which does not trouble us on our return from the best literary country
of Byron or Wordsworth. Byron has taken us by rough roads, and
Wordsworth led us through some desperately flat and dreary lowlands to
his favourite "bits;" but we feel that we have seen mountain and
valley, wood and river, glen and waterfall at their best. But
Coleridge's poetry leaves too much of the feeling of a walk through a
fine country on a misty day. We may have had many a peep of beautiful
scenery and occasional glimpses of the sublime; but the medium of
vision has been of variable quality, and somehow we come home with an
uneasy suspicion that we have not seen as much as we might. It is
obvious, however, even upon a cursory consideration of the matter, that
this disappointing element in Coleridge's poetry is a necessary result
of the circumstances of its production; for the period of his
productive activity (at least after attaining manhood) was too short to
enable a mind with so many intellectual distractions to ascertain its
true poetic bent, and to concentrate its energies thereupon. If he
seems always to be feeling his way towards the work which he could do
best, it is for the very good reason that this is what, from 1796 to
1800, he was continually doing as a matter of fact. The various styles
which he attempted--and for a season, in each case, with such brilliant
results--are forms of poetic expression corresponding, on the face of
them, to poetic impulses of an essentially fleeting nature. The
political or politico-religious odes were the offspring of youthful
democratic enthusiasm; the supernatural poems, so to call them for want
of a better name, had their origin in an almost equally youthful and
more than equally transitory passion for the wild and wondrous.
Political disillusion is fatal to the one impulse, and mere advance in
years extinguishes the other. Visions of Ancient Mariners and
Christabels do not revisit the mature man, and the Toryism of middle
life will hardly inspire odes to anything.