disentangle the weed from fear of snapping the flower." This is plain-
spoken criticism, but I do not think that any reader who is competent
to pronounce judgment on the point will be inclined to deprecate its
severity. Nay, in order to get done with fault-finding as soon as
possible, it must perhaps be added that the admitted turgidness of the
poems is often something more than a mere defect of style, and that the
verse is turgid because the feeling which it expresses is exaggerated.
The "youthful bard unknown to fame" who, in the _Songs of the
Pixies_, is made to "heave the gentle misery of a sigh," is only
doing a natural thing described in ludicrously and unnaturally stilted
terms; but the young admirer of the _Robbers_, who informs
Schiller that if he were to meet him in the evening wandering in his
loftier mood "beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood," he would
"gaze upon him awhile in mute awe" and then "weep aloud in a wild
ecstasy," endangers the reader's gravity not so much by extravagance of
diction as by over-effusiveness of sentiment. The former of these two
offences differs from the latter by the difference between "fustian"
and "gush." And there is, in fact, more frequent exception to be taken
to the character of the thought in these poems than to that of the
style. The remarkable gift of eloquence, which seems to have belonged
to Coleridge from boyhood, tended naturally to aggravate that very
common fault of young poets whose faculty of expression has outstripped
the growth of their intellectual and emotional experiences--the fault
of wordiness. Page after page of the poems of 1796 is filled with what
one cannot, on the most favourable terms, rank higher than rhetorical
commonplace; stanza after stanza falls pleasantly upon the ear without
suggesting any image sufficiently striking to arrest the eye of the
imagination, or awakening any thought sufficiently novel to lay hold
upon the mind. The _Aeolian Harp_ has been already referred to as a
pleasing poem, and reading it, as we must, in constant recollection of