rightly, as his invention, a "science of reasoning and judging concerning
the productions of literature, the characters and measures of public men,
and the events of nations, by a systematic subsumption of them, under
principles deduced from the nature of man," which, as he says, was unknown
before the year 1795. He is the one philosophical critic who is also a
poet, and thus he is the one critic who instinctively knows his way through
all the intricacies of the creative mind.

Most of his best criticism circles around Shakespeare; and he took
Shakespeare almost frankly in the place of Nature, or of poetry. He
affirms, "Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate
workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of
place." This granted (and to Coleridge it is essential that it should be
granted, for in less than the infinite he cannot find space in which to use
his wings freely) he has only to choose and define, to discover and to
illuminate. In the "myriad-minded man," in his "oceanic mind," he finds all
the material that he needs for the making of a complete aesthetics. Nothing
with Coleridge ever came to completion; but we have only to turn over the
pages about Shakespeare, to come upon fragments worth more than anyone
else's finished work. I find the whole secret of Shakespeare's way of
writing in these sentences: "Shakespeare's intellectual action is wholly
unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the
totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare
goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just
as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems
forever twisting and untwisting its own strength. "And here are a few
axioms: 'The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called
forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind';
or, in other words, "The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to
instill that energy into the mind which compels the imagination to produce