fixed in the heavens, the Poet of the Friendly Pieces lingers among us and

can be questioned. We owe it to him and to ourselves to appreciate them. It is unfair to his genius that he should be represented in most anthologies of English verse only by the Mystery Poems, and that those who read the Poems of Friendship should so generally be ignorant of their meaning. It is unfair to ourselves that we should refuse the companionship of the most open-hearted of men, a generous spirit, willing to reveal to us the riches of his mind, a man whom all can understand and no one can help loving. There is not so much kindness, humour, wisdom, and frankness offered to most of us in the ordinary intercourse of life that we can afford to decline the outstretched hand of Coleridge.

Poetry draws mankind together, breaks down barriers, relieves loneliness, shows us ourselves in others and others in ourselves. It is the friendly art. It ignores time and space. National, racial, and secular differences fall at its touch, which is the touch of kinship, and when we feel this we laugh shamefacedly at our pretensions, timidities, and reserves. Everything in antiquity is antiquated except its art and especially its poetry. That is scarcely less fresh than when it fell first from living lips. The religion of the ancients is to us superstition, their science childishness, but their poetry is as valid and vital as our own. We appropriate it, and it unites

us with our fathers.

'One precious, tender-hearted scroll
Of pure Simonides'

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shines through the mist more brightly than the Nicoma-
chean Ethics or the Constitution of Athens.
most enduring in the Old Testament is the humanity
revealed here and there in veins of poetry, not only as
psalms and prophecies but gleaming out from the
historical books. It is the nature of all great poetry to
open and bring together the hearts of men. And few
poets have so generously given themselves out to us as
Coleridge. The gift is rare and wonderful because he
was a very good man, even more than because of his
marvellous mind. When I say he was good, I mean that
he was loving. However many other kinds of goodness
there may be, this is the indispensable element. Some
one has been trying to persuade me that artists should

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abandon themselves wholly to art. If this means that they should dissociate themselves from their fellow-men who have the misfortune to be mere ordinary mortals, or should neglect the duties and forgo the pleasures that other people perform and enjoy, it is a heresy at which the Muse of Literary History shrugs her shoulders.

The Poems of Friendship make yet another claim on our attention: they are among the supreme examples of a peculiar kind of poetry. Others not unlike them, though not surpassing them, are Ovid's 'Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago,' and several of the Canti of Leopardi. Some passages in Cowper's 'Task' resemble them in tone. Poignancy of feeling, intimacy of address, and ease of expression are even more perfectly blended in Coleridge's poems than in any of these.

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The compositions which I denominate Poems of Friendship or Conversation Poems are 'The Eolian Harp,' 'Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement,' 'This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,' 'Frost at Midnight,' Fears in Solitude,' 'The Nightingale,' 'Dejection,' and 'To William Wordsworth' (sometimes printed 'To a Gentleman'). The list is not complete; there are shorter pieces which might be added; but these are the most substantial and, I think, the best. The qualities common to all the eight are qualities of style no less than of subject. Wordsworth is clearly more entitled than Coleridge to be considered the leader in creating and also in expounding a new kind of poetry, though a careless examination of their early works might lead one to think that they came forward simultaneously and independent of each other as reformers. Until he met Wordsworth, which was probably in 1795, Coleridge wrote in the manner which had been fashionable since the death of Milton, employing without hesitation all those poetic licences which constituted what he later termed 'Gaudyverse,' in contempt. Wordsworth, on the other hand, though employing the same devices in his first published poems, 'An Evening Walk' and Descriptive Sketches,' showed, even in those juvenile compositions, a naturalness which foretold the revolt accomplished in 'Guilt and Sorrow,' dating from 1794. If one reads Coleridge's early poems in chronological order, one will perceive that Gaudyverse persists till

about the middle of 1795, and then quickly yields to the natural style which Wordsworth was practising.

The Eolian Harp,' composed on Aug. 20, 1795, in the short period when Coleridge was happy in his marriage, sounds many a note of the dolce stil nuovo, and is moreover in substance his first important and at the same time characteristic poem. The influence of Wordsworth is to be seen in small details, such as a bold and faithful reference to the scents 'snatched from yon beanfield.' The natural happiness of Coleridge, which was to break forth from him in spite of sorrow through all his darkened later years, flows like a sunlit river in this poem. In two magnificent passages he anticipates by nearly three years the grand climax of the Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,' singing:

'O! the one Life within us and abroad,

Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,

A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere—

And what if all of animated nature

Be but organic Harps diversely framed,

That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,

At once the Soul of each, and God of all.'

Here is the Philosopher at his best, but he steps down from the intellectual throne at the bidding of love; and out of consideration for Sarah's religious scruples, and in obedience to his own deep humility, apologises for

'These shapings of the unregenerate mind.'

It is to be noted also that the blank-verse is more fluent and easy than Milton's, or any that had been written since Milton, moving with a gentle yet sufficiently strong rhythm, and almost free from the suggestion of the heroic couplet, a suggestion which is felt in nearly all 18th-century unrhymed verse, as of something recently lost and not quite forgotten. The cadences are long and beautiful, binding line to line and sentence to sentence in a way that the constant use of couplets and stanzas had made rare since Milton's time.

A few weeks later Coleridge wrote 'Reflections on