had found himself or his style; and he added: "Hence my poetry is crowded
and sweats beneath a heavy burden of ideas and imagery! It has seldom
ease." It was an unparalleled ease in the conveying of a "body of thought"
that he was finally to attain. In "Youth and Age," think how much is
actually said, and with a brevity impossible in prose; things, too, far
from easy for poetry to say gracefully, such as the image of the steamer,
or the frank reference to "this altered size"; and then see with what an
art, as of the very breathing of syllables, it passes into the most flowing
of lyric forms. Besides these few miracles of his later years, there are
many poems, such as the Flaxman group of "Love, Hope, and Patience
supporting Education," in which we get all that can be poetic in the
epigram softened by imagination, all that can be given by an ecstatic plain
thinking. The rarest magic has gone, and he knows it; philosophy remains,
and out of that resisting material he is able, now and again, to weave, in
his deftest manner, a few garlands.

ARTHUR SYMONS.





SELECTIONS FROM THE
POEMS OF COLERIDGE




THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER