of Coleridge, as of any other poet, by its relation to the actual.
Ancient Mariners and Christabels--the people, the scenery, and the
incidents of an imaginary world--may be handled by poetry once and
again to the wonder and delight of man; but feats of this kind cannot--
or cannot in the Western world, at any rate--be repeated indefinitely,
and the ultimate test of poetry, at least for the modern European
reader, is its treatment of actualities--its relations to the world of
human action, passion, sensation, thought. And when we try Coleridge's
poetry in any one of these four regions of life, we seem forced to
admit that, despite all its power and beauty, it at no moment succeeds
in convincing us, as at their best moments Wordsworth's and even
Byron's continually does, that the poet has found his true poetic
vocation--that he is interpreting that aspect of life which he can
interpret better than he can any other, and which no other poet, save
the one who has vanquished all poets in their own special fields of
achievement, can interpret as well as he. In no poem of actuality does
Coleridge so victoriously show himself to be the right man at the right
work as does Wordsworth in certain moods of seership and Byron in
certain moments of passion. Of them at such moods and moments we feel
assured that they have discovered where their real strength lies, and
have put it forth to the utmost. But we never feel satisfied that
Coleridge has discovered where _his_ real strength lies, and he
strikes us as feeling no more certainty on the point himself. Strong as
is his pinion, his flight seems to resemble rather that of the eaglet
than of the full-grown eagle even to the last. He continues "mewing his
mighty youth" a little too long. There is a tentativeness of manner
which seems to come from a conscious aptitude for many poetic styles
and an incapacity to determine which should be definitively adopted and
cultivated to perfection. Hence one too often returns from any
prolonged ramble through Coleridge's poetry with an unsatisfied feeling