the picture." "Poetry is the identity of all other knowledges," "the
blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human
passions, emotions, language." "Verse is in itself a music, and the natural
symbol of that union of passion with thought and pleasure, which
constitutes the essence of all poetry "; "a more than usual state of
emotion, with more than usual order," as he has elsewhere defined it. And,
in one of his spoken counsels, he says: "I wish our clever young poets
would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose--
words in their best order; poetry--the best words in the best order."

Unlike most creative critics, or most critics who were creative artists in
another medium, Coleridge, when he was writing criticism, wrote it wholly
for its own sake, almost as if it were a science. His prose is rarely of
the finest quality as prose writing. Here and there he can strike out a
phrase at red-heat, as when he christens Shakespeare "the one Proteus of
the fire and flood"; or he can elaborate subtly, as when he notes the
judgment of Shakespeare, observable in every scene of the "Tempest," "still
preparing, still inviting, and still gratifying, like a finished piece of
music"; or he can strike us with the wit of the pure intellect, as when he
condemns certain work for being "as trivial in thought and yet enigmatic in
expression, as if Echo and the Sphinx had laid their heads together to
construct it." But for the most part it is a kind of thinking aloud, and
the form is wholly lost in the pursuit of ideas. With his love for the
absolute, why is it that he does not seek after an absolute in words
considered as style, as well as in words considered as the expression of
thought? In his finest verse Coleridge has the finest style perhaps in
English; but his prose is never quite reduced to order from its tumultuous
amplitude or its snake-like involution. Is it that he values it only as a
medium, not as an art? His art is verse, and this he dreads, because of its
too mortal closeness to his heart; the prose is a means to an end, not an