ter, friend, he moves with firm, yet light steps, alike unostenta tious, and alike exemplary. As a writer, he has uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been the cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national independence and of national illumination. When future critics shall weigh out his guerdon of praise and censure, it will be Southey the poet only, that will supply them with the scanty materials for the latter. They will likewise not fall to record, that as no man was ever a more constant friend, never had poet more friends and honorers among the good of all parties; and that quacks in education, quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism were his only enemies.*

*It is not easy to estimate the effects which the example of a young man as highly distinguished for strict purity of disposition and conduct, as for intellectual power and literary acquirements, may produce on those of the same age with himself, especially on those of similar pursuits and congenial minds. For many years, my opportunities of intercourse with Mr. Southey have been rare, and at long intervals; but I dwell with unabated pleasure on the strong and sudden, yet I trust not fleeting, influence, which my moral being underwent on my acquaintance with him at Oxford, whither I had gone at the commencement of our Cambridge vacation on a visit to an old school-fellow. Not indeed on my moral or religious principles, for they had never been contaminated; but in awakening the sense of the duty and dignity of making my actions accord with those principles, both in word and deed. The irregularities only not universal among the young men of my standing, which I always knew to be wrong, I then learned to feel as degrading; learned to know that an opposite conduct, which was at that time considered by us as the easy virtue of cold and selfish prudence, might originate in the noblest emotions, in views the most disinterested and imaginative. It is not, however, from grateful recollections only, that I have been impelled thus to leave these my deliberate sentiments on record; but in some sense as a debt of justice to the man, whose name has been so often connected with mine for evil to which he is a stranger. As a specimen 1 subjoin part of a note, from The Beauties of the Anti-jacobin, in which having previously informed the public that I had been dishonored at Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a time when, for my youthful ardor in defence of Christianity, I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of French phi-(or to speak more truly, psi-)-losophy, the writer concludes with these words: "since this time he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex his

* [ Mr. Coleridge first became acquainted with Mr. Southey, then an under graduate at Baliol College, in June, 1794.-Ed.]

CHAPTER IV.

THE LYRICAL BALLADS WITH THE PREFACE-MR. WORDSWORTH'S EARLIER POEMS-ON FANCY AND IMAGINATION-THE INVESTIGATION OF THE DISTINCTION IMPORTANT TO THE FINE ARTS.

I HAVE wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied to myself readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me from the main road; so I dare calculate on not a few, who will warmly sympathize with them. At present it will be suf ficient for my purpose, if I have proved, that Mr. Southey's wridisce his friends, LAMB and SOUTHEY."* With severest truth it may be asserted, that it would not be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections than those whose names were thus printed at full length as in the same rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his children fatherless, and his wife destitute! Is it surprising, that many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done adverse to a party, which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious calumnies Qualis es, nescio; sed per quales agis, scio et doleo.

* [Of this now harmless injustice Mr. Talfourd speaks as follows, in his interesting sketch of the life, accompanying the delightful Letters of Charles Lamb. "It was surely rather too much, even for partisans, when denoun cing their political opponents," (in the poem of the 'New Morality' published in the Anti-Jacobin,')—" as men who dirt on private worth and virtue threw,' thus to slander two young men of the most exemplary character-one of an almost puritanical exactness of demeanor and conduct-and the other persevering in a life of noble self-sacrifice, chequered only by the frailties of a sweet nature, which endeared him even to those who were not admitted to the intimacy necessary to appreciate the touching example of his severer virtues." Vol. i p. 120.

This passage I quote not, of course, for the sake of refuting The AntiJacobin of 1798, but for its warm testimony to the virtues of my father's friend, Mr. Lamb. Having quoted it, I can not but observe, as regards the terms in which it speaks of Mr. Southey (my revered uncle), that his purity, a pureness of heart and spirit far beyond any that mere exactitude of demeanor and conduct could evidence or express,-was utterly unnized, as to me it seems, with puritanism, either in opinion or in spirit.

tings no more than my own furnished the original occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, and to the clamors against its supposed founders and proselytes.

As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads were in themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so entitled.* A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have precluded nine tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it up, as he would any other collection of poems purporting to derive their subjects or interests from the incidents of domestic or ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso, that these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference to, the author's peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his attention previously directed to those peculiarities. In that case, as actually happened with Mr. Southey's earlier works, the lines and passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to perversity of judgment. The men of business who had passed their lives chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners conveyed in easy, yet correct and pointed language; and all those who, reading but little poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it, which seems most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the volumes altogether.

* [See ante, note, p. 144.-Ed.]

May we not say that the deepest and most pervading purity is preclusive of puritanism? On this point he might be favorably contrasted with Cowper, as well as honorably compared to him in moral strictness, and perhaps raised above him on the score of that deeper purity which is a nature rather than a principle.

Of Mr. Lamb's character in this respect Mr. Coleridge gave a brief description which has been preserved in the specimens of his Table Talk. It was of Charles Lamb that he said, "Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which shines and takes no pollution. All things are shadows to him, except those which move his affections."

Some further account of Mr. Lamb will be found in the biographical supplement at the end of the volume.-S. C.

Others more catholic in their taste, and yet habituated to be most pleased when most excited, would have contented themselves with deciding, that the author had been successful in proportion to the elevation of his style and subject. Not a few, perhaps, might, by their admiration of the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Wye, those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old Cumberland Beggar, and Ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with kindred feeling The Brothers, the Hart-leap Well, and whatever other poems in that collection may be described as holding a middle place between those written in the highest and those in the humblest style; as for instance between the Tintern Abbey, and The Thorn, or Simon Lee.* Should their taste submit to no further change, and still remain unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them, that are, more or less, scattered through the class last mentioned; yet even from the small number of the latter, they would have deemed them but an inconsiderable subtraction from the merit of the whole work; or, what is sometimes not unpleasing in the publication of a new writer, as serving to ascertain the natural tendency, and consequently the proper direction of the author's genius.

In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical Ballads,† I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth's writings have been since doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in the poems themselves were dwelt on and cited to justify the rejection of the theory. What in and for themselves would have been either forgotten or forgiven as imperfections, or at least comparative failures, provoked direct hostility when announced as intentional, as the result of choice after full deliberation. Thus the poems, admitted by all as excellent, joined with those which had pleased the far greater number, though they formed two thirds of the whole work, instead of being deemed (as in all right they should have been, even if we take for granted that the reader judged aright) an atonement for the few exceptions, gave wind and fuel to the animosity against both the poems and the

* [The poems here mentioned are now found in the collected edition of Mr Wordsworth's Works as follows: II. p. 161. V. p. 7-p. 282. II. p. 106. I. p. 109. II. p. 141-p. 124. V. p. 17.-Ed.]

[This Preface, published in 1800, is now printed II. p. 303.-Ed.]
I

VOL. III

poet. In all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger. Not able to deny that the author possessed both genius and a powerful intellect, they felt very positive, -but yet were not quite certain that he might not be in the right, and they themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of it, and by wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had written a long and argumentative essay to persuade them, that

Fair is foul, and foul is fair;

in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without judgment, and were now about to censure without reason.*

In opinions of long continuance, and in which we have never before been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced of an error, is almost like being convinced of a fault. There is a state of mind, which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes place when we make a bull. The bull mainly consists in the bringing together two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connection. The psychological condition, or that which constitutes the possibility, of this state, being such disproportionate vividness of two distant thoughts, as extinguishes or obscures the consciousness of the intermediate images or conceptions, or wholly abstracts the attention from them. Thus in the wellknown bull, “I was a fine child, but they changed me," the first conception expressed in the word "I," is that of personal identity-Ego contemplans: the second expressed in the word “me,” is the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed,-Ego contemplatus. Now the change of one visual image for another involves in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd only by its immediate juxtaposition with the first thought, which is rendered possible by the whole attention being successively absorbed in each singly, so as not to notice the interjacent notion, changed, which by its incongruity with the first thought, I, constitutes the bull. Add only, that this process is facilitated by the circumstance of the words I, and me, being sometimes equivalent, and sometimes having a distinct meaning; sometimes, namely, signifying the act of self-consciousness, sometimes the external image in and by which the mind represents that act to itself, the result and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose the direct contrary state, and you will have a distinct sense of the connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels as if he were standing on his head, though he can not but see that he is truly standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a tendency to associate itself with him who occasions it; even as persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician.