He has rare feeling for the beautiful, whether in the world of morals; of nature, or of the harmonies of sound. The motherless Christabel in her time of danger dreams a beautiful truth of this divinely governed world:—
"But this she knows, in joys and woes,
That saints will aid if men will call:
For the blue sky bends over all."
His references to nature are less remarkable for description or photographic details than for suggestiveness and diffused charm, such as we find in these lines:—
"…the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune."
Wordsworth wrote few poems simpler than The Ancient Mariner. A stanza like this seems almost as simple as breathing:—
"The moving moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide;
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside."
Prose.—Coleridge's prose, which is almost all critical or philosophical, left its influence on the thought of the nineteenth century. When he was a young man, he went to Germany and studied philosophy with a continued vigor unusual for him. He became an idealist and used the idealistic teachings of the German metaphysicians to combat the utilitarian and sense-bound philosophy of Bentham, Malthus, and Mill. We pass by Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825), the weightiest of his metaphysical productions, to consider those works which possess a more vital interest for the student of literature.
[Illustration: COLERIDGE AS A YOUNG MAN. From a sketch made in
Germany.]
His Lectures on Shakespeare, delivered in 1811, contained epoch-making Shakespearean criticism. We are told that every drawing-room in London discussed them. His greatest work on criticism is entitled Biographia Literaria (2 Vols., 1817). There are parts of it which no careful student of the development of modern criticism can afford to leave unread. The central point of this work is the exposition of his theory of the romantic school of poetry. He thus gives his own aim and that of Wordsworth in the composition of the volume of poems, known as Lyrical Ballads:—
"…it was agreed that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.