And the gift of handling the finer passages of human feeling, at once with power and delicacy, which was another of the results of that finer psychology, of his exquisitely refined habit of selfreflexion, is illustrated by a passage on Friendship in the Second Part: 'Alas! they had been friends in youth; To free the hollow heart from paining-- The marks of that which once hath been.' I suppose these lines leave almost every reader with a quickened sense of the beauty and compass of human feeling; and it is the sense of such richness and beauty which, in spite of his 'dejection,' in spite of that burden of his morbid lassitude, accompanies Coleridge himself through life. A warm poetic joy in every thing beautiful, whether it be a moral sentiment, like the friendship of Roland or Leoline, or only the flakes of falling light from the water-snakes-this joy, visiting him, now and again, after sickly dreams, waking or sleeping, as a relief not to be forgotten, and with such a power of felicitous expression that the infection of it passes irresistibly to the reader,-this is the predominant quality in the matter of his poetry, as cadence is the predominant quality of its form. 'We bless Thee for our creation!' he might have said, in his later period of definite religious assent, because the world is VOL. IV. so beautiful; the world of ideas-living spirits, detached from the divine nature itself, to inform and lift the heavy mass of material things; the world of man, above all in his melodious and intelligible speech; the world of living creatures and natural scenery; the world of dreams. What he really did say, by way of a Tombless Epitaph, is true enough of himself— 'Sickness, 'tis true, Whole years of weary days, besieged him close, WALTER H. PATER TIME, REAL AND IMAGINARY. An Allegory. On the wide level of a mountain's head, (I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place) That far outstripped the other; O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed, And knows not whether he be first or last. LOVE All thoughts, all passions, all delights, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame. Oft in my waking dreams do I The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene, She leaned against the armed man, Few sorrows hath she of her own, I played a soft and doleful air, She listened with a flitting blush, I told her of the Knight that wore I told her how he pined; and ah! She listened with a flitting blush, But when I told the cruel scorn That crazed that bold and lovely Knight, And that he crossed the mountain-woods, Nor rested day nor night; That sometimes from the savage den, And sometimes starting up at once In green and sunny glade,— There came and looked him in the face An angel beautiful and bright; And that he knew it was a Fiend, This miserable Knight! And that unknowing what he did, And how she wept, and clasped his knees; And how she tended him in vain And ever strove to expiate The scorn that crazed his brain; And that she nursed him in a cave; His dying words-but when I reached All impulses of soul and sense And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, And gentle wishes, long subdued, She wept with pity and delight, I heard her breathe my name. |