interesting, and Coleridge's youthful Muse, with a frankness of self-
disclosure which is not the less winning because at times it provokes a
smile, confides to us even the history of her most temporary moods. It
is, for instance, at once amusing and captivating to read in the latest
edition of the poems, as a footnote to the lines--

"Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile,
O Albion! O my mother isle!"

the words--

"O doomed to fall, enslaved and vile--1796."

Yes; in 1796 and till the end of 1797 the poet's native country
_was_ in his opinion all these dreadful things, but, directly the
mood changes, the verse alters, and to the advantage, one cannot but
think, of the beautiful and often-quoted close of the passage--

"And Ocean mid his uproar wild
Speaks safety to his island child.
Hence for many a fearless age
Has social Quiet loved thy shore,
Nor ever proud invader's rage,
Or sacked thy towers or stained thy fields with gore."

And whether we view him in his earlier or his later mood there is a
certain strange dignity of utterance, a singular confidence in his own
poetic mission, which forbids us to smile at this prophet of four-and-
twenty who could thus conclude his menacing vaticinations:--