It has been pointed out by the profoundest poetical critic of our time that
the perfection of Coleridge's style in poetry comes from an equal balance
of the clear, somewhat matter-of-fact qualities of the eighteenth century
with the remote, imaginative qualities of the nineteenth century. "To
please me," said Coleridge in "Table-Talk," "a poem must be either music or
sense." The eighteenth-century manner, with its sense only just coupled
with a kind of tame and wingless music, may be seen quite by itself in the
early song from "Robespierre":


"Tell me, on what holy ground
May domestic peace be found?"


Here there is both matter and manner, of a kind; in "The Kiss" of the same
year, with its one exquisite line,


"The gentle violence of joy,"


there is only the liquid glitter of manner. We get the ultimate union of
eighteenth and nineteenth century qualities in "Work without Hope," and in
"Youth and Age," which took nine years to bring into its faultless ultimate
form. There is always a tendency in Coleridge to fall back on the
eighteenth-century manner, with its scrupulous exterior neatness, and its
comfortable sense of something definite said definitely, whenever the
double inspiration flags, and matter and manner do not come together. "I
cannot write without a _body of thought_," he said at a time before he