of which secondary class Spenser and Southey may be mentioned as eminent instances.  To neither of these does Mr. Coleridge belong; in his “Christabel,” there certainly are several distinct pictures of great beauty; but he, as a poet, clearly comes within the other division which answers to music and the musician, in which you have a magnificent mirage of words with the subjective associations of the poet curling, and twisting, and creeping round, and through, and above every part of it.  This is the class to which Milton belongs, in whose poems we have heard Mr. Coleridge say that he remembered but two proper pictures—­Adam bending over the sleeping Eve at the beginning of the fifth book of the “Paradise Lost,” and Delilah approaching Samson towards the end of the “Agonistes.”  But when we point out the intense personal feeling, the self-projection, as it were, which characterizes Mr. Coleridge’s poems, we mean that such feeling is the soul and spirit, not the whole body and form, of his poetry.  For surely no one has ever more earnestly and constantly borne in mind the maxim of Milton, that poetry ought to be simple, sensuous, and impassioned.  The poems in these volumes are no authority for that dreamy, half-swooning style of verse which was criticized by Lord Byron (in language too strong for print) as the fatal sin of Mr. John Keats, and which, unless abjured betimes, must prove fatal to several younger aspirants—­male and female—­ who for the moment enjoy some popularity.  The poetry before us is distinct and clear, and accurate in its imagery; but the imagery is rarely or never exhibited for description’s sake alone; it is rarely or never exclusively objective; that is to say, put forward as a spectacle, a picture on which the mind’s eye is to rest and terminate.  You may if your sight is short, or your imagination cold, regard the imagery in itself and go no farther; but the poet’s intention is that you should feel and imagine a great deal more than you see.  His aim is to awaken in the reader the same mood of mind, the same cast of imagination and fancy whence issued the associations which animate and enlighten his pictures.  You must think with him, must sympathize with him, must suffer yourself to be lifted out of your own school of opinion or faith, and fall back upon your own consciousness, an unsophisticated man.  If you decline this, non tibi spirat.  From his earliest youth to this day, Mr. Coleridge’s poetry has been a faithful mirror reflecting the images of his mind.  Hence he is so original, so individual.  With a little trouble, the zealous reader of the “Biographia Literaria” may trace in these volumes the whole course of mental struggle and self-evolvement narrated in that odd but interesting work; but he will see the track marked in light; the notions become images, the images glorified, and not unfrequently the abstruse position stamped clearer by the poet than by the psychologist.  No student of Coleridge’s philosophy can fully understand it without a perusal of the illumining, and if we may so say, popularizing commentary of his poetry.  It is the Greek put into the vulgar tongue.  And we must say, it is somewhat strange to hear any one condemn those philosophical principles as altogether unintelligible, which are inextricably interwoven in every page of a volume of poetry which he professes to admire....