The romantic witchery of the “Christabel,” and “Ancient Mariner,” the subtle passion of the love-strains, the lyrical splendour of the three great odes, the affectionate dignity, thoughtfulness, and delicacy of the blank verse poems—­especially the “Lover’s Resolution,” “Frost at Midnight,” and that most noble and interesting “Address to Mr. Wordsworth”—­the dramas, the satires, the epigrams—­these are so distinct and so whole in themselves, that they might seem to proceed from different authors, were it not for that same individualizing power, that “shaping spirit of imagination” which more or less sensibly runs through them all.  It is the predominance of this power, which, in our judgment, constitutes the essential difference between Coleridge and any other of his great contemporaries.  He is the most imaginative of the English poets since Milton.  Whatever he writes, be it on the most trivial subject, be it in the most simple strain, his imagination, in spite of himself, affects it.  There never was a better illustrator of the dogma of the Schoolmen—­in omnem actum intellectualem imaginatio influit.  We believe we might affirm, that throughout all the mature original poems in these volumes, there is not one image, the expression of which does not, in a greater or less degree, individualize it and appropriate it to the poet’s feelings.  Tear the passage out of its place, and nail it down at the head of a chapter of a modern novel, and it will be like hanging up in a London exhibition-room a picture painted for the dim light of a cathedral.  Sometimes a single word—­an epithet—­has the effect to the reader of a Claude Lorraine glass; it tints without obscuring or disguising the object.  The poet has the same power in conversation.  We remember him once settling an elaborate discussion carried on in his presence, upon the respective sublimity of Shakespeare and Schiller in Othello and the Robbers, by saying, “Both are sublime; only Schiller’s is the material sublime—­ that’s all!” All to be sure; but more than enough to show the whole difference.  And upon another occasion, where the doctrine of the Sacramentaries and the Roman Catholics on the subject of the Eucharist was in question, the poet said, “They are both equally wrong; the first have volatilized the Eucharist into a metaphor—­the last have condensed it into an idol.”  Such utterance as this flashes light; it supersedes all argument—­it abolishes proof by proving itself.

We speak of Coleridge, then, as the poet of imagination; and we add, that he is likewise the poet of thought and verbal harmony.  That his thoughts are sometimes hard and sometimes even obscure, we think must be admitted; it is an obscurity of which all very subtle thinkers are occasionally guilty, either by attempting to express evanescent feelings for which human language is an inadequate vehicle, or by expressing, however adequately, thoughts and distinctions to which the