‘This beast not unobserved by Nature fell,
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.’
And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted to be these arid woodland ruins—cruelly, because the common sight of the day blossoming over the agonies of animals and birds is made less tolerable by such fictions. We have to shut our ears to the benign beauty of this stanza especially—
‘The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creature whom He loves.’
We must shut our ears because the poet offers us, as a proof of that ‘reverential care,’ the visible alteration of nature at the scene of suffering—an alteration we are obliged to dispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us—upon such grounds!—to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no more than a fictitious sign or a false proof?
To choose from Wordsworth is to draw close a net with very large meshes—so that the lovely things that escape must doubtless cause the reader to protest; but the poems gathered here are not only supremely beautiful but exceedingly Wordsworthian.
Youth and Age.—Page [256].
Close to the marvellous Kubla Khan—a poem that wrests the secret of dreams and brings it to the light of verse—I place Youth and Age as the best specimen of Coleridge’s poetry that is quite undelirious—to my mind the only fine specimen. I do not rate his undelirious poems highly, and even this, charming and nimble as it is, seems to me rather lean in thought and image. The tenderness of some of the images comes to a rather lamentable close; the likeness to ‘some poor nigh-related guest’ with the three lines that follow is too squalid for poetry, or prose, or thought.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.—Page [258].
This poem is surely more full of a certain quality of extreme poetry—the simplest ‘flower of the mind,’ the most single magic—than any other in our language. But the reader must be permitted to call the story silly.