Khan,” for example, not only the lines by themselves are musical, but the whole passage sounds all at once as an outburst or crash of harps in the still air of autumn.  The verses seem as if played to the ear upon some unseen instrument.  And the poet’s manner of reciting verse is similar.  It is not rhetorical, but musical:  so very near recitative, that for any one else to attempt it would be ridiculous; and yet it is perfectly miraculous with what exquisite searching he elicits and makes sensible every particle of the meaning, not leaving a shadow of a shade of the feeling, the mood, the degree, untouched.  We doubt if a finer rhapsode ever recited at the Panathenaic festival; and the yet unforgotten Doric of his native Devon is not altogether without a mellowing effect in his utterance of Greek.  He would repeat the

  [Greek:  autar Achilleus dakrusas, etaron aphar ezeto. k. t. l.]

with such an interpreting accompaniment of look, and tone and gesture, that we believe any commonly-educated person might understand the import of the passage without knowing alpha from omega.  A chapter of Isaiah from his mouth involves the listener in an act of exalted devotion.  We have mentioned this, to show how the whole man is made up of music; and yet Mr. Coleridge has no ear for music, as it is technically called.  Master as he is of the intellectual recitative, he could not sing an air to save his life.  But his delight in music is intense and unweariable, and he can detect good from bad with unerring discrimination.  Poor Naldi, whom most of us remember, and all who remember must respect, said to our poet once at a concert—­“That he did not seem much interested with a piece of Rossini’s which had just been performed.”  Coleridge answered, “It sounded to me exactly like nonsense verses.  But this thing of Beethoven’s that they have begun—­stop, let us listen to this, I beg!” ...

The minute study of the laws and properties of metre is observable in almost every piece in these volumes.  Every kind of lyric measure, rhymed and unrhymed, is attempted with success; and we doubt whether, upon the whole, there are many specimens of the heroic couplet or blank verse superior in construction to what Mr. Coleridge has given us.  We mention this the rather, because it was at one time, although that time is past, the fashion to say that the Lake school—­as two or three poets, essentially unlike to each other, were foolishly called—­had abandoned the old and established measures of the English poetry for new conceits of their own.  There was no truth in that charge; but we will say this, that, notwithstanding the prevalent opinion to the contrary, we are not sure, after perusing some passages in Mr. Southey’s “Vision of Judgment,” and the entire “Hymn to the Earth,” in hexameters, in the second of the volumes now before us, that the question of the total inadmissibility of that measure in English verse can be considered as finally settled; the true point not being whether such lines are as good as, or even like, the Homeric or Virgilian models, but whether they are not in themselves a pleasing variety, and on that account alone, if for nothing else, not to be rejected as wholly barbarous ...