“In Philarmonia’s undivided dale!”

Alas!  “Frailty, thy name is Genius!”—­What is become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity?  It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in the Courier.—­Such, and so little is the mind of man!

It was not to be supposed that Mr. Coleridge could keep on at the rate he set off; he could not realize all he knew or thought, and less could not fix his desultory ambition; other stimulants supplied the place, and kept up the intoxicating dream, the fever and the madness of his early impressions.  Liberty (the philosopher’s and the poet’s bride) had fallen a victim, meanwhile, to the murderous practices of the hag, Legitimacy.  Proscribed by court-hirelings, too romantic for the herd of vulgar politicians, our enthusiast stood at bay, and at last turned on the pivot of a subtle casuistry to the unclean side: but his discursive reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that well-known “bourne from whence no traveller returns”—­and so has sunk into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalized by useless resources, haunted by vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart forever still, or, as the shattered chords vibrate of themselves, making melancholy music to the ear of memory!  Such is the fate of genius in an age, when in the unequal contest with sovereign wrong, every man is ground to powder who is not either a born slave, or who does not willingly and at once offer up the yearnings of humanity and the dictates of reason as a welcome sacrifice to besotted prejudice and loathsome power.

Of all Mr. Coleridge’s productions, the Ancient Mariner is the only one that we could with confidence put into any person’s hands, on whom we wished to impress a favourable idea of his extraordinary powers.  Let whatever other objections be made to it, it is unquestionably a work of genius—­of wild, irregular, overwhelming imagination, and has that rich, varied movement in the verse, which gives a distant idea of the lofty or changeful tones of Mr. Coleridge’s voice.  In the Christobel, there is one splendid passage on divided friendship.  The Translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein is also a masterly production in its kind, faithful and spirited.  Among his smaller pieces there are occasional bursts of pathos and fancy, equal to what we might expect from him; but these form the exception, and not the rule.  Such, for instance, is his affecting Sonnet to the author of the Robbers.

  Schiller! that hour I would have wish’d to die,
  If through the shudd’ring midnight I had sent
  From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,
  That fearful voice, a famish’d father’s cry—­

  That in no after-moment aught less vast
  Might stamp me mortal!  A triumphant shout
  Black horror scream’d, and all her goblin rout
  From the more with’ring scene diminish’d pass’d.