intermingle with deductions, and inference follows image. He thinks emotions, and feels thoughts. We hear the "rustling pinions" of the great principle that is to comprehend all, but it passes over the head, not into it. The mind of the man does not seem to comprehend and bind together the ideas it singly perceives or appropri ates. His prose works contain great things, without being great works. They give an impression, which we believe was felt among many of his contemporaries, that he was half seer, and half charlatan.

From his poetry, his philosophical criticism, and the traditions of his conversation, Coleridge will probably be most esteemed by posterity. As a poet we think that his genius is displayed with the most wonderful effect in "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner." In these the mystical element of human nature has its finest poetical embodiment. They act upon the mind with a weird-like influence, searching out the most obscure recesses of the soul, and waking mysterious emotions in the very centre of our being; and then sending them to glide and tingle along every nerve and vein with the effect of enchantment. It is as if we were possessed with a subtile insanity, or had stolen a glance into the occult secrets of the universe. All our customary impressions of things are shaken, by the intrusion of an indefinite sense of fear and amazement into the soul. To address so refined an element of thought as this, is one of the most daring efforts of genius; for the chances are always in favor of failure, and failure inevitably draws down ridicule. Everybody detests the idea of mysticism, and denies its legitimacy; and keen must be the imagination which succeeds in piercing through the common experience of consciousness, to its remote seat

in our nature. When it is awakened, no effort of the will can stifle its subtle workings. Touched by a master mind, it becomes a source of mysterious delight; and Coleridge knew well the mental avenues and labyrinths through which language must pass to reach its dwellingplace. He could likewise stir that supernatural fear in the heart, which he has so powerfully expressed in one stanza of the "Ancient Mariner"- a fear from which no person, poet or prosaist, has ever been entirely free; - and which makes the blood of the pleasantest atheist at times turn cold, and his philosophy slide away under his feet:

"Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round, walks on,

And turns no more his head,

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread."

The harmony and variety of Coleridge's versification, his exquisite delineations of the heart, his command of imagery, his "wide-wandering magnificence of imagination," have so often been the theme of admiring comment, that they need not be dwelt upon here. There is no person, with the least pretension to poetical taste, who cannot find something in Coleridge, either in the gorgeous suggestiveness of his poetry, or in its delicate and graceful feeling, to admire or love. There are, at the same time, a number of obvious faults, scattered over his poems, which evince that he sometimes reposed on his laurels, and wrote when he ought to have slept. Some of his love pieces are merely pretty, and others tame and mawkish. No poet, with so much feeling and faculty for the sublime, and with such a sway over the most majestic harmonies of sound, ever allowed himse.f

to fall into such bombast as occasionally disfigures his style. Affluent as he was, he seems to have sometimes selected those hours for composition when his mind chanced to be barren and nerveless; and the results of those sterile intervals every lover of his genius would desire to see blotted from his works. It appears impossible that the mind that created "Genevieve" should likewise have produced amatory verses which would do no honor to Mrs. Cowley or Robert Merry. Coleridge, indeed, surprises us almost as much by his failures as his triumphs.

ROBERT SOUTHEY fills a large space in the literary annals of our time. His name and his powers were connected with those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in the poetical revolution which marked the commencement of the century. Though the largest portion of his time was spent in retirement, he was engaged in continual contests. Byron detested and reviled him, with the utmost warmth of his nature; and the Edinburgh Re view, for a series of thirty years, made him the object of its sarcasm and ridicule. Many of these attacks were almost justified by Southey's own intolerance of nature. He was a dogmatist of the most provoking kind, cool, calm, bitter, and uncompromising; and he delighted to dogmatize on subjects which his mind was unfitted to treat. Nothing could shake his egotism. Though, in many respects, one of the best of Christians and noblest of men, he was never free from bigotry when there was any occasion for its development. He often confounded his prejudices with his duties, and decked out his hatreds in the colors of his piety. In all his controversies he never seems to have appreciated the rights of an adversary. To oppose him was to champion infidelity

or anarchy. Yet no man had more kindness of heart or displayed greater willingness to befriend either strug gling genius or mediocrity, when his controversial passions were stilled. If we look at him from one point of view, he seems the most unamiable of men; while from another, he appears the most benevolent and gentle. He was a kind of St. Dominic on one side of his nature, and a kind of Fénelon on the other. His adversaries, therefore, he made his enemies, and his friends became his partisans.

As a prose writer Southey was more successful than as a poet. His prose style is of such inimitable grace, clearness and fluency, that it would make nonsense agreeable. His poetry indicates a lack of shaping imagination, and is diffusely elegant in expression. He often gives twenty lines to a comparison which Shelley or Wordsworth would have compressed into an epithet. In narrative skill, and constructive power, he excels both; and is himself excelled only by Scott. His mind was exceedingly fertile in the invention of incident. "Thalaba" and the "Curse of Kehama" are the most dazzling of his long poems, and show to the best advantage the whole resources of his mind. In these the originality consists in connecting common passions and common virtues with the most fantastical and uncommon incidents, and in exhibiting the powers and feelings of human nature in relation to the grotesque fictions of superstitious faith. The predominant faculty in exercise is fancy; and, were it not that the author's perceptions of character and conduct are rigidly severe, the whole representation would appear like a feverish dream; but the continual presence of the faults and the virtues of Robert Southey, amid the most monstrous and im

probable machinery of his story, gives to the essential substance of the poems a character of didactic reality Inhuman or superhuman actions are performed from human motives, and relate to human ideas of duty and feeling.

In the delineation of the passions, Southey manifests generally more of the theologian than of the poet. Lore is almost always represented either as lust or adoration. Macaulay pointedly remarks, that "his heroes make love either like seraphim or like cattle." There is no golden mean between the extremes of passion, in his delineations. He never could have written " Genevieve," or represented Effie Deans. There is something harsh and hard in his morality, which prevents his forming a tolerant estimate of character. His men and women are

didactic rather than dramatic,

embodiments of essays on human nature, rather than embodiments of human nature itself. They evince a great lack of insight, and have little objective truth. His characters are mirrors to reflect the outlines of his own individuality. As a poet, he seems to us to fall below Scott, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and to belong to the second class of contemporary poets. In imagination and true poetic feeling, we should hesitate to place him on an equality with Campbell, Barry Cornwall, Tennyson, and Keats, although in general capacity and acquirements, and especially in force of individual character, he is their superior. It requires no prophetic gift to predict that most of his verse is destined to die.

THOMAS MOORE began his career with singing, not the "Loves of the Angels," but the loves of the roués. His early poems are probably the most disgraceful legacies of licentious thought ever bequeathed by prurient youth to