of fruitful trains of reflection which have modified his whole view of certain great subjects.  On every thing that he left is set the stamp of high mental authority.  He was not, perhaps, primarily, he certainly was not exclusively, a poet.  In theology, in philosophy, in political thought and literary criticism he set currents flowing which are flowing yet.  The terminology of criticism, for example, is in his debt for many of those convenient distinctions—­such as that between genius and talent, between wit and humor, between fancy and imagination—­which are familiar enough now, but which he first introduced or enforced.  His definitions and apothegms we meet every-where.  Such are, for example, the sayings:  “Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist.”  “Prose is words in their best order; poetry, the best words in the best order.”  And among the bits of subtle interpretation that abound in his writings may be mentioned his estimate of Wordsworth, in the Biographia Literaria, and his sketch of Hamlet’s character—­one with which he was personally in strong sympathy—­in the Lectures on Shakspere.

The Broad Church party, in the English Church, among whose most eminent exponents have been W. Frederic Robertson, Arnold of Rugby, F.D.  Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and the late Dean Stanley, traces its intellectual origin to Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, to his writings and conversations in general, and particularly to his ideal of a national clerisy, as set forth in his essay on Church and State.  In politics, as in religion, Coleridge’s conservatism represents the reaction against the destructive spirit of the 18th century and the French Revolution.  To this root-and-branch democracy he opposed the view that every old belief, or institution, such as the throne or the Church, had served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to which it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to society, instead of a curse and an anachronism.

As a poet, Coleridge has a sure, though slender, hold upon immortal fame.  No English poet has “sung so wildly well” as the singer of Christabel and the Ancient Mariner.  The former of these is, in form, a romance in a variety of meters, and in substance, a tale of supernatural possession, by which a lovely and innocent maiden is brought under the control of a witch.  Though unfinished and obscure in intention, it haunts the imagination with a mystic power.  Byron had seen Christabel in manuscript, and urged Coleridge to publish it.  He hated all the “Lakers,” but when, on parting from Lady Byron, he wrote his song,

  Fare thee well, and if forever,
  Still forever fare thee well,

he prefixed to it the noble lines from Coleridge’s poem, beginning

  Alas! they had been friends in youth.