We should not have dwelt so long upon this point of versification, unless we had conceived it to be one distinguishing excellence of Mr. Coleridge’s poetry, and very closely connected with another, namely, fulness and individuality of thought.  It seems to be a fact, although we do not pretend to explain it, that condensation of meaning is generally found in poetry of a high import in proportion to perfection in metrical harmony.  Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton are obvious instances.  Goethe and Coleridge are almost equally so.  Indeed, whether in verse, or prose, or conversation, Mr. Coleridge’s mind may be fitly characterized as an energetic mind—­a mind always at work, always in a course of reasoning.  He cares little for anything, merely because it was or is; it must be referred, or be capable of being referred, to some law or principle, in order to attract his attention.  This is not from ignorance of the facts of natural history or science.  His written and published works alone sufficiently show how constantly and accurately he has been in the habit of noting all the phenomena of the material world around us; and the great philosophical system now at length in preparation for the press demonstrates, we are told, his masterly acquaintance with almost all the sciences, and with not a few of the higher and more genial of the arts.  Yet his vast acquirements of this sort are never put forward by or for themselves; it is in his apt and novel illustrations, his indications of analogies, his explanation of anomalies, that he enables the hearer or reader to get a glimpse of the extent of his practical knowledge.  He is always reasoning out from an inner point, and it is the inner point, the principle, the law which he labours to bring forward into light.  If he can convince you or himself of the principle a priori, he generally leaves the facts to take care of themselves.  He leads us into the laboratories of art or nature as a showman guides you through a caravan crusted with spar and stalactites, all cold, and dim, and motionless, till he lifts his torch aloft, and on a sudden you gaze in admiration on walls and roof of flaming crystals and stars of eternal diamond.

All this, whether for praise or for blame, is perceptible enough in Mr. Coleridge’s verse, but perceptible, of course, in such degree and mode as the law of poetry in general, and the nature of the specific poem in particular, may require.  But the main result from this frame and habit of his mind is very distinctly traceable in the uniform subjectivity of almost all his works.  He does not belong to that grand division of poetry and poets which corresponds with painting and painters; or which Pindar and Dante are the chief;—­those masters of the picturesque, who, by a felicity inborn, view and present everything in the completeness of actual objectivity—­and who have a class derived from and congenial with them, presenting few pictures indeed, but always full of picturesque matter;