yet sets the whole brain dancing to its tune, can hardly be indicated more exactly than in Coleridge's own words in reference to the Italian lyrists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They attained their aim, he says, 'by the avoidance of every word which a gentleman would not use in dignified conversation, and of every word and phrase which none but a learned man would use; by the studied position of words and phrases, so that not only each part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to the harmony of the whole, each note referring and conducing to the melody of all the foregoing and following words of the same period or stanza; and, lastly, with equal labour, the greater because unbetrayed, by the variation and various harmonies of their metrical movement.' These qualities we may indeed find in many of Coleridge's songs, part Elizabethan, part eighteenth century, in some of his infantile jingles, his exuberant comic verse (in which, however, there are many words 'which a gentleman would not use') and in a poem like 'Love,' which has suffered as much indiscriminate praise as Raphael's Madonnas, which it resembles in technique and sentiment, and in its exquisite perfection of commonplace, its tour de force of an almost flawless girlishness. But in 'Christabel' the technique has an incomparable substance to work upon; substance at once simple and abnormal, which Coleridge required, in order to be at his best.

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 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.

LANDOR, whose praise, but for Byron's immortalising onslaught, would be Southey's chief claim to remembrance, said in all good faith: 'Interest is always excited by him, enthusiasm not always. If his elegant prose and harmonious verse are insufficient to excite it, turn to his virtues. While Southey was living, his virtues benefited many; with his death they ceased to concern the world; only his legacy remained. It is that legacy, of verse and prose, which we have to consider in any attempt to estimate his position in English literature; and it is only to confuse two distinct worlds of activity, to put forward, as so many of his admirers and apologists have done, his virtues,' 'the beauty of his life,' or even 'the magnitude and variety of his powers, the field which he covered in literature,' as in any sense a compensation for his lack of the virtues and beauty of great poetry, the magnitude and variety of great prose.

Byron said of Southey that he was 'the only existing entire man of letters'; and in the preface to the first volume of his collected poems Southey names, as 'what has been the greatest of all advantages, that I have passed more than half my life in retirement, conversing with books rather than men, con

1 (1) Fall of Robespierre (with Coleridge and Lovell), 1794. (2) Poems (by Robert Lovell and Robert Southey), 1795. (3) Poems by Bion and Moschus, 1795. (4) Joan of Arc, 1796. (5) Minor Poems, 2 vols., 1797. (6) Thalaba the Destroyer, 2 vols., 1801. (7) Metrical Tales, 1805. (8) Madoc, 1805. (9) The Curse of Kehama, 1810. (10) Roderick, the Last of the Goths, 1814. (11) Carmen Triumphale, 1814. (12) Carmen Aulica, 1814. (13) Odes to the Regent, 1814. (14) The Lay of the Laureate: Carmen Nuptiale, 1816. (15) The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo, 1816. (16) Wat Tyler, 1817. (17) Princess Charlotte's Epithalamion, 1817. (18) A Vision of Judgement, 1821. (19) A Tale of Paraguay, 1825. (20) All for Love, and The Pilgrim to Compostella, 1829. (21) Oliver Newman (posthumous), 1845. (22) Robin Hood, 1847.

stantly and unweariedly engaged in literary pursuits.' There, in what made him so capable a man of letters, was what made him no poet; 'books made out of books pass away.' He gives us a conscientious list of 'the obligations which I am conscious of owing either to my predecessors, or my contemporaries'; and assures us that 'the taste which has been acquired in that school' (some of his masters were among the best) 'was not likely to be corrupted afterwards.' It matters little how far that taste was or was not corrupted; what mattered was, that there was no native genius for the best taste in the world to set in motion; and that such impulse as there was, the genuine will to write, was never wholly unencumbered by second thoughts, or by recollections of what had been written and printed by poets. Southey had no new vision of the world; he came with no new music.

To himself, it is true, he seemed to have made a new heaven and a new earth, and to have perfected a rare and unfamiliar music. He went to the East, or to Spain, or to heaven itself, for the scene of his 'works of greater extent?; he followed Dr. Sayers in the use of unrhymed metres, and produced English hexameters of his own. He is forever insisting that he will 'sing as he pleases,' imagining that a new metre means a new music, and that the desire to be novel brings with it the power to be new. It seems to him a self-evident corollary that by 'following his own sense of propriety' he was 'thereby obtaining the approbation of that fit audience, which, being contented that it should be few, I was sure to find.' And it is with complete confidence that, thirty years after 'Kehama had been published, he reminds us that, at the time of writing, 'it appeared to me, that here neither the tone of morals, nor the strain of poetry, could be pitched too high; that nothing but moral sublimity could compensate for the extravagance of the fictions.' That moral sublimity, he never doubted that it was within his grasp; that strain of poetry, he never doubted that he could pitch it as high as he had the mind to. Un

troubled by a suspicion that he might not be a poet, he was conscious that he could write in verse very much as he wanted to write. All his knowledge of literature, which was not even sufficient to make him a fine critic, availed him nothing when he came to look at his own work in verse. The criticism, severe but just, of Jeffrey and the others, seemed to him 'malice' which he need only disregard. "The reader will be as much amused as I was,' he says, in quoting that admirable letter of Jeffrey to Hogg: 'For Southey, I have, as well as you, great respect, and, when he will let me, great admiration; but he is a most provoking fellow, and at least as conceited as his neighbour Wordsworth.' He quotes many unfavourable criticisms in his prefaces, always with lofty scorn; but time has sided with the critics.

Southey loved books with the chief passion of his life; and Rogers, who notes acutely that 'he was what you call a cold man,' declares that he was never happy 'except when reading a book or making one.' He lived always in the midst of books, considered that 'it is to literature, humanly speaking, that I am beholden, not only for the means of subsistence, but for every blessing which I enjoy'; and, as the mind died out of him in his last years, still loved to handle and caress the books which he could no longer read. He was probably what is called the 'best read' of English writers; he had taste and memory; and in all he has written about books there is prodigious knowledge and for the most part ready, or as he would have called it, catholic sympathy. But he said, really meaning the lamentable thing which he said: 'Your true lover of books is never fastidious.' He read everything, and he read with an enthusiasm which was never sharpened into divination; when he took the right view, as he more often did than not, he never said the essential thing; of what has been called the vraie vérité of things he had no conception: never does he come upon it even by accident.

So, though he quotes the 'Mad Song' of Blake with admira