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  COLERIDGE


  BY S. L. BENSUSAN


  [Illustration]


  LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
  67 LONG ACRE, W. C., AND EDINBURGH
  NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO.


[Illustration: Samuel Coleridge]


CONTENTS


  CHAP.                                  PAGE

       INTRODUCTION                         7

    I. EARLY YEARS                         13

   II. IN SEARCH OF THE IDEAL              25

  III. IN THE LAKE COUNTRY AND AT MALTA    33

   IV. TROUBLED YEARS                      41

    V. COLERIDGE AS AN OBSERVER OF NATURE  61

   VI. COLERIDGE AS POET AND CRITIC        75

       INDEX                               93




COLERIDGE




INTRODUCTION


Among the great writers whose activity is associated with the closing
years of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth centuries, are
several who claim more respect than popularity. If they were poets,
their works find a place in a thousand libraries, but the dust gathers
upon covers long unopened, and only the stray enthusiast removes it.
Southey, Cowper, and Coleridge, for example, are authors of well-nigh
universal acceptance, but who, outside the ranks of professed students
of poetry, could claim an intimate acquaintance with their work? In _An
Anthology of Longer Poems_ published at Oxford two years ago and
prepared by two Professors of English Literature, Southey, for all his
great gifts, is not represented at all, and William Cowper is
responsible for nothing more than the familiar lines to his mother's
picture.

Dryden and Alexander Pope, Goldsmith, Gray, Crabbe, and Thomson are
little more than names to the most of the generation that has just
entered upon its inheritance. Perhaps, if the truth be told, the
present-day reading public cannot keep pace with its ever-growing task,
and satisfies its conscience by paying to the worthy dead the sacrifice
of a small expenditure. In the old time it was hard to gather a modest
library, to-day the difficulty lies in selection. The best efforts of a
thousand years clamour for a place on our shelves, the material for
reading has been multiplied, the capacity for reading remains where it
was, if indeed the wonderful growth of claims upon our attention, the
quickening of the pace of life, has not reduced our leisure time at the
expense of books. Little wonder, then, that in the struggle for a
sustained reputation many sound writers fail to hold their own. It is
only when we choose one of the poets just named for a course of steady
reading and turn to his pages with some knowledge of the life and times
which gave them birth, that the dead man becomes a living force, and we
find how far his claim to recognition lies outside the scope of a mere
convention. Even then the inequalities of thought and style will be
painfully apparent. We shall read much that would not have been
preserved had the poet written in an age when self-criticism was as
strong a force as it is to-day, but there will be no waste of labour if
the full extent of his gifts as well as his limitations can be grasped.
It is not safe to accept the "selected works" of any man of mark; a
selection can never be quite fair to an author.

Of all the men whose work was completed between the middle of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there are few, if any, whose life is
of more interest to the psychologist, the student of transcendentalism,
and the lover of fine thought, than that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the
subject of this brief study. He was compact of remarkable strength and
fatal weakness, of rare attainments and incomplete achievement, of
courage and cowardice, of energy and laziness, of reason and unreason,
of airy wit and solid wisdom. Look upon one side of his life and
accomplishment and you are lost in wonder and admiration, look upon the
other and there is food for little but pity and regret. Modern teaching
has revealed the narrowness of the boundary between genius and insanity,
and, in the light of this knowledge, we see that Coleridge was neither
wholly a genius nor wholly sane, though he approached either condition
very nearly at different periods of his troubled life. We would hesitate
to-day to condemn him with the severity and fluency shown by his
contemporaries--