Ah! bard, tremendous in sublimity! Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood, Coleridge retained his preference for Schiller over Goëthe to the last. But it needed not the German literature or language to teach the poet, that (in the words of the petition of the people of Denmark, whereby in 1660 they made a voluntary surrender of their liberties to the crown*) "freedom is the RIGHT and natural CONSEQUENCE of VIRTUE, but for the vicious to claim it is SEDITION."-In his fine " Ode to the Departing Year," (1796,) he fails not to suggest a similar sentiment; but it is in his "France," which he wrote about six weeks afterwards (Feb. 1797), that he gives it expression. "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain. Slaves by their own compulsion! in mad game They burst their manacles, and wear the name As the year advanced, his love for his country increased, and with his patriotism his detestation of France; and in April, 1798, we find him murmuring out his "Fears in Solitude, during the Alarm of an Invasion,"-one of his finest poems, and greatly superior to his "Religious Musings," which has been much overrated. Some of the fears are but too applicable to the present hour: All individual dignity and power Engulfed in courts, committees, institutions, A vain, speech-mouthing, speech-reporting guild, We have drunk up, demure as at a grace, Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth; Contemptuous of all honourable rule, Yet bartering freedom and the poor man's life nor inapplicable, even now, his warning against all French examples of freedom : Coleridge printed this clever jeu d'esprit in the tenth and last number of "The Watchman," dated Friday, May 13, 1796. "Still promising Freedom, themselves too sensual to be free." Dupes of a deep delusion! some, belike, On which our vice and wretchedness were tagged, Pulled off at pleasure." "But, O dear Britain! O my mother isle! Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy To me, a son, a brother, and a friend, A husband, and a father! who revere All bonds of natural love, and find them all O native Britain! O my mother isle! How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas, Have drunk in all my intellectual life, All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts, The time, however, was about to arrive when the poet should borrow both "form and feeling" from another country. In the latter end of the year 1798, Coleridge left England for Germany. Whether at his departure he yet retained any love for the early gods of his idolatry, Brissot Roland, Condorcet, Fayette, Priestley, and Hartley, it is clear, that on his return his mind was entirely purified from this false worship. He had attended the Göttingen morning lectures on physiology, and their evening ones on natural history, by no less a teacher than Blumenbach. A Ratzeburgh student had repeated to him Eichhorn's Lectures on the New Testament, and Professor Tychsen had taught the Gothic of Ulphilas. He had perused the entire circle of German literature from Ottfried to Goëthe, and had seen and conversed with the poet Klopstock. He returned accordingly with enlarged knowledge, but with his knowledge increased difficulties to surmount, in the dominion which German modes of thinking had obtained over him, and from which to claim his native liberty, needed all the genius and original power with which Heaven had gifted his heart and mind. Nay, he became more intensely German than the Germans themselves; and that, notwithstanding he emancipated himself from the limits, even while he retained the nomenclature, of Kant's system, is little short of miraculous. In this, however, he seems to have been assisted by some of Schelling's early essays; but Schelling landed at last in a scheme of mere pantheism, while Coleridge passed on to the full perception of that God who was before the world. Kant's system is only half a philosophy, and if considered as a whole is imperfect and false. By depriving the self-consciousness of all objective validity, he, while acknowledging that we had ideas of God and our own beings, prohibited his pupil from affirming that there was a God and a personality correspondent to and producing the ideas. It was to be expected that Coleridge, with the strong feelings which he had already indulged on these topics, would not receive such conclusions without interrogatory, even from a Königsberg professor; and it is owing to this fundamental difference between the two minds, that he proceeded to erect for himself a house to live in, for which Kant's theory was to serve exclusively as the scaffold. It was, however, from this philosophy that he learned the distinction between understanding and reason, of which he made such excellent use afterwards, to discriminate the absurd pretensions of the French revolutionists, in their vilely assumed worship of the goddess of reason, whom he convicted of having instead served the usurping idol of intellect. This distinction, indeed, seems now to be tacitly allowed; for we hear no more of the age of reason, but ever of the march of intellect. The philosophy of France was, after all, the mere copy and adaptation of one that had previously appeared in Britain, but has long since been generally condemned, except by a few Scotch metaphysicians, for want of depth and earnestness. Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, followed in the wake of Locke, misunderstood and misrepresented. To the French Intellectualists must be conceded the merit of having worked out the system of the human understanding to its last results. Nor need those results have been evil, had not the understanding which was thus analyzed been exalted above its sphere, and encouraged to usurp the name and prerogatives of reason. This once effected, not only was the consequence bad, but there was no limit, either actual or possible, to the mischief. To use the strong language of the "Lay Sermons," "the understanding of man became the pander and the prostitute of sensuality, and whether in the cabinet, laboratory, the dissecting-room, or the brothel, was alike busy in the schemes of vice and irreligion." To the labours of Schelling, Coleridge seems to have been indebted for that scheme of bipolarity, by the aid of which he effected, in the third volume of "The Friend," that réconciliation between the philosophies of Bacon and Plato, which forms so cardinal an illustration of his science of method. "The difference," says Coleridge, "or rather distinction, between Plato and Lord Bacon is simply this, that philosophy being necessarily bipolar, Plato treats principally of the truth, as it manifests itself at the ideal pole, as the science of intellect (i. e. de mundo intelligibili); while Bacon confines himself, for the most part, to the same truth, as it is manifested at the other, or material pole, as the science of nature, (i. e. de mundo sensibili.) It is as necessary, therefore, that Plato should direct his inquiries chiefly to those objective truths that exist in and for the intellect alone, the images and representatives of which we construct for ourselves by figure, number, and word; as that Lord Bacon should attach his main concern to the truths which have their signatures in nature, and which (as he himself plainly and often asserts) may indeed be revealed to us through and with, but never by the senses, or the faculty of sense.' Coleridge's admiration of Plato preceded his German studies, and was another secret cause that contributed to his enfranchisement from mere Kantism; for Kant is not a Platonist, but an Aristotelian. Our poet, however, stopped short of the superessentialities in which Thomas Taylor delighted to disport himself. Being is the highest idea in the philosophy of Coleridge, and he recognises nothing beyond: being, supersensuous and super-intellectual indeed, yet expressing itself in an intelligent Aoyos, in an affirmative will, and in a practical reason. Like St. John, he commenced with a reality-a person-and not with a mere idea, whether occupying its proper station as the growth of reason, or speculatively elevated above conscious being. He wisely saw that speculation had no function in this high region, if such were; and it is in confining the range of speculation within the limits of the natural world, and permitting to the moral, action, and action only, that the utility of Coleridge's philosophy will be seen to evolve itself in practice. By keeping within these bounds, he proved himself capable of avoiding Berkleyism on the one hand, and Spinozism on the other; though with the latter it is evident that he had a tedious and perilous contest, before he felt himself victor. The result of his conflict is reduced to a diagram in the "Table Talk", which, as it may serve for a specimen of the algebraic manner in which the author was wont to note down his thoughts as they happened to occur, we think it fit to copy. It may be added, that in relation to the subject of the formula, Kantism is the same as Spinozism. "You may state," he said to his nephew, "the Pantheism of Spinoza, in contrast with the Hebrew or christian scheme, shortly, as thus : SPINOZISM. W-G=0; i. e. the World without God is an impossible idea. HEBREW OR CHRISTIAN SCHEME. W-G=0; i. e. The same as Spinoza's premiss. But G-W=G; i. e. God without the World is God the self-subsistent." From many passages of his early poems, such as "The Æolian Harp," &c. it is clear, that Coleridge's mind was then labouring with pantheistic tendencies; but the "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni" celebrates, as it were, his ultimate deliverance; declaring aloud, with all the voices of nature, the being of an independent Creator, who was and is before and beyond all that has ever been created. The lines on "The Brocken," as well as the "Ode on Dejection," are particularized, on the other hand, by transcendental statements; such as: "I had found That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive "It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west : "O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Coleridge's lyrical powers were of the highest order, but he needed to have written another ode, in addition to those we have, to contest the palm with Wordsworth. The "Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Early Childhood," excels the aim of all contemporary poets. Coleridge, however, would have been entitled to demand-Where is your "Ancient |