O rais'd from anxious dread and busy care, Joy lifts thy spirit, joy attunes thy voice, To thee do all things live from pole to pole, O lofty Poet, full of life and love, The importance of this poem in Coleridge's spiritual history cannot easily be overestimated. The poet may be taken at his word, although literalness must not be carried too far. For instance, it is not to be concluded that Coleridge did not live many pleasant days after he had written this poem. Nevertheless it is strictly true that the kind of joy necessary for the working of his creative imagination never returned to him. Abstruse research, abstract reasonings, were the only substitutes possible. Had he had a profound conviction, such as Poe's, that sorrow and melancholy are the best themes for poetry, he undoubtedly could have written many marvellous poems in a doleful spirit. But like Wordsworth he held that truly creative art must be inspired by joy, that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions. The poet, Coleridge held, must be full of life and love, must have a sense of the immenseness of the good and fair; he must "bring the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity" 10-imagination, will, intellect, emotion; not only must he have fine perceptions of spiritual truth, but his soul must be able, by an inward active energy, to create even the life and element 10 Biographia Literaria. See the whole passage, close of chapter XIV. of what it perceives. The contrast between this high transcendental and spiritual conception as an ideal of his art and the utterly depressing mood and waning power of the poet himself at the age of thirty, is as pathetic as anything in literary history. With a grace equal to its pathos he deferred to one who he deemed had the requisite qualifications-Wordsworth. Seldom thereafter did he allow himself to sing in a strain similar to this once in the poem To William Wordsworth, written in 1807, after he had read Wordsworth's Prelude. Here he asserts again the transcendental principle of the self-determining power of the mind, "the dread watch-tower of man's absolute self," as he describes Wordsworth's singing of Currents self-determined, as might seem, Or by some inner Power; of moments awful, Now in thy inner life, and now abroad, When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received In sharp contrast to this conception is Coleridge's own mood of Fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope; 11 These passages are strikingly similar to the corresponding passages in Dejection: An Ode; " only, the disparity between the poet's ideal and his prevailing mood is even greater here than in the earlier poem. He recognizes with bitterness the impossibility of ever realizing 11 They begin respectively with, "O Lady! we receive but what we give," and, "But now afflictions bow me down to earth." his ideal in poetry. Yet he consoles himself with the thought that Peace is nigh Where wisdom's voice has found a listening heart. But in poetry the world demands a producer, not a listener. However, if Coleridge could not produce the poetry his heart could pronounce good, he would remain silent; and silent he remained as a poet almost literally the rest of his life. Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni12 (1802), five years earlier than To William Wordsworth and about the same time as Dejection: An Ode, aims to be more specifically religious than the other two poems, and shows a strong tendency toward the abstract: O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone. The poet's Thought, or Reason, comes into perfect union with God, Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused, Into the mighty vision passing-there As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven! In Dejection: An Ode Coleridge conceives the finer aspects of Nature as possessing what the mind of man contributes to them; in Hymn Before Sunrise he asserts a complimentary truth, namely, that Nature herself is but a tool, a mouth-piece, of the Mind of the Divine. The stupendous mountain, the wild torrents thundering 12 For his conception Coleridge was indebted to the poem Chamouni at Sun-rise, by Frederike Brun, a German poetess. But Coleridge, as DeQuincey said, "created the dry bones of the German outlines into fulness of life." down the "precipitous, black, jagged rocks," the vale beneath, all gorgeously described, are but so many voices attesting the omnipotence of God: Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills, Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God. The Mind of God and the Reason of Man are the two sovereign entities of existence; the objects of Nature are but the reflex of either: Whene'er the mist, that stands 'twixt God and thee, Defecates to a pure transparency, That intercepts no light and adds no stain There Reason is, and then begins her reign! 13 Hymn Before Sunrise is full of exclamatory sentences, suggesting that the poet had difficulty in lifting his emotions and style to the height of his great argument. And unless interfused by correspondingly deep emotions its profound abstract conception yields more fruit for prose than for poetry. Both the expressed and suggested transcendental ideas in the poems just considered are fully drawn out in The Friend, a series of essays published as a weekly periodical in 1809 and 1810, and revised and published in book form in 1818. The display of immense learning and wide reading, the unusually large number of latinized words and complicated sentences, the extraordinary subtle and abstract reasonings, show that Coleridge gave free rein to that intellectual and abstracting power of the mind for which he was famed among his contemporaries. The 13 But he also quotes Dante to the effect that such Reason is unattainable. treatise stands midway in his life and intellectual career, and represents his moral principles fully developed. It undoubtedly contains the essence of the matter he used in oral conversation, and is thus the foundation of the great influence he exerted over the thought of the generations following him. It therefore in no wise deserves the rather contemptuous treatment accorded it by most of his biographers and critics, who generally dismiss it with a short paragraph. Had Carlyle, for instance, studied it with the same thoroughness with which he usually studied historical documents he could have seen that Coleridge not only in a large measure anticipated his own thought but also the characteristic thought of the century, and could have saved his sneers at Coleridge. No apology is needed to set forth fully the leading ideas of this significant work. By 1809 Coleridge was deeply immersed in the study of German metaphysics, which confirmed and helped to develop his own transcendental philosophy. Though for a time Schelling was in the ascendency, Kant in the long run was the most important influence. The works of Kant, Coleridge frankly asserts in Biographia Literaria, "took possession of me as with a giant's hand." Kant gave him the conviction of the essential difference between Reason and Understanding—a fundamental position in The Friend. But Coleridge was no mere imitator of Kant. For his great principle of method he was indebted to Plato and Bacon as well as to Kant. To Coleridge, whose reasonings, though subtle, were never rigidly logical, Plato's 'Ideas,' Bacon's 'Laws,' and Kant's 'Intuitive Reason' were all very much the same. For instance, in Constitution of Church and State Coleridge says: "That which, contemplated objectively (that is, as existing ex |