the circumstances in which it was written, it unquestionably is so. But
in none of the descriptions either of external objects or of internal
feeling which are to be found in this and its companion piece, the
_Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement_, is there
anything which can fairly be said to elevate them above the level of
graceful verse. It is only in the region of the fantastic and
supernatural that Coleridge's imagination, as he was destined to show
by a far more splendid example two years afterwards, seems to acquire
true poetic distinction. It is in the _Songs of the Pixies_ that
the young man "heaves the gentle misery of a sigh," and the sympathetic
interest of the reader of today is chilled by the too frequent
intrusion of certain abstract ladies, each preceded by her capital
letter and attended by her "adjective-in-waiting;" but, after all
deductions for the conventionalisms of "white-robed Purity," "meek-eyed
Pity," "graceful Ease," etc., one cannot but feel that the _Songs of
the Pixies_ was the offspring not of a mere abundant and picturesque
vocabulary but of a true poetic fancy. It is worth far more as an
earnest of future achievement than the very unequal _Monody on the
Death of Chatterton_ (for which indeed we ought to make special
allowance, as having been commenced in the author's eighteenth year),
and certainly than anything which could be quoted from the
_Effusions_, as Coleridge, unwilling to challenge comparison with
the divine Bowles, had chosen to describe his sonnets. It must be
honestly said indeed that these are, a very few excepted, among the
least satisfactory productions of any period of his poetic career. The
Coleridgian sonnet is not only imperfect in form and in marked contrast
in the frequent bathos of its close to the steady swell and climax of
Wordsworth, but, in by far the majority of instances in this volume, it
is wanting in internal weight. The "single pebble" of thought which a
sonnet should enclose is not only not neatly wrapped up in its envelope