Coleridge's melody, by Sir Walter Scott.

Endowed therefore with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fully
master of his poetic means because of the very versatility of his
artistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthful
sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost
much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimely
silenced Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity
because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously considering
criticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which would
have sounded the most movingly beneath his touch,--and to have struck
it at the very moment when the failing hand was about to quit the keys
for ever.

"Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra
Esse sinunt."

I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the
_Dejection_, that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of
creative imagination, might, but for the fatal decree which had by that
time gone forth against Coleridge's health and happiness, have been but
the cradle-cry of a new-born poetic power, in which imagination, not
annihilated but transmigrant, would have splendidly proved its vitality
through other forms of song.


FOOTNOTES

1. Perhaps the deepest impress of the Wordsworthian influence is to be
found in the little poem _Frost at Midnight_, with its affecting