J. S.
Replies to Minor Queries.
Coleridge's "Christabel" (Vol. iv., p. 316.).
—I am not familiar with the Coleridge Papers, under that title, nor indeed am I quite sure that I know at all to what papers MR. MORTIMER COLLINS refers in his question. On this account I am not qualified, as he will perhaps think, to give an opinion upon the genuineness of the lines quoted as a continuation of "Christabel." If I may be allowed, however, to hazard a judgment, as one to whom most of the great poet-philosopher's works have long and affectionately been known, I would venture to express an opinion against the right of these lines to admission as one of his productions. I do it with diffidence; but with the hope that I may aid in eliciting the truth concerning them.
I presume "brookless plash" is a misprint for "brooklet's plash."
The expressions "the sorrow of human years," "wild despair," "the years of life below," of a person who is not yet dead and in heaven, do not seem to me, as they stand in the lines, to be in Coleridge's manner; but especially I do not think the couplet—
"Who felt all grief, all wild despair,
That the race of man may ever bear,"
is one which Coleridge would have penned, reading as I do in the Aids to Reflection, vol. i. p. 255. (edit. Pickering, 1843) his protest against the doctrine
"holden by more than one of these divines, that the agonies suffered by Christ were equal in amount to the sum total of the torments of all mankind here and hereafter, or to the infinite debt which in an endless succession of instalments we should have been paying to the divine justice, had it not been paid in full by the Son of God incarnate!"